A Guide to
the Plays
The Tragedies
To keep with our simple definition, if no one
dies in a comedy, then obviously someone
dies in a tragedy – and usually the title character, along with many others. The tragedies
can provide a rich experience for exploring
very real themes: action and its consequences, love and loss, family struggles.
We recommend these plays mostly for more
mature, self-directed students drawn to puzzling over serious questions. Though fourth
and fifth grade groups sometimes perform
heavily cut versions of Macbeth or Julius
Caesar, there is often the risk of trivializing
the violence and harsh reality Shakespeare
portrays. On the other hand, considering
what kids might see when the television is
left on for very long, the internal drama of
these stories – Macbeth’s agonizing struggle
with his conscience, or Brutus’s grappling
with the decision to assassinate Caesar, for
example – can provide a powerful antidote
to the callousness of much televised mayhem.
As with the comedies, there are terrific moments in all of the tragedies that are worth
studying with children. But we think these
three tragedies provide the best opportunities for whole-play exploration by mature
kids: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth.
Hamlet
Like Tempest, Hamlet throws us right into
something spooky and mysterious – in this
case, the ramparts of a haunted castle at
night. The opening scenes with the ghost of
Hamlet’s father are wonderful for the dramatic pacing, the evocation of a powerful
mood, and the crispness of the language.
From there, of course, you are propelled into
the struggles of perhaps the most famous
character in all of Western literature – young
prince Hamlet, struggling to make sense of
his life and the world around him. When
you ask kids to quote one Shakespeare line,
almost always the first one is, “To be or not
to be.” So it’s great to be able to explore this
famous line in context, and see what comes
after it.
Hamlet is a very long play, and needs substantial editing to work for children. Also,
the role of Hamlet dominates much of the
play, so the lines are not evenly distributed.
One solutions is to “tag-team” the major
roles and have 5 or 6 Hamlets, each taking
a different part of the play. This also has the
benefit of giving more kids the direct experience of playing this amazing character.
As in most of the tragedies, the final scene
requires great commitment and concentration. Anything less, and it can easily become as silly and comical as “Pyramus and
Thisbe” in “Midsummer.” So be sure you
have kids willing to take the death scenes
seriously.
Romeo and Juliet
The second most often-quoted bit of Shakespeare by kids, in our experience, is “Romeo, Romeo...” This is a play that, partly
thanks to hip film versions in the 1960s
and 1990s, seems eternally fresh for young
people. Almost everyone, amazingly, knows
something of the story of Romeo and Juliet,
400 years after Shakespeare turned this clas-
sic tale into a brilliant play.
Sixth grade girls love the character of Juliet,
and boys of all ages love the swordfighting, so it’s a dynamic package for a mature
group of kids. The challenge is often finding a boy ready to take on Romeo. If you
can, then you’re in for something special.
One fifth grader we worked with one year at
Blackshear Elementary in Austin became so
enamored of being thought of as the famous
young lover that he even adopted “Romeo”
as his nickname for years afterwards.
The Prologue and the opening scene – the
brawl between the Capulets and Montagues
– combine for another terrific jump-start for
a Shakespeare project. There are also wonderful scenes to explore between Juliet and
her family and Romeo and his buddies. This
play, like Hamlet, will need substantial editing for a group of young players.
Macbeth
This is one of Shakespeare’s darkest and
most nightmarish plays, but kids seem to be
fascinated by it – perhaps for the same reason they’re drawn to Halloween costumes or
scary stories.
For opening scenes in Shakespeare, it’s hard
to get more creepy than the three witches,
or Weird Sisters, who with their chant of
“Fair is foul and foul is fair” immediately
signal to us that something bad is going on.
Lady Macbeth is a fantastic character study,
Macbeth has powerful speeches, and there is
plenty of startling action, including a great
swordfight at the end.
The most attractive element of this play
for us, from a teaching standpoint, is the
harrowing look at what happens when you
choose – against your better wisdom – to
harm others. The actions of Macbeth and
Lady Macbeth open up powerful possibilities for classroom discussions about good
and evil, right and wrong, selfishness and
generosity, and the impossibility of reversing some courses of action – “What’s done
cannot be undone,” as Macbeth says, both
numbed and horrified at the reality of that
truth. In our experience, even third-graders
can be fascinated by looking into the mind
of a character as he wrestles with himself
over whether to do something “bad” or not.
There is also the question of what influence
the “supernatural” elements have on the
play’s characters. Do the witches lead Macbeth into murder, or do they merely bring
out into the open what was already going on
in his thoughts? The play is in many ways a
fascinating psychological study.
Again, it takes a mature group of kids to
tackle these elements and not reduce the
play to a cheesy horror show with kilts.
And there are some truly terrible moments
– including the one where Macduff’s family is massacred – that are not to be taken
lightly. Sometimes an edited and streamlined
version of the play is more appropriate for
younger students.
One good starting point is to focus on
analyzing and exploring Macbeth’s famous
soliloquies, especially the one in which he
agonizes over whether to kill the king (“If
it were done...”). This can bring out a depth
of response in the students and show how
Shakespeare uses language to capture internal struggles and states of mind (“How full
of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!”).
Other tragedies
There are amazing and powerful scenes in
all the other tragedies, King Lear especially.
We have often considered working on Lear
with young people. But the play is so agonizing at points that it would be very difficult to do without a very mature and sensitive group of students. It’s probably best to
look at individual scenes from these plays
(Othello is another) that can be pulled out
and explored. The impact of these scenes
will be strong, and perhaps will eventually
lead the students to read these plays later,
when they are older.