Since 1999, I've been teaching Shakespeare to my students, and this study has become a focal point of my classroom. 

It started out as an accident really.  One autumn morning during my first year of teaching, I said to my second grade students, who were shockingly inattentive at that moment:

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.”

This phrase, from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, may not have been enough to get the class’s attention, but the fact that I had shouted it from atop my desk in an act of first-year desperation did get their attention.  And then a student, a young lady by the name of Elizabeth, asked me, “What’s that mean?” 

20 minutes later I had summarized Julius Caesar to my students and they were demanding to perform it.  And with a principal who was heavily involved in community theatre and a 1-year teaching position that I was desperately hoping would stretch into 2, I decided take a risk and teach these 7-year olds about the greatest storyteller who ever lived.  And when my principal found out what I was doing, he jumped right in and taught a brand new teacher who knew a lot about the script but very little about the theatre a whole lot in the span of a month. 

And it worked. 

That first year I adapted the play myself, keeping the important lines in Shakespeare’s original verse, lines like  “Et tu Brute,” but translating the rest into modern English.  The play ran about 30 minutes and the parents loved it.  More importantly, the kid’s loved it.  We spent the rest of the year reading adaptations of many of Shakespeare’s other plays and studying the Elizabethan time period.  

And I got that all-important second year of teaching at Wolcott School.

Since that first year, my classes have studied and performed Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, Hamlet, and The Taming of the Shrew.  With great thanks to the Foundation for West Hartford Public Schools, I now have a stage in my classroom where we perform all of our productions. 

In the last three years, my students have performed The Tempest, Hamlet and The Taming of the Shrew using Shakespeare’s original script, abridged by the immortal Albert Cullum, but otherwise completely intact in terms of language.  These were great challenges that my students conquered with poise and brilliance.  There is nothing better than listening to an 8-year old recite Shakespearean verse and understand every word with which they are uttering.

My students also study Shakespeare's life, the history of the Globe theatre, the vocabulary of Shakespeare's day,  scansion, set design, and blocking.  Many of them end up writing plays of their own or translating Shakespeare's plays into 21st century language and situations.  it's a wonderful focus of study and one that I encourage others to attempt. 

The results will be remarkable.