Shakespeare Set Free: Macbeth

Both of my degrees are in American Studies, so I knew when I started teaching English that I was going to need to work hard on preparing to teach British literature, especially Shakespeare, the biggest Brit author of them all. I teach Macbeth and Hamlet, and have accumulated quite the pile of lesson plans and assignments for both, from online resources and my fellow teachers, but am always looking to improve how I deal with the texts in the classroom.

Enter Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth, a workbook of essays and lesson plans compiled and authored by scholars at the Folger Shakespeare Library and past participants of the Teaching Shakespeare Institute (which Bmore teach went to this past summer).

So far I’ve read the scholarly essays, and already have learned so much about how to present the play to my students. I had never thought about the porter being a Shakespearean clown character, and I had no idea that Macbeth was not written during the Elizabethan age, but instead during the reign of King James, who believed himself to be a direct descendant of Banquo. Also, since the book is large enough to make good photocopies of handouts from lesson plans, the essay pages have nice wide margins for my own note-taking.

But even more importantly, I’ve found some great techniques in the lesson plans that I’m looking forward to employing, about ways to read scenes in class, how to encourage students to feel at home with the language, and tips on helping students “get a scene on its feet,” transforming it from page reading to actual acting out– setting Shakespeare free and all, you know. One introductory lesson has the students reading the same scene four times, each in different ways, with a few different groups of processing questions after each reading.

Teaching Shakespeare has partly been such a challenge for me because I didn’t really enjoy reading it when I was myself a student. My first exposure was in ninth grade, when a listless long-term substitute led us slowly through Romeo and Juliet, a unit of which my most vivid memories include watching the old black-and-white version with Leslie Howard, and then watching the lush Franco Zefferelli version with its two ripe young lovers. If we read any more Shakespeare in high school, I have no memory of it– my next memory is of a great class I took in college, with a professor visiting from the Folger Library, who introduced me to Othello and Richard III. I know I saw several performances of Shakespeare in those years, especially a Free for All performance of Twelfth Night, but also the production of Midsummer’s Night Dream done at my own high school. I’ve always enjoyed going to see Shakespeare, but always struggled with the reading, until I began teaching the plays. The language is beautiful, of course, but being able to imagine it on stage, in my head, and think of the different interpretations actors might choose has always been a challenge. Maybe it’s my own maturity, or that I’m much more motivated now, but I’ve found so much more richness in the texts than I ever did as a student.

With the help of great resources like Shakespeare Set Free, maybe I can help my students discover these treasures a lot sooner than I did.