How to Teach Shakespeare

Students find Shakespeare challenging for several reasons.  It is possible to help students peel back the layers of complexity, but it’s no easy feat. 

As a rule of thumb, I start with reading the text out loud and reading with the emotion of each character, but eventually move to watching movie versions.  For Hamlet, I start with Zeffirelli’s version for Hamlet’s interactions with his family and friends early in the play, then Doran’s version for the play in the play, and then Branagh’s version for the scenes depicting the downfall of Ophelia.  Students then compare the various depictions of Hamlet and some of the choices made in relation to his perceived or real madness.  Students understand the lines better when they can hear the tone of the performers and see their body language. 

But there are a few other things to cover that should help students understand The Bard: 

1.  Early Modern English

Instead of focusing on the grammatical differences in Shakespeare’s language, Early Modern English, I encourage students to think of it as poetry that doesn’t follow all the rules and conventions.  I also remind students that Shakespeare used the insults, expressions, and interjections of everyday speech in Elizabethan England.  Students might otherwise think he wrote only for the nobility.  Elizabeth and James attended his plays, but so did lower class people referred to as commoners, or the groundlings.   

2.  Enjambment

Another little thing that makes Shakespeare challenging are the line breaks that appear in the text.  Enjambment is a poetic technique where the line does not end with punctuation but instead runs into the next line.  Directors often remind performers of Shakespeare not to pause not at the end of the line, but only where there is a comma, period, dash, or semi-colon.  When I distribute the text, I will read a few enjambed lines without pausing at the end to show them how much easier it is to understand. 

3.  Literary techniques

There are certain passages in Hamlet where every single line contains a literary technique.  Not only did the characters speak using personification, metonymy, synecdoche, simile, and apostrophe, but there are also other techniques like rhyme, alliteration, consonance, assonance, repetition, and parallel structure.  I identify literary techniques in the margins of a passage because it would take too much class time to find all of them.

I scanned the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in Hamlet and found some remarkable patterns in rhythm that connect to his changing emotional state in each line.  Shakespeare’s soliloquies truly reflect the fragmented, nonsensical, rambling quality of consciousness.  They can also show the logical and methodical nature of the characters. 

4.  Politics and power

It’s easy to forget how the power dynamics of Elizabethan England influenced the characters and even what Shakespeare could and couldn’t say under a monarchy.  People were often accused of treason and killed.  Monarchs would sometimes display the heads of traitors on the London Bridge.  Shakespeare set some of his plays elsewhere (Denmark, Italy, Scotland) to avoid open criticism of the English government.  He had to be careful about linking his characters and plot to Elizabeth. 

In the hierarchy of Elizabethan society, people had to speak in deference to someone more powerful.  This included both family and gender.    Children obeyed their parents (their father more than their mother), and fathers ruled their wives.  Females could not speak openly in conversation, freely pick their partner, go to school, or vote like Ophelia and Juliet. 

5.  Historical context

When trying to interpret witches or ghosts, students usually need some explanation of the popular and sometimes controversial religious beliefs of Elizabethan England.  The ghost in Hamlet exists in purgatory, but people believed the devil could appear as a ghost.  Hamlet also chooses not to kill Claudius in the chapel because he might enter heaven after repenting.  The characters mention Christian doctrine related to suicide a few times in the play and religious beliefs concerning incest.  Shakespeare wanted his audience to debate the good and bad ways politics and religion might influence the decisions of the characters.   

Shakespeare wrote Hamlet shortly after the death of his young son Hamnet and while his father was terminally ill.  Stephen Greenblatt explored the impact of these events on Shakespeare in “The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet”.  Shakespeare played the ghost on stage.  Sometimes mixing biography and text can confuse students, but the historical context of Shakespeare’s plays can help them understand his intensions. 

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