I have the privilege of introducing a group of twenty eighth graders to the unabridged, unadulterated Shakespeare. We began Romeo and Juliet this week, and it is the highlight of my year.
I began preparing a foundation earlier in the year by having the kids write sonnets and wrestle with iambic pentameter. I mentioned that Romeo and Juliet is, for the most part, in metered verse. “You mean he wrote the WHOLE play in iambic pentameter?” they asked incredulously. I got my Riverside Shakespeare, large enough to use in the gym as a free weight. “Not only that — most everything he wrote was in iambic pentameter.”
They were, in a word, terrified.
That’s understandable: the Bard does have quiet the reputation for being inaccessible to many casual modern readers: long sentences that sometime contain clauses with convoluted, inverted structure, and vocabulary that can make one’s toe nails curl.
We took it slowly.
In fact, we took a whole lesson on the prologue:
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
The next day we spent an entire lesson on the opening fight scene. With some group work, class discussion, and multiple readings, they actually began to find Gregory and Sampson to be, amusingly, “losers.” Laughter in the classroom while reading Shakespeare is musical.
The result: comments like this on our online forum:
- The language isn’t as hard as I anticipated.
- Now that we have taken the time in class to discuss the play in normal language, I find it rather challenging but yet understandable.
- I was scared at the beginning because i didn’t think i would get any of it. Now that we have started i actually understand most of it.
- At first i figured the language would be extremely difficult to understand and read like words such as “tis” or “thy” or “ay,” but if you read the words you can figure them out over time.
The most enjoyable will be observing their reaction as they watch Romeo + Juliet, the Luhrmann version of 1996. Not the best version in cinematic history, but I show it to illustrate the timelessness of the story.
I found Shakespeare much easier to read after spending a semester studying John Milton. Much easier and much more fun.
Luhrmann’s film is one of my favorite versions of Romeo and Juliet; what’s captured in that movie is just how impetuous, rash, and juvenile Romeo and Juliet are. So many other films have them be “young lovers” in their mid-twenties, close to responsible adulthood; in Luhrman’s version they really are just kids.
I certainly agree that Milton is more challenging. I think most Shakespeare is simpler than Paradise Lost and many of Milton’s other works because Milton was trying to accomplish so much theologically and politically. He wasn’t just writing literature. But I’ll confess: I like them both immensely.