Matching Tracksuits

We looked at the final soliloquy in the play, when Romeo loses all sense of rationality and makes a horrible decision based primarily on emotion. We examined how Shakespeare develops this idea within the text by

• extensive use of “O”;
• chaotic changes in the soliloquy’s subject;
• references to a loss of control;
• and other techniques.

Students first presented their claims about the text, many of which led naturally into the observations I wanted students to have later in the lesson.

They were doing some pre-teaching for me, in other words.

It was a good day to be a teacher.

It’s that time of the year, the highlight of my teaching year in many ways: I go over Romeo and Juliet with my English I class. I know I’ve mentioned this before, even at roughly the same time of the year. (The start of the second semester is just such a perfect time to begin the most challenging read of the year.) I suspect I’ll be writing about it every January, because I get such a thrill out of introducing a new group of kids to arguably the greatest writer in English.

It’s such a time of uncertainty for the students. Shakespeare has held such a vaunted place in their imaginations for so long that they’re certain it will be the most stilted, boring bunch of aristocratic nonsense they’ve ever encountered.

And then they hear the nurse making one sexual innuendo after innuendo: “I am the drudge and toil in your delight, / But you shall bear the burden soon at night.” They notice that Juliet is prone to making them, too:

‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man.

They see Mercutio being a positively provocative smartaleck: “And but one word with one of us? couple it with / something; make it a word and a blow.” They find themselves not liking characters: “Mr. Scott, Romeo is kind of creepy in a way.” And out of the seeming blue, they find themselves able to follow three scenes (2.4-2.6) in a recorded performance without the aid of the text before them.

Every day, I ask the same question: “On a scale of one to five, how difficult are you finding Shakespeare now?” I ask students to hold up the number of fingers to express their difficulty with the text. After the first reading of the prologue, it was all fives. Now, after two acts, it’s a mixture of fours, threes, and twos.

I have the privilege of watching 100+ eighth graders grow and develop over the course of nine months. I see them developing self-control, self-confidence, and occasionally even calm humility, but these are part of the natural course of growing up. Seeing them gradually make their peace with an author they feared only months before (and I can claim all 100 for this, for everyone in my classroom comes to terms with the Bard at some point and some level) is something I can claim at least partial credit for, and it’s one of the many thousands of reasons I can’t imagine doing anything else.

Photo by -JvL-

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.

It’s going to be a fun month.Photo by shizhao