To teach or not to teach Shakespeare? That is the question — not at the high school level, where it’s an easy “yes,” but for upper elementary and middle school classes, where educators differ as to how well the Bard translates.
Among those who say Shakespeare can be integrated in earlier grades is Jon Wargo, associate professor at the University of Michigan Marsal Family School of Education, who has undertaken research on the Shakespeare in Detroit summer STEAM program aimed at youth.
“I would tell educators, ‘Don’t block the Bard,” he said. “Watching young people engage with his works, Shakespeare remains so relevant given the topics and themes presented.”
However, Rex Ovalle, secondary section chair at the National Council of Teachers of English and an English teacher at Oak Park and River Forest High School in Illinois, says younger students shouldn’t be pushed ahead to such advanced work.
“Middle school should be about the practice and fluency of reading,” Ovalle said. “Shakespeare requires such advanced decoding and flexible literacy just to read a couple hundred lines of it.”
Wargo, on the other hand, sees relevance to Shakespeare for middle school students that ranges from current issues to building their language arts skills.
One example of how lessons on Shakespeare can tie to current issues: “’King Lear’ can tell us a lot about how power and wealth can divide people, and how it can bring people together,” Wargo said. “And Shakespeare can help us tune in to literary devices: symbolism, metaphor, meter, rhyme, structure — elements of literature that students take with them as they navigate complex texts. Shakespeare can serve as a bridge.”
Educators should embrace available age-appropriate scaffolds to engage preteen and early teenage children in Shakespeare, Wargo said.
“Graphic novels can be inroads for middle-grade learners to wrap their heads around complex texts,” he said. “Another thing we don’t have much space or time for, in the realm of English, is: act it out. … You watch actors embody these texts, you can figure out what’s going on.”
But Ovalle expresses skepticism that most students will be able to ascend those scaffolds, and he’s concerned about how that will impact them. “Of course there are always exceptions, but it’s well outside the proximal zone of development,” he said. “It’s so hard to read these texts. I worry that you’re going to convince them that they don’t like Shakespeare.”
And Ovalle also said he wonders whether teachers who want to start students earlier are just getting caught up in their own enthusiasm.
“These texts are so gorgeous,” he said. “We get so excited about them. But it’s a very teacher-centered way of thinking about what a student needs. What a student needs is general fluency and appreciation for the act of reading itself. For a lot of students, that’s not going to be Shakespeare.”
When the basic understanding of Shakespeare has been laid down in earlier grades, Wargo said he sees benefits in high school, including the opportunity for “intertextuality” with other works. He compares the scene in “Hamlet” where Ophelia goes mad to a similar scene in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” suggesting that high school English teachers could ask students to compare their respective uses of different literary devices.
“Being able to compare and contrast those types of texts, recent and distant, are skills that readers use in all stages of their lives,” he said.
But Ovalle said that middle and high school curricula are seldom well-aligned enough to be adequately “in conversation with each other,” and he has run into problems where students are asked to read a Shakespeare play or other work that they already have consumed.
“Re-reading is powerful,” he said. “But that’s not how a lot of teenagers are viewing it. You do need the surprise of the text.”
Ovalle said it can also “cause headaches” when students say, “I’ve read ‘Macbeth’ already” and think they don’t need to read it again. “I can do the work [of explaining] how re-reading it is powerful,” he said. “They still have this attitude of, ‘I’ve already done this.’”
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