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Act 1, Scene 1:
Getting Started

Guide to Educator
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For the K-3 teacher
For the 4-8 teacher
Shakespeare and
the TEKS

Texts for
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A Guide To The Plays
"A Most Rare Vision"–
Student and educator
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  1. Introduction
  1. Comedies
  2. Romances
  3. Tragedies
  4. Histories
  1. Choosing a play to study
  2. Cutting or adapting a play
  3. If you fear the audience won't "get it"

All of the scenes we offer on this site are edited in some way. In the time most of our teachers have, it is simply impossible to do an entire play, and often difficult to do an entire uncut scene.

Sometimes we edit simply to avoid overwhelming young students; other times is to get right to the “action” parts or the dramatic conflict. Flexibility is the key here; if the students master the material quickly, we often add back in some of the longer speeches.

One thing we don’t do, however, is use texts that rewrite the plays to make them “easier to understand.”

We understand the impulse to help the kids enjoy the story by “translating” the language and allowing them to just focus on the plot and characters. Often we do this informally, in discussion. We might in rare cases change a word here or there in the text – for example, changing “O hell!” to “O no!” with younger kids – but essentially we believe in giving children Shakespeare’s actual language, in all its complex Elizabethan glory and density.

Here is why:

Shakespeare chose each word for a reason. The plays are a series of words, from start to finish, that form a very complex pattern – sometimes in unrhymed (“blank”) verse, sometimes in rhyming verse, sometimes in natural or sprawling prose. Each shift in language is a clue to setting, mood, tempo, character.

Many school productions use texts from Shake Hands With Shakespeare, written in 1968 by legendary teacher Albert Cullum, or from some other mysterious source – sometimes the teacher may not actually know who found it or typed it in, because it was passed down over the years and recopied. These texts are a mix of Shakespeare’s poetry and simplified English, designed to make the plays fun and understandable for elementary readers.

These scripts may have the positive effect of making the plays immediately more accessible, and Cullum certainly was – as a recent documentary shown on PBS confirmed – a brilliant teacher. But there is a price to be paid for “improving” the text for kids. The poetry is destroyed. Rhythm and meter, so elegantly and intuitively worked out by Shakespeare, are scrambled. The words clank and jar. And the lines are actually harder to memorize, because they don’t flow from one to the next as Shakespeare intended.

We always attempt to persuade teachers in this situation to switch back to an actual section of text, for the reasons stated above, but also for this one:

If these students are going to be memorizing and performing a text, why not give them the benefit of learning from real poetry, from the work of a great artist? If we are more concerned about whether the students’ parents and siblings understand “the show,” then perhaps our priorities need to be reconsidered. The main purpose of this work is to enrich the student, not the audience. We want the audience to learn, too; but when we drastically alter the text, what they are learning, alongside the students, is, “Shakespeare is confusing, so we’re fixing that for you.”

Students can and will embrace the actual text, if it is handed over to them in small doses. You are the one who controls the flow of text. If you are new to dealing with the actual text, go slow yourself. Take a few weeks to read it over and over, perhaps in the summer or over a vacation break. Rent some films of the play, if it’s a popular one like Midsummer, so you can see different interpretations of the story. Then decide which parts would be most interesting for your kids. Focus in on one or two scenes and trim them down to a basic core, leaving a good section of original language and perhaps changing a word or two to create transitions between the sections. (For examples on ways to mix simple narration and bits of text, see our text section here.)

The key is: Don’t bite off too much! Perhaps just focus on that one really fun scene for the whole semester and have students create it as a group, swapping off roles. Learn that one scene really, really well. Then you can see what to add from there.

Often, it’s the pressure to try to tell the story of an entire play that forces teachers to give in to “Shakespeare Made Simple” sorts of revisions. You don’t need to do an entire play, or even tell the whole story. Believe us: Parents and administrators are so impressed by students performing “the real thing” that even if you present one scene, and use a narrator to put it in context, you will have done something very special. And your students will have learned something invaluable about the way Shakespeare used words to bring a scene to life.

Then next year you can go for a whole play!