Unlocking Shakespeare

Understanding Shakespeare is often presented as a case of translation; of changing the archaic, old-fashioned, and high metaphorical language of the 16th century stage into words and sentences that make more sense to our modern ears. This can often be assisted by performance; the joy of watching thespians bring these words to life with action and emotion and acting choices. However, when looking at Shakespeare's plays in the classroom, we don't always have the choice to see the Bard's work erupt, cajole, and brood across the stage.

To have a better grasp on the playwright's texts there needs to be an increased awareness of the way in which the contemporary 16th and 17th century audiences of England saw the world - and this goes beyond just understanding the words. In order to see things through their eyes with a greater level of comprehension we need to consider the connotations of certain terms that are used; terms that reflect a radically different set of beliefs and values to those we currently take for granted.

'You' and 'Thou'

You may or may not be surprised to learn that some languages have multiple pronouns for the same way of addressing someone. A 'formal' and an 'informal' version of you is present in Italian, French, German, Danish, Swedish, etc. One is polite and formal, the other is more colloquial and friendly. In English we currently have no such convention; using only you in both situations. In Shakespeare's time, however, this wasn't the case.

The formal terminology was as it is now: you, your, yours, yourself.

The informal equivalent, though, was: thou, thee, thy, thine, thyself.

To make things more complicated, the choice of who got called what was dictated by the Elizabethan class system, and by personal relationships. Here are some examples:

• Thee - if someone was beneath someone in social status, or if two high status people were in private and had a close enough relationship to not be concerned by the 'rules'.
• You - if someone was the same status, or higher, or if you wanted to show respect.
• Sometimes a character in a Shakespeare play will momentarily switch to using a different pronoun in order to insult someone. This can be used to reveal great drama to a modern reader once they are familiar with the above system as it was considered incredibly disrespectful and offensive to do this to someone.
  

Swearing

The modern usage of the term 'swearword' is usually reserved for things like 'sh_t', 'f_ck', etc. It should be noted, however, that the origin of the term 'swear' is closely tied to religion and a person's relationship with God. Generally speaking there have been two kinds of swearwords in the last two thousand years - those that are used in connection with topics and things that are considered taboo or unmentionable (see the examples above) and those that are used in connection to things that are considered sacred.

In Shakespeare's time it was the sacred form of swearing that was considered more serious. If you swore something before God (made a promise, EG. "I swear to God', or "May you be damned to Hell") then it was highly offensive if it you did not mean it, and committing offenses (blasphemy) against God was believed to inevitably lead to Hell. Additionally, as Elizabethan society was a culture that did not include any atheists, saying these things in a flippant manner meant you were invoking something sacred and powerful from God for things that were beneath Him. It was taboo for anyone to presume that they could tell God what to do, so wording had to be careful if a person did not want to offend.

Shakespeare makes use of both kinds of swearing throughout his plays, but you will note that it is the religious kind that features more heavily. As you may be aware from our own context, swearing can be quite varied and colourful, and the religious kind of swearing in Shakespeare's context is no different, with many characters often swearing on different parts of God or icons related to God. Some examples:

• S'blood = short for 'God's blood'.
• Zounds = a shortened version of 'God's wounds'.
  
• God's Bones, God Almighty, Jesus Christ = mentioning these things in a non-religious context was considered offensive.
• Blessed = especially when used in combination with something that a priest would never bless (EG. Part of a fig - hence the swearword 'Blessed fig's end' in Othello)
• God's will = wishing that God would do something on one's behalf was incredibly presumptuous and offensive.
• Damn = asking God to send someone to Hell. Also presumptuous.
  
• Oath = to take an oath before God was an incredibly sacred thing to do. To use the term flippantly was to make a mockery of this.
• By the mass = referring to a holy congregation in a church.
• Strewth = not used by Shakespeare (to my knowledge) but familiar to older Australians. This is a shortened version of 'God's truth'.
  
• Gadzooks = a contraction of 'God's hooks', referring to the hooks that held Jesus to the cross.
  

The Humours

There are several references in Shakespeare's plays to the humours that exist within a human's body. This is a reference to the medieval belief (dating from classical Greek and Roman medicine) that, in the same way that the world consisted of four elements (wind, earth, fire, water), a human's body was made up of its own four components: the humours. Each humour connected to a fluid within the body and corresponded with emotions and personalities. An imbalance in any of one of these humours would be cited by Elizabethan doctors as the source for disordered behaviour, and the terminology associated with this is still partially in use today.

It might be easier to think of the humours as being a medieval explanation for things that would be later explained by science (chiefly medicine and psychology).

The humours were as follows:

• Choler
• Yellow bile from the liver
• If someone was 'choleric' they were considered to be easily angered or irritated.
• Sanguine
• Blood
• A 'sanguine' personality was someone who was cheerful and optimistic, especially in bad situations.
• Melancholy
• Black bile
• Someone 'melancholic' was prone to depression and sadness.
• Phlegm
• Mucus
• A 'phlegmatic' personality was, at best, unemotional and dependable. At worst, the term was related to apathy and laziness.
  

In Othello, for example, there are several references that can become clear upon reflection of the above information:

• "Sir, he is rash and very sudden in choler" - Iago, Act 2, Scene 1
• "I think the sun where he was born / drew all such humours from him" - Desdemona, Act 3, Scene 4
• "Were he in favour as in humour alter'd" - Desdemona, Act 3, Scene 4
  
• "I pray you, be content; 'tis but his humour" - Iago, Act 4, Scene 2
  

And So...

That's just the tip of the Tudor iceberg. I'm sure I'll revisit this topic more each time I teach a Shakespeare text - I'll look forward to it as I find it endlessly fascinating!

August Heat

Hello from Amber-land!

Below you'll find some resources that have been developed for a lesson that can be taught with Years 7-10 English. Normally I'd discuss the way the lesson works but today I'm going to take a different approach by reflecting a little on how the lesson went and how it was developed/delivered. I find it useful to blog about this process as putting it into words helps me crystallise how I teach. If you're already an experienced teacher just on the look-out for some resources then, by all means, feel free to skip down to the bit about the PowerPoint and activity sheet and disregard anything you already know :)

Preamble done.

Now, to start with, my friend and colleague Kira Bryant, who is also my Head Teacher, brought to the faculty's attention a great short story called 'August Heat' by William Fryer Harvey. Kira said it worked well with her Year 7 class, so I figured I'd give it to a go with three of my junior classes - two Year 8s and a Year 9 class.

(Incidentally, Kira has a really cool blog called Tales from an Edugeek that has a whole stack of stuff about English teachers who write.)

'August Heat' is suitable for our purposes for a number of reasons:

• It isn't too short and it isn't too long - just the right length for the 'mainstream' in a junior classroom (that zone of proximal development that we all love so much!)
• It was published in 1910, which makes it 110 years old, and therefore public domain. As it's not subject to copyright laws there's therefore no legal problem photocopying or printing it for the classroom.
• The style of writing isn't too inaccessible for today's teenagers. The prose is straightforward but not without a certain poetry, and Fryer Harvey's craft as a storyteller should grab the attention for at least a suitable portion of the class.
  
• The content could be described as 'horror' or, at least, in the realms of the mysterious and supernatural. Kira describes it as having an ending with "just the right amount of ambiguity to challenge our students". In any case, the story isn't too inappropriate for young adolescents, and it has an effective sense of dread and mystery that builds in detail until the wonderfully enigmatic ending.
  

So, as I was saying, I decided to use it with three classes.

The lesson itself was designed to be relatively direct. Getting students back into seats in a shared classroom has been, to put it lightly, a bit of a challenge after the disruptions caused by COVID-19 over the last three months. I initially attempted to do a class novel when each of my junior classes returned but that didn't really work out the way that I'd hoped. Each student was moving from separate, individualised online learning to working in a single room with the same novel, ostensibly learning at the same pace. I tried this with my four junior classes (two Year 9s, two Year 8s) and this approach is only really working with one of them so I had to abandon it for the other three classes.

Side-note: Don't be afraid to abandon a lesson that just isn't working. Adapting to the needs of a classroom is paramount to both their sanity and yours. I learned this very early on in my career. Sure, it can be depressing to see a beautifully-designed lesson just completely clunk in the face of disengaged students, but learning how to deal with this is preferable to taking it personally. When this happens to me, and it still happens even now because I like to keep trying different things, then I tend to take two approaches:

1. Recognise where exactly the lesson went wrong and learn from this.
   
2. Use the remaining time of the 'lost' lesson to work individually with students who are still engaged and/or build rapport by talking to the disengaged about why the lesson isn't working for them. If it's a case that the student is 'acting out' then, more times than not, it could be because the work is too difficult for them. Their behaviour should still be dealt with in an appropriate manner (that's a blog for another day), however, the 'tipping point' where they lost the will to learn is invaluable information if you can pinpoint where, when, and why it happened. That, in itself, is informal assessment of student ability.

Anyway. I abandoned the novel study with my two Year 8 classes and my other Year 9 class. I decided that self-contained lessons with minimal whole-class instruction was the best way to go. I also wanted to have it student-centered so I could spend my time doing one on one instruction or 'crowd control' around the room, so I put all the activities onto a single double-sided sheet.

Here's the lesson:

1. Read through the short story with the class. This is presented in PPT form after I heard my colleague Blake speaking about how much more engaged students can be when reading through a screen. Something about smartphone conditioning I guess! I broke the story up across slides with an image for each part of the story (except for one slide).
2. Students work through the six activities on the sheet. There are six of these to correspond with each of the Super 6 activities. I wanted to do something like this after blogging about the Super 6 a couple of weeks ago, so I split the sheet into two halves - the first half is for the students to do before and during activities (Predicting, Monitoring, Questioning), and the second half is for after (Visualising, Summarising, Connecting). I won't go into too much detail as the activities are deliberately self-explanatory to make it as student-directed as possible.
   

Reflecting: The actual lessons with each individual class all turned out very differently. I did the lesson three times across a Friday. Our school has a 5 period day, and I delivered the lesson for Year 8 Class A in Period 1, Year 8 Class B in Period 4, and Year 9 Class A in Period 5.

• Year 8 Class A: This went really well. The class was engaged for the entire short story and the majority of them finished the sheet. Some students struggled with certain parts of the sheet but I was able to simply flip the sheet over and let them pick an activity from the back - after listening to and watching 'August Heat' some students with additional learning needs were quite happy to express their learning visually or tell me stories of how it connected to other things.

• Year 8 Class B: Even though they're both Year 8, this class is really quite different to Class A as it contains a whole range of students with quite diverse learning needs. This class found it significantly more difficult to focus for the entirety of the story so I simply read up until the slide with no picture (this slide is needed to cover the visualisation activity) and told the class that was where it ended. The students who had no issues paying attention were still able to complete the sheet and came up with interesting ideas that demonstrated their comprehension. For the students who had struggled I was able to walk around to them, one by one, and explain whatever had confused them. The variety of activities on the sheet gave every student at least one entry point to show their comprehension. From this point on I just wandered the room, keeping students on task, clarifying information, and answering any questions students had.

• Year 9 Class A: As per the law of diminishing returns, Year 9 were even less engaged than Year 8 Class B. This was last period on a Friday, and the class came in off the back of lunchtime, so I guess they were all ready to go home! Usually this particular period starts with a cascade of groaning requests, like, "It's last period Friday sir, can we do something fun?" (My response of "This is English, it's always fun" is not usually well-received) or "Can we just have a chill lesson?" (Response: "Nah bro"). I made the quick decision to follow the same approach I used with Year 8 Class B, opting to cut the PPT short at the halfway mark. Sheet completion was probably around the 20-30% mark, with another 40% at least doing half of it, and the remaining 20-30% of the class still doing at least one activity after the reading portion. Not ideal, but better than the last Friday Period 5 I'd had with them.   

In hindsight, I've decided that the lesson works fairly well and I'm sure I'll use it again next year. That said, the inability of two of the classes to focus through the entire PPT while the story was read to them isn't what I had hoped for. I knew that some of the students in Year 8 Class B in particular would find it quite challenging so it wasn't a surprise, but these things still need to be tried.

For the next lesson I did an entirely self-contained sheet with no whole class instruction and no PPT/board work. I figured this would be a better work-around for students unable to focus on teacher-talk for any amount of time. This turned out to work even better but more on that in a future blog.