Muddy Reflection

In my last post, I (kind of) reviewed the latest film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, written by Julian Fellowes and directed by Carlo Carlei. Since then, the film—and the play on which it is based—has been haunting me. I simply can’t pull my mind away from Romeo and Juliet for long. I awoke this morning, in fact, with the faint memory of performing in and/or directing a production in my dreams.

I am sad to report that upon further review, the call on the field stands: the Carlei/Fellowes Romeo and Juliet remains an exercise in condescension. Usually, if I’m still pondering a work long after seeing it, it means it has either profoundly impacted my life or inspired me to reconsider my initial reaction. Part of me was hoping time would help me see more redeeming qualities in the film, but if that’s to be the case, one week has not been long enough.

I have, however, been ruminating on the film’s usefulness. In doing so, I have come to the tentative conclusion that I am glad the film was made.

The Enemy of My Enemy…

I’ve come to this conclusion because I remember my junior year of high school. (Please forgive any hyperbole in the following anecdote; the nature of my memory tends toward accidental exaggeration.) Among a fairly long list of summer reading and movie-watching assignments was the novel The Scarlet Letter. It was by far the most painful of my summer assignments for no better reason than it bored me. I don’t know whether it was Hawthorne’s style, the story, the characters, or my own teenaged literary biases getting in the way, but I do know I hated it. And so did my classmates. All of them.

Shortly after the school year began, the Roland Joffé film adaptation, starring Demi Moore and Gary Oldman, was released. To our dismay, we did not get to take a field trip to the cinema (any excuse to get out of class!), but we did get to read excerpts from the script. It was screenwriter Douglas Day Stewart’s Scarlet Letter in the same way the recent Romeo and Juliet is Julian Fellowes’. My classmates and I erupted: How could Hollywood possibly do this to a masterpiece of American literature?! It’s Hawthorne “lite”! Dimmesdale would never do that!

In a single morning, a classroom full of students, who an hour earlier dreaded the mere idea of discussing the novel they despised, came passionately to its defense.

The Game’s Afoot

That classroom experience has stuck with me for a long time now. At first, it was a curiosity. How could we all change our minds so suddenly, so vehemently? Then, as I became a teacher, it became an enlightening case study in riling up otherwise apathetic students. It’s no coincidence that memory keeps worming its way back to the forefront of my mind. It’s nearly the same reaction I’ve had to the pseudo-Romeo and Juliet.

As I said last time, I adore Romeo and Juliet, so my defense of it against this oft-mentioned, little-seen adaptation isn’t quite in the same vein as my class’s adamant defense of the previously-loathed Scarlet Letter. I also said the new film missed its chance to become a classroom staple. The memory of my high school experience, though, has prompted me to rethink that statement.

Don’t get me wrong; I do not recommend using the film to teach the play. Doing so would be the audio-visual equivalent of using the No Fear Shakespeare text as a substitute for the real thing (which I have seen done). But I think there’s room to use it, and No Fear Shakespeare, as a Shakespearean “gateway drug.”

We have to face the fact that many, if not most, of our students are afraid of Shakespeare. As a result of the elitism I discussed last time, most young people (OK, it’s not just young people) are trained to believe Shakespeare’s use of language is too difficult for them. Some of the blame falls on well-meaning word nerd English teachers (yes, I fit in this category, too) who put Shakespeare on such a high pedestal. It’s natural to be intimidated by genius, especially when that genius is presented as the perfection the rest of us will never attain.

Unfortunately, students are often only told that Shakespeare is an awe-inspiring genius instead of being shown—or, better yet, being led to discover it on their own. While they’re lousy resources for teaching the plays themselves, English “translations” of Shakespeare’s plays such as No Fear Shakespeare and the new Romeo and Juliet might be able to help us teach why we revere Shakespeare’s language, just as my high school experience with The Scarlet Letter taught me to appreciate Hawthorne.

All too often I see schools and society beat down children’s inherent curiosity until they are convinced that education is about right versus wrong, where the right answer is the one they’ve learned to recite from a book or repeat from a teacher and the wrong answer is the one they’ve come up with themselves. Shakespeare doesn’t work that way, and we shouldn’t pretend it does. We can reignite students’ interest in inquiry by letting them investigate the plays for themselves. We can turn them into iconoclasts (in the best of ways) by tapping into their latent tendencies toward indignation. We can let them know that people such as Julian Fellowes sell them short, which is neither fair nor right. But in the process, we must make it unmistakably clear that we are not those people, that we believe in their abilities, that we have their backs.

The Non-Lesson Plan

I’m still developing these ideas, which have been rattling around my brain in dribs and drabs but have yet to coalesce into anything nearing a lesson plan. I imagine a variation of the Think-Pair-Share technique could work well. Students could read a snippet of text, write their own paraphrases, and share their difficulties in trying to say what Shakespeare says as well as Shakespeare says it. Then, they could read or watch a “modern English translation” and discuss what the “translators” did well, what they did poorly, and what the pros and cons of such “translations” are. They could even try to perform both the real version and the “translation” to see how much more successfully Shakespeare’s words are transformed into engaging drama. Not only would these types of exercises get students’ metaphorical hands dirty as they dig into the language, but they would also empower students to trust themselves instead of relying on the “experts.”

Are any of you currently implementing similar exercises into your own classes? I’d love to hear other ideas!

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