How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (3 page)

That all the world will be in love with night

or they hear Macbeth utter:

Life’s but a walking shadow,…It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
,

Signifying nothing
.

they are likely to feel that thoughts of longing, death, and hopelessness are less alien to them.

From the beginning, I had a number of additional goals in mind in teaching my children Shakespeare. One was to give them the tools to read Shakespeare’s works with intelligence for the rest of their lives. On the simplest level, this will enrich their lives and give them a lifetime of pleasure.

Another goal was to expose them to literature of such universal depth and worth that it would inspire them to want to achieve great things as they marched forward into maturity. I have staked my life as a writer on the proposition that the arts make a difference in how we see the world and how we conduct our lives—how we view charity to our neighbors and justice to our communities—and Shakespeare, as the greatest artist in the history of our civilization, has worlds to teach us as long as we have the tools we need to understand him.

From a very personal standpoint, the course of Shakespeare studies outlined in this book also provided me and my children with hundreds of hours of one-on-one time together that we never would have shared otherwise. These hours spent together have made our family stronger and more tolerant of one another.

On a practical note, I had another, very specific goal in mind: to teach
my children at least twenty-five passages from Shakespeare’s plays so that they could have the lines at their fingertips and spout them whenever the occasion presented itself. The occasion might be citing a literary reference in an English essay, or it might include making an intelligent point in conversation. These uses, frankly, open doors for our children, which is what we as parents are always trying to do.

Being fluent in Shakespeare from an early age imparts one last advantage that has a significance all its own: It gives my children self-confidence. It gives them the tools, as Falstaff might say, to be witty in themselves and be proud of it. As a father, this is one of the best parts of the whole exercise.

L
et me outline the plan of this book so you know what’s coming. Then we’ll get right back to
I know a bank
.

The Twenty-five Passages

Together you and I will teach your children twenty-five passages of Shakespeare by heart. We’ll start with short, accessible passages; then gradually we’ll increase the length and complexity of the passages until, toward the end, we’ll go for a few entire soliloquies.

I have strong views about which plays—and which passages from these plays—your children will find it easiest to start with, and I have put them in a very specific order. If you follow this order, I can just about guarantee that your kids won’t get bogged down and frustrated.

I think that children do best by starting with the comedies. Specifically, I find that
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and
Twelfth Night
are the most child-friendly of all the plays, and we’ll spend a good deal of time on them. We’ll then move more quickly through the canon in order to expose your children to some of Shakespeare’s most famous works.
Hamlet, Macbeth
, and
Romeo and Juliet
, for example, are simply part of our cultural DNA and cannot be missed.

Shakespeare’s Language

In every chapter, I’ll be quoting a great deal of Shakespeare’s poetry and prose in addition to the passages being memorized. I’m doing this to expose your children to as much of Shakespeare’s language as possible. I’ve chosen these additional passages carefully, as I want your children to come away from this book with a level of familiarity with Shakespeare that they can’t get elsewhere. In every case, you and your children should read the additional passages aloud.

The Stories and Characters

Along with the passages themselves, we’ll teach your children the plots and characters to go with them. This is not only valuable in itself but will help them memorize the passages more quickly, and they’ll remember them longer. If you learn the line
Lord what fools these mortals be!
and associate it with a hilarious little sprite named Robin Goodfellow in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, you’ll never forget either the character or the line.

Additional Materials

At the end of the book, I’ve added some materials that I think you’ll find useful, including a chronology of Shakespeare’s plays, two lists of additional passages in case your children want to push their Shakespeare studies further, a list of my favorite Shakespeare epigrams, and a bibliography of some of my favorite Shakespeare books, movies, and audio recordings.

The Quotation Pages

Soon after I realized that memorization was the key to teaching my kids to love Shakespeare, I stumbled onto a trick that made the whole thing easier. The trick is to present each quotation in an attractive, easy-to-read format, using one page for every few lines. To this end, I broke every passage up into short, logical chunks based on rhythm and meaning, and I printed them on typing paper, using large, attractive fonts. Thus, the first page of
I know a bank
ended up looking like the sample below.

I know a bank

where the wild thyme blows
,

Where oxlips

and the nodding violet grows
,

For any child from six to sixteen, looking at a page like this is simply less daunting than looking at a page full of small type. For my own children it made all the difference, especially for the first five or six years. (Frankly, they still like to learn new passages this way, and they’re now sixteen and twenty.) In the early parts of this book, I’ll print the Quotation Pages right in the text so you and your children can get familiar with using them. After that I’ll ask you to go to
howtoteachyourchildrenshakespeare.com
, where you’ll be able to download and print all the Quotation Pages at your convenience. Just go to your browser—Safari or Explorer or whatever you like to use—and type this address into your search engine:
http://www.yourchildrenshakespeare.com
. The Quotation Pages will appear on your screen, and you can immediately print them and start using them.

I strongly urge you to use the Quotation Pages as part of the memorization
process. We may be in the computer age, but by using the Quotation Pages, you’ll have much more success than trying to learn the passages from a computer screen or a page with small type.

Listening

The other technique that turned out to be crucial for my children was to have them listen to the passages aloud so that they could imitate what they heard. Since I was so familiar with Shakespeare, I was able to recite the passages myself and have my children repeat what I said. For some parents and teachers, this may not be an option; therefore you can find recordings of all the major passages in this book recited by three great Shakespearean actors, Derek Jacobi, Richard Clifford, and Frances Barber at
howtoteachyourchildrenshakespeare.com
.

Now let’s return to
I know a bank
.

Passage 1, Continued Imagery and Rhythm

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows
,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
,

Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine
,

With sweet muskroses, and with eglantine
.

(
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
,
Act II, Scene 1, lines 257–60)

I
n
chapter 1
, your children learned the first line of
I know a bank
.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows

Now let’s look at the next three lines. We’re going to

1. define the difficult words and talk about imagery, and

2. learn how the rhythm of the words makes them easier to memorize (remember: Shakespeare wrote with memorization in mind).

Learning these lines will take your children less than half an hour. Don’t forget to use the Quotation Page, which looks like this:

I know a bank

where the wild thyme blows
,

Where oxlips

and the nodding violet grows
,

Quite overcanopied

with luscious woodbine
,

With sweet muskroses
,

and with eglantine
.

Here is the second line of the speech:

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
,

Say it aloud with your child. You know the drill: Quiet room. Four times. Break it in half. No embarrassment.

Where oxlips

Where oxlips

Where oxlips

Where oxlips

An
oxlip
is another kind of flower (a hybrid between a cowslip and a primrose).

Also notice that the two words
where
and
oxlips
, taken together, create a tongue twister: You have to pause after
where
in order to pronounce
oxlips
. The thing to be aware of is that Shakespeare has done this deliberately to slow down the reader. He pulls linguistic tricks like this all the time to give the actor a sort of playbook on how to say his poetry aloud. He uses his vowels and consonants with enormous care, creating sounds that can slow you down, speed you up, make you pause at the right place, or add an emotion that you didn’t see coming. (This aspect of Shakespeare’s poetry is the subject of an entire book by
Sir Peter Hall, one of the founders of the Royal Shakespeare Company. I’ve listed it in the Bibliography.) Turn this tongue twister into a game. Tell your daughter to say the phrase
where oxlips
six times in a row as fast as she can.

where oxlips where oxlips where oxlips where oxlips where oxlips where oxlips

It’s tough, isn’t it? Well, that’s what Shakespeare intended. He doesn’t want you to rush through this description of a bank of flowers. He wants you to take your time to paint the word picture and make it sound beautiful. He’s teaching you how to recite his speech.

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
,

Here the interesting choice is the word
nodding
, which creates a visual image of violets bending sleepily in the breeze as though they’re humans, nodding their heads. By giving the flowers this human quality (a poetic device called personification), Shakespeare makes the bank of flowers come alive. This is particularly clever because this bank of flowers is going to be an important setting in the play.

Imagery

Imagery like this is a powerful tool in all poetry but particularly in Shakespeare. He uses images like this every few lines to deepen his text and make it feel more universal. (The great book on this subject is
Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us
by Caroline Spurgeon. In it she lists hundreds of Shakespeare’s favorite images, showing us how Shakespeare felt about everything from dogs to cats, from ambition to jealousy.) The word
nodding
actually creates two images. It suggests that the flowers have a sleepy human quality; it also suggests that they are bowing their heads in respect—which in turn suggests that the bank is a place where someone important, like a queen, might come to sleep. As we’ll see in a moment, that is exactly what the bank is for, and the queen’s name is Titania.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows
,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
,

Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine
,

With sweet muskroses, and with eglantine
,