Uncovering Emotion in Shakespeare Texts

A high school Shakespeare unit, unsurprisingly, can lead to some hesitation for both students and teachers: The plays were written over 400 years ago with labyrinthine plots and characters, as well as words you need to look up in almost every sentence. But there’s a reason these plays are so often studied: Every scene contains action, complicated emotion, and lessons to be learned.

I’ve been teaching and directing children and teens in Shakespeare plays for the last 25 years, with my company, Child’s Play NY, and other theaters before that, and have taken my approach into English language arts (ELA) classrooms during their Shakespeare units. I’ve noticed that when we offer young people the opportunity to perform Shakespeare, we appeal to their desire to be taken seriously, to be challenged with sophisticated material, and to connect with each other in meaningful ways.

Helping students connect with SHAKESPEARE’S LANGUAGE

While Shakespeare may seem difficult to connect with, there are a number of techniques I’ve used to help teenagers tap into these epic stories.

1. Find the image. Below is a piece of text that Juliet speaks in Romeo and Juliet. While it could be easy for students to get lost in the sea of words, you can help them determine what is happening by guiding them to stop and get specific about what each piece of descriptive language means,and then put it all back together. Start by asking students to bracket the descriptive language like this:

[Gallop apace], you [fiery-footed steeds],

Toward [Phoebus’s lodging]. Such a [wagoner]

As [Phaeton] would [whip you to the west]

And [bring in cloudy night immediately].

Students have learned how to identify descriptive language throughout their ELA classes in the past, so this activity helps them apply something they already know how to do in a new context with new language.

Once students have bracketed the pieces, they can look up any words they don’t know and then create a visual for what the character is saying. Teachers can have students complete this activity on small portions of text and then have students use what they’ve visualized to help them get an understanding of an entire scene.

2. Focus your attention. When getting started with Shakespeare, it can be helpful to encourage students to only focus on the most important words in a given line. This can mean skimming over pronouns, articles, conjunctions, and prepositions to give more time and attention to what can be visualized. I encourage students to cross out these words lightly in their scripts, like this:

Hamlet: And, would it were not so, you are my [mother].

This can help students avoid getting lost or overwhelmed by the text and more quickly identify the most important thing a character is saying.

3. Rule-breaking iambs. Shakespeare is often noted for his use of iambic pentameter—writing five beats per line, with a weak syllable and a strong syllable in this pattern: (bu-BUH-bu-BUH-bu-BUH-bu-BUH-bu-BUH). But Shakespeare is a sophisticated breaker of his own rules. An over-full verse can be a clue that a character is feeling so much that it can’t be contained in the regular meter. For example, Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be, that is the question” or Lord Capulet’s “Graze where you will, you shall not house with me.”

As students are reading, encourage them to look for these moments where the rules are broken, and ask them what emotions the characters might be experiencing to cause this break.

4. Notice how vowels impact emotion. In Shakespeare’s writing, you can often find examples where vowels invoke a sense of vulnerability, and the lack of vowels invokes a feeling of frustration. Look at Juliet’s invocation on the balcony, “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?,” full of emotion and open vowel sounds, contrasted with the next line, “Deny thy father and refuse thy name.”

Helping students identify these patterns can make it easier for them to understand what a character is feeling and, therefore, better understand the scene at large.

5. Find the opposites. In Shakespeare’s plays, characters are often wrestling with opposing viewpoints, and they use each other or even the audience to help them solve a problem, like Viola, in Twelfth Night, who is conflicted over whether to reveal her concealed identity: “As I am man / My state is desperate for my master’s love: / As I am woman, now alas the day!”

To help students understand these opposing viewpoints, encourage them to not only read these parts of the text, but physically demonstrate the opposition through gestures and physical movement. One way to do this is to pick two areas in the room, and when a character expresses an opposing view, have the students move from one area to the other.

6. Use games to engage with the text. I encourage teachers to use games as a way to help students find freedom in gestures and a boldness in their vocalization that they might not otherwise find if they were trying to “get it right.” The following are a few favorites that help students get out of their heads and into the physical life of the characters.

Shakespeare uses names to reveal who the characters are: The name “Tybalt” has sharp, jabbing sounds with Ts and Bs, and “Romeo” has those open vowel sounds that reveal his emotive nature. To help students think about what a character’s name might mean, you can play the Character Gesture Game.

To play, students stand in a circle; one at a time they say their character’s name and act out the gestures that feel aligned with it. This not only gets students thinking, but gets them performing in a low-stakes way that can help them with a larger performance of a play later on.

Another option to help students practice some low-stakes performance is through the Four Corner Emotion game. To play, assign a different emotion to each corner of the room—for example, Grief, Fear, Surprise, and Anger—and assign a line of text to each student. Then, one at a time, have students move from one corner to the other, repeating their same line, but saying it with the relevant emotional inflection for that corner. The rest of the class can talk about which feeling made that line pop the most and why, justifying their reasoning with evidence from the text.