A Lesson in Shakespearean Insults: Artful Questioning to Unlock the Language and Meaning of Conflict in Romeo and Juliet

Introduction

My chapter contributes to this book, New Approaches to the Investigation of Language Teaching and Literature, by providing one method of introducing William Shakespeare to secondary school pupils. The choice to write about Shakespeare comes from a good place– the belief that Shakespeare is not meant to be some old bore inflicted to blight the lives of teenagers in a stuffy classroom. However, boring is the way one 13-year-old boy feels about encountering Shakespeare’s plays for the first time in Y8, and this is due to their readability, the volume of reading, as well as the passive pedagogies used to teach them:

The boy’s sentiment is honest and perhaps understandable. Slogging away, reading Shakespeare sat behind a desk would be not only tedious but rather futile as an educational endeavour since Shakespeare’s plays work through emotion and experience. They were never penned to be read from the page in a monotone manner; they were penned to be performed so to ‘get the kids involved’ in the action is a worthy pedagogical goal. Realistically though, learning is a type of behaviour and to a large extent, disengagement is the familiar companion to the secondary school teacher who has likely encountered Shakespeare’s image of the ‘whining pupil creeping like a snail unwillingly to school’ (As You Like It, 2,7).

At the time of writing this chapter, I am in my nineteenth year of teaching. I taught English in mainstream secondary schools, special schools, and pupil referral units before moving into teacher-training and then higher-education. Like all teachers, I had to learn my craft and worked diligently to build my own library of ‘tried and tested’ resources to facilitate involvement with plot, action, character, and themes. Memorable lessons include creating a dating profile for Shakespeare’s ideal woman based on the unflattering images he employs in Sonnet 130. The format of iconic dating show Blind Date introduces some of the more memorable characters from Shakespeare’s plays. The Cilla Black character presents each of the three contestants who are ‘looking for love’ by asking them, ‘what’s your name and where do you come from?’ The contestants then introduce themselves in character in a memorable way using the synopsis they have been given of a Shakespearean character.

After losing my precious USB stick containing a decade’s worth of lessons, I uploaded hastily made replacements to one of the teacher resourcing websites. These were the most downloaded resource and were featured in The Guardian’s How to teach… Shakespeare (Drabble, 2013). This chapter focuses on my Introduction to Shakespeare lesson which uses Shakespearean insults as its focus. Broadly, this chapter will raise points that are useful for international teachers whose pupils struggle with literary analysis since the major objectives of this chapter are practical:

• 1.

  to share the teaching strategies and materials which support and encourage involvement with the language of Shakespeare (in this case, the content of Act 1, scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet);

• 2.

  to develop higher level thinking skills through questioning influenced by Bloom’s revised Taxonomy.

• 3.

  to explore ways of helping students to excavate meaning from text and read canonical texts with more subtlety.

The material presented here aims to encourage international dialogue (and hopefully future collaboration) between teachers and academics on creative pedagogies for exploring canonical texts of the past.

Overview Of Main Sections

This chapter will proceed in four parts. Section one analyses some of the issues connected with teaching Shakespeare in two parts. The first provides a brief account of the neoliberal policy context in which UK teachers have been working for the past two decades. Following this, the section turns to a discussion of Shakespeare’s plays. We trace some of the deep roots of Shakespeare in our current language and the cultural values this embodies. Looking to the pupil perspective, we then turn to the kind of thinking that reading Shakespeare involves and the specific demands it places on the pupil as a reading process.