For the past eighteen years, I have been directing plays. Most of the casts I have directed have been young theater artists, from ages four to nineteen. In the past several years, I have been working with teens and young adults. The favorite playwright of these theater troupes?
I am not surprised by this. Shakespeare has been my favorite playwright since I was eleven years old. While many who meet the Immortal Bard in high school lit classes may think of Shakespeare as difficult, boring and irrelevant, those of us who do Shakespeare—experience Shakespeare in production—find excitement, challenge and timely and timeless themes.
Shakespeare’s genius is above all theatrical genius. Shakespeare’s plays, in his own time, were great commercial successes. The plays brought in audiences and kept them coming back. Because of Shakespeare’s genius, audiences continue to be enchanted, challenged and touched by these plays. The young lovers of Midsummer Night’s Dream or of Romeo and Juliet, frustrated by parents and society, are easily recognized by young lovers of any era. Macbeth’s ambition—do the ends justify the means?—or Brutus’ struggle with divided loyalty—is my loyalty to my friend or to my country?—are as timely today as they were four hundred years ago.
Most people will agree that Shakespeare’s plays are some of the greatest in the English language. Many people will also agree that his texts are among the most challenging. Why should anyone attempt such difficult plays with young actors? For me, there are several answers to this question.
Young people deserve the best, and Shakespeare is the best. Any theatrical production requires many hours of practice, design work, set construction. Hundreds of hours are required to mount a production. In my opinion, these hours are better spent on a great script than a mediocre script. Working with one of Shakespeare’s classics, you know you have a script that can succeed – because it has succeeded with audiences for hundreds of years.
These scripts can succeed with young actors. While it is true that Shakespeare’s plays have a reputation for challenging both scholars and actors today, it is also true that many of the roles were written for adolescent apprentices, boys ranging in age from ten to seventeen or eighteen. The scripts are “playable”.
In producing and performing in one of Shakespeare’s plays, young people are learning by doing. It is obvious—and confirmed by numerous studies—that young people performing Shakespeare increase their vocabularies. The richness and quality of Shakespeare’s language not only enrich vocabulary but also encourage complexity of thought. Many studies also show that students engaged in drama improve academic performance in Language Arts and Humanities.
When my troupes have produced one of Shakespeare’s plays, we have learned much more than the lines of that particular script. We have set Shakespeare’s plays in different time periods. As a result, when working on Hamlet set in the Victorian era, we have learned not only about Elizabethan England, but also about the music and mores of Queen Victoria’s time. Setting Julius Caesar in Caesar’s Rome, we learned about costume, superstition and politics. Setting As You Like It in the 1920s, we learned about flappers, flivvers and dancing the Charleston.
Perhaps more important, although more difficult to measure, are the affective benefits of performing Shakespeare. I have seen the young people in my theater troupes grow and mature in many ways. They have grown in poise and self-expression. They have also increased their self-esteem, by undertaking a task that is acknowledged by all to be challenging and succeeding in that task. By working long hours on this task with a group all committed to the same goals, young people learn team work. They learn that the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts; that everyone is needed and makes a contribution. In addition, young people seeking to test their limits and find a thrilling challenge can find a positive venue for this in performing Shakespeare. Performing in front of an audience is a challenge, a thrill and excitement. Performing Shakespeare can be a positive way for young people to challenge themselves to excel.