If a teacher chooses to investigate one of these 12 SOL plays with their students, practicing parts, or all of it, out loud, not only will the students retain new syntax and vocabulary, but they are likely to create memories that might last a lifetime. A wonderful, forty year-old nurse, Ashley, at my dentist, can still joyfully play all of Juliet in the famous balcony scene. This memorization, done in her teens, now gives her a party-piece, and some tangible experience of performing. Far from dumbing down the scripts, I have intensified the situations the characters find themselves in. This cannot be accomplished with the usual literary, piece-meal, or translation-nonsense, common to teachers. There is a multitude of ways to waste time “teaching” Shakespeare. The only teachers that are ever remembered are those who helped students actually PLAY Shakespeare!

Think about it: for $10 Canadian dollars, your school can own a PDF script that can be used by your whole student body, in perpetuity. The whole series and guides are currently on sale for ½ price. If you have some talent, you will now have the library to experience these plays orally, or staged. If your students are self-starters they have a HUGE playground to explore. This classroom-approach mainly requires judicious casting and regular oral practice and refinement. What you supposedly know about Shakespeare, what you memorized from some boring professor at university, is basically blah, blah, blah to students’ ears, certainly to mine. The essence of drama is ‘What is going to happen next?’

The rules and supposed rhythm of iambic pentameter verse are not rigorously followed by highly trained professional actors anyway. Good actors are trained to invent their text as their characters would, as life demands, as their vocabulary allows. Good actors would never let rhythm boss them about. In the 4 Shakespeares I performed with Maggie Smith, I never once heard her pound out rhythm; she was always natural and wonderfully inventive. Also, I have been in many other world-class productions with the Canadian Stratford Festival. All the texts were vacuumed of archaic and repetitive language. These SOL scripts would work well in any theatre, but I intended them for the classrooms of all ages. I call my formatting thought-verse for a reason. Shakespeare is best fresh-minted!

SOL just needs courageous teachers!‍ ‍There is always some chaos once voices and emotions are unleashed. Relish them; they are the sounds of learning!

The teaching of Shakespeare has been broken forever, certainly my 75 years. I have fixed it. What is the problem? The poor choices or technique of some movie star?? The big business of bores??? Try the voices of your students, instead! At least read the whole SOL script out loud. Your students are not stupid. They’ll tell you what they like, they might even memorize favourite chunks that they find. Speeches make wonderful interludes between dental procedures, while impressing parents greatly. My kids, as you might imagine, knew many. They also read to their classmates; it all came down to PRACTICE!

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