All the World's a Stage

"How did you get your students to memorize all those lines?" a girl asked me at our Shakespeare class performance of As You Like It. Memorizing the lines for a play that is over two hours long is no easy feat, made even more difficult when much of the language is archaic, written over 400 years ago. In addition, the character Rosalind has more lines than any other woman in a Shakespeare play, and I cast two students in the role, each acting Rosalind for one of our performances. While I consider memorizing to be an accomplishment, many of the other skills my students acquired as we rehearsed and performed As You Like It are even greater. Each of the following will serve them well throughout their lives.

• Commitment: Every student chose to participate and to put in the work necessary for a smooth performance. I could not make everyone memorize their lines even if I wanted to, but they cared enough about having a good performance that they all practiced on their own and learned their parts. 
• Enunciating and projecting: These two abilities are the foundation of all public speaking. A person who can be heard and understood encourages the audience to listen and care about what they have to say.
• Empathy: Acting requires empathy because an actor will only be convincing if they understand and enter into the feelings of the character they play. As the director, I watched my young cast members mature into their roles over the course of our rehearsals, progressively bringing greater depth of expression into their acting. The ability to empathize may be the foundation for all moral behavior. According to the Collins English Dictionary, empathy is "the power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another person's feelings." Unless they understand that others have feelings different than their own, people will not care how their actions affect another person.
• Teamwork: Participating in the cast of a play requires cooperation. If a cast member forgets lines or fails to come onstage at their cue, every other actor on the stage needs to cover for and try to help them while appearing to the audience as if this was the way it was supposed to be. In some group projects, one person can get stuck doing most of the work, but in a play, a few good actors can't make up for several who consistently forget their part or play it woodenly. The success of all depends on each one in a transparent way.
• Literary Interpretation: Close readings of a text yield the best interpretations. Too often when people read literature, they form their opinions quickly, without an indepth study of the text to justify their conclusions, but acting requires memorization. My students know Shakespeare's own words in a way that a cursory reading and discussion in a class would never provide. They had to think about what each of their lines meant to become the character and to help the audience catch on even when the language was opaque. My own understanding of the play gained clarity and depth through all the rehearsals and even the performances.

If asked I wouldn't know how to grade my students on their participation in the play. Education can't be easily quantified. Schools tend to focus too much on requirements and benchmarks, constantly measuring incremental mastery of knowledge or skills that appears systematic but is really arbitrary. I measure education in a more personal fashion. Have my students grown in skills and character traits that will expand for them the experience of being human? Will they desire to know other things in the future the way they now know As You Like It? Do they work better with others? Can they communicate better? I believe they have, and I hope as they all find and play a meaningful role in the world, they will remember that "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players."