Cambridge School Shakespeare

Weaknesses plague most student editions of Shakespeare. They spend too much space dissecting the language and interpreting what Shakespeare means instead of helping students find meaning themselves. In addition, perhaps because this is the type of learning typical in schools, they make studying Shakespeare a dry exercise completed in a chair. The Cambridge School Series avoids these traps, however, and is the best tool I have encountered to help me teach Shakespeare. Each play in the series begins with a letter by editor Rex Gibson explaining the purpose of these editions. He writes:

This Julius Caesar aims to be different from other editions of the play. It invites you to bring the play to life in your classroom, hall or drama studio through enjoyable activities that will increase your understanding. Actors have created their different interpretations of the play over the centuries. Similarly, you are encouraged to make up your own mind about Julius Caesar, rather than having someone else's interpretation handed down to you.

Gibson actually does enable students to make up their own individual minds about what each play means instead of handing down an "expert" opinion. He does at times explain different ways people have viewed the play, but only as an opening for a discussion where readers can decide on their own interpretation. The activities also do "bring the play to life" by making the study of a play an active enterprise, helping students experience Shakespeare as Elizabethans originally did. In Renaissance England no one read Shakespeare's plays. Well, the actors might have, but it was en route to memorizing and performing them. The audience heard and saw. To fully experience Shakespeare today, I think it is necessary to watch movies or plays, read them aloud, memorize and perform selections from them, and do a variety of activities designed to help you contemplate them. The Cambridge School editions have made it easy for me and my students to get better acquainted with Shakespeare. Last year I taught 13 students As You Like It, Macbeth, and King Henry V, and I'm currently teaching Julius Caesar to my two daughters and niece. The series has been invaluable for me, reducing my preparation and research time as I have prepared to teach each play.

Some features of the editions I like are:

• Extensive photographs of real productions of the plays in both color and black and white. This enables students to see that every director has interpreted the play differently, so of course every reader can.
• Brief summaries of the action on each page to help the student understand the action. Plays with longer summaries tend to interpret the play in the process, in my opinion, leading the student to think only one interpretation is correct.
• Essays in the back that provide background information and discuss characters, imagery, Shakespeare's language, major themes, critics' reactions to the play, and performances of the play from Elizabethan times to the present.
• An unobtrusive glossary of difficult words. This way students can look for the meanings if they want, but it doesn't interrupt the flow of reading if they choose not to. I find that sometimes I understand less of the action if nearly every word is prominently defined and displayed.
• Activities to go along with the action of the play on the left-hand side of every page. These include discussing, acting, writing, drawing, designing sets or costumes, miming, and pretending you are a director making decisions about how to stage the play.
• Writing assignments that go beyond literary criticism. Some of the writing topics seem like traditional English class assignments, but others involve other types of writing: for example, writing additional scenes, promotional material for a "production" of the play, a letter from one of the characters to another, a poem to accompany part of it, and a scene recast as a chapter in a novel. Students can gain experience with creative writing, summarizing the action of the play, letter writing, and imitating Shakespeare's style in addition to structured expository writing.
• I habitually spend time on a never-ending quest for the perfect curriculum for every subject. When I do find something ideal, I feel like broadcasting it to everyone I know. Cambridge School, my best discovery in years, should be on everyone's homeschool high school essential list.

A Poetry Assignment

Poetry combines my love of language, music, truth and beauty. The best poetry fuses these elements together in such a way that I think, "That is true. I wish I could phrase it so well." My current nightstand read, The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship by David Whyte, while not a book of poetry, is written by a poet. He explains early on that as a public speaker he mostly relies on hundreds of memorized poems that he strings together into speeches. I immediately began my list of "Poems to Memorize." Perhaps we all might be a bit more of a poet if we spent our time reading, writing, memorizing and reciting poetry.

I studied poetry in high school and college but claim no expertise in teaching it. Since grandmother, mother, daughters, and nieces recently began a three-week study of 19th-century British and American poets (not meant to be exhaustive), I have been attempting to feel my way through teaching it. For each poet we study, I have assigned us to write a poem based on one we have read. Speaking for myself, I know it has not made me write great poetry, but I have a greater appreciation for the poets we have studied, and I do feel I can consider myself an amateur poet.

At the request of one of my daughters and one of my nieces, we included Edgar Allan Poe in our study. I gave the following assignment:

Using Edgar Allan Poe’s “Alone” as your inspiration, write a poem on the topic of your choice using the following guidelines:

• Describe a feeling.
• Use dashes as your only punctuation.
• Make each couplet (set of two lines) rhyme.
• Each couplet should have the same number of syllables on each lines, either 7, 8 or 9 syllables.

Example poem:

Alone

Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood's hour I have not been

As others were — I have not seen

As others saw — I could not bring

My passions from a common spring —

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow — I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone —

And all I lov'd — I lov'd alone —

Then — in my childhood — in the dawn

Of a most stormy life — was drawn

From ev'ry depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still —

From the torrent, or the fountain —

From the red cliff of the mountain —

From the sun that 'round me roll'd

In its autumn tint of gold —

From the lightning in the sky

As it pass'd me flying by —

From the thunder, and the storm —

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view —

My niece just completed her final course of chemotherapy for leukemia last week. The poem she wrote, "Jealousy," touched me with the true feelings of a 14-year-old girl. Here it is:

Jealousy

Whenever I look around and see—

Pretty girls with hair—unlike me—

Curly—straightened—or wavy hair—

Sometimes it’s really hard to bear—

My thoughts are filled with jealousy—

Why not that hair belong to me—

A wig I wear upon my head—

Taken off when it’s time for bed—

I’m not saying—I’m jealous all the time—

Just sometimes it hits me in my mind—

When I have thoughts of jealousy—

I think—one day—that will be me—

My assignment idea, good or bad, is not the intellectual property of anyone other than myself. You are welcome to use it in your own home or class, but I do politely request feedback on whether you enjoyed the assignment if you do indeed complete it.

English Sonnets

For our Shakespeare class this fall, I assigned my students to write sonnets. They needed to be English or Shakespearean sonnets, which basically means the following rules had to be met:

1. The poem would consist of 14 lines.
2. Each line would have 10 syllables, consisting of five repetitions of the stress pattern "da DUM." Another word for this is iambic pentameter, the iamb being a poetic foot that has an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, pentameter meaning that each line contains five iambs, resulting in 10 syllables.
3. The sonnet would have three quatrains (four lines) and a couplet (two lines).
4. The rhyme scheme would be a-b-a-b c-d-c-d e-f-e-f g-g.

I completed the assignment as well and found it to be a challenge. Here it is:

My child that now in arms I do enfold,
With wavering steps and laughing eyes you flee,
For steadily you learn and grow more bold,
No more content to stay, be still, with me.
Like jam that glows of jewels in a jar,
The treasured fruit of harvest well-preserved,
I long to keep you always as you are,
My ruby, sapphire, child with love I serve.
The spring of childhood, buds upon a limb,
A promise of more harvests yet to reap,
Will not remain so tiny on the brim
Of growth, but is a fruit I cannot keep.
Yet in my mind I will retain the child,
The gleaming jam of youth from fruit once wild.

My niece wrote the following sonnet:

I hear the anger in my mother's voice.
There's piles of books of work I have not done.
My sisters fuss and make a lot of noise.
The day should not be gloomy, but be fun.
When e'er a day like this is come to pass,
I want to run away and just be free
And have some time to lay upon the grass.
I'll go some place that is only for me.
Beyond the meadow high upon a hill,
A cottage sits and waits only for me.
Upon my horse I ride, oh what a thrill,
What beauty lies within the flow'rs and trees.
Parting my fantasy is such sweet sorrow,
At least I get to come back here tomorrow.