Shakespeare Can Be Fun

I love Shakespeare! I think he was an absolute genius. His plays teach amazing lessons about relationships and human nature. I adore his poetry; he has written some of the most beautiful lines I have ever read. His comedy is hysterical and his tragedy keeps me thinking for days. I have read and studied every one of his plays and I have seen all of them live or on video. I'm not saying this boastfully, I just want you to understand the depth of my passion for Shakespeare. ;0)

Sometimes kids like to rebel by hating something mom loves. Fortunately, this hasn't happened at my house. (Well, at least not with Shakespeare!) They're not as crazy as me, but my husband and my kids all "get" Shakespeare and willingly watch it with me.

I have spent 3 of the past 5 years, teaching Shakespeare to the teens in our commonwealth school. (This is a once a week school for our homeschooled youth.)

This year I taught a leadership class instead, but I still got my fix of Shakespeare. My younger kids and I studied history with some of our friends and we ended the year with a study of the renaissance and a Shakespeare play.

On Monday night they performed Much Ado About Nothing and they were amazing!

We had a cast of 15 children ages 4-13. When I teach teenage youth, we spend a semester studying Shakespeare in depth. Then we take 12 weeks for actor's training and 7 weeks of rehearsal to produce a 1 1/2 to 2 hr play.

For this group, I cut the play to be about 45 minutes long since we only had 3 weeks for rehearsal. We set the play in the 1950s which made the music and costumes really fun! My sister Jenny was the unofficial producer and all the moms worked on costumes, sets, props etc. It was exciting to see these children work so hard to memorize their lines (and every bit of it was Shakespeare), understand their characters and know where to be on stage. Amazingly, we didn't even have a mom backstage helping them enter and exit. They did it all on their own, with the older ones helping the little ones. Our littlest actor, my niece Cammi, got sick and was sooo sad that she couldn't perform.

Marianne did a fabulous job in the role of Beatrice and Evan was a wonderful Don Pedro.

Here's a dramatic moment onstage when Hero, played by my niece Emma, fainted. Who would have thought that a 10 year old could faint so convincingly?!

Here are the guys apologizing for all of the trouble they have caused. The judge in the background is my niece Alyssa.

Our handsome boys. (The little guy is my nephew Dallin)

Our beautiful girls

I have to end by sharing some of my favorite Shakespeare resources:

If you want to watch Shakespeare, check out Kenneth Branagh's versions of Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet or his funny Love's Labour's Lost musical!

For kids, try Lois Burdett's Shakespeare Can Be Fun series.

If you want to read a play, I highly recommend the CliffsComplete versions. They are easy to read with great commentary.

My favorite book about Shakespeare is Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom, but I also like Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare.

I hope you have fun with Shakespeare sometime soon!