Why Your Students Need to Know Shakespeare

I know what you're thinking---Shakespeare is taught in high school English classes and so your students don't need to know anything about him. (Did I get it right? Is that what you really were thinking?)

Why am I talking about Shakespeare? Because John and I are in the thick of writing Shakespeare Unshackled (or everything you wanted to know about Shakespeare but were afraid would show up on the quiz.)

Shakespeare didn't invent the English language, but he came at a time when it was rapidly changing. In his plays he invented a vast number of phrases that live with us to this day. And because his plays are consistently performed, I'm pretty sure that the language can never change so much that his language becomes impossible to understand. English didn't freeze after Shakespeare, but it got pretty slushy.

John and I are at the familiar point in writing where words and music are flying back and forth as we critique each other's work and try to find the best way of making the material work. Let me share a chunk of one of John's lyrics. This is sung by a write who is upset that every time she comes up with an expression, it turns out that Shakespeare already invented it.

"Elbow room" and "catch a cold"
"All that glitters isn't gold"
How many phrases can just one guy make?

"Heartsick" "leap frog" "fancy free"
"One fell swoop" "it's Greek to me"
He made up "goodness' sake" for goodness' sake!

"Love is blind" "the game is up"
"Laughing stock" "an, there's the rub"
That "green-eyed monster" has me, you can tell.

"In a pickle" "flaming youth"
"Break the ice" and "naked truth"
They're household words, but that's his phrase as well!

An important part of learning about Shakespeare is knowing something about his time and place. John wrote a lyric to be sung by people in Shakespeare's time:

Things are topsy and they're turvy
We've got plague and we've got scurvy
There are chickens in the bedroom and the dog just drank my tea,

It is noisy and it's smelly
And there's nothin' on the telly
In the wacky world of England in the sixteenth century.

Queen Elizabeth's our ruler
And there ain't nobody cooler
She sent Francis Drake around the world to see what he could see.

Spain's Armada was a baddy
But she said "Now who's your daddy?"
In the wacky world of England in the sixteenth century.

Silly stuff, but as usual, John has cleverly thrown in an awful lot of information that your students will absorb. Sure, they can wait til they're seniors to read Hamlet, but your kids deserve to know something about the most important writer in our English language.

The play is designed for grades 5-high school, and will be released about March 20th. More to come in this blog very soon.

© 2007 John Heath and Ron Fink