This paper offers practical pedagogical strategies for teaching Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to high school students. It addresses common barriers — including language difficulty, historical distance, and performance anxiety — and proposes a scaffolded approach that begins with thematic connections students already relate to, such as parental authority, young love, and violence in media. The paper outlines activities including wordless pantomime, visual metaphor illustration, sonnet writing, and iambic pentameter exercises before culminating in flexible, low-pressure performance. The goal is to build student comprehension and confidence progressively rather than expecting immediate dramatic engagement with difficult Elizabethan text.
"Sometimes parents just don't understand." What teenage student does not recognize the importance of this truth in his or her daily life? And what phrase more succinctly sums up the basic theme of Romeo and Juliet? This is why so many modern composers and filmmakers with an eye on drawing in an adolescent audience have found inspiration in the Elizabethan tragedy. Over the course of this century alone, audiences have been treated to modernized retellings of the classic — from Baz Luhrmann's film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes to West Side Story's contemporary musical setting of the Montagues and the Capulets in New York City. Yet teachers are often almost as intimidated about teaching Shakespeare as their students are about learning from him.
Why are we as teachers so intimidated by Shakespeare? Of course, teachers wish to make the play historically comprehensible, rather than merely encouraging students to see themselves in the lives of the main characters. A teacher's goal is to give students more than they can glean from attending a screening of a modern film or listening to a motion picture soundtrack. But the play's issues of individual choice and free agency in marriage — versus parental control — are the same issues that gripped the Elizabethan era as well as our own. If students can appreciate this thematic connection, they can become hooked on Shakespeare through Romeo and Juliet.
Also, the prevalence of violence and sword fighting — both in Shakespeare's England, his imagined Italy, and in the media of today — helps students draw connections between the history and themes of the text, the characters, and their own lives. The appeal of some of the most verbally dense and difficult characters in the play, like Mercutio and his "Queen Mab" speech, and the Nurse, can be unlocked, at least in part, by stressing the nature and construction of these characters' personalities and emotional lives. This gives students an incentive to unpack even the most challenging phrases and speeches.
Language — there's the rub! The issue of language is perhaps the most difficult obstacle for a teacher to overcome, as it is one of the primary reasons students claim to dislike Shakespeare. Again, having a personal connection to the characters gives students an incentive to want to understand what those characters are saying — especially when it is slightly risqué, as with Juliet's "Gallop apace, ye fiery-footed steeds" soliloquy before she receives Romeo, the Nurse's ribald jests about virginity, and Mercutio's frequent taunting of his friends.
However, the romantic nature of the language, as well as its difficulty, may be one reason to discourage students from immediately acting out the play as a way to engage with the text. Acting out scenes is important, but it must come at the end of a series of stages — it cannot be jumped into with the same heady impetuousness as the young lovers of the text jump into marriage.
"Pantomime and visual illustration build plot understanding"
"Sonnet writing and meter exercises demystify poetic form"
"Flexible, low-pressure performance closes the learning sequence"
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