~by Keith Jones
Although I have taught Shakespeare on the college level for many years, I had never considered directing a play until RiverTree School asked me to direct their end-of-year Shakespeare play.
I quickly learned that two of the most essential elements to possess in directing a Shakespeare play for grade school children are passion and patience.
Passion for Shakespeare is contagious. If the children—and their teachers and parents—see the passion you have, they will not only be able but they will be eager to share that passion with you. The popular impression that kids are reluctant to engage with Shakespeare is entirely false. With the invaluable help of their teachers, these kids were as far from “creeping like snail unwillingly to school” as can be imagined!
Patience is essential because the process can be lengthy. It takes time for the play to come together. The children need time to study the story, to learn their lines and their blocking, and to learn to project their voices without shouting. While they are learning those, they are also starting to understand more about the characters they are enacting and the way those characters relate to the others on stage. But none of that comes in a day.
Answering students’ questions was a particularly delightful part of the process. They had a lot of them, and even though the questions tended to start at a basic “What does this character mean in this speech?” level, they soon developed into something much more: “Why is this character so mean in this speech?”
The kids and I had an enormously joyful time engaging with the material. Directing grade school children in a Shakespeare play was unquestionably one of the most profound ways of engaging with Shakespeare that I have ever experienced.
Keith is a Professor in the Department of English at Northwestern College, and the author of Bardfilm: The Shakespeare and Film Microblog. You can see Keith featured in this month’s Teacher to Teacher segment on our monthly BardNotes e-newsletter, as well as Margaret in our first ever Student to Student video, below.