by Philip Schwadron,
Author, It’s Not Hard to Learn the Bard: A Guide to Introducing Shakespeare to Teenagers.
One might imagine that the topics and themes Shakespeare wrote about 400 years ago might not be relevant anymore. One could argue that too much has changed, and for teens especially.
But when I tread into teaching Shakespeare to my high school teens, once they get past their fear and trepidation of the language, they get sucked in and find it’s not only easy to personally connect to what he wrote about so long ago, but fall in love.
Our world may have changed since then, but when it comes to people and what we care about, it hasn’t changed much at all.
Shakespeare continues to be timeless and relevant because of his examination of the human condition.
In fact, show me a teenager who isn’t affected by love, loss, family expectation, and sex, and, like our friend Hamlet says, I’ll “shuffle off this mortal coil”and into an early grave.
Readers continue to find inspiration and salvation in classic literature, but it’s Shakespeare’s plays that tend to be appealing to teens.
His plays reveal something about ourselves that others don’t, and while our external world is ever-evolving, nothing about our interior human lives—what we care about and long for—has changed, and Shakespeare’s characters seem just like people today.
Shakespeare described the terrifying beauty of the adolescent so early in its development, and so definitively and so thoroughly, that it is only slightly an exaggeration to say that he invented teenagers as we know them today.
‘Romeo and Juliet,’ his extended study of the humiliations and glories of adolescence, is the biggest hit of all time and, unlike most of Shakespeare’s works, it has never slipped out of fashion.
[…] This shouldn’t be surprising: People just love to watch a couple of dumb kids make out and die. (And they are awfully young, these dumb Veronese kids: Shakespeare doesn’t ever tell us Romeo’s exact age but we know that Juliet is just 13.)
The great French scholar Philippe Ariès concluded that for most of the Medieval period ‘people had no idea of what we call adolescence, and the idea was a long time taking shape.’
Yet our whole modern understanding of adolescence is there to be found in this play.
Shakespeare essentially created this new category of humanity, and in place of the usual mix of nostalgia and loathing with which we regard adolescents (and adolescence), Shakespeare would have us look at teenagers in a spirit of wonder.
He loves his teenagers even as he paints them in all their absurdity and nastiness.
Of course, the most important feature of adolescent rebellion is that it’s doomed. In this, as well, Shakespeare was right there at the beginning. He defined what it means to be ‘star-cross’d.’
The opposition between the adolescent and the mature orders of the world can have only two possible endings.
One is comic: the teenager grows up, develops a sense of humor, marries, has kids, moves to the suburbs, gets fat and becomes boring.
The other is tragic: the teenager blows up in a blaze of glory. We much prefer to live the comedy. We much prefer to watch the tragedy.”
Shakespeare’s characters are smart, strong, and emotionally open, and the eternal themes of illicit love, gender switching, disappointing our parents, and unmet desire continue to be relevant and important topics to teens.
The fact that Shakespeare wrote gender-bending characters such that the female characters were imbued with intellect, given equal opportunity to express themselves, and were empowered with opinions that were taken seriously by the male characters would be considered progressive nowadays, let alone in the 1600s.
In Romeo and Juliet, for example, the language is beautiful, full of love sonnets and romantic poetry. But what if we take the language out and just digest the plot? In that case, we get a story of two teenagers trying to have sex without their parents finding out. (Sound familiar?)
How it plays out is Juliet meets Romeo at a party on a Friday night, they make out a little bit, and then plan to meet again for some real quality time together.
But their parents hate each other. So, what do they do? Sneak out of town, get married (after all, they’re Catholic and it’s 1593), then go back to Juliet’s bedroom and consummate the marriage, after which Romeo sneaks out the window before dawn. (Note: I do not condone teens doing this, but let’s just say it’s been done).
Then there’s Henry IV, Part One. Here we have a father who is completely disappointed in his deadbeat son as the son’s main occupation is to hang out with losers at the pub, drinking and womanizing.
One could argue that real-life kids have consistently done the same since then, causing innumerable parents the world over sleepless nights as they worried over what their children would become, and in the end, the kids turned out just fine! (Parents, take note: there’s always hope).
“He was masterful at imbuing his stories and his characters with qualities that audiences and readers identify with.”
“Six reasons Shakespeare remains relevant 400 years after his death,” Professor Michelle Boston
This is how I get my students engaged: by letting them see themselves in the characters.
♦ When the Shakespeare father tells the teen character, no, you may not date that boy, how it feels so unempowering and frustrating to their modern hearts.
♦ Or when Hamlet tells his ex-girlfriend Ophelia how he never loved her, and how much that stung, and the extreme desolation it brought her.
♦ Or when Prince Hal’s father calls him a disappointment who will ruin England? Ouch.
There is pain in these moments, and 400 years later, that pain feels no less than it was back then.
In all of his plays are examples of the continuity of humanity’s flaws through the generations. Teenagers are more sensitive to and wary of their flaws than any other age group—and today’s teens are yet more aware of how they are perceived and how their lives can play out on a public stage, causing every emotion to act inside them tenfold.
The secret of Shakespeare is to teach teens to dive into the themes, the characters, the humor, and the essential desires of what each of these characters wants without worrying over or getting caught up in the language and meaning of individual words.
Showing teens how to access the ideas frees them up to become acclimated to the story; after a time, once they have identified with the characters and themes, they stop fearing the words and start taking in the music of the ideas.
When they relax and let the lyricism of the language wash over their modern ears, in time, they acclimate to the rich and glorious poetry of it. They inevitably realize it’s not as foreign as they’d originally thought. More often than not, they fall in love with it.
Like with any new jargon (wasn’t “bling” once just a sound, after all?), Shakespeare’s language too becomes familiar. Then even the most reticent teen will feel its beauty and the true gift of Shakespeare’s writing.
I wrote this book to give teens the opportunity to connect to themselves through something both current and historic, to know that the world doesn’t change much—or, really, at all—and that their concerns are actually all people’s concerns.
Being able to be introduced to Shakespeare through hearing it read aloud first shifts the focus to what it means rather than how it’s said.
Then the music of the line—lines only only Shakespeare could write—become one of the greatest joys of the ear and heart.
Parents and teachers: if your teen or students are intimidated by Shakespeare, curious about his work, or want to gain some insight into his plays so you can go to the theater and fully enjoy the experience, this book is for you. You will learn something about human condition—and importantly—about yourself.
Bio: For over 40 years, Phil Schwadron has been involved in the performing arts as an actor, director, dancer, singer, songwriter, playwright and musician. He began his professional career at the age of 13, performing in the 1983 Tony Award-winning Broadway production of On Your Toes. After moving to Los Angeles, Phil, along with his twin brother Steven, acted professionally in television (Cheers, Beverly Hills 90210) and film (Safe Passage, She’s Out of Control, and Meet the Applegates). Phil received his BA in Theatre Arts from CSU Northridge, followed by his MFA in Acting from California Institute of the Arts.
Currently, the Schwadron brothers write songs, record, and perform with the vocal comedy group The Poxy Boggards. Phil taught Shakespeare Appreciation for 11th grade, and Acting for the Camera for 10th grade in the Integrated Arts Department at the Orange County School of the Arts.
During his ten years at OCSA he also taught Acting and Tap Dancing, plus Acting Techniques for the OCSA Music and Theatre department. It’s Not Hard to Learn the Bard is his first book.
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