Which Shakespeare play to teach?

I also want to give an English Education majors view on teaching shakespeare to middle/high school learners. i'm in my Junior year and taking English 464: shakespeare. Now I remember reading good ol' willy in highschool and I loved it. Unfortunately most everyone else hated it. Now that I am in this class I can see what a disservices we did to The Bard. Honestly, you mention the comedies as being "uncomplicated". You couldn't be much farther from the truth. If you get out there into the research then you will see that plays like Merchant and Midsummer are VERY complicated. They involve issues of religious conversion, gender roles, discrimination, familiy vs. friend as well as anything vs. state... it goes on and on and on. PLEASE do not underestimate the complication in comedies or in ANY of Shakespeare's plays. You do The Bard a disservice.

So, my World Lit class voted to read All's Well That Ends Well. There is practically no supplemental resources on this play to aid me in teaching it. Probably due to the fact that it was one of Shakespeare's least performed play. Any suggestions in teaching it from those who may have read it or perhaps taught it? Thanks!

To Genoveva: It's been thirty years since I read this play, part of a Shakespeare class at Temple University. As you say, it wasn't his best mover. He apparently used a Decameron text as a source for the storyline. Trying to find a source that had any depth I came up with this link......... http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=877 Hope this helps you get started. quasi

I teach Shakespeare in my English (as a foreign language) classes in Germany, and MY former teacher told me she had done all kinds of stuff before, R&J, JuliusC, Othello, but she finally would up teaching Macbeth a lot.
I've since taught Macbeth many times and it's now the play I know best and students tend to stay with it very well because it's fast moving. In Macbeth, Shakespeare's shortest tragedy, you can even leave out the Hecate scene (probably not Shakespearean, but an interpolation, as Hecate speaks in iambic and the other witches in trochaic meter and there is no good reason to introduce a fourth witch anyway...) and the lengthy English scene, in which Malcolm "tests" Macduff to see whether he is trustworthy or a spy sent by Macbeth, and you can save loads of time.
Macbeth is DEFINITELY a good choice.

As a second play I'd take a look at Romeo & Juliet or Twelfth Night. That depends on whether you'd rather teach comedy or tragedy - over here we USUALLY teach tragedies because all the punning and word-play in the comedies tends to eat kids' lunch and just NOT be funny anymore once you've done all the explaining.
Romeo & Juliet is lengthy but has the advantage of being incredibly well-documented in all kinds of ways, e.g. films, audiobooks, etc., and besides it contains it's very own plot-summary towards the end when the friar speaks - if you've forgotten what had happened sofar, HE'S GONNA TELL YOU.

Twelfth Night is brilliant on the stage no matter what you do, I haven't taught it yet but definitely would like to. Like Rosalind in "As You Like It", the Viola/Cesario character as leading role gives a perfect example of explaining just WHY having a female character pretending to be a man was such a natural choice in Shakespeare's day: The female characters were played by boys and men ANYWAY, because no women were allowed to act - meaning this was a very WELCOME excursion both for the audience and the actor (oh goody, I get to use my normal voice again!) or actually might be very challenging, because now you have a boy playing a woman playing a man - and of course NOT quite succeeding in that last bit, keeping the audience entertained. And - what I really like: The characters aren't just COPIES of one another, as they tend to be in some of the more dubious comedies such as Love's Labours Lost (which I still find brilliant, especially after seeing what Branagh did to it) so they all have a REASON for being there in the first place.

Lots of luck to you in your teaching... shaklover

Shaklover's right.
We were taught Macbeth in 11th grade Lit. You can't go wrong with Macbeth.

If you can find a Shakespeare play that is on locally in a real theater, even better. It's great if they can get some idea of the theater itself, since many have never been.

we did romeo and juiliet back then.
you could do much ado about nothing and romeo and juiliet

I did Macbeth in grade eleven as well. It was in keeping with a whole tragic hero theme. We also read The Crucible and Frankenstein

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Originally Posted by byucougs

I teach 8th grade LA and I taught Midsummer Night's Dream this year. It went well. Next year I want to teach three plays. I think I am going to teach Midsummer again. Any suggestions for the other two? To the students that read this, do you have any fond memories of Shakespeare that you would like to share?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Ed "Mr. Belak"

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The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet are accessible for 8th graders. To me, the idea is to teach them something they can get without having to skip a lot of the subtext and complexities. Hamlet, King Lear, & Macbeth, for example, are too difficult for 8th graders.

I was a LA teacher in secondary education for several years and I taught Much Ado About Nothing. It is perfect for high school students because of the parody Much Ado about Noting.