Why Study Shakespeare?

I teach Shakespeare at a weekly Charlotte Mason-inspired enrichment program which I launched with a few friends this year. My classes include a talented and fun group high schoolers as well as a rollicking class of 19 middle schoolers. For most of my students, and certainly for my own daughters who are in these classes, this is not their first encounter with the Bard, because in Charlotte Mason and classical schools and homeschools, Shakespeare is an integral part of our education. Skeptics might ask, “His language is old-fashioned, and his plots are somewhat convoluted. So why don’t we wait until high school to start studying him?” Well, we’re not aiming to have our students understand and appreciate every aspect of every play. Charlotte Mason says in her book Formation of Character,

“Shakespeare is not to be studied in a year; he is to be read continuously throughout life, from ten years old and onwards. But a child of ten cannot understand Shakespeare. No; but can a man of fifty?”

If a middle aged former English major like me can find new sources of delight in a play I’ve studied and taught multiple times, then my goal for my children is just to commence their journey of Shakespeare appreciation. My younger ones study the general story of the play and memorize famous speeches. In middle school, we start getting more into the text of the play, performing scenes ourselves, and try to watch Shakespeare on stage. By high school, my kids are familiar enough with the language that we can perform more of it with ease and also dig into deeper discussions of the motivations of the characters. Not all of my students in my classes will go on to study Shakespeare in depth in college like I did, but my goal is to set up my own kids and my other students for a lifetime of appreciating Shakespeare more and more.

But what about the edgy stuff in Shakespeare?

This spring, our students will be studying Macbeth. This intense tragedy contains witches, murder, insanity, and even an infamous use of the word “damned” by Lady Macbeth. Parents, especially the kind of purposeful Christian parents in our program, might legitimately ask whether this is the type of thing we should be exposing our children to—doesn’t the Bible tell us to stay away from sorcery, murder, and profanity?

This is an excellent question. As with everything I bring into our homeschool, I start evaluating Macbeth by asking if this is a work that exemplifies goodness, truth, and beauty.

Is it good?

Witchcraft is indeed forbidden to Jews and Christians from the Old Testament on, but Shakespeare clearly affirms the Biblical teaching on sorcery. The Weird Sisters of Macbeth are malevolent forces tempting Macbeth to a disastrous fate, not misunderstood heroines who just need to “let it go” or “defy gravity” to become their full selves. Yes, Macbeth murders his king and houseguest, but the play clearly shows that this is a grave evil, with horrible consequences. Even the infamous “out, damned spot!” line of Lady Macbeth’s (which has shocked parents in classic children’s literature and real life for well over a hundred years!) is not a blasphemous use of the term but is actually a spiritually accurate statement of what Lady Macbeth is realizing. Having hardened her heart and become complicit in her king’s murder, the guilt turns her mad, and she sees the reality that her unrepentant sin has damned her to hell. At this point in the play, I always stop and do a vocab lesson with my students so that everyone understands that this scene is really talking about her eternal destination, and I’ve yet to have a child start dropping “damns” into their speech after reading that scene. Nowhere in the play is evil promoted or upheld as good. I want my children imbibing literature that is clear on what is good and evil, and Macbeth passes that test.

Is it true?

Macbeth follows in a long tradition of tragedies going back to the ancient Greeks. In Greek tragedy, the protagonist has a fatal flaw which leads to his or her tragic downfall. For Macbeth, the flaw of ambition unrestrained by faith or integrity causes him to break his oath of fealty to his king, his responsibility of hospitality to his guests, and then the bonds of friendship as he orders more deaths of men he used to consider comrades. I talk to my kids all the time about the consequences of sinful choices, but Macbeth provides a vivid picture of how sin not only harms the victims but also, when unconfessed, poisons the soul of the sinner. Macbeth loses the ability to sleep and struggles with insanity; Lady Macbeth’s madness ultimately leads to her death. While many modern films and books portray villains as simply misunderstood, Shakespeare ensures that we see these villains for what they are. A classroom discussion will naturally ask kids to grapple with questions of motivation, behavior, and consequences. We might conclude together that the pain and suffering throughout this play could have been avoided if Macbeth had ignored the witches or if his wife had convinced him to support Duncan’s kingship rather than to murder him. As a teacher, I draw attention to themes, but instead of hitting my kids over the head with a lecture, I let the literature guide them to the natural conclusions that Shakespeare sets up. Even though evil temporarily reigns when Macbeth claims the Scottish crown, by the end of the play, Macbeth has been overthrown by the more legitimate heir to the throne. For those of us who have an eternal hope, this truth that Good will eventually prevail over Evil is demonstrated in the restoration we glimpse at the end of the play. The lessons of Macbeth reflect a true Christian understanding of the reality of the world.

Is it beautiful?

Okay, even if we accept that Macbeth is actually a profoundly moral play that upholds Christian teachings, why do we actually need to read it? Couldn’t we just read our kids a passage from Romans and call it a day? This is where the artistic excellence of Shakespeare comes into the discussion. The beauty of the language and the very complexity of plot and character that makes Shakespeare daunting to the casual reader are what make his works worth studying. Just as we work to form our character, I try to train my children’s tastes and abilities by exposing them to the very best writers, artists, composers, and playwrights. Plenty of writers have defended the value of studying Shakespeare more eloquently than I could, so I’ll just affirm that I love a good story beautifully told.

So at what age do you start exposing kids to Shakespeare?

Many of Shakespeare’s comedies are quite accessible to even young students—we start Shakespeare in early elementary school at my house, and I have seven year olds in my Midsummer Night’s Dream class who are having a blast with the play. My own family has studied and loved Twelfth Night, Midsummer, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It together. The tragedies add a new dimension, and the type of discussion of morality that I describe above is not always developmentally appropriate for young children. At our co-op, the other teachers and I decided that we were going to cut off the Macbeth class to start at age 12, which is middle school, and let the younger students spend the semester working on acting, memorizing speeches and sonnets, and learning more about Shakespeare’s life and times. Younger siblings can certainly learn along with their older siblings at home, if their parents deem them ready, but we don’t feel comfortable discussing murder with seven year olds who aren’t our own children. In a brick and mortar school, I would definitely encourage elementary teachers to start with comedies and even some of the histories.

What if I don’t feel comfortable teaching Shakespeare to my children?

Never underestimate the value of an enthusiastic teacher in cultivating a child’s love for a subject! Even though I literally have a degree in the subject, I’ve had my older kids take Shakespeare classes from other enthusiastic teachers at local homeschool co-ops and online homeschool tutorials. Shakespeare is so perennially popular that you have a good chance of finding some program, even through your parks and rec department or local college theater department. And if you absolutely have no other options and need to be the one teaching it, find beautiful children’s retellings (Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare is a good start) and try to find local performances or watch a (previewed) film version (Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night is a great film with amazing stars and no scenes that I need to fast forward with my kids). The Globe Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust all have lots of resources for studying Shakespeare with kids.