Final Point 3

Play: As You Like It

Audience: High school students

This play dabbles in romance, humor, and identity, which are all subjects that high school students deal with on a regular basis.  This is conducive to our goal to get the students interested and interacting on a more personal level with Shakespeare.  We want to make reading Shakespeare a more fun and less daunting class for the next rising generation.

• We do not think it would be productive to overwhelm students with scholarly articles.  We think it would be counter-productive in relation to our goal to create an environment that fills the gap between Shakespeare and the students.
• That being said, we do want to open their minds slightly to the idea that the text can be more than just a text.  We are interested in the idea of bringing a feminist lens to the surface in regards to Rosalind's identity throughout the play.  We feel this would be an interesting point to bring up for high school students as they themselves are molding their own identities.  We feel it would, once again, diminish the gap between the students and Shakespeare.
• With the goal of interaction in mind, we think it would be helpful to give a [very] brief explanation of the history of performances of Shakespeare's time and the different techniques one can use to perform this play today.  The history of men playing women's roles in a cross-dressing play could be humorously engaging to a high school audience and discussing the different techniques one could use today in performing the play would promote the students interpreting and performing the play themselves.
• With high school students being active in their use of technology, we like the idea of creating an online/e-book version with hyperlink annotations.  It would be less distracting to an audience that can be a  little attention-deficient and more easily accessible.  It would add to the text rather than detracting from it.  We would annotate words that are not familiar to your average high school students and "translate" them in a way that they specifically would understand.

For our edition, ultimately what we hope to accomplish is a way to grab the attention of students; a way to help them, at the very least, find enjoyment from reading Shakespeare, because enjoyment of a subject/thing cultivates a love for learning more about that subject/thing.  We think that it is a lot to ask young students to dive deeply into Shakespeare and really "get it," but to learn how to enjoy it is a terrific and an important starting point.