Students Learn How to Teach Shakespeare

Joe Salvatore understands the importance of keeping Shakespeare alive for his students. So when the teacher in Steinhardt's educational theatre program received an NYU Curriculum Development Challenge Fund Grant to incorporate a high school youth ensemble into the program's Shakespeare Initiative, he was ecstatic.

“I think it's important that our educational theatre students understand how to read, act, and teach Shakespeare, and what better way to learn than by working with high school students?” Salvatore said.

Salvatore, who is a director and dramaturge, was inspired to create the ensemble after teaching the Shakespeare theatre course and inviting young people into the class to work with his students. The experience gave Salvatore's students a chance to experiment with coaching techniques that were discussed in classroom.

Salvatore and his graduate students auditioned 30 high school students for the youth ensemble and cast 14 of them in the production. The group rehearsed once a week for three hours, and often participated in Salvatore's graduate level Shakespeare courses.

“Working with Shakespeare is like working with a second language,” Salvatore said. “People think that Shakespeare's language is hard, but I like to say that that the ear and the mouth have to recalibrate to it.” If an average high school performance takes eight weeks of rehearsal, Salvatore's students were told to prepare for twelve to sixteen weeks of practice. Like learning a foreign language, Shakespeare requires immersion.

The one-time grant from the university helped to provide props and costumes for the ensemble, lunches for long Saturday rehearsals, and a $100 stipend for each high school student.

Why are teachers so passionate about Shakespeare?

“Shakespeare's not going away,” Salvatore, said. “His plays are in high school and college curricula across the country. There is something about the humanity in those plays that makes us look at ourselves and question the choices that we make.

“Therefore, we need to provide artists and teachers with the proper training to teach the plays as theatre in performance rather than only as pieces of English literature.”