Bobcat Stories

There’s a reason William Shakespeare has been, for over 400 years, a giant presence in English literature. The great tragedies, the pointed histories, and the charming comedies have been considered part of a literary education for generations and are still in most school curricula. While Bosque School is proud of the wide variety of diverse, contemporary literary voices our students read, there is always a place for the Bard. Five teachers from different grade levels and departments (Sean Etigson, Jasmine McSparren, Meghan Bode, Emily Kratzer, and Katie Proctor) met with the Buzz to discuss how and why they teach Shakespeare, both as literature and as theater. Find a seat in the fashionable “Gentlemen’s Stalls,” or perhaps up with the patrons in the galleries, or, for you rowdier groundlings, pay just a penny to stand in the yard, and enjoy the show.

In 7th grade, says teacher Sean Etigson, a highlight of the yearlong study of the power of stories is exploring “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” By reading the play aloud, scene by scene, in large and small groups, students focus on strategies for understanding Shakespeare, such as understanding the context and plot, and considering the relationships and motivations of the characters. Analyzing the text from multiple perspectives and asking questions about what motivates these characters helps the students develop empathy and self-awareness. Similarly, they focus on making relevant connections between the text and their own lives. Once, when reading one of the mixed-up romantic scenes about who likes whom, a future Bosque School graduate reflected, “They’re just like 7th graders!”

Their study of Shakespeare also centers on building vocabulary — forsooth! — and playing with the rich language of the script and sonnets. Students are asked what they think is the most important word or phrase Shakespeare brought into English; they investigate those 2,000-3,000 words and phrases, and practice writing them with a quill and ink on parchment. They then write a paragraph about why this word is so significant, and these posters in our hallways advertise Shakespeare’s lasting influence on language: gossip, bet, champion, and football. Whether it is drawing inspiration from the Hip-Hop artist Akala and playing “Hip Hop or Shakespeare?” or writing an analytical response sheet in rhyming couplets, the students delight in the power of Shakespeare’s words.

Final projects vary and engage both creative and expository writing skills. Sometimes, the 7th graders put their literary analysis skills to writing an evidence-based argument in the form of a mock trial speech about who was responsible for the mess of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” They deliver these speeches to a live audience, who also serves as the jury. Rarely is the same character found responsible for causing the most harm! Other years, they take a more creative approach by asking students to write and perform “Shakespeare’s Lost Scenes”— scenes that are not included in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” but should be! This assignment results in equal parts hilarity and poignance – a nuanced outcome that feels particularly Shakespearean.

Mr. Etigson and the 7th graders call this unit “Shakespeare is Everywhere,” and without fail, it captures the imagination and enthusiasm of the classes. As one student wrote this year: “Shakespeare fills me with mirth!”

When those same Shakespeare scholars become 8th-graders, they study “Romeo and Juliet,” those famous star-crossed lovers. Teacher Ms. McSparren says that a common belief is that reading Shakespeare is one of the toughest things a student can do, so mastering the skills of decoding and understanding the text means you can read anything. This unit targets many analytical skills and language acquisition. Approaching the story from many different angles, not just the plot, allows the students to create avenues of understanding. 

One popular activity the students participate in every year is writing letters to Juliet. They choose a character from the play and imagine what that character might express in a letter to Juliet after the tragedy has unfolded and both she and Romeo, along with their friend Mercutio, are dead. They rework Shakespearean language, write on stationery with old-fashioned quills, and address them to the Club de Giulietta in Verona, which has accepted these letters from around the world since the 1930s. The almost 100 years of letters from the collection, many of which are available online, demonstrate the universal themes the play explores.

Topics the 8th graders wrestle with go beyond the story and the text. They discuss the lawsuit against the 1968 Franco Zefferelli movie, using it to discuss the ethics of casting actual 14-year-olds, and debate whether there should be restrictions on the roles minors can be cast in.

They take a look at the work of the Public Theater Company (PTC), which sought to make Shakespeare more accessible during COVID by translating the plays into ASL and Spanish. The PTC also made videos using Pablo Neruda’s translation of the play, and made them available to lower-income Spanish-speaking communities, envisioning Shakespeare as a tool of empowerment rather than an expression of oppression or elitism.

At the heart of the play is the duel, which results in Mercutio’s death and causes all the tragedy that follows. To see why dueling was such a big thing for masculinity, the students read an Italian guidebook on dueling, “Code di Duello,” and learn the rules and protocols of a duel to examine which character broke the rules first. They then practice the actual fencing techniques, and finally, watch Ms. McSparren and fellow middle school science teacher Sam Williams re-enact the duel between Mercutio, Romeo, and Tybalt.

Ms. Williams also becomes a partner as the class connects Shakespeare and science, focusing on Renaissance discoveries in astronomy and anatomy, including the Black Plague, Halley’s comet, and the first viewing of the constellation Cassiopeia. They examine this era’s new understanding of stars, which gave Shakespeare the first use of the phrase “shooting star,” and inspires the question of whether the stars or our actions determine our fate. The students also examine what it would be like to be a woman at the time, reflecting on Juliet’s experience of marriage, consummation, and Catholic identity. At the end of the unit, they see movie and ballet versions of the play and write about how the story can be told through dance.  

Through all this, says Ms. McSparren, students who approach the play thinking it’s going to be a hard, serious unit, find that it’s actually quite playful. The story and the language come alive, and the students become a different kind of reader, more active, more involved. And sometimes, the students who do the best in this unit are those who are dyslexic or neurodivergent, who can experience reading as something more than intimidating words on a page. Students who find it hard to sit still can learn through movement, such as fencing or acting out a scene. And sometimes, that romantic scene between Romeo and Juliet? Those bawdy puns? Pretty funny when it coincides with the sex ed unit in WELLBEING class. The 8th grade launches “Romeo and Juliet” in January 2026, so watch out for those fencers as they dance across campus next month.

Eighth-grade drama is another home for the Bard. Meghan Bode, drama teacher, begins the year with a theater history research project, after an overview from ancient Egypt through Shakespeare, and the students pick an era or subject that they research in more depth. As the students then move into more advanced theater techniques, they are aware of where they are in this long tradition. The Shakespeare unit that follows usually begins with the sonnets, as they are easy to memorize, help students understand blank verse, iambic pentameter, and rhyme, and are open to interpretation by the speaker, subject, and audience. But this year, the students really wanted to focus on stage combat, so their first activity was to work with the scripts written by Ian Doucher, who rewrote all the “Star Wars” movies, scene by scene, in Shakespearean verse. The students selected scenes from those books to build their stage combat performance and integrated the language into the physical techniques of the performance.

When it was time to study the sonnets, the students were in excellent shape for reading and understanding them, and ready to learn the various scansion techniques to recognize the range of exceptions to the foundation of blank verse. For example, Hamlet speaks in verse, but when he says “to be or not to be,” he builds the line with an extra syllable and a feminine ending. The witches of “Macbeth” also speak in their own patterns. The students pore through the scripts, syllable by syllable, hunting down significant moments where exceptions show the character’s meaning and purpose. Studying the rhetorical devices Shakespeare used gives the students tools to understand the lines, and translating them into modern English helps them understand what they are saying on stage, even if the audience doesn’t fully understand.  If the actor fully understands the text and captures the emotion and what the character is going through, Ms. Bode says, the audience will go along with them.

The drama students then must choose a play to put on. They watch different productions, both traditional and modern, which demonstrate the wide range of interpretation. In the past, they’ve often chosen Macbeth, and have also done “Hamlet,” “Twelfth Night,” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Years ago, the program did a Shakespearean Journey, with students performing scenes from various plays all around campus, accompanied by a strolling flute player. But in response to the students’ desire to work all together on a single play, this new model of giving each class a chance to choose and stage a full play was developed. This also helps the class partner better with the tech class, who will help them stage a full, coherent show this year, and it will be “Romeo and Juliet!”

Shakespeare also took over Mainstage this fall, with the all-school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Ms. Bode believes it’s such an easy play to teach and stage because of its three distinct groups: the human lovers (who speak in iambic pentameter), the fairies (whose lines have meter but charming irregularity), and the mechanicals (who speak in prose).  Each distinct way of speaking makes it easier for the actors to identify their character and how they fit into the show.

It’s a very physical show, with much running in and out of the woods, much pushing and pulling, so that the actors’ bodies are telling the story as well.  This cast got “off book” very early, running scenes and acts almost a month before opening, so that the language was as natural as possible, and by the time they got to performance, it was second nature, allowing the physical staging to be layered on simultaneously.

What Ms. Bode tries to get through to her students is that they are much like Shakespeare’s own company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, —  a motley crew of actors rehearsing on the fly, getting pages and acting that very night, telling stories on a stage. With arguably more refinement, a high school production is not actually very far away from the way Shakespeare was performed in his own time. This is the work of an ensemble, which is the central model of the Bosque School theater program.

A wonderful improvisation this year was that in the moments before the show, as the audience gathered outside the doors of the Black Box Theater, and again during intermission, the actors were sent out in character to improvise and mill about among the audience in the lobby. It connected them to their roots as performers. Ms. Bode emphasizes that students performing Shakespeare, particularly post-COVID and right now, are part of the historical spectrum. The genius of Shakespeare is how relevant the themes, ideas, and stories of his plays are. We can relate to the power of love, the thirst for power, the quest for justice, and the experience of grief, all so relevant to us as humans, and the foundation of our connections to each other as well as to something much larger.

In the 12th-grade humanities class, Emily Kratzer uses “Julius Caesar” in a unit examining revolutions and pro-democratic movements. Shakespeare used the political world of Ancient Rome to represent the changes in religious, political, and social thinking of the time, at the historical moment that marks the beginning of the era we call the Enlightenment. The play shows that democracy is worth fighting for, as the English Civil War simmers, ready to boil over when Charles I takes the throne and abuses his power, prompting Parliament to stand up to him and sparking the civil war. These political events form the basis of Americans’ own ideas about the Constitution, which contains many very deliberate provisions designed to prevent tyranny, and inevitably, the students see parallels with current political conflict and presidential behavior. 

In preparation for studying the poetic rhetoric of the play, the students study monologues from other plays, such as “Richard II,” which is a beautiful meditation on the mortality and fragility of kingship, from which comes the enduring phrase, “the hollow crown.” They also made comparisons with “Macbeth,” as this senior class had studied that play in 8th grade.

Dr. Kratzer makes sure the students understand Shakespeare in his historical context – in the change of dynasty from Elizabeth I to James I, especially the period in which Shakespeare wrote his political and historical plays; was it dangerous for him to be writing a pro-democracy play at the time? How does Shakespeare place democracy against an absolutist monarchy? What did he think a king was? What is the role and responsibility of parliament in restraining the power of the monarch? Watching scenes from the 1970 movie “Cromwell” helps them see the dramatic conflict between the Parliamentarians (also known as the Puritans) and the monarchists. When the king is finally put on trial, he cannot believe it’s happening because he believes so much in his own divinity.

This moment represents the larger themes of the class, which examines the political, historical, and literary transition from a mythological understanding of the great chain of being as God’s perfect order to a more secular and individualized sense of the world. Throughout the year, this class considers what was happening to make people question the idea of a cosmic order that allows a king to tell me who I am and what I must do. What are the limits of human autonomy and individual desires?  How do we get to Cassius’ bold assertion in Act I, Scene ii of “Julius Caesar” that “Men at some time are masters of their fates: / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” 

Speeches after the assassination are very important, as Brutus and Antony build an argument to justify their actions, and Brutus makes a fatal error in underestimating Antony. Beautiful rhetorically, their speeches use sophisticated figures of speech. The students study contemporary uses of some of these devices in the closing statement of Johnny Cochran in the O.J. Simpson trial and the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Then they write their own speeches, using these devices, to deliver a persuasive argument. This year, they chose a fairy tale or another commonly known story, and built an argument defending the villain.

The students watched “Julius Caesar” on the National Theater website. The production was very modern and designed to make the story relevant to a contemporary audience (the assassins carried Glocks!) They compared that production to the Marlon Brando production of the 1950s, which was more traditional and which many of the students preferred.

Dr. Kratzer’s hope is that the students buy into the idea that language use is a creative art that is as fun to practice as the other creative arts. There’s power in using language effectively, and a sacred responsibility to use it for noble ends rather than manipulative or deceitful ones.

And finally, a tropical storm is brewing in Humanities 10, set to arrive onshore during the spring semester. Teachers Katie Proctor and Erin Zavitz plan to use Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” to open conversations about European expansion and colonialism. The students will explore the problematic master-slave narrative in the play, including the relationship between magician Prospero and Ariel, a spirit who must do Prospero’s bidding in hopes of one day earning his freedom, and Prospero’s brutal subjugation of Caliban, a native inhabitant of the island. Students will also read a play by contemporary Caribbean playwright Aime Cesaire, titled “A Tempest,” which tells the story from Ariel’s perspective.  

Multiple perspectives, historical context, rhetorical analysis, social and political significance, the challenge of performance, and so much poetry. Each time a Bosque School student encounters Shakespeare, it is with an invitation to exercise very sophisticated skills and, fundamentally, to deepen and honor our humanity. Thank you for coming to the show! As Prospero declares at the close of “The Tempest,” “our revels now are ended,” and as Puck begs the audience at the end of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “If we shadows have offended / Think but this, and all is mended /That you have but slumbered here / While all these visions did appear.” Fare thee well!