Teaching Shakespeare

I really enjoyed Elyse’s presentation on “Something Rotten.” I think she brought up some good points on how difficult it can be to teach Shakespeare to high school students. “Something Rotten” is definately something that they would enjoy and be able to interpret Shakespeare at so many levels. I was thinking another way to perhaps make the teaching of Shakespeare a little more appealing to high school students and give them a different perspective culturally, would be to show them Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare’s works. I think showing students different interpretations of Shakespeare will only spark their interest in his works because it’d give them an opportunity to some how relate to the work through aspects of pop-culture. Some great Bollywood adaptations that I recommend for everyone to check out would be: Macbeth’-inspired ‘Maqbool’, Othello inspired ‘Omkara’ and Romeo and Juliet inspired ‘Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak.’

1 thought on “Teaching Shakespeare

  1. chantal

    I LOVED Omkara… and I completely agree about incorporating Bollywood films… The films you mention were all very well done and stay relatively close to the original story lines (unlike Baz Luhrmann’s R&J which jumps around quite a bit and is more heavily adapted); your suggestions incorporate aspects of pop-culture, adaptation, and multi-modal learning.

    I had a prof do something similar when we were studying the romance genre in one of my lit classes; she showed our class Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and I walked around Langara that day obsessively humming ‘Shava Shava’ until finally walking up to Main & 49th to grab it on a 2in1 with Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Since then I’ve been hooked! 🙂

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