A Perfect Match: Teaching Close Reading with Shakespeare

“My students hate reading. Please help.”

We see this message, or some variation of it, at least once a day in online teacher groups. And it’s a frustration we’ve also experienced. 

Trying to get our students to read a text once is bad enough, but close reading is an essential part of our curriculum as English teachers, and it requires our students to read a text multiple times. Needless to say, they are rarely interested in doing so.

We’ve tried all manner of methods to engage our students in close reading—the traditional three reads, embedding text-dependent questions in the text itself so close reading becomes part of the first (and only) read, assigning students to rainbow highlight a text based on specific instructions. Other approaches to close reading include modeling annotation, assigning an article of the week, and providing students with step-by-step guidelines. We were challenged to find anything that worked.

While students may not be particularly open to close reading, we’ve found them most open to it with, surprisingly, William Shakespeare. This seems counterintuitive: isn’t analyzing Shakespeare the end goal for advanced readers? And yet when you really think about it, he’s one of the most important tools in our teacher toolkit. Students seem to almost universally find Shakespeare difficult to understand, and because of that, they are a little more receptive to the idea of reading the text multiple times, especially if each time they understand it a bit more.

What Is Close Reading, and Why Do We Need to Teach It?

Close reading is the skill of examining an author’s diction and stylistic choices to see how they contribute to a text’s meaning. Why did the author choose this word and not that word? Which words most contribute to the author’s tone? What effect does the telegraphic sentence structure have on the passage’s meaning? Why use a simile in line 3?

In a picture-perfect close reading lesson, we would all engage in an unencumbered first read of a text, check for basic comprehension, and then dive into a second or even third read, annotating like fiends and carefully analyzing each word an author has selected. Not sure about you, but we don’t have a lot of picture perfect in our classrooms.

Close reading is a skill our students need for all kinds of reasons.

But it can be challenging to get students who are reluctant to read in the first place to engage in a deep read of a text, particularly if it requires them to read the same part of a text more than once.

Why Use Shakespeare to Teach Close Reading?

Ironically, we’ve found that Shakespeare makes great source material for close reading lessons with students of all grade and ability levels.

On the one hand, this is obvious to those of us who love Shakespeare. He’s a master at crafting language, so his texts are rich and worthy of analysis. We don’t have to stretch to make it clear how his stylistic choices convey meaning.

But this can also seem counterintuitive. After all, if our students don’t like to read at all, why would we start them with one of the grand masters, whose English seems almost foreign to us over 400 years later?

That’s exactly why. In our experience, students are especially reluctant to engage in multiple readings of a text when they “already get it.” It’s like pulling teeth to get teenagers to use a dictionary when they think they “already know” what a word means, and they don’t see value in spending multiple class periods engaging with an article they understood the first time.

But with Shakespeare, they don’t know what it means. They have to use a dictionary. They have to recognize the difference between literal and figurative language. And there’s something about Shakespeare, some kind of “sacred text” quality, that makes even our reluctant readers kind of interested in doing the work. 

Even better, Shakespeare’s language is so rich that we can assign short passages, engaging students in brief close reading activities that don’t test the limits of their patience. Our students are more likely to get on board with re-reading a 14-line sonnet than a five-page article or short story.

So, how do we do it? We’ve found a few lessons particularly fruitful with our students. Maybe they’ll work for you, or maybe they’ll inspire your own ideas, but we’re confident they’ll get you thinking.

Close Reading and Shakespeare’s Sonnets

We’ve seen both struggling sophomores and AP seniors experience success when close reading Shakespeare’s sonnets.

The sonnets are perfect for close reading: not only are they only 14 lines in length, but the Shakespearean sonnet form organizes them into three quatrains, each focused on building part of an argument or illustrating an example, and a concluding couplet that provides a revelation or evaluative thought. The clear structure makes it easy to break the text into units of meaning that help students better understand the meaning of the work as a whole.

Additionally, the sonnets tend to be high-interest: Sonnet 18 is straightforward (and who doesn’t like a good love poem), Sonnet 130 entertains students of all ages (though you do have to explain that the mistress’s breath doesn’t actually “reek” according to the way we define the word today), and Sonnet 138, while probably better suited for AP students, features a highly toxic relationship (and what teenager doesn’t want to pick apart a toxic relationship?).

For our AP students, we required students to look up pre-selected words (particularly those we didn’t think they would know or that were used in a non-traditional way) and then paraphrase each line of the poem. We suggested they use Collins Dictionary since it differentiates British and American definitions. After the hard work of paraphrasing, students realized the content was pretty straightforward and felt more confident as they dug into more analytical questions.

For our struggling sophomores, we asked guiding questions about each line to help them track what was going on and provided definitions for words we thought they’d be unlikely to know (though we occasionally asked them to look up a word or two as well). In working through the questions, they gained a solid understanding of the poem’s meaning and could discuss it as a class.

Another helpful activity to do with the sonnets is to play YouTube videos with different speakers reading each poem (Sonnet 138 by Alan Rickman and Tom Hiddleston are two of our favorites). Not only does the speaker’s intonation aid students in comprehension, but different speakers read the poem in different ways, which lends itself to interesting discussions, especially with more advanced students.

Sometimes, we kept our close reading work at the discussion level; other times, we had students practice writing an analytical paragraph. The writing activity generally went well because students not only understood the poem but could use their paraphrase to help construct meaningful commentary that explained their quotation in the context of the poem as a whole and connected it to the poem’s overall purpose.

Close Reading and Romeo and Juliet

We used a hybrid approach when we taught Romeo and Juliet to honors-level freshmen. We knew we didn’t have time to read the entire play as a class, stopping to analyze each line. So instead, we assigned basic comprehension questions to guide students through their initial reading of each act, and then we selected a key scene for students to analyze as a class.

After watching a film clip of the scene, we assigned small groups of students a handful of lines to interpret, providing guiding questions to help them. Then, as each small group shared their responses, the class came to a more in-depth understanding of the scene, at which point we assigned students to write an analytical paragraph in response to a short-answer prompt.

This hybrid approach helped us to provide a balance of independence and support for our students, and our students developed a strong understanding of the play without needing to read every word together.

Close Reading and Julius Caesar

When we started using Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories with our struggling readers, we still wanted them to grapple with a few excerpts of the original text. We decided to focus on what motivated Cassius and Brutus to assassinate Caesar, so we assigned students to close read Caesar’s death scene, Cassius’s speech from Act 1 in which he approaches Brutus about Caesar’s growing power, Brutus’s Dark Decision soliloquy from Act 2 and his funeral speech from Act 3, and Mark Antony’s funeral speech from Act 3. 

For each passage, students used different colored highlighters to identify evidence indicating Cassius’s and Brutus’s motivations for murdering Caesar and determine whether or not those motivations were justified.

Working through the text together took quite a bit of work, and we provided the No Fear Shakespeare translation to help students, but all students found something to support their interpretation of these characters’ motivations. Giving the students something specific to look for was a key part of what made the activity work.

Close Reading and Macbeth

During the pandemic, we (like all of you) had to get creative with the way we had our AP Lit students practice close reading, and, as is often the case when we have to get creative, we ended up with an activity we loved.

After reading the full play, we put students in groups and assigned each group its own discussion board on Canvas. Each group was responsible for a different speech or soliloquy, and while the ultimate goal was a collaborative analytical paragraph, we provided them with a timeline of mini due dates for each of the following elements and assigned specific students to each one:

The group then worked together to compose an analytical paragraph with the following elements:

We were so pleased with how these assignments went. Because the groups had to be active on the discussion boards in order to receive credit for participating, we got to watch them wrestle with the text, helping one another work through the meaning and construct a meaningful written analysis.

Close Reading and the AP Lit Exam

We pretty regularly used the 2009 Q1 prompt, which requires poetry analysis, with our AP students. The text is a passage from Henry VIII in which Cardinal Wolsey laments his removal from his position at court, and students are directed to write an essay in which they explain how Shakespeare uses allusion, figurative language, and tone to convey Cardinal Wolsey’s complex response to his dismissal.

While the activity worked better after our students had already had a little bit of practice, it was a prompt many of them found accessible, and because they had to explain how a couple key similes and metaphors conveyed Cardinal Wolsey’s emotions, the ever-important claim-evidence-commentary trio felt doable to them.

No matter what ability level or text you teach, Shakespeare’s works offer rich source material for close reading activities that your students will actually participate in. And isn’t getting them on board really half the battle?

Conclusion

While we’ve revised our Julius Caesar crime report investigation since the rainbow highlighting activity above, it still offers students of all ability levels opportunities to dig into the text and grapple with Shakespeare’s masterful use of language. Save yourself the time of creating something from scratch and check it out! 

Interested in one of the other activities we discussed? Email us at [email protected] or DM us on Instagram @threeheads.works for more details.