Introducing Shakespeare Doesn’t Have to Be Boring

We’ve never been big on author biographies. Sure, there are some helpful details to know here and there, but when we’re trying to get our students just to read a text (or, let’s be honest, listen to a text as we read), it’s rare that the author’s biography is a significant tool in capturing their interest or aiding their understanding.

But introducing Shakespeare feels different.

There are quite a few reasons to make space for introducing Shakespeare in your curriculum (don’t worry, we’ll get into them). And as English teachers (and often English majors), we tend to find all things Shakespeare fascinating.

But our students are rarely as fascinated as we are.

We’ve tried a number of strategies for introducing Shakespeare over the years: a gallery walk, a traditional lecture, an overview of his wildest plots. And it feels like part of every English teacher’s training includes some sort of Shakespearean insults activity.

These activities did their job, but we’re pretty confident they didn’t make any of our students’ list of lasting high school memories. So, as we were creating our units for Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet, we decided to try something totally different for introducing Shakespeare: an escape room.

And we’re thrilled with the results. The activity hits the criteria we’re looking for in any introduction to Shakespeare, but it places the emphasis on engaging students rather than ensuring they remember every last detail. And given Shakespeare’s knack for appealing to the groundlings that crowded before the stage at the Globe, we’re pretty sure he’d approve.

Why Introducing Shakespeare Is Worth Your Time

Shakespeare is, arguably, the GOAT when it comes to English literature.

It’s hard to argue against Shakespeare’s importance as a literary icon. There may be other contenders, but we’re pretty sure Shakespeare would be at the top of most people’s ballots for the Greatest of All Time (at least, when it comes to Western literature).

After all, he wrote 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a handful of other texts. His plays are staples at theaters throughout the world, countless remakes inspired by his works fill our Netflix queues and TBR lists, and almost everyone knows at least a few Shakespeare quotations (whether they realize it or not). And the guy is credited with inventing more than 1700 words and phrases.

As people who have successfully invented exactly zero words and phrases, we’re impressed. And while none of our students needs to be a Shakespearean expert, he is a central figure in our subject area, and it’s worth teaching our students a little something about him.

Shakespeare belongs in students’ cultural toolkits.

Because Shakespeare is at the top of the ranks of literary stars in the Western world, he belongs in students’ cultural toolkits.

We want our students, no matter what their background is, to have every advantage when they attend college. Most of them will take at least one literature course, many literature courses will include Shakespeare, and most college professors will expect that students have, at minimum, encountered Shakespeare before.

And even if high school and college literature classes are the last time many of our students read Shakespeare for themselves, his works have made such an impact on Western culture that our students will encounter him again, whether they’re actually attending one of his plays, watching a movie shaped by his influence, or using a phrase of his that has entered the English lexicon.

It seems criminal to think that we’ve had a role in educating students who might one day say, “Shakespeare who?”

Shakespeare’s works are intimidating.

So, we’ve got this guy at the top of the literary canon who writes in “English” that is so unfamiliar as to seem like an entirely different language. That’s intimidating.

There are very few of us who approach Shakespeare without at least a little bit of trepidation: we know he’s a big deal, and a few lines in, we know getting through his texts is going to be a mental workout.

For our students, many of whom are uninterested in reading or read below grade level for a variety of reasons, this creates an enormous obstacle to overcome.

Our students need to get their feet wet with Shakespeare in a way that makes them feel eager and confident to continue digging in. They need to see that they can successfully make meaning from his language. And really, they need to see that he’s kind of a cool guy. He’s hardly a stuffy professor who would write in his ivory tower, far away from students. He’s a man of the people, he’s funny, and he was much more concerned about making money than leaving a lasting literary legacy.

Shakespeare’s works are written within a specific context.

When we know a little bit about the conventions of the sonnet form or how Elizabethan theater worked, it does actually aid us in understanding Shakespeare’s writing.

The sonnet form has an organizational structure that helps us understand the meaning of the poem. Having some familiarity with the “Fair Youth” and the “Dark Lady” can give us a boost in understanding the direction a sonnet is going to go. 

Knowing that the Elizabethan theater had very few sets or costumes explains why most scenes start with a report on the weather and why characters so often greet each other by name. Understanding that most of Shakespeare’s audiences were rowdy helps us understand why he repeats himself so much, why he includes so many dirty jokes, and why he includes comedic scenes even in his tragedies.

Sure, you can understand Shakespeare without these things, but we’re trying to give our students as many footholds as we can, so if one of these ideas helps them, then let’s take advantage.

Fine, you might be thinking. You’ve made a case for why introducing Shakespeare matters, but how do we do it in a way that doesn’t bore our students to death before we even begin reading?

Introducing Shakespeare with an Escape Room

We wanted our students to get information about Shakespeare and gain experience with his language, but we (finally) acknowledged that they didn’t need to remember a specific set of facts that they had dutifully recorded in their notes. Their engagement and confidence building is far more important than the specific facts they come away with.

So we created an escape room premised in Shakespearean lore: Shakespeare has been kidnapped by The Admiral’s Men, a competing theater company, and it’s our students’ job to rescue him—on their first day as employees of the Globe Theater, no less.

The escape room is challenging (we wanted it to appeal to high school students of all levels), but we’ve included all kinds of tips and added bonuses to help you scaffold to meet your students’ needs.

Students have to complete five tasks in order to rescue Shakespeare, learning key information about him along the way.

Task #1: By the Numbers

The first task covers the cultural basics: students receive a brochure with biographical information about Shakespeare and some basic facts about the Globe Theater. Their job? Find the answers to a series of clues, providing them with numbers they’ll need to unlock the padlock holding the beloved playwright hostage.

Task #2: Reveal the Key

The second task helps our students understand the context Shakespeare was writing for: as they read their employee handbook for working at the Globe Theater (it is their first day, after all), they answer a series of questions that reveal yet another important number that they’ll need to set Shakespeare free.

Task #3: Folding an Octavo

The third task is all about getting students excited about Shakespeare’s world while also reinforcing their ability to use context clues to sequence a text. Their task is to fold an octavo, gaining an appreciation for how books were printed during Shakespeare’s time. The pages of the octavo they’re constructing teach them a little bit about bookmaking and Shakespeare’s famed First Folio, but more importantly for their purposes, they include all the clues students need to fold and cut the octavo correctly. When students have successfully numbered the pages in the correct order, they’ve got yet another clue to help them rescue the Bard.

Task #4: Bard v. Bot

The fourth task is all about grappling with Shakespeare’s intimidating language and getting a sense of just how many famous plays our beloved literary genius wrote. It turns out that the players at the Rose Theater have a backup plan. They’ve discovered this thing called “AI,” and they think it might be able to mimic Shakespeare’s writing closely enough that they won’t need him after all. Thankfully, we’ve managed to get our hands on 17 attempts to mimic Shakespeare’s famous insults, and it’s up to our students to determine which insults are the real Shakespeare and which versions are fakes.

We’ll be honest here: this one is hard. After letting students wrestle for a while, you may need to let them invoke their friend Google. But in addition to incorporating those Shakespearean insults everyone loves so much, this activity also offers the added modern bonus of letting our students think about the nuances of language that clue us all in to AI-written text.

Task #5: Criss Cross

Finally, students complete a criss cross puzzle with words Shakespeare invented. The goal here is to highlight why Shakespeare has gained such status as a literary icon but also to give students a very doable puzzle, particularly after the challenge of Task #4, building their confidence in their ability to deal with Shakespeare’s language.

Free Shakespeare

Once they have completed the five tasks, students use their answers to determine the code that will unlock the padlock keeping Shakespeare locked up at the Rose Theater. Prizes for the winners are at your discretion!

Make it Work: Differentiation

To help you scaffold the escape room for your students and, as necessary, level the playing field, we’ve also included clue cards for each of the five tasks as well as three challenge cards you can give to a group that needs to slow down (a sick scribe who takes away their materials for a period of time, an audition for Richard Burbage that requires them to lend their talents to another group, an outbreak of the plague that sends them into a brief timeout).

Bonus Activity: Introduction to Shakespearean Language with Sonnets

When we taught Romeo and Juliet to our 9th grade honors students, we wanted them to have the chance to grapple with Shakespeare’s language in a far less intimidating context than diving right into the entire play. We created an activity that provides students with a little bit of background on the sonnets (particularly useful if they’ll eventually head into AP Literature), and then gives them the opportunity to work in pairs to paraphrase Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”).

By successfully working through the language in a scaled-down, no stakes, collaborative format, students realize that with a little bit of work, they can understand what Shakespeare’s trying to say, and they will get better at it the more they do it.

Introducing Shakespeare is worth making time for in our jam-packed curriculum, but it’s important to remember why we’re doing it. We want our students to feel comfortable with the Bard, both for our purposes and after they leave our class, and the feeling that they can do it is far more important than the specific facts they remember. The task of reading the text itself is going to be challenging, so let’s get them engaged and having fun before it starts.