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Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.

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A play that the Times theater critic Charles Isherwood recently called “the ur-drama of young love,” “Romeo and Juliet” has been performed countless times in countless ways over its 400-year history, yet has managed to seem fresh and relevant whether staged in Stratford-upon-Avon, Central Park or an Italian prison.

In fact, putting the title “Romeo and Juliet” into Times search returns more than a million articles, essays and reviews, including nearly a thousand from the 19th century. (For instance, from 1896: “‘Romeo and Juliet Interrupted: An Insane Man Intrudes on the Balco...)

We combed through several years’-worth of articles to find one piece we thought illustrated the play’s power particularly well, but we’ve linked to 25 more you might choose to substitute for your own Text to Text.

Do you teach Shakespeare with The Times? How? We’d love to publish your idea, so leave a comment below.

Background:

Poster for a lesbian-themed “Romeo and Juliet” on stage in Philadelphia this fall. Go to related article »

“Every generation, it seems, needs its own film version of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers… And every generation, intentionally or not, puts its mark on the story,” writes Anita Gates in a 1996 piece accompanying the opening of the Baz Luhrmann film starring Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio. (A film that the Times review said, “invents a whole new vocabulary for a story of star-crossed young love.”)

We framed our Key Question for this Text to Text pairing as a result of the richness we found when we searched the play in The Times archives — and found “Romeo and Juliet”-inspired musicals, ballets, movies,operas and novels, as well as lesbian, Yiddish,hipster, hip-hop, Arab-Israeli, prep school and 15-minute versions.

One of our favorite finds is a Times article from Sept. 23, 2001, written by a New York critic just two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks:

What part can theater play when life is in upheaval? At a time of grieving, do people feel comfortable about being entertained?

Go to a show, political leaders tell us. Business as usual, economic advisors say. It is the entertainer’s business, as the song goes, to ”make ‘em laugh.” People have turned to entertainment when there is a national crisis, said Jed Bernstein, president of the League of American Theaters and Producers.

Still, last week Broadway theaters reported an 80 percent decline in ticket sales since the attacks, and one new musical, ”Assassins,” has been canceled.

The current production at the McCarter, which opened on Sept. 14, is indisputably a tragedy, but it could have been divinely chosen for the moment, for it fulfills the highest purpose of theater — to enlighten and to purge, to create order out of chaos.

The play is about the human impulse to hate, and as much about the need to love. Ultimately, each audience member must reflect upon which force wins.

The play was written in 1595. It is called ”Romeo and Juliet.” Though you may have seen it before, after seeing Ms. Mann’s new staging, you may not be so sure. At least you will see it anew. And that is the difference between timely and timeless.

Key Questions: What can we learn about ourselves and our world from a 16th-century play? How has “Romeo and Juliet” been reworked to speak to new audiences in different times and places?

Activity Sheets: As students read and discuss, they might take notes using one of these graphic organizers (PDFs):

• Comparing Two or More Texts
• Double-Entry Chart for Close Reading
• Connecting The New York Times to Your World

Excerpt 1: From “Romeo and Juliet”: The Prologue

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

Excerpt 2: From “Montague and Capulet as Shiite and Sunni” by Tim Arango (April 28, 2012)

Rui Vieira/Press Association, via Associated PressRehearsals of “Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad,” an Iraqi adaptation of the play, performed in Baghdad in 2012.Go to related article »

BAGHDAD — It is not poison or a dagger that takes the lives of the young lovers, but a suicide bomb. The Montagues and Capulets are divided not just by family, but also by religious sect. And the dialogue in the Iraqi adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” is sprinkled with references to Blackwater, Iranians and the American reconstruction effort.

After a recent performance here at the National Theater, where the dramatic arts were once degraded to serve as a dictator’s propaganda, the audience filed out buzzing over the return of serious art to the Iraqi capital. Cloaked as a Shakespearean classic was a lively rendering of their own lives over the past nine years.

“It was about our reality, the killing that happened between the Sunnis and Shias,” said Senan Saadi, a university student who was in the audience.

The killing, of course, still happens. The morning after the show, explosions were heard in Baghdad. By the end of the day, a string of attacks around the country had left nearly three dozen people dead. By then, the cast of the play, including veteran Iraqi actors and young up-and-comers, was preparing to leave for the World Shakespeare Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare’s birthplace.

“Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad” opened Thursday at the festival and runs for 10 days as part of the cultural program linked with the coming London Olympics. Its story line of a doomed cross-sectarian love affair manages to touch on nearly every element of the recent collective Iraqi experience.

That it garnered many laughs — especially over the buffoonish Qaeda character in an explosives-laden vest, who is Paris, Juliet’s failed suitor, in Shakespeare’s original — and plenty of tears, too, is perhaps a small sign that Iraqi society is beginning to reconcile with the trauma of the war.

“Romeo, he doesn’t see Juliet for nine years,” explained Monadhil Daood, a famous Iraqi actor and playwright who is directing the play and spent two years writing the script. “At their first meeting they talk about the conflict between Sunni and Shia.”

The words Sunni and Shia are not mentioned explicitly, but are symbolized in ways that are clearly recognizable to an Iraqi audience. Capulet, Juliet’s father, is denoted as a Sunni by his red-and-white checkered keffiyeh (not to mention that a Qaeda fighter seeks to marry his daughter). Romeo’s father, Montague, wears a black-and-white scarf more commonly worn by Shiites.

“My message is that love is better than the conflict between the families,” Mr. Daood said.

For Writing or Discussion:

1. How does Shakespeare emphasize conflict and contrast in the language of the prologue? Where do you see twosomes, pairings, repetition and opposites?
2. Shakespeare’s prologue gives away the story of the play. Which lines mirror the situation between the Sunnis and Shias outlined in the article? What threads run between the two?
3. How does this production represent the “recent Iraqi collective experience”?
4. At the end of the play, Mr. Capulet asks for Mr. Montague’s hand and Montague vows to erect a statue of Juliet so that all remember their children. What understanding have they come to after the death of their children? What does it say about human nature that it takes such grief and sacrifice to reach common ground? How is this production of “Romeo and Juliet” itself a means of helping to heal Iraq?
5. How have Shakespeare’s plays been performed and received throughout recent history in Iraq? What do the various ways in which they have been used teach us about their universality?
6. If you were a director selecting a setting (time and place) for “Romeo and Juliet,” what other modern day conflicts would lend themselves to its plots and themes? Why? Is it possible to find a fresh approach for a play performed so many times in so many ways already? Can you find something in this week’s Times that echoes these themes or suggests a setting and potential characters?

Going Further:

Embed Code

<iframe src="http://embed.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_studies_the_brain_in_love.html" width="200" height="112" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>

See also School Leadertship 2.0 - click here

The Biochemistry of Love: The Learning Network contributor and English teacher Sarah Gross tells us that her favorite “Romeo and Juliet”assignment invites students to look at the biochemistry of love and its effects on human behavior or adolescent brain development. She starts by showing students the TED talk embedded above, then gives them this prompt:

Romeo and Juliet are the most famous pair of lovers in Western literature, but is their love real, or is it just infatuation? They make impulsive, life-altering decisions based on their love and end up losing their lives as a result of their relationship.

Task: Using evidence from the text and two of the articles listed below, write a well-developed essay explaining whether Romeo and Juliet should be held responsible for their impulsive behavior.

Here are the articles she lists:

From The New York Times:

• “Anti-Love Drug May Be Ticket to Bliss”
• “Room for Debate | When Do Kids Become Adults”
• “The Brain on Love”
• “Love and Pain Relief”

And from other sources:

• Frontline | Inside the Teenage Brain
• Psychology Today | Taking Words Seriously – Romeo and Juliet Are Tr...
• NPR | The Teen Brain: It’s Just Not Grown Up Yet
  

Shakespeare and the Invention of the Teenager: The Times Magazine recently excerpted a short piece from “Flaming Youth,” a chapter in “How Shakespeare Changed Everything,” by Stephen Marche, that we very nearly chose as the main Text to Text pairing for this feature. He writes:

…our whole modern understanding of adolescence is there to be found in this play. Shakespeare essentially created this new category of humanity, and in place of the usual mix of nostalgia and loathing with which we regard adolescents (and adolescence), Shakespeare would have us look at teenagers in a spirit of wonder. He loves his teenagers even as he paints them in all their absurdity and nastiness.

Students might use this idea as a lens through which to analyze the play: Where can they see evidence of Shakespeare’s “love” for teenagers? How does he manage to portray this difficult stage of life so realistically that it still resonates 400 years later, yet also make it “wonderful”?

Create Your Own Version: If it is true that every generation needs its own version of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, how might you and your classmates stage a scene from this play that teases out the themes, ideas, characters and conflicts that speak especially well to you? As you do this, you might consider the argument recently opened up in the Times Culture section:Is Shakespeare better with contemporary imagery, or clad in classic...Read what readers had to say in order to consider whether you want your Romeo riding a motorcycle and using contemporary slang, or wearing tights and speaking in Elizabethan English.

More Resources

• The Folger Shakespeare Library | Teaching Romeo and Juliet
• Shaking Up Shakespeare: Reaching the Shakespeare-Averse With Adapta...
• Learning Network Resources: Teaching Shakespeare with The New York ...