Recently, there has been renewed interest in introducing the works of Shakespeare to the general public. Film directors and actors from Britain, the United States and Australia have been jumping on the ‘Bard’s Bandwagon’ to re-package, re-interpret, re-shape and re-invent a broad range of Shakespeare’s works for a brand new audience—young people. If Shakespeare is working on the screen, it’s up to us to make it work in the classroom.

At school, many of us can recall slogging through a seemingly impenetrable Shakespearian play taught by an uninspired teacher. If we were lucky, we might have come across a teacher who had a lively and enthusiastic approach to the Bard’s work that captured our imaginations and laid the foundations for a love affair with Shakespeare’s plays. If we were unlucky, we came out of school thinking Shakespeare was a waste of time, irrelevant and too difficult.

Students shouldn’t have to have a bad experience when they work with Shakespearian texts. The onus is on you, the teacher, to lay the foundations for that love affair. It’s easy to teach Shakespeare badly. Just hand out copies of a play and start reading. It’s not so easy to teach it well. To teach Shakespeare well takes time for planning. Time is in short supply these days in schools, which is why we have written Will Works.

We can’t teach Shakespeare for you, but we’ve taken time to look at a broad range of plays across three high-interest areas:
      • The Supernatural
      • Crimes and Criminals
      • Women in Shakespeare

We hope that the interesting and innovative approaches we suggest to working with snippets of text will give you a good springboard from which to launch any in-depth work on specific plays that you might be contemplating. If you are working with younger students, see Will Works. as providing them with a taste of joys to come. If you are working with older students, you will probably find material here that will link into whatever study you are planning, and it will also alert you to some new approaches to dealing with the texts.

Download the Table of Contents page here.

Grades 5–8.