From Oxford to WC: Bringing Shakespeare to Life
According to Worthington Christian High School English Teacher Noelle Mills, one of the biggest reasons why students struggle with studying William Shakespeare is because his works are being taught the wrong way.
Shakespeare was a playwright, and his works are meant to be seen and not read. “As any high school student can probably attest, the language is challenging … even for most adults,” Mills said. “It’s not meant to just be read, right? It’s supposed to be performed. It’s supposed to be seen. You are supposed to feel immersed in the play’s place, time, and events. When you are asking students to read it, it can be challenging.”
That is why Mills traveled to England’s University of Oxford to participate in “Shakespeare in Pre-Production,” a six-week class that ran from the end of June to the beginning of August. Worthington Christian partnered with Mills in making the experience possible, investing in an opportunity for her to deepen her study of Shakespeare and bring that learning back to WC.
The program, taught by Professor Brian McEleney, attracted teachers from the United States, France, Germany, China, and the United Kingdom. The MA English Literature program is offered by Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English, which she is currently completing.
Mills said there’s no home-field advantage when it comes to studying Shakespearean works. “I don’t know if the person who grows up in England has any better ability to understand Shakespeare’s language than the English-speaking American,” she said. “A lot of the language is quite out of date for modern British people.
“People who have read Shakespeare before or have consistently seen lots of Shakespeare plays before have a benefit over those who haven’t. You have to get used to thees, thous, and terms we don’t use anymore. But once you’ve read it before, once you’ve seen it before, you remember how certain words are used. It’s not like a native language. I would almost compare it to a dialect, but even that feels too extreme.”
And if teachers struggle with the Shakespearean sonnets and soliloquies, imagine how difficult it might be for high school students. “If students can clear that barrier,” Mills said, “they often find the stories engaging and relevant.”
“It’s easy for them to disconnect with the material when they don’t know what the actual sentences are saying,” she said. “It takes time breaking down the language and combing through a few key passages and seeing the metaphors.
“However, the language is beautiful once they become familiar with it, and the stories themselves are compelling. Every time you teach Macbeth or Hamlet, many students will begin to enjoy the story. They like a story of struggles with leadership and power.”
McEleney, the director of the Theatre Program at the Bread Loaf School of English and the founding director of Brown University/Trinity Rep M.F.A. Acting Program, had each teacher put together a plan for directing their students in acting it out. Participants chose a Shakespearean play and designed how they would present it in class. Mills chose Twelfth Night, the Bard’s romantic comedy involving twins Viola and Sebastian.
“I felt it would be good for me to interact more in depth with a comedy,” Mills said. “I’ve never taught a Shakespearean comedy before, except in discussion circles. It helped me better understand the comedy genre.
“My husband Matt came with me while I was getting settled into the program. He actually started to read Twelfth Night too, so we could talk about our ideas. It was fun to brainstorm with him and talk through some of the things we were doing in my classes.”
This was Mills’ second visit to Oxford, having spent a day there in 2023 following the paths of the Inklings (a group of fiction writers that included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams). She said one of the highlights of the trip was sitting on the same park bench where Tolkien would read and write.
“It was fun to walk around in places where lots of famous authors that I loved walked and worked.”
McEleney’s class took field trips to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Shakespeare’s birthplace, the schoolhouse where he taught, and the church where he is buried. If there was one letdown, it was finding out the Royal Shakespeare Company wasn’t performing a Shakespearean classic but Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, starring Kenneth Branagh and Helen Hunt.
However, the class also journeyed to London to see Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Globe.
Mills grew up a fan of Shakespeare, but she admits she understood less of the plays than she led on to believe.
“I probably would say that my high school self would have at least pretended I knew what was going on, even if I didn’t,” she said with a laugh. “I feel like the task of the modern English teacher is to help students see this as something living, not as something that’s bound within the pages of the book.”
Even though the Bard’s last play, The Tempest, was written over 400 years ago, Mills believes Shakespeare has as much to say to a high schooler today as he did to nobility and commoners in the 1600s.
“Frankly, you won’t have modern novels if you don’t have Shakespeare,” Mills said. “He helped develop characters, and that makes his plays still relevant. He hits so many different issues that are still real right now: What does it mean to have power? How should you use your power? How does one lead in a situation that’s challenging? What do you do if the person you love doesn’t love you back? How do you react to being in a new place and a new setting where you know no one?
“While yes, the characters speak a language that is different from ours in some ways, they still have the same everyday challenges we experience now.”