Final Point 3: Our Play and Audience

After careful consideration and thought, we Spear Shakers are happy to announce that we will be annotating The Tempest for a high school audience.  This audience includes both the students and their heroic high school English teachers.

Why The Tempest and why high school?  Let us explain...

The Tempest:

• First and foremost, we chose The Tempest because it is not Romeo and Juliet.  Romeo and Juliet is typically the first Shakespeare play people interact with, and that interaction usually comes in the form of their freshman high school English class.  Our group's feeling is that R&J has become too cliche, too overdone, and is not the best example that beginning students could have of what a Shakespeare play is like.  We want to offer up The Tempest as a replacement for Romeo and Juliet, in the hopes that doing so will help more students appreciate and like Shakespeare in more meaningful ways.   
• The Tempest stands out even among the other Shakespeare plays.  It's one of the few plays of Shakespeare that has an original, non-recycled plot, and it doesn't quite neatly fit into the standard divisions of "tragedy, comedy, or history."  There is an intriguing level of different-ness in The Tempest  that makes it appealing.
• There are a lot of characters in the play.  There's the complex and powerful Prospero, the good-girl Miranda and the handsome-prince Ferdinand, Stephano and Trinculo the class-clowns, the plotting Sebastian and Antonio, the mysterious Ariel, and the outcast Caliban.  These are types of people and characters that high school students already understand to some extent from experiences with principals, jocks, school pranksters, "in-crowds," "out-crowds," and the likes.  There's good potential for students to be able to connect and understand the play in a meaningful way.    
• The Tempest invites the students to consider different social and political influences of Shakespeare's time and culture.

High Schoolers:

• High school students are immersed in pop culture and have experienced a lot of Shakespearean influences without realizing it. We hope to facilitate this by making students aware of and understand the influence Shakespeare has had not only in literature but in culture in general. 
• This gives us the opportunity to help mold and shift students views of Shakespeare as "old" and "boring" and see him relevant and as contributing to their world. 
• We hope to develop critical thinking and analytic skills by having students answer critical thinking questions and make predictions for character development based off of the initial introduction they are given.
• The students can build and follow different character developments and find connections and real life examples that follow similar patterns.
• They can explore how their views of the characters shift, what makes the villain "evil", what makes the protagonist "good," and questions about what being "good" or "evil" actually mean.  For example, "Is Prospero a good father, or an evil sorcerer?  Why?"  
• We hope to develop literary skills such by having students identify and practice literary devices such as blank verse, iambic pentameter, and other rhyme patterns. 
• High school students are fun.  They're strange, and sassy, and not afraid to tell you what they think, and we find that interesting.  There are a lot of different opinions that can be made and had about The Tempest, and we feel like there will be something in the play for a wide range of students and opinions.