Rewriting Shakespeare

Day 1

1. Tell students that today they will be talking about Shakespeare and how Shakespeare’s plays influence artists to this day.
2. Open the discussion by talking about Hamlet. If your students are familiar with the play, ask them to summarize the plot and list some of the major themes. If your students have not read the play, pass out pages 1 and 2 of the Hamlet Backdrop and Synopsis handout.
3. Have students take turns reading the "Backdrop" section aloud, and then quickly summarize the plot. You can say something like “Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark. He comes home from his university after his father dies to discover that his mother has married his uncle. He sees the ghost of his father, who says he was murdered by Hamlet’s uncle and commands Hamlet to avenge his death. Hamlet is torn apart by his uncle’s betrayal and his mother’s weakness, and spends time pondering life and death. He wonders what it means to kill someone, especially in revenge.”
4. Ask students if Hamlet’s dilemma reminds them of anything they’ve seen or experienced Was there a time in their lives when somebody betrayed them? Has anyone ever asked them to do something that they felt would change their lives, possibly not for the better? How did it make them feel? How did they decide what to do?
5. Explain that Shakespeare discusses these questions using soliloquies, long speeches for actors who are alone onstage, delivered directly to the audience. Hamlet has several soliloquies over the course of the play, the most famous of which is “To be or not to be.” Tell students that in this speech, Hamlet contemplates whether it is better to live “to be,” or die, “not to be.”
6. Pass out the Hamlet: To Be or Not handout so students can follow along and refer back to the text of the soliloquy.
7. Play Flocabulary’s Hamlet: To Be or Not video. You may want to play the video twice, as the language is dense.
8. Play the video again with Discussion Mode turned on. Discussion Mode pauses the video at certain points and displays questions for discussion. Students will discuss the theme of death in the speech.
9. Ask students what other themes they see in the speech. Answers might include the difficulty of everyday life, the possible relief of death, fear of the unknown.
10. Ask students why they think this is the most famous speech in Hamlet. What about this speech do they think has resonated with people across time? What about it resonates with them?
11. Ask students to continue to think about the themes and questions of this speech, and that in the next class you will be talking about how artists riff on or remix Shakespeare’s themes to create their own pieces that are still connected to a literary tradition.

Day 2

1. Ask students for a quick review of the last class. What are the themes you talked about in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech? What stuck with them after class?
2. Tell students that today they will be discussing and creating adaptations of Shakespeare’s work.
3. Play Flocabulary’s Flocabulary’s Hamlet: To Be or Not (Remix) video.
4. Ask students for their initial reactions to the “remix.” What did they recognize from the original speech? What was different?
5. Play the video again with Discussion Mode turned on. In this discussion, students will get a chance to discuss the differences between the two pieces and the whether or not they think the “remix” was successful.
6. Tell students that they now have a chance to create their own rap remixes of “To be or not to be” using Flocabulary’s Lyric Lab. Ask students to write a 12 to 16-line rap using and riffing on the themes they’ve identified to create something that is meaningful to them.
7. Lyric Lab is found under “Create” on every video page. You can assign the Lyric Lab to students if you’ve set up a Flocabulary class. Otherwise, direct them to find it on their own. Decide or have students choose to use Lyric Lab on either the Hamlet (original) or the Hamlet (remix) video. Each version incorporates different vocabulary words, so your students or you may want to choose based on which words you’d like them to incorporate in their raps.¹
8. To close class or at the beginning of the next class, ask students to share their raps with each other.

¹ If you or your students are unfamiliar with writing rhymes in Lyric Lab, Flocabulary has produced a few videos about How To Use Rap in Your Classroom. Further videos on how to use Lyric Lab and how to write sophisticated rhymes can be found on the Lyric Lab page under “Need help getting started? Watch a video!”