Jeremy Ehrlich
Head of Education, Folger Shakespeare Library

Audio clips of Shakespeare productions can be a rich and engaging resource in the classroom, offering distinct advantages for our classroom work in teaching Shakespeare, both in textual analysis and in encouraging classroom design and performance.1 Focusing on this single and most important element of a Shakespearean actor’s work allows students to put aside their interest in (or disorientation from) the other elements of visual Shakespeare – setting, costume, lighting, gesture, and stage picture – to focus specifically on individual interpretations of the text and on that piece of a production that was most important to Shakespeare’s audience. This allows a more intense concentration on the individual actor’s motivation and tactics, the fundamental building blocks of the actor’s work. By moving on to compare different actors’ work on the same text, students can develop a sophisticated understanding of the different choices available to actors preparing these roles, and prepare to do that same interpretive work themselves. Finally, audio provides us with a much longer look at the history of performance than its much younger sibling, video.

Classroom audio is not meant to be simply a fun, extra-curricular addition to the more serious work of interpretation that we do in class each day; rather, it is a full partner in that enterprise. Our classroom goals in working with audio are the same as our goals for the rest of our Shakespeare units: to give students the tools to interpret the Shakespeare text, show how that interpretation affects its meaning, and prepare them for their own analysis through writing, performance, and design work. As the suggestions and activities in the following pages will show, audio work aims to help in each of these goals. If students are struggling to understand the meaning of a particular passage, listening to it interpreted is a useful first step to understanding. Listening to it interpreted in different ways is the next natural step to a more complex understanding of its possible range of meanings. Students working toward performance will find specific examples of choices they can make while acting out the text. Those listening to multiple examples of the same passage will be exposed to a range of possibilities without the expectation that any one of them might be the “right” choice. Students planning on doing design work on possible set, costume, lighting, and background music choices for a possible production of the play will hear work that can jump-start their imaginations without suggesting any visual cues they might later have trouble rejecting. Playing clips in the classroom can and should be a tool to further the work we are already doing, not something new we need to find time to cram into our schedule.

So, what do we do when we bring audio to class along with our texts? Older and more sophisticated students, or those already familiar with working with audio performances, may be ready to listen to the clips and analyze the choices made by the actors with little preparation for the medium. If your students are ready, you may be able to play them some clips and ask for their responses without spending class time thinking about how to interpret audio. Just as you would do to ask students to interpret other spoken-word art like poetry readings or readers’ theater, you may be able to ask these students to start out by naming specific choices that they’ve heard the actors use in the clips. Then, they may be able to explain the effect of those choices and work from there to more complex questions of motivation and meaning. As a warm-up activity, you might try having students mark up their own texts as a kind of musical score, with notes about how they intend to speak each word or line. Have a few perform their text, then have students examine the audio tapes for similarities and differences. Or, you could use the audio clips as treats after the end of a session of close reading and textual interpretation; studying the text carefully will give the students more things to listen for when they finally hear the clips.

Younger or less sophisticated students, or those with little exposure to spoken-word performance, may need more specific tools than this in order to help them understand what they’re hearing. Students can break audio down into its component parts just as they are able to break video down into its own component parts. Because there are far fewer things to consider in an audio clip, the analysis will quickly become much more specific, and therefore more detailed, than similar work on video.

Anyone who’s shown a full-length movie to a class over several days knows the problem of keeping students’ attention on the work. At the Folger, we have long advocated for comparing several clips of the same scene from different movies rather than showing a whole movie from start to finish. Similarly, the Sourcebooks audio CD allows students to work on comparing interpretations of the same pieces of text, rather than listening to (falling asleep to?) an entire play. This is an important advantage in working to break the medium down into its component parts. Just as you might have one group of students follow the camera angles of a movie, another the costumes, another the lighting, another the background music, and so forth, you can work with audio clips in similarly specific ways.

The basic components of audio are volume, pitch, pace, pause, and tone. Four are relatively objective. Students can comment on their initial findings in terms of volume (loud or quiet), pitch (low or high), pace (fast or slow), and pause (long, short, or non-existent) without heading into the realm of the subjective. The audio worksheet gives students an easy, visual means to track changes in actors' audio performance. Tone, of course, is more subjective. When the tone is not transparent to students, looking at their results for the first four more technical elements of audio may help lead them to conclusions about tone. If a speech is extremely loud and fast without pauses, that suggests a more rushed and emotional tone than a quiet, slow speech with multiple pauses. From there, conclusions about tone may be easier for students.

One possible way of approaching basic audio work in the classroom is shown in the handout. It is meant to give some guidance for the first-time user of audio in the classroom. I would urge you to adapt this to the particular circumstances and interests of your own students.

To use it, divide the students into four groups. Assign each group one of the four technical elements of audio – volume, pitch, pace, and pause – to follow as you play them an audio clip or clips. In the first section, have them record what they hear: the range they encounter in the clip and the places where their element changes. In the second section, have them suggest words for the tone of the passage based in part on their answers to the first. Sections three and four deal with tools of the actor. Modern acting theory finds the actor’s objective is his single most important acting choice; an actor may then choose from a variety of tactics in order to achieve that objective.2 Thus, if a character’s objective on stage is to get sympathy from his scene partner, he may start out by complaining, then shift to another tactic (asking for sympathy directly? throwing a tantrum?) if the first tactic fails. Asking your students to try to explain what they think a character is trying to get, and how she may be trying to do it, is a way for them to follow this process through closely. Finally, the handout asks students to think about the meaning (theme) of the passage, concluding with a traditional and important tool of text analysis.

As you can see, this activity is more interesting and, probably, easier for students when it’s used with multiple versions of the same piece of text. While defining an actor’s motivation is difficult in a vacuum, doing so in relation to another performance may be easier: one Othello may be more concerned with gaining respect, while another Othello may be more concerned with obtaining love, for instance. This activity may be done outside of a group setting, although for students doing this work for the first time I suggest group work so they will be able to share answers on some potentially thought-provoking questions.

You may find that you would rather cut off the group work after steps one and two and move directly to the next stage of your investigation. These may be enough to prompt effective design and performance work or to jump-start a discussion of text analysis. While it’s useful to bring the process to a conclusion, that conclusion can take many forms. A student performance of the same speech she’s heard others tackle may be as effective an assessment of the work as a more traditional writing assignment.

From this stage, there are a number of ways to deepen and continue your students’ investigations. One way is to incorporate this type of activity into traditional written essays. If students are writing argumentative essays, they can use specific actors’ performance choices as support for their theses. Henry V isn’t the cynical, shrewd political operative that some modern critics claim but rather a genuine military hero? Well, Laurence Olivier played him that way. By using some of their notes on the mechanics of speech as specific arguments for a particular interpretation, students will be delving into this kind of argument in all the complexity you could wish.

Another useful class technique at this point is to bring in video clips, especially clips of the same speeches, and even actors, with which they have been working. This opens up whole new areas of analysis. How do the other, visual elements of the production help to further the work being done by the actor? Are there elements of the production that students find jarring? If so, where do they find the origin of that tension? Was the actor trying to do something different from the overall production? Did the director make a choice that undermined the rest of the show’s interpretation? Before playing the video clips, you could ask students to speculate on how they think certain visual elements will be used. Afterwards, you can discuss the ways in which they were right and wrong.

Audio work can also be a strong lead-in for class performance. If clips offer a range of choices for delivering a particular piece of text, and students can define that range, the next step is to make choices. Why should a particular piece be loud or soft? Slow or fast? What textual evidence do they have for those choices? How do they find the piece most effective? Students can continue this comparison work on different student performances of the same piece of text. Once they’ve compared the choices of professional actors, their own acting takes on a new degree of seriousness when it is subjected to the same kind of analysis.

In a similar way, students can move from audio clips to making design choices for a hypothetical production of the play. Once they’ve established character motivations and, through those, an underlying theme, they will be in a strong position to consider how they might want to use design elements in a production. Which audio choices work best for them? How would a production designed around those choices look? Individuals or groups of students could design sets, costumes, lighting or sound; could cast and block individual scenes; or could create a storyboard for the production.

Finally, of course, audio work can most likely help to introduce many of the lessons that you are already using in the classroom. Do you have students act out scenes in modern contexts? Listening to clips can suggest other contexts or provide suggestions for choices they can make in their performances. Do you have students search for image patterns in online concordances? They can listen for these patterns and describe how the actors do or don’t emphasize them. Do you wish to discuss iambic pentameter? Some of the actors emphasize meter more than others; a single group of clips can produce an astonishing variety of the uses of meter in performance. Scansion on the page can come alive for a student when following along in a medium that forces attention on aural choices. Do you want to examine performance history? The earliest audio clips take you much further back than video can.

At the end of the experience of working with audio in the classroom, we have another question for you: How do you like it? What questions do you have? What other resources would be useful for you? We want to hear from you. Come join the discussion at the Folger’s online Teacher’s Lounge (www.folger.edu/education; go to Teaching Shakespeare) or on the Sourcebooks site (www.sourcebooksshakespeare.com). If you have questions, you can reach us at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . As you can see, working with audio in the classroom creates opportunities to explore Shakespeare’s plays in ways that are meaningful and engaging, providing a wealth of material for a variety of classroom activities. Furthermore, your students can work on enhancing their sophistication with dramatic analysis without being distracted by the visual information of video. Perhaps, like Henry IV, we can all be “altered much upon the hearing it.”3

1My approach with audio owes much to Stuart Sherman, the first teacher to use audio with me in the classroom.
2For a useful introduction to these terms, see William Ball, A Sense of Direction, New York: Drama Publishers, 1984. The classic text on the subject is Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1989.
34.3.158. William Shakespeare, ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, Henry IV, Part 2, New York: Washington Square Press, 2005.