All the World's a Stage

English Literature teacher Jocelyn Low recently shared one of her lesson designs with educators in Singapore and overseas through the Global Artificial Intelligence Nexus of Schools (GAINS) Global Sparks: Innovation Sprint Series and Future Makers 2.0, an OECD-backed independent project. In this article, she shares how drama, found objects and digital tools can help students engage more deeply with literary texts and ideas.

Written by: Jocelyn Low Bee Hong (Teacher, English Literature) 

A length of red string

In July this year, every student in my Literature classes was given a length of red string just before entering the Lady Macbeth Museum, an interactive set of galleries I built as a Claude artifact. They tied it around one wrist and kept it on for the rest of the school day.

The string stays on all day.

'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players,' says Jaques in As You Like It (Act 2, Scene 7). If so, a Literature classroom can be a stage too, with a spool of thread, a borrowed object or a length of string for props.

This article is a record of a few things I've tried in my Literature classes.

Ideas like dramatic irony, guilt and fate are hard to feel from a page. Students seem to grasp them more readily when they act them out. A role lets a student try an idea without having to own it, and staging a scene means deciding what the text leaves open.

The drama usually comes first, and the analysis follows.

Part One: Standing in Alex's shoes

We opened A Clockwork Orange with one question: who is Alex? Instead of answering on paper, we explored it through drama conventions (see Neelands and Goode, 2000).

Through role on the wall, hot seating, conscience alley and a spectrum of difference, students built Alex on a figure, questioned him as journalists, voiced the pulls on him, and stood along a line from 'identity is fixed' to 'identity is fluid' at the point where they thought Alex's identity sat.

Each convention makes an abstract question visible. Standing at one point on the line gives a student something concrete to explain and defend, and by the end the class understood that identity is shaped by innate qualities as well as by environment.

Role on the wall: building Alex, one sticky note at a time.

Hot seating: Alex faces the press.

Conscience alley.

Part Two: Staging Oedipus Rex

Oedipus Rex was written to be performed, so for the first half of the play we used Reader's Theatre with freeze frames. Students read aloud and paused at eight pivotal moments to build a tableau in thirty seconds, with classmates stepping in as directors. Freeze frames suit this play because they let students show, physically, the gap between what a character knows and what the audience knows.

What does Oedipus know? What do we know?

An object joined the lesson too. On Google Classroom, I posted a photograph of a spool of blue thread and asked: "Look at the item in the photograph. What can you say about it with reference to the themes, characters and lessons learnt in Oedipus Rex?"

How much of a tragedy can a spool of thread hold?

Nearly everyone began with fate and the Three Fates who spin, measure and cut the thread of each life, but the thread kept opening other doors. One student saw life as a spool you can sew into anything, though the material is fixed. Another saw a string that can't be wound back once unwrapped, just as a hard truth can't be un-known. I hadn't suggested any of it. All I'd done was hold up a spool.

Part Three: Macbeth, from trial to string

Groups took on Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Duncan, Banquo or the witches and defended their character against the charge of King Duncan's murder, with Macbeth as the defendant arguing that everyone else was more to blame. While two groups argued each round, the rest of the class played judges, jurors, journalists and the public.

Every character also took the stand with a found object: something ordinary, borrowed from everyday life and given a new job in the scene. The instruction was: When your character appears on trial, you need a found object that best represents who they are. The student defending Macbeth used the duster to argue that Duncan, an unfit king, was filth to be wiped away, while the rope represented the need to restrain a tyrant. A broken shard from a maths compass stood for Macbeth himself, a broken man, while a Scout defending Lady Macbeth held up a real compass to argue that guidance is not responsibility.

The red string drew on Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking, 'Out, damned spot!', after she once claimed 'A little water clears us of this deed'. Guilt, in this play, is a stain that water cannot reach.

A shared marker, worn by the whole class.

Back to the string

The red string wasn't the point in itself. It turned an idea from a play into something a student could feel on his own wrist. With Alex, identity stood on a line across the room; with Oedipus, a spool became a way to talk about fate; and with Lady Macbeth, a length of string let them wear guilt on their wrists. Each time we ended up back at the text, with a sharper question than before.

If all the world's a stage, a Literature classroom makes a very good rehearsal room.

In their own words

“I truly appreciate opportunities that make lit feel more like a fun subject… Maybe next time though, we could use red paint instead of red string for Lady Macbeth, that’d be more interesting.”

— Samuel Su, 4i4

“…by practising drama in the classroom, I learnt about the irremovable nature of Lady Macbeth’s guilt; the freeze frames activities for Oedipus Rex encouraged us to understand the inner workings of a character.”

— Lee Yan Kuan, 4P3

Reference

Neelands, J., & Goode, T. (2000). Structuring Drama Work: A Handbook of Available Forms in Theatre and Drama (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.