Teaching Shakespeare to GenZ

Educator Jocelyn A. Chadwick looks at the opportunities for teaching Shakespeare in today’s classroom, encouraged by GenZ’s passion for connecting literature from the past with their own here and now, bringing in the music, movies, and even ads that shape their world, to create their own unique meaning.

The essay comes from The Folger Guides to Teaching Shakespeare, which published the first three guides this month— Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet—with A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Othello coming in March 2025. The guides are filled with tips for making Shakespeare relevant and accessible to 21st-century students.

In so many unexpected ways, the 21st-century Shakespeare audience in school— students, teachers, and others—share far more with William Shakespeare and his time than we may initially recognize and acknowledge. From his infancy to his death, Shakespeare and his world closely paralleled and reflects ours: upheavals and substantial shifts culturally, sociopolitically, scientifically, and religiously, as well as the always-evolving human condition. Each of the plays represented in this series—Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream— illustrates just how much William Shakespeare not only observed and lived with and among tragedy, comedy, cultural diversity, challenges, and new explorations, but also, from childhood, honed his perspective of both past and present and—as Toni Morrison expresses—rememoried it in his plays and poems. Tragedy and Comedy is rooted in the antiquities of Greek, Roman, and Greco-Roman literature and history. William Shakespeare uniquely crafts these genres to reflect and inform his own time; more importantly, the plays he left us foreshadow past and future connections for audiences to come—audiences who would encounter cross-cultures, ethnicities, genders, geography, even time itself.

More than at any other time in our collective history experienced through literature, the past’s ability to inform, advise, and even “cushion” challenges our students’ experiences today. It will continue to do so into the foreseeable future and will continue to support and inform, and yes, even protect them. Protecting, meaning that what we and our students can read and experience from the safe distance literature provides, allows, even encourages, readers to process, reflect, and think about how we respond, engage, inquire, and learn.

One fascinating trait of GenZ readers I find so important is the how of their processing and relating canonical texts with other contemporary texts and other genres around them: TV, movies, songs, even advertisements. What I so admire and respect about students’ processing is their critical thinking and their ability to create new and different comprehension pathways that relate to their own here and now. In this new instructional paradigm, we all are exploring, discovering, and learning together, with William Shakespeare as our reading nucleus.

Although many writers and playwrights preceded William Shakespeare, his scope and depth far exceeded that of his predecessors and even his peers. His constant depiction and examinations of the human condition writ large and illustrated from a myriad of perspectives, times, cultures, and worlds set Shakespeare decidedly apart. The result of his depth and scope not only previewed the immediate future following his death, but more profoundly, his thematic threads, characters, settings, and cross-cultural inclusions continue to illustrate us to us.

The pivotal and critical point here is GenZ’s continued reading and experiencing of William Shakespeare’s plays. As they experience this playwright, they take bits and pieces of what they have read and experienced directly into other texts they read and experience in classes and daily living. In fact, in the “tidbits” they experience initially through Shakespeare, students will connect and interpret and make their own meaning and connections, even outside of textual reading. Malcolm X, in fact, provides us with an example of how that works:

Like Malcom X, GenZ students turn toward the wind, staring directly and earnestly into their present and future, determined to exert their voices and perspectives. Their exposure to past and present literature, sciences, histories, and humanities allows, even empowers, this unique generation to say, “I choose my destiny.” And the myriad texts to which we expose them informs, challenges, and compels them to always push back and move toward a truth and empowerment they seek. Some of us who are older may very well find such empowerment disconcerting—not of the “old ways.” But then, just what is a comprehensive education for lifelong literacy supposed to do, if not expose, awaken, engage, even challenge and open new, prescient doors of inquiry, exploration, and discovery? This is the broad scope of not just education for education’s sake but of reading and experiencing for oneself devoid of outside agendas—whatever they may be or from wherever they may emanate.

Dr. Jocelyn A. Chadwick is a lifelong English teacher and international scholar. She was a full-time professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education and now occasionally lectures and conducts seminars there. In addition to teaching and writing, Chadwick also consults and works with teachers and with elementary, middle, and high school students around the country. Chadwick has worked with PBS, BBC Radio, and NBC News Learn and is a past president of the National Council of Teachers of English. She has written many articles and books, including The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Teaching Literature in the Context of Literacy Instruction. Chadwick is currently working on her next book, Writing for Life: Using Literature to Teach Writing.