Shakespeare at Clapham
For over a decade, Clapham students have been performing Shakespeare plays for a live audience.
Every year, middle school students put on a classic Shakespeare play during the spring semester. This springtime theatrical production is a testament to the formative power of the performing arts. It provides a unique platform for students to confront challenging texts, respond to direction, develop poise under pressure, and experience the profound satisfaction of bringing a story to life. The process cultivates discipline, imaginative problem-solving, and taste: a lasting appreciation for classical literature.
Cultivating Character and Joy Through Shakespearean Performance
Research increasingly suggests that engaging with and performing Shakespeare in the middle grades yields demonstrable benefits for students. Beyond fostering a deeper appreciation for classical literature, such programs:
- Sharpen cognitive faculties: Performing Shakespeare enhances executive functions, particularly working memory, and improves reading comprehension.
- Refine linguistic precision: Students studying Shakespeare have better composition scores, notably in their command and understanding of complex vocabulary.
- Cultivate emotional intelligence: By grappling with universal human experiences—ambition, guilt, grief, and love—through performance, students grow in their recognition and articulation of feelings they will certainly encounter someday if they haven’t already.
- Enhance verbal dexterity: Regular exposure to Shakespeare’s verse hones an appreciation for rhythm, metaphor, and diction, improving overall language proficiency.
- Promote collaborative skills: Staging theatrical productions naturally necessitates coordination, rigorous rehearsal, and mutual trust between students.
- Inspire a virtuous imagination: Through engaging with the classics, students see the fruits of virtue and vice through story. They are given a context in which to explore the gamut of human experience in a contained environment, along with opportunities to process the play with trusted faculty mentors.
- Cultivate taste: Students immersed in Shakespeare cultivate an awareness of excellence and beauty in art, ultimately equipping them to produce beautiful work themselves.
