Is Hamlet too tough for high school kids?

Shakespeare's greatest play connects in ways we could not predict.

When my teaching career ended, I headed into retirement figuring I’d miss three things; the daily banter with the kids, the early morning chats with colleagues and the daily stories about what this kid did or that kid said or whatever the talk of the day might be.

As a second school year comes to a close without my sticking my nose in it, I do occasionally miss hearing a really good question, a student’s laugh or maybe a kid making some discovery in their writing. But the one thing I truly miss is Hamlet.

I did not expect that I would necessarily ever enjoy teaching Shakespeare, Hamlet in particular. In high school, Shakespeare’s work seemed dry, boring, ill-suited, it seemed, for the classroom.

When I got to college and was confronted with someone who knew how - and WHY - to teach it - (Thank you Sister Marjorie Francoeur) - well, it was like someone opened a window to the most glorious sunrise God could have put out there for us and all of a sudden I could see and hear and read and think about things that I’d never considered before jumping off the page. How in the world could someone write like that? Especially then!

Years later, when it was my time to take a turn in the classroom, I wondered if I could do for some of my students what she did for me. I decided my ticket would be Hamlet.

Shakespeare’s longest play, his most challenging role - 4,000 lines! - Hamlet was no small thing to tackle in a high school classroom, particularly in a struggling school like mine, far and away the bottom of the barrel as far as the Florida state testing rankings go.

Somehow I trusted that Shakespeare’s stirring play would inspire my students the way it inspired and fascinated me. Why? Well, to put it the way one brilliant teaching friend of mine explained it to me one summer at an Advanced Placement English Literature summer seminar, “Hamlet has everything. Everything. Why would you want to teach anything else?”

She was right. Drama, murder, love, hate, death, sex, sin, romance, humor, revenge and that’s just in the first couple acts. While I looked at all different versions - Sir Laurence Olivier’s cripplingly indecisive Hamlet, Ethan Hawke’s modern Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh’s stylish, reflective Hamlet, the actor that I thought would capture my student’s imagination in the role was Mel Gibson, who had the lead role in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 movie version of the play.

Known primarily as an action hero, Gibson brings a ferocity to the role, a prince who seems to have it all, intelligence, looks, power, wealth, wit, yet once the hand of fate or destiny begins pulling his chain, nothing, it seems can stop his inexorable doom. Reading later that Zeffirelli had actually made the film with high school students in mind, made me think I’d made the right call.

When the students first saw the opening scene where Hamlet meets Claudius, his mother’s new husband, the new king, also Hamlet’s UNCLE, Zeffirelli makes a slight change that caught the kids’ attention right away. Claudius greets Hamlet, sitting in a darkened room, still mourning his father’s shocking death. Hamlet responds “More than kin and less than kind,” originally a muttered aside in the original screenplay, here, it becomes a bold, F-you to the new king AND his stepdad in the film, while his mom giggled away nervously. The kids, who may have seen something similar in their own life, liked that right away.

When the ghost of Hamlet’s father returns, and first, asks him to avenge his poisoning by Claudius - who is now sleeping with Hamlet’s mom - then asks him to leave her fate to God, well, that was a twist that had the kids nodding in agreement.

Later, when Hamlet’s former girlfriend Ophelia, acting on her father’s orders, returns some romance-tinged items Hamlet had given her, he pretends not to know what she’s talking about. She gets right up in his face (another moment kids could relate to) and after a beat, Hamlet fires back with a mean diatribe “God gives you one face and you make another” a line that certainly landed with one of my students.

Some weeks later, the senior girls were in the cafeteria for their senior pics and, well, let’s just say that some might say they overdid their makeup. My student, wandering by, definitely thought that. He walked to the group of them and said “God gives you one face and you make another.” I tiptoed back to class.

As the play continues and Hamlet finds comical ways to play Claudius, his mom Gertrude and the meddling Polonius - a classic scene in the library - the class loved his wit, his being-ahead-of-the-grownups and they could relate to that, too.

Yet as things unfold and people start dropping, some of them as a direct result of things Hamlet did, remarkably, the class never turned against him. He had their heart.

And at the heartbreaking finish with the duel with the corrupt Laertes, one student, realizing Hamlet’s fate, stood up and hollered at full volume, “NO!” Another broke into almost hysterical tears. A classmate threw an arm around her, handing her a tissue.

Why, I asked them, one and all, do we react like this? He’s mean to Ophelia, rude to his mother, disrespectful to Claudius and Polonius, makes sure several people die, yet we all are rooting for him at the finish. Was he the one person trying to live right amidst all the corruption, lying, deception? Was that it?

“He was just living his life,” one student explained. “All this crap just came down around him and he couldn’t get out of it. I can relate.”

“The world disappointed him, I think,” another said. “As smart and as handsome and as powerful as he was, he had no one to turn to. And there was never going to be someone he could turn to. He was all alone.”

Being a struggling school, the Department of Education was always hovering around and it just so happened one day, two inspectors showed up the morning of our Hamlet final exam. As I was headed to the meeting, I just grabbed a couple of student exams, figuring I’d give them an idea what we were doing. I hadn’t read them but knew the two students I picked were sharp. I trusted them.

I handed them to the inspector when we got to the room. She sat there, silently reading, holding up the meeting. Then, she looked up at me, tears in her eyes.

“A HIGH SCHOOL KID wrote this?” she asked. “Oh my God!”

Shakespeare may have been dead for more than 400 years. His words sure aren’t.