Shakespeare Was Made to Be Watched — So Why Do We Still Treat Him Like Homework?

If Shakespeare were alive today, I’m convinced he’d be horrified by the way many students encounter his work. Sat in rows, highlighters in hand, silently deciphering a text that was never designed to live on a page. Shakespeare’s plays were not written to be read. They were written to be performed, experienced, argued over, laughed at, misinterpreted, shouted, whispered, and embodied. They were noisy. They were chaotic. They were communal. They were, in many ways, the Netflix, TikTok, and live music of their time. So why, in English classrooms up and down the country, do we so often reduce them to comprehension exercises and quote hunts? One of the biggest barriers students face with Shakespeare is not the language, it’s the distance. We present these plays as distant, untouchable, “high culture” texts rather than what they really are. Stories about power, love, jealousy, betrayal, loyalty, identity, family conflict, and social pressure. In other words, the same themes that dominate everything our students watch today. If you frame Romeo and Juliet as simply “a tragic love story written 400 years ago,” it feels dusty and irrelevant. But if you frame it as a story about teenage rebellion, family control, secret relationships, and the consequences of impulsive decisions? Suddenly it looks a lot like a Netflix series. If Macbeth is just “a play about a king who kills another king,” students struggle to connect. But if we explore it as a story about toxic ambition, peer pressure, manipulation, and the psychology of guilt? It becomes chillingly contemporary. If Hamlet is “a prince who takes too long to get revenge,” we lose them. But if we position him as a young man overwhelmed by grief, betrayal, surveillance, and existential crisis? That’s a character many students recognise instantly. Some of the most powerful moments I’ve had teaching Shakespeare have come from getting students to play with the text rather than analyse it first. Years ago, I wrote an appropriation of Hamlet, in the style of ‘Kidulthood’, as a piece of street theatre. Suddenly, Hamlet wasn’t an indecisive prince, he was a conflicted young man navigating loyalty, violence, and reputation in a brutal urban landscape. The language shifted, the setting shifted, but the emotional core remained the same. And the students got it. In another lesson, I asked students to take famous Shakespearean monologues and translate them into rap lyrics. Watching a group of Year 10 boys transform “To be, or not to be” into a hard-hitting verse about mental health, identity, and pressure was extraordinary. The rhythm, the emotion, the performance, all of it felt far closer to how Shakespeare intended his words to live. Even the idea of Romeo “spitting lyrics” rather than “delivering a soliloquy” immediately reframes him as a character students can understand. A passionate, impulsive, love struck teenager pouring his heart out in the only way he knows how. Humour, too, is a powerful tool. In an online community of teachers I’m part of, we often share funny classroom moments. My favourite this week was this: An English teacher is discussing Romeo and Juliet with her Year 10's and mentions that, at just 14, Juliet was a virgin. One lad pipes up: “Like… a virgin virgin?” The boy next to him replies: “Well, Romeo wasn’t there to sort out her broadband, was he?” It’s ridiculous. It’s chaotic. It’s absolutely Year 10 energy. But it also opens up a genuine discussion about innocence, reputation, gender, and how different societies understand sexuality, which is exactly what Shakespeare is exploring in the play. Perhaps the shift we need in English education is this. Watch Shakespeare before we read him. Let students see the drama, the tension, the comedy, the heartbreak. Let them experience the story as theatre first. Through film adaptations, live performances, role-play, or even their own creative reinterpretations. Only then should we dive into the language with highlighters and annotations. Once students care about the characters, the words start to matter. Shakespeare was not a silent, solitary writer sitting in a library. He was a playwright responding to the world around him. Politics, power, relationships, and human behaviour. If we teach him as something alive, messy, and performative rather than something dusty and academic, our students don’t just understand Shakespeare, they feel him. And that, surely, is how these beautiful plays were always meant to be experienced.