Gender in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

One of my students, David, pointed out how odd it is that after a year of digging deeply into the themes and literary devices in texts, we end the year translating the plot of a shallow love story. David’s right. We don’t do much with A Midsummer Night’s Dream beyond understanding the words. Sure, we act it out, and sure, we use it to learn the concept of subtext, and sure, we talk about how it’s adaptable to different settings. But the level of depth still isn’t very impressive, especially for the motivated critical thinkers I get to teach.

David’s problem with Midsummer stung because I had identified the same problem and hadn’t done much to fix it. I’d thought, it’s the end of the year, so it’s OK to do curriculum lite. I’d justified it further thinking, it’s Shakespeare! Even if all we do is read it and translate the meaning (or, as Kelly Gallagher put it in Deeper Reading, “construct the gist”), the students are learning Shakespeare. But still, I wanted to get a little deeper into the characters—even if that meant exposing their shallowness—and the themes of the play. Quite by accident, or as if fairies had planned it without my knowledge, I came upon a solution.

For the first part of the lesson, I adapted a activity I’d sat in on in my friend Kalin’s classroom. I broke the students into four groups and assigned each group of students a group of characters: the four lovers, the three other main Athenians, three of the mechanicals, and the three main fairies. I put the characters’ names on the board, and as a group, the students had to write three adjectives that they felt defined the character. Easy enough.

Next, each group of students rotated so they had a new group of characters. They had to revise the list. The rules were that for each character, they had to keep at least one adjective and change at least one adjective.

In the third round, when student groups rotated to get a revised list, the students were allowed to circle only one adjective for the whole class to discuss and negotiate. At the end, they copied the lists into their notes.

The next day, I told them we were going to discuss a theme that interested Shakespeare: gender roles. We reviewed the difference between sex and gender, the concepts of gender role and gender identity, and the idea of a gender continuum (which some of them had learned by participating in the YES Institute). In each class, students mentioned terms our society uses to label those who defy gender expectations—terms like tomboy, metrosexual, and yes, gay. We discussed how sexual orientation and gender identity are not the same thing; there can be a gay man with very masculine characteristics, or a heterosexual woman with very masculine characteristics.

Groups of students then placed the characters on a gender continuum. I asked them to put each character where they, as the audience members, saw the character and not where the character would put him- or herself. As the day before, we rotated groups and revised; this time, the second group was allowed to move only one character, and then the class raised characters to discuss.

Toward the end of the lesson, I wrote the adjectives from the previous day under the character’s names. So Helena, who they’d deemed very feminine, was also insecure, jealous, and whiny. Titania, who they’d deemed more masculine, was aggressive, stubborn, and powerful. I asked the students, what does this reveal?

It was powerful stuff. Some resisted the implications. Some acknowledged that gender stereotypes affect them. Most protested that guys and girls aren’t really like that, and I kept reminding them that we weren’t talking about individual behaviors but about social expectations. I can’t say I changed their consciousness, but they did think about something they might not have thought about in a way that was just comfortable enough.

So for next year, too late for David but worthwhile for the class below his, I’m considering titling my unit Social Justice in Shakespeare. We can talk about the racist language (“Away, you Ethiop!”), the stereotypes perpetuated by framing working-class characters as ignorant and foolish, and the question of whether characters are responsible for their behavior when under the influence of the love flower.

What do you think? What other social justice lessons have you taught using Shakespeare?