Women In Shakespeare

Thank you for broadening the worldview of our students and for providing them
with an opportunity to connect Shakespeare to their daily lives.
We have never seen our students get so hands-on with Shakespeare.

Natasha Faul, Head of Faculty, Bossley Park High School

In 2023 and 2024, Bell Shakespeare shared the Women in Shakespeare program with 16 schools across Sydney, thanks to the generous support of the WeirAnderson Foundation. Throughout the program, students and teachers have explored Shakespeare’s female characters and gained an understanding of the historical context in which they were written and set, with such insights providing a lens through which to look at and discuss the female experience today.

The Women in Shakespeare program includes an in-person Professional Learning workshop for teachers at Bell Shakespeare HQ and in-class workshops, delivered by teaching artists. Schools also had access to video resources featuring soliloquies and scenes from female characters. Students had the opportunity to apply their learnings and interpretations of the characters to then develop their own adaptations where Shakespeare’s female characters took on a new voice and level of agency.

Teachers described that many students had limited experience performing Shakespeare and interpreting his works beyond the page. For students from an EALD background in particular, the language of Shakespeare’s plays can be daunting. Teachers also mentioned that the students had negative perceptions of Shakespeare due to having difficulty accessing the plays in a way that made them relevant in a contemporary context. These sentiments were exacerbated by the teacher’s lack of confidence to teach Shakespeare and have innovative resources that create variety in teaching methods, helping students creatively engage with Shakespeare.

A key aspect of the 10-lesson program is for students to take ownership of the storytelling and creatively respond with their own adaptations of Shakespeare’s female characters. The task was flexible to consider the different ways that teachers wanted to approach the lesson plan; the different abilities of students, and the texts they wished to focus on.

This year, Sarah Peachman from Picton High School and Kimberley Landow from Forest High School combined their classes to produce a podcast. Picton High School students shared their thoughts about the female representation in Romeo & Juliet and Forest High School Students on King Lear.  Each episode was 5 minutes in length and examined a core question.