The Shakes: Rapping Arguments about Shakespeare

In the year following Illuminating Chaucer, I made some adjustments to the curriculum.  I felt that, when recording the Chaucerian raps, students lost track of their theses, their points.  I wanted to see if students could write and perform really tight arguments in response to another canonical work, Romeo and Juliet. This time through, students co-crafted raps that addressed social issues that appear both in the play and today’s newspapers.  The emphasis in crafting the verses was on argument: maintain cogency.  Interestingly, though students’ early drafts were usually very strong arguments, their raps lost cohesion.  I wondered at the end if I had to un-teach what students thought rap music was seeing many of them resort to simple rhyme, humor, and sly bawdy witticisms rather than the intended academically oriented arguments they planned to make. Either way, the beats were better (we had them donated by a company in California) and the raps are thoughtful, exciting, and ties together the worlds of Shakespeare and students’ experiences in New York City.

Resources:

For a track from the album, please click here: Shakes 4