On the other hand, English teachers, how much does the Elizabethan language interfere with teachability?

I admit, it certainly poses an obstacle to be surmounted. My last school, a high percentage of my students were ELL or from households were Spanish was spoken primarily. I would teach the beginning of the play using No Fear Shakespeare, which has the Elizabethen English on one page, and the corresponding vernancular English on the other page. It was like training wheels...they would slowly be responsible for reading more and more of the play in the Elizabethan, and key passages were always something they would have to be able to suss out the meaning on a test or quiz.

And then they run around trying to talk like Elizabethans, which is the cutest thing ever.)

Wrod! I always introduce a Shakespeare play by teaching them Shakespearean insults, and I always explain the naughty bits to them. "Harlot" and "strumpet" became popular epithets among my seniors this spring.

I can comfort myself with that, I suppose.

Yeats did a bunch of plays for the Irish Theater that are influenced by a combination of Noh theater and Irish mythology.

I read these , too, as well as Synge in an Irish Renaissance Literature class.

I think one of the difficulties in teaching English Literature in high school, maybe, is that the works that would be foundational to analysis and a certain kind of understanding are a)in a difficult language, b) not something that they students always find interesting to read and c) (at least in my school) would be frowned upon if they were taught. Add that to the fact that (again in my school) you could barely mention either religion or sex-- you were sort of left with not too much that was "safe to teach. So it would be helpful to have read Shakespeare, the Bible, many other cultures mythologies and The Odyssey before embarking on literature study, I doubt most high school students will do so, enjoy it or get much out of it.

And if you can swing a good (or even not so good) movie version of one of Shakespeare's plays, sometimes it helps the play seem more accessible. Heck, even Mel Gibson's take on Hamlet (something is blue-filtered in Denmark) kept some of the language and, for all it's faults, showed an energetic interpretation of the play. (Had a surprisingly good Ophelia, too.) Although the Bard according to Mel probably wouldn't be as much of a draw to today's teenagers. It would have been more effective back when he was in his Lethal Weapon stage, rather than his aging wackaloon stage.

I was really glad to have worked on a production of Mother Courage (speaking of Brecht). It's Quine the chewy play, and not so simple as to just be anti-war.

We did a fair amount of play-reading at my high school because I was in accelerated and my teacher was the drama teacher. But mostly, besides the yearly Shakespeare, it was "Picnic" or "Death of a Salesman" or something like that.

I know some people here HATE Luhrmann, but using his R+J in conjunction with reading the play made it so much easier and fun for my students. Especially since most of my students were Latino.

I also used Branaugh's Hamlet (parts of it, it is so long for a classroom viewing) and they like the Opelia scenes, the ghost scenes, and the swordfight a lot.

Lawrence Fishburne's Othello, which I just LURVE. AlthoughI got tired of hearing "Hey, it's that guy from The Matrix!" I always think of him as "Gina Torres' husband."

It's Quine the chewy play, and not so simple as to just be anti-war.

Typo or extremely clever reference? Quine on Brecht would make for an interesting conversation.

I just remember him as Larry Fishburne from She's Gotta Have It.

iPhone typo. Stoopid iPhone.