Shakes: The Bard Meets the Beat

The Shakes is the product of 9th grade students' exploration of social issues in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Students first entered into an in-depth analysis of the content and form of both Shakespeare’s language and rap music. They went on to explore how both the Bard and rappers use devices like imagery, hyperbole, allusion, and metaphor to both entertain and critique society. Students then crafted thoughtful argumentative essays and used them to co-author verses for rap songs—a new genre of music students called Academic Rap. The result is an album that contains four songs, uniting the theaters of Elizabethan England with a classroom in Manhattan.