New Ways into Romeo and Juliet with the Folger Method

This free interactive virtual session uses Folger Method Essential Practices to open up fresh entry points into Romeo and Juliet, a play so familiar that students often think they already know it before they have read a line. This session returns to Juliet’s very first scene, Act 1, Scene 3, to examine the social expectations and pressures placed on her from the moment she appears, and to open up questions of marriage, identity, and the roles a society assigns, questions students can still feel in their own lives. 

In this session, you’ll experience, and leave ready to use, three adaptable activities that give students new ways into the play: 

• Cut the scene to its essentials. Working in groups, participants will take up the cutting strategy on Act 1, Scene 3, negotiating line by line what to keep and what to lose. We will consider how that negotiation forces real decisions about character, conflict, and theme, and how the act of cutting becomes an act of interpretation that students own. 

• Put the play in conversation with a contemporary poem. Participants will read Ada Limón’s “Wife” alongside the scene and explore how both texts represent the roles that marriage and social expectation shape for women. We will discuss how an unexpected pairing lets students approach a famous scene with fresh eyes and a stake of their own. 

• Draw the connections that build interpretation. Participants will work through discussion that links the speaker of the poem to the characters on the page, surfacing the tension between individual desire and social expectation that runs through both. We will look at how this kind of talk gives students room to develop and defend readings that are genuinely theirs.