Pairing Texts: Shakespeare and the Sweep of Literature

This free interactive virtual session uses Folger Method Essential Practices to guide participants into a paired-text approach that places Shakespeare in genuine conversation with other literature. Rather than using one text to unlock another, participants will explore how pairing invites students to read both works more fully, letting each illuminate what the other cannot say alone. 

In this session, you’ll experience—and leave ready to use—three adaptable activities that invite students to move between texts, letting each one reshape how they read the other: 

• Bring Hamlet and Their Eyes Were Watching God into the same room: Participants will experience a Choral Reading, a collective practice in which voices layer across a text to surface patterns of imagery and rhythm, moving across both works to explore how Zora Neale Hurston and Shakespeare each stage interiority, grief, and the pressure of expectation in ways that deepen when placed side by side. 
• Dig into the philosophy, pedagogy, and practical applications of pairing texts: Using Folger Method Essential Practices, participants will examine what makes a pairing genuinely reciprocal, exploring how to select texts, design sequences, and create conditions where students move between literary worlds and build meaning across both. 
• Read Twelfth Night and Abigail Adams’s “Remember the Ladies” together: Participants will use Tone & Stress, a low-stakes entry, high-stakes discovery practice in which shifting tone of voice, inflection, and emphasis changes meaning and emotional stakes, to test what we hear differently about gender, authority, and voice when both texts are in the room, revealing how Shakespeare and Adams ask overlapping questions that neither text fully answers on its own.