TL;DR Summary -

I wrote a new translation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet that focused less on a direct translation of language and more on the characters, their relationships, and conveying a really good and engaging story. I used it as a teaching tool to supplement our 9th-grade Romeo and Juliet unit and it was a huge success! Other teachers used it and found great success as well and portions of it are being used in various schools in Minnesota and Wisconsin right now. Students and colleagues implored me to publish it and so I spent three years trying. Unfortunately, I found that educational publishing is difficult to break into. However, one publisher -- Theran Press -- offered to cover over half the costs of publishing, to guarantee me a higher royalty, and to let me keep full copyright. This is where you come in! I'm asking for everyone and anyone's help in getting this published as I think this could revolutionize the teaching of Shakespeare and copies of this could be in every high school in America. Any donation is appreciated and anyone who contributes to this will have their name printed on an Acknowledgements page in the book. For the full story behind this venture along with a link to a small portion of the work and a link to a survey conducted with actual students, keep reading below! Thank you so much for your help!

Tony

The Full Story:

As a high school English teacher for the last 19 years, I have found that teaching Shakespeare can be one of the most difficult things to do. Because of this, I have created something that for the last several years has invigorated my unit on Romeo and Juliet. Students spend the unit laughing, engaged, and looking forward to class and frequently say it is the best unit of the year, all while still reading Shakespeare and decoding his complex language. My colleagues have used it as well to great success and implored me to send it out and get it published so that high school students around the country can find the engagement and enjoyment in Shakespeare that our students do. This may be the best selling point of all: it does not need to be tested. It has already proven successful throughout my school as well as a few other schools where former colleagues now teach. Check out the results of this survey conducted with actual students. It only needs to be reproduced so others may find our same success. Let me explain what it is and where it came from.

Based on his standing as the greatest writer the English language has ever seen, you would think that every student who graces my classroom would be absolutely pumped and excited to read Shakespeare’s literary masterpieces! But obviously, that is not the case. Modernized and updated versions of his plays are always popular among teens, so the problem does not lie in the plots or characters. The problem lies in the language. I love the language of Shakespeare, but teenagers typically don’t. As their teacher, it was my job to get them to read, comprehend, analyze and, hopefully, enjoy Shakespeare. My previous strategy was to only read the major scenes in class and really spend time decoding and analyzing the language in those scenes. For the rest of the play, I had the freedom to convey plot points in other ways in order to keep the storyline coherent while also being efficient with time. I used video clips, graphic novels, and summaries to fill in these blanks.

The problem was that other than the few scenes I chose to read in the original Shakespeare, it was mostly seatwork and individual activities. Kids were losing interest and energy. I wanted to make things more interactive. I thought maybe we could do a performance of those less significant scenes, except with a modern translation. I looked around the internet and at books in our Media Center, but I didn’t like what I found. The translations were dull and dry and focused more on translating the language rather than conveying a great story. They didn’t bring the humor and passion that Shakespeare intended. I wanted the students to be engaged and have fun and I didn’t see that happening with the materials that were out there. I decided I could do better. I sat down and wrote a new version of the first few scenes of the play. I modernized the language while focusing on the actual storytelling and creating authentic conversations between characters. I did my best to maintain the personalities of the characters and follow the plot and dialogue as Shakespeare wrote it, but also make it fun for a modern audience of teenagers to read.

I tried it in my classes with Act I, Scenes 1-4. Here is a sample of the Prologue and Act 1so you can get a feel of what I did. We got through these scenes in one day. But more importantly, the kids loved it. And most importantly, they understood it. We were able to move into Act I, Scene 5 (where we read the actual Shakespearean text), and the kids were engaged in the story and ready to find out what happened next. I gave it to my colleagues in case they wanted to use it. A number of them did and came back to tell me that their students absolutely loved it and were raving about it. I started getting stopped in the hallways by random students who told me they loved the “Bakkish” version! Remember that these are high school students! I decided that if it was this effective in engaging the students and helping them not just understand the text but actually enjoy the story, then it could become a wonderful teaching tool if I created a “Bakkish” version of the entire play. And over the last number of years, that is what I did.

I truly believe that this can be an invaluable tool that teachers everywhere can use to engage their students in Shakespeare so that those eye rolls and groans can be replaced with genuine excitement. I see class sets of this in every high school across the nation. I can see it even outside the classroom in bookstores or catalogs, where anybody can pick this up and read it and have an enjoyable reading experience on their own. If this finds success, I plan to do a “Bakkish” version of other Shakespeare plays and create an entire series. I believe, based on my experience in my own classroom and the comments I have received from my colleagues and their students, that this has that kind of potential.

So, I have spent the last three years sending this out to every publisher or literary agent I can find. I have gotten many positive responses such as "This is really cool!" and "I can definitely see how this is effective," and "Bravo to you! This is great!"! Unfortunately, they were always followed with a "But." "But I don't have the right contacts for this type of project," or "But this doesn't quite fit with our Young Adult catalog" or "But we already have a Shakespeare listing and we don't want to have competing titles" or "This would have been perfect for our ___ division, but we shut it down a couple of years ago." And then they wished me luck and told me to keep trying. It soon became clear that my little project was a very niche idea that didn't align with most traditional publishers. In fact, in education publishing, there are only a few publishers that have a pretty sizeable grip on the industry. You probably know them. And they rarely take unsolicited or unagented submissions, so they were not really an option.

I looked into self-publishing, but that was overwhelming and expensive. That route also made no guarantees that it would look good, I would have any sort of platform to advertise or do anything else to help with the marketing reach I am striving for.

However, during all of this, I got in touch with one publisher, Theran Press, who absolutely loved it and offered a different model. They are a smaller academic press that runs a "Hybrid" model of publishing. Basically, the gist is this: They ask that the author covers half of the expense of publishing. In exchange for this, they offer top-notch publishing skills (I have seen their books. They look GOOD!), higher royalties, my book on their advertising platforms, catalogs and social media, and what may be most important: I would maintain the copyright. Most publishers force the author to relinquish it to them. In this case, I would keep it. That is huge in my mind. 

Here is where you come in:

This publisher said that I would need to come up with about $4400 for my share. I put my goal as $5000 because I know that each donation comes with a fee attached to it. Also, if I can exceed that minimum as well as my goal, then I could also invest in making a Kindle version of this book to make it even more accessible anywhere.

So that's the story. Please help me bring this book to the world of education. I plan on writing more after this and I hope it can revolutionize the teaching of Shakespeare so each new generation can learn it, love it, and appreciate it as much as I do.

Thank you so much!

Anthony Bakke

English Teacher at Robbinsdale Armstrong High School in Plymouth, Minnesota since 2004

Masters in Science in Education and Professional Development from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls

Bachelor's Degree in Communication Arts and Literature from St. Cloud State University