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Are you looking for a way to help your children grow their confidence, expand their vocabulary, and gain an appreciation for the classics? Theater-loving mom and author Jenny Bradley is crafting the perfect Shakespeare collection for young learners – Kids on Stage.

In her first release of the series, Jenny has adapted Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be accessible for children to read and perform while staying true to the original language. Join us today as we talk with her about what motivated her to create this series and how families, homeschool groups, and schools can use this great resource.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us Jenny Bradley. Jenny, thanks for joining us.

Jenny Bradley:
Oh, absolutely. I'm delighted to be here talking to you today.

Marlin Detweiler:
Jenny sent Laurie and me a book that we'll talk about in just a minute. A book that she published is something that we think our audience is going to be really interested in. But Jenny, tell us a little bit about yourself first—personally, your family, your education, your interests.

Jenny Bradley:
All right, well, my family's my favorite subject, so that's easy. I'm married to my college sweetheart, Mark, and we have five boys now, ages 13 down to four months, almost. I'm an Arkansas native, originally from Little Rock, youngest of five kids, and grew up in a Christian home.

Just had a mom who was a prayer warrior. My dad was a doctor, and he used to pray with his patients during their time together. Anyway, just really blessed to have grown up in a Christian family and excited to have had that in my life.

Marlin Detweiler:
Very good. Where did you go to school?

Jenny Bradley:
So for high school or—

Marlin Detweiler:
College.

Jenny Bradley:
College. Okay. I went to the University of Arkansas, and I actually—well, I am Razorbacks. Yeah. Go Hogs. I spent one semester at Wheaton College, but it was way too cold, and I was homesick, so I transferred to the University of Arkansas. Switching from those two schools was definitely a very different kind of situation there at U of A. It was a lot of fun, but education-wise, I couldn't have put my finger on it then, but it was missing something. It was focused on

business, practical advice, how to succeed in, “The real world”, but honestly, thankfully, God was good to us in that season of my life. He and my now husband were mentored by a couple, Ted and Lillian Winger. He was a campus pastor. Honestly, he taught the Westminster Confession of Faith and Romans.

And those were some of the first conversations I had about predestination versus something. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, I look back at that time as kind of redeemed—my education at U of A was redeemed by the informal education through the church, which is really neat.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's wonderful. Yeah, yeah. When you come to us, we've become familiar with you, first of all, because you have been a wonderful customer in various things, but you sent us a book that you wrote and that captured our imagination. Tell us a little bit about your writing. What is it that you've produced?

We're going to talk, of course, about this book—a Shakespeare book, A Midsummer Night's Dream—in just a minute. But tell us more broadly about your writing. What has motivated you to write?

Jenny Bradley:
Well, it's a little bit of a long story, but essentially, it was a labor of love because our homeschool group got together, and we wanted to do a Shakespeare play. The idea was to do Henry the Fifth because, at the time, we were all getting together for Middle Ages and Reformation studies. We were studying things like Beowulf and Robin Hood. Honestly, I got a lot of things from Omnibus II—we found kids' versions—and we were studying these things.

And so I thought, okay, we'll do Henry the Fifth. And then we ended up, I was like, let's do maybe two weeks on A Midsummer Night's Dream and just see how that goes. What happened was that the kids begged to do A Midsummer Night's Dream instead of Henry the Fifth.

At the time, we were in the middle of baseball season. I had three boys playing baseball, and we had six games a week. I didn't think I had time to write anything, but the kids begged to do it. And, you know, you hate to turn kids down when they want to do something like that. So the result was that I started writing it at home for our group to perform.

Marlin Detweiler:
You wrote a play of A Midsummer Night's Dream because it was something that just wasn't available otherwise.

Jenny Bradley:
That's exactly right. Well, if you get on Amazon or something and search for A Midsummer Night's Dream—like a kid's version that's doable—and I say that because obviously, the real thing is out there, it would take you about 2.5 hours to perform, though. It's not exactly accessible. My mom was like, “I would never have watched that.”

Marlin Detweiler:
Even her?

Jenny Bradley:
Not even for the grandchildren. Yeah. She's very honest.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Well, that's good.

Jenny Bradley:
Yeah. So I looked, and everything was modern translations. It was conversational language. They had taken Shakespeare's words and changed them so that they sounded like we would speak today. And, you know, as someone who loves literature, this is a travesty to me.

Marlin Detweiler:
Not gonna cut it.

Jenny Bradley:
This is not Shakespeare. You know, Shakespeare is the language. Yeah. So I knew I wanted to preserve as much of Shakespeare as possible, preserve the story as much as possible. I have to hand it to my editor, Amy. She really helped me shape it. She helped me add in some parts that she was like, "I really think this is important," and, "I think what Shakespeare is doing here, we need to see that." So, yeah, it was nice to have her here.

Marlin Detweiler:
You're taking the entire play.

Jenny Bradley:
Uhhuh.

Marlin Detweiler:
And you're prioritizing the things that are significant in it, but you're also wanting to make it tighter and manageable by a younger crowd. The grammar school crowd might not feel excited hearing this. And there wasn't anything out there to do that.

Jenny Bradley:
Right. Yeah, that's exactly right.

Marlin Detweiler:
What were the things that were available and what were you able to kind of work off of?

Jenny Bradley:
I used the original script, and I read through Leon Garfield. I think it's—let me see what it's called. I don't have it around here somewhere. Anyway, he wrote some Shakespeare stories, and to me, I wanted to make sure that we had narrators explaining parts of the story that were missing.

So I read through that and sort of tried to think of it. Okay, this is somewhere in between. If you're familiar, E. Nesbit wrote some short, beautiful Shakespeare stories for kids, and they're really short.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, at the moment, I'm not recalling. Okay, but it does sound familiar.

Jenny Bradley:
Yeah, they're a little too short. There's too much missing. And then Leon Garfield’s are pretty long, and they don't include the lines from the actual play. They do a few, but I wanted something that could actually be performed on stage.

There’s also—I wanted it to be something that kids could download. Puppets are—my publisher has puppets on their website that you can download, and you can glue them on popsicle sticks. You could have your own little family get-together with your popsicle stick puppets and do this play. So that's what I tried to do.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, you're really filling a niche. My kids can be more than this, but not quite the whole thing.

Jenny Bradley:
That's exactly right. Yeah. And so I can sort of hear in my head the argument of a Shakespeare purist who would say, "No, you got to do the whole thing. You got to do the whole thing. Wait until they're older even."

To me, I have these kids, and I want them to be able to have a version that they can do young. I want them to actually play Shakespeare. It's called a play, but we put it in the theater world as, "Okay, it's got to be perfect."

You have to have everything all together before you can attempt it. And children learn a lot through play.

Marlin Detweiler:
I'm very much in favor of meeting children where they are with the good things of our culture in order to have them love the full amount if they can't fully appreciate it initially.

We created a phonics curriculum called The Phonics Museum. One of the things that was important to us was to get children reading a book as quickly as possible.

There were curricula out there that didn't have children reading until six months or later into the process, and it's counterproductive to the motivation of the student, which is what we're after to begin with. Right. And I think you've seized on that.

Jenny Bradley:
Well, right. And I like to say that I've made it for amateurs. I love basketball, but I'm not going to go tell a pro basketball player how to play basketball, right?

Someone who knows Shakespeare and can knock it out of the park—goes to the Globe Theaters and performs it—might say, "Okay, this is amateur stuff."

But I actually embrace that because amateur comes from amare—to love. This came out of a place of love. A love for the kids. A love for Shakespeare.

I really just want it to be for people that want to love Shakespeare or do love Shakespeare. For the child—if I had been a fifth grader and had gotten my hands on this, I would have totally printed out puppets and made my family watch me produce my own little play.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, that's really neat. So you've kind of answered why you're doing this. You're filling a niche that you saw was not filled. What else are you planning? And this, this book, A Midsummer Night's Dream. How would you say it targets third through sixth grade?

Jenny Bradley:
I would say it's ideal. Our kids actually were like eight to 12. I think you could go all the way up to 16, especially with homeschool groups. You know, I would think if you're 17, 18, you might find it too childish, but maybe not. You know, I think it just depends on the scenario.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. We've seen tremendous value in theatrical production of grammar for grammar school kids. And that's where I would really 16 or 17 sounds a little old. I think they're ready for the whole thing there. Right. And that sort of thing. But the as grammar school kids getting into it, I know one of my children ended up in the theater world in a number of ways, including professionally, was some of the things he does on both sides of the camera because of some of the theatrical things that his teachers did with him in grammar school.

Jenny Bradley:
Yeah. That's neat. Well, and we had a young lady, or at least she's a young lady now, at the time, I would have called her a little girl, but, you know, a few years have gone by, and when she first started saying her lines, she looked absolutely mortified, like she just did not want to be there at all.

Especially because there's a few, you know, I'll call them lovey dovey lines. And she just looked like she wanted to hide. And, yeah, by the end of the six weeks that we worked on it, she came alive. And she was this, like, strong actress that, you know, got into it. And then the next year when we did a different play, she was actually a hero in Much Ado About Nothing, and she's swooning and fainting and, you know, and now, her mom was just telling me this week because we're about to do Julius Caesar this coming semester.

She said, this is her thing now, like letters, you'll see. Would love a lot of lines. And she, you know, and then she was actually asking me, like, do we know what the parts are yet? So here you had this little girl that was, like, embarrassed and didn't want to do it. And now she's all in. So that’s fun to see.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's a very important thing. Yeah. Idea of developing children in their communication, in their articulation, in their rhetoric. You know, we study rhetoric in classical education, really in the high school years. But there's a lot that can be taught with getting comfortable with your own skin and your own expression. Right. And then you've just really, I think, identified a very important opportunity that parents can have doing these kinds of things that you're helping with.

Describe to me on the book and book cover, obviously, it's Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night's Dream. What's the significance of the Kids on Stage brand you've put on it?

Jenny Bradley:
The Kids on Stage is, so it'll be a series. And so, like I said, we'll do another Kids on Stage for Much Ado About Nothing. And then we'll do Julius Caesar. And those are the only ones I know so far. I started to take it a year at a time and try to decide. I told my oldest group of kids this week.

I was like, what if we did Romeo and Juliet next year? And they were like, no, please, no. And I'm like, but it's so good, guys. And anyway, so we'll see.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. That's funny. That is funny. So you're differentiating yourself from what exists by saying you're not ready for the whole thing, but what exists is a little dumbed down. It's not true to style. And we really, you know, one of the values of writers like Shakespeare is feeling, his vocabulary. And, yeah, the sophistication of his language.

Jenny Bradley:
Right.

Marlin Detweiler:
How does that fit with the third grader and the fifth grader that you interact with? How does that relate to the language? What do they say about it?

Jenny Bradley:
Oh, man. You know, honestly, I think they are a little bit you have to go through it several times, you know, and explain, hey, this is what he means here, you know? But, by the time they actually perform it, they know what they're talking about. Yeah. And so, you know, I'll read you a line here.

We had a little boy that played Lysander and, and he's not again, he's not little anymore, but he gets to this part and he falls to his knees and he says, “I do repent. The tedious minutes I was her have spent, not Hermia, but Helena I love who will not change a raven for a dove.

The will of man is by his reason swayed. And reason says, you are the worthier man.” So anyway, I mean, he nailed it. And it was, you know, he's pleading with this, you know, woman, you know, she's not a woman, but you know, and character-wise there and you know, the fallen, you know that his reason is swayed, which is ironic because he's under an enchantment at that point, which I just love that Shakespeare is taking those topics, you know, is love and enchantment.

Is it reason, you know, not that we necessarily get in that with the kids, but it's just, you know, it's fun for the I would love to have had like the moms get together and talk about the actual play and read through that play together would have been fun to do.

Marlin Detweiler:
That would be a that's.

Jenny Bradley:
You know, we're all busy moms.

Marlin Detweiler:
Here.

Jenny Bradley:
Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
The process.

Jenny Bradley:
Maybe, maybe this year, this is our year to play.

Marlin Detweiler:
One of the things that has stood out to me in classical education since literally the first year of my involvement. I remember in 1992, a very talented baseball player, loving literature and things like the theater and that sort of thing. The world in which I grew up was one where the jocks were kind of here, and the theater group was kind of here, and the band group was in a different place.

And partly because it was impractical to do multiple things, sometimes because all of them are fairly consuming, but also partly because different things are cool for different people.

Or partly because it wasn't practical, but also partly because I don't want to be part of that group.

Jenny Bradley:
Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
And I hated that as I looked back on it, because I remember my music teacher trying to encourage me to be part of the choir. I'm kind of loud. I have a big voice and she thought I could sing well enough to do that. I thought it would be good, and I didn't want to do it because it wasn't cool.

In the sports group that I was a part of, but in classical education, and I loved hearing you say three kids playing baseball and now they're doing this and they're doing both. And I think the classical education has been uniquely positioned to encourage appreciating the beauty and significance of multiple politically unrelated categories. What do you think?

Jenny Bradley:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that homeschoolers and classical schoolers are in a unique situation in that you have a lot of values coming from home, as in, we had a family that was very familiar with Shakespeare. And so when their boys found out that we were doing this play, there was instant excitement. We got three boys that are, you know, these are middle school boys excited about Shakespeare.

Well, that's contagious. And so everyone else is sort of like, well, you know, we don't know what if this, this is cool or if this is not cool, they're going to go, they're like, oh, this is apparently it's great. You know. And so I think, you know, they're actually a big Veritas Press family too, when they, they watch a lot of the movies at home and their family just loves it.

And so they actually kind of brought that to the table, you know, just that excitement, you know? So that's neat.

Marlin Detweiler:
It really takes us past some of the silliness that comes out of peer pressure. And I love that aspect of what you're doing here and making Shakespeare cool. I'd say I would call that a real differentiating aspect of what you're doing and what classical education does. What other cultural influences are you seeking to have as you think about kids on stage, I had to look it up again?

Jenny Bradley:
You're fine.

Marlin Detweiler:
And how you want to influence the marketplace?

Jenny Bradley:
Yeah, I think that's a great question. You know, I was actually just listening to a podcast, the new Mason jar with Cindy Rollins, if you're familiar with that. And she had on a guest named Dr. Jason Baxter, and they were talking about just this. This problem with the obsession we have with our culture, with technology.

And, so you got video games and you got social media, and you got kids on their phones all the time. And Dr. Baxter was saying that his concern is that we're reducing our language down to just Instagram and Facebook emoticons, you know, and so what does it mean when we like cat memes?

But we also like our pictures of our families and that kind of thing, or we love them or, you know, we've reduced it down and where does that leave us? You know, with our language when it's reduced down like that? And so to me, Shakespeare is the opposite. It's the expansion of language.

You know, like you were saying that the kids, how do they deal with the language that they don't know? Well, hopefully all of us are still encountering words that we don't know as we continue to read and continue to learn. And yes, we have the internet. So there's this idea of, oh, you don't have to learn anything anymore.

You can just look it up on the internet. And yet that denies the fact that we are image bearers, you know, and we are created for more than that. We are created to know things because knowledge is good, because our creator gave us that desire to know him and to know creation. And so, you know, hopefully this play as points kids towards Shakespeare and points them to expand their vocabulary, expand their language.

But that's not the end of it. It's that what does that mean? What they expand their language that hopefully they can express themselves better in life and that they can have deep, deep thoughts and honestly, I told one of my sons, I can't remember what he was saying.

He didn't want to read, you know, something that I wanted him to read. And I said, well, I respect you too much to not have you read this, you know, and he didn't necessarily appreciate that. But, you know, if you say he's a young man. Look, I respect you. This is for your good. You know, even if you feel like it's not.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's really a good place to leave things here. Developing the language abilities of children is an important part of what we do with them. My dog needs some more language too.

Jenny Bradley:
And they have those buttons now, my son tried to tell me dogs can talk now, and I said, those buttons are not the same thing as dogs talking.

Marlin Detweiler:
I appreciate what you're doing. I want to encourage you. I want to encourage our listeners, really, think in terms of the value of theater and what you're doing to help them out and thank you so much.

Jenny Bradley:
Oh, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It's been an honor.

Marlin Detweiler:
And, folks, thank you again for joining us at Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. We hope to see you next time. Bye bye.