To be or not to be in Shakespeare Club? That is the question.  English teacher Robert Wysocki has decided to take the new position of sponsor of Shakespeare Club.

Wysocki aims to reboot the club and focus on making it less intimidating for students, for he understands students’ difficulty with the language.

“I’m essentially trying to refocus the club,” Wysocki said. “In past years there have been a large focus on going to plays at the Chicago Shakespeare theater downtown, and my hope is that there is a little bit more focus with the new club on helping kids overcome some of the fear or stigma about the difficulty of Shakespeare’s language.”

According to Wysocki, he wants to center it more around students actually taking part in the material, rather than just reading or watching a play. He also wants to modernize Shakespeare to show students how he’s still relevant today, and it also makes the material more approachable and understandable for students.

“This is the way I envision it; if Shakespeare [was] alive today, he’d be a hipster living in Wicker Park,” Wysocki said. “He would have arm tattoos, he’d be wearing an earing, and he’d be writing cool plays, but he’d also be writing poetry or songs.”

Wysocki also plans on throwing a Shakespeare Fest in April and hopes it will become an annual event. He hopes students will find new and creative ways to innovate Shakespeare’s work through music, acting and other modern arts.

“I hope to start out small but make [Shakespeare Fest] an annual thing that we look forward to and really just have it be fun,” Wysocki said. “I don’t want it to be a bunch of people standing in a lunchroom reciting soliloquies, unless they modernize the soliloquy like turning it into a rap with music in the background. Or there’s two people yelling Shakespeare curses at one another, that sort of thing.”

The new Shakespeare Club will first meet on Wednesdays, consisting of more student interaction and innovation toward Shakespeare’s work. Wysocki encourages students who may be intimidated by Shakespeare’s language to still give the club a try. He says through modernizing the material, students will be more captivated by the work and will have more fun with it as well.

“There are a lot of ways to modernize Shakespeare,” Wysocki said. “He’s still relevant today; we’re celebrating the 400 year anniversary of Shakespeare, and so the idea is to have a club that occasionally might go to a play, but more importantly does things around school that shows that Shakespeare doesn’t have to be intimidating […]. When I teach [Shakespeare], we always modernize what we’re doing. We try to make it contemporary, the language and the situation, while keeping the themes the same.”