Finding ways of bringing a Soliloquy to life can be hard for students. That lengthy passage of dialogue can seem impenetrable, complicated and daunting. The following series of activities can help you and your students brings life to a Soliloquy and feel confident about performing it. Continue reading Bringing a Shakespeare Soliloquy to life
Shakespeare’s rural backound has been a great influence on him and his plays. Unlike his contemporaries, Shakespeare didn’t go to university (Oxford or Cambridge), and as such didn’t have an opportunity to loose his accent (which is fairly average of what happens at universities). Not only was his lack of formal education fuel for ridicule from his fellow playwrights, his rural Warwickshire accent was too. … Continue reading Shakespeare’s rural background
Shakespeare is a bit of a mystery to use all, but here are five things that you definitely didn’t know about him. 1 Shakespeare the collaborator. Shakespeare was one of many writers at the time. The entertainment industry was a burgeoning industry at the time and Shakespeare was plying his trade alongside and with many other writers that we know about and many more that … Continue reading 5 Things You didn’t know about Shakespeare
Here is the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream broken down into 8 manageable chunks for students to work with and mess about with. We do a lot of different activities with a plot outline like this from starting with a simple Still Image for each section activity all the way to looking for lines from the text to act out an overview of the … Continue reading The Plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 8 chuncks
This is the Peacham Manuscript. It is the only surviving manuscript from the time of Shakespeare and the only surviving documentation of the costumes that actors might have worn on stage. The image is of a performance of Titus Andronicus. Take a closer look at the image and the central character, is wearing a toga and laurel wreath, suggesting that she is from ancient Rome. … Continue reading Elizabethan Costume
How did Shakespeare overcome not having any set in his stage? How did Shakespeare’s actors use his words to understand how to act? How does this compare to modern performances of Shakespeare? Setting the scene through language. In the opening prologue of Henry V Shakespeare asks us, his audience, to imagine the theatre as the battle ground of Agincourt and to imagine that “when we … Continue reading How Shakespeare uses language to set the scene.
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