Shakespeare

Students will select a monologue to use in this performance unit during the class period. They will also work in groups to create an entertaining and educational performance based off of a plot summary for one of Shakespeare’s plays.

The objective of the lesson is for students to learn what iambic pentameter is and to have the opportunity to create their own monologues using iambic pentameter. This lesson is a useful complement towards studying classical works by playwrights such as William Shakespeare.

In Elizabethan times, audiences at the Globe had to use their powers of imagination and listening to envision the worlds of Shakespeare’s plays. Today, modern audiences are treated to elaborate depictions of Shakespeare’s settings with expensive sets, lighting, projections, and sound. This lesson will test your students’ creative collaboration. They will design a set and soundscape in obstacle course form for one of Shakespeare’s plays using found objects, sounds, and actions.

Students work together to create and explore an obstacle-course setting and soundscape for one of Shakespeare’s plays.

Sometimes it’s less intimidating for students to approach Shakespeare’s language with a goal in mind. In this exercise students are given a line from a Shakespeare play out of context and asked to create a scene using three tableaux that tell a story. By approaching the language with an active goal in mind, students delve deeper into the language’s meaning and take control of the story.

Students will use textual analysis to explore how to uncover the clues that Shakespeare left in his text. They will apply this knowledge to a monologue.

Students will understand how to uncover the directorial clues that Shakespeare left in his work by doing a textual analysis. They will explore Emotional Outbursts, Action words, and Emotion words through a structured color coding analysis of a Shakespeare monologue.

Students interact with Shakespeare’s language out of context to create expressive tableaux that tell a simple unrelated story.

Students will identify unfamiliar words on a page of Shakespeare quotes, translate those quotes into modern English, and act out the quotes to identify character/play clues. Students will then complete a quotes assignment and reflection. Plus! Bonus assignment.

Students analyze, rehearse, and perform Shakespearean scenes using the concepts introduced over the course of the unit.