My ninth graders will begin their unit on Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Globe Theatre and all that jazz after Easter.
What do you think is bottom line information about Shakespeare any educated person should know?
I'll begin the list and please do add any survival information you'd want on the list:
English writer known primarily for his plays: histories, tragedies and comedies;
Wrote probably the most famous of all stories of young romance;
W. S. wrote during both Queen Elizabeth's and King James' reigns;
'Wherefore' means 'why';
Importance of First Folio was preserving Shakespeare's works that had been written primarily for dramatic production rather than for reading;
Anne Hathaway's cottage was very large and pretty--and she was eight years older than young William;
Groundlings liked coarse humor;
W. S.'s company, the King's Men, performed at the Globe Theatre;
The Globe closed for several years due to the plague;
Boys played female roles;
W. S. is also known as the Bard;
Stratford-on-Avon
4/23/1564--born rather late in birth order in a very large family;
4/23/1616--died very young, in my way of thinking, at only 52 [edit!!];
The sonnets--William evidently loved, too, a man;
What were tights made of, anyway?
What other information do you think should be included?
Might mention copyright law and IP in regards to WS' plays being pirated (e.g., first (bad) quarto of Hamlet. Cf. today and digital media and the law.
WS had twins named Hamnet and Judith.
WS' father was probably a crypto-Catholic.
Weren't the sonnets more highly regarded during WS' times than his plays?
Ben Jonson's "little Latin and less Greek" in re WS' scholarship.
Of all his plays, only The Tempest may be based on an original (with WS) plot. All the rest are from well-known sources.
The first critic to mention WS and write about his plays was Thomas Rhymer who basically panned WS on theoretical grounds.
I'm sure there are more, but that's my tuppence farthing.
What were tights made of, anyway?
they were knit of course. of wool most likely, (cotton was very expensive, and linen has less give, and is scratchier.
and some of the company, (and people of the time) would have closed there shirts/jackets with buckles, not buttons, but cause they thought buttons to be ostentatious displays of wealth. (the puritan who came to NE held the same views, and had buckles on their shoes, and belts, and hats, and every garment, but no buttons!)
tights was pretty comfortable.. stockings were long, and had tips (they came to a tapered V at the top) that that got tucked into a waist band -- and pretty cheap.
while there were guilds for knitting in london, and other big cities-- in the country, common folk knit for income, (and like farm wife of early US, who raised chickens and eggs for sale and 'pin' money) english knitters did the same.
the knitting frame that Queen Elizabeth rejected, never made money (when set up in france) the english home industry of knit gloves and stockings outsold machine knit french stockings (which were actually smoother, and finer, and in many ways superior!)--but just a bit to expensive!
Weren't the sonnets more highly regarded during WS' times than his plays?
I'd like to believe 'highly regarded' = 'more popular/performed' in this case, but I don't have to...
Can anyone name an author who introduced so many new words
into the language?
Hmm. Probably not, but it's a chicken and egg thing. The editors of the OED went out of their way to record many words they probably wouldn't have just because they were in the Shakespearean corpus.
Geez, sumpin wrong with my usage of the word regard? Just come out and say it.
Never 'wrong'... more complex and intricate probably, however, I do think (much more likely wrongly so than you) that these days 'highly regarded' insinuates elevated quality... or is *supposed to.
>> that these days 'highly regarded' insinuates elevated quality <<
Yeahbut® it was the Jacobo-Elizabethans doing the regarding, yes? But, I can't really answer for their æsthetics. See the intentional fallacy thread for more information.
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" is a jab at the competition, for the smell of raw sewerage at the Rose Theater could be unpleasant.
Wasn't the Globe built on marshland in London?
Show biz folk have many superstitions - one particularly related to the W.S. play "MacBeth" - it is considered that mentioning the name brings bad luck so the play is always referred to as "The Scottish Play."
An old episode of the PBS TV show from Bitain called "Black Adder" delt with that superstition with hilarious results! If you can find a copy of the episode your students would enjoy it, I'm sure.
>>Wasn't the Globe built on marshland in London?<<
Dunno. I have the Rose bit on the authority of a mad-woman Shakespearean acting teacher only. Figured I'd put it up and see if it got shot down.
The new Globe Theatre in London is an exact replica of the original Globe. But with electricity and a spinkler system. And toilets.
It only puts on plays during the summer. This was also true in Wordy William's time.
Disagree with jheem over the inclusion of so many words from the plays in the OED simply because they were in Shakespeare's opera. I read an article from the Oxford Press some years ago which stated that usage since his time decided inclusion or exclusion. [name-dropping] Blame Dr Johnson and his bloody dictionary. I do. I had lunch sitting on the steps of his house the other day. It's just round the corner from where I work when I'm in London [/name-dropping].
WS plays should be looked at in the political context of the Elizabethan/Stuart milieu in which they were written and performed. Can you discern any political or cultural difference between those written before 1603 and those written after?
You should let your students see "Shakespeare in Love" and then have them find some of the quotations (the whole script was quotes from the plays). It's also hilarious in its own right.
"Richard III" was shameless propaganda for the Tudors, largely culled from an essay justifying the Tudor revolt written by Sir Thomas More. Not that it helped him much more. Poor Dickie got the bird and poor Thomas got the chop.
>usage since his time decided inclusion or exclusion [in OED]
this rather surprised me, as the OED is rife with nonce-words and others with the single citation being only another dictionary. but I couldn't find a single counterexample in a quick search.
Disagree with jheem over the inclusion of so many words from the plays in the OED simply because they were in Shakespeare's opera.
Dr Johnson was part of the problem, but the availability of some concordances of Shakespeare's works made the editor's task easier. I based my suggestion on a partially digested and half remembered reading of the fourth chapter (Shakespeare's Dictionary) of John Willinsky's enjoyable book Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED (pp. 57-75).
You should let your students see "Shakespeare in Love".
Yes, indeed, a fun movie. There's also a short scene in Last Action Hero with Joan Plowright (Laurence Olivier's widow) as a high school English teacher showing a scene from her husband's Hamlet before it gets re-image-ined by the lead kid. The look on her face, when she says they may remember him from some commercials he did, is priceless.
W. S. is also known as the Bard;
4/23/1564--born rather late in birth order in a very large family;
4/23/1616--died very young, in my way of thinking, at only 52
Maybe things have been figured out since I went to school but wasn't there a whole thing that we really didn't know who Shakespeare was, nor his exact date of birth or death.
I remember some conjecture that WS was actually Sir Francis Bacon.
A good intrigue for the kids no?
Perhaps. But the article, from memory, wasn't a defence of the inclusion of so many of his or the selection criteria. It just mentioned how Shakespeare's nonce-words made it into the dictionary and cited Johnson's dictionary within the context, although exactly how I can't remember. I'm not about to start arguing the finer points, because I don't remember them if they were even there!
His date of birth is not known, just when he was baptized. But his date of death is known as the will was probated. There's about as much of documentary evidence as you would imagine from a middle class English man of his time. Maybe a little more. (Ducks behind a rock while the Oxfordians load cannons and fire.)
I hold the outlandish belief that William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare. And even if he were an alien, it would have little to do with his texts. Bacon, Oxford, Mercutio Florio. There's been a ton of conjecture on who he was. Ben Jonson seemed to think WS was WS. Not to be tautological, but it's good enough for me.
WS was actually Sir Francis Bacon.
It's true. But did you also know that Sir Francis Bacon was actually Christopher Marlowe? And that Christopher Marlowe was actually Queen Elizabeth I? But wait, that's not the weird part! The weird part is that Queen Elizabeth I was actually Ethel the sea pirate's daughter.
Egg zactly! You know the Jesuits are behind all the funny goings on in the world, but then the Church of LDS is behind the Jesuits. And don't get me started about the [fill in the blank] ... On a different topic, I hear that Mel Gibson's new film is going to be a Yiddish-language version of the Protocols. Piffle!
OOOOOOOOOOO-khranka where the wind comes sweeping down the plain...
"OK, it's a far cop, but society's to blame."
"Right. We'll be arresting them later."
Er, perhaps you should SEE "Shakespeare in Love" before screening it for a bunch of ninth-graders. WW works in a rural area of Virginia, and my guess is she'd be the subject of Gibson;s next movie, the Passion of the English Teacher.
While I consider the love-making scenes to be very tasteful, and while I think Gwynneth Paltrow is very nicely shaped, I doubt very much that WW is going to want to show it to her kids.
Speaking of Shakespeare, though, I just read a fascinating book of short stories, edited by Anne Perry, entitled Much Ado About Murder. It's a collection of short murder mystery stories with the common theme of Shakespeare and his plays. The most fascinating one is entitled The Serpent's Tooth (warning: DO NOT read the following if you intend to read the book, since it gives away one of the stories."
The author concludes that Shakespeare was poisoned by his daughter and son-in-law, and that he knew this was happening, so he wrote his epitaph to accuse them of the crime; his epitaph anagrams to:
Susanna and John Hall murdered me, Good Shakespeare. Curst be ye to rest my bones. For Best be ye to digg the stones.
TEd
Ted
I'd forgotten that scene. I suppose it was necessary. You're right; it would have to be an expurgated version since the sight of the nekkid female body seems to send most USns into a feeding frenzy of moral indigation ...
Come to think of it, it's a wonder that anybody there has kids.
I surprised that they allow Romeo and Juliette to be read in American high schools. After all, there's gang violence, underage sex (they're what? 14, 15?), and suicide. Or are they using Bowdler's versions of WS' plays again?
My fave line in R&J: "The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon." Look that up in your Funk and Wagnall's.
He wrote both comedies and tradegies, as well as histories.
He used a lot of plays on words. In particular, he was really great at using irony (think Marc Antony's speech at Caesar's funeral).
(Ask a historian, but I think his history is a little suspect.)
Just in general: here we have one of the most famous people who ever lived - in fact, whose fame has easily transcended "western culture" - and there are still a lot of things about him that are not known with certainty.
He liked to use the soliloquy. He may have acquired this technique, as he acquired much of the inspiration for his stories, from his familiarity with greek and latin.
He wrote over 150 sonnets.
Sonnets have 14 lines and most of the sonnets use iambic pentameter.
The rhyme scheme for a sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg.
Worth memorizing:
Sonnet XXIX
First part of ANTONY's speech in JC, Act III
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar."
Last part of Polonius' advice to Laertes
(bearing in mind that this, too, is irony -
because of Polonius' character)
"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
First part of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet
"But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun."
From Hamlet's soliloquy
"To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them."
To get the effect of these, one might give a synopsis of the story or of the character involved, recite the entire passage and discuss it's meaning and import, and then commit these very few parts to memory.
I don't know how much time you will spend on this unit, but hopefully you will have sufficient time to go through at least one play in its entirety. (I've always been partial to JC.)
My fave line in R&J: "The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon." Look that up in your Funk and Wagnall's.
Yep, I did R&J at school and that line caused a lot of hormone-driven teenage male mirth. It's another example of Mr Shakespeare pandering to his audience's baser instincts. The interesting thing is that if he had reason to expect most of his audience to understand the analogy, those baser instincts were backed up by a quite interesting level of worldly, not to say carnal, knowledge!
"Polonius was stabbed in the arras."
"Oooh, I bet that smarted!"
Thanks for your input here.
Chesterfield County isn't a rural county, but one of ever-expanding suburbs.
Yes, we will read R&J all the way through. I'm going to introduce the play with Zefferelli's interpretation, which is my favorite. I think the street brawls, murders, suicides, hostilities and hot young passion will be immediately understandable to my kids. Fights in the halls are not necessarily uncommon these days--thank God kids don't carry around swords anymore and weapons of any kind are completely illegal at school.
If you have any other favorite lines from 'R & J', please note them here.
Oh, this unit will most likely be my students first encounter with William S.
If they won't let you do it for the reasons outlined above you can rally spark the kids interest in Shakespeare by explaining that you wanted to do it but the teen-sex and violence made it inappropriate for their tender little minds.
>>please note them here<<
Well, if you're going to show films, you might consider Peter Brook's Lear and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet. These are interesting for 'opposite' reason's of anachronism, not, however, because of the Almereyda film's modern urban setting. Brook's is a psychological exploration of Lear, probably placing the storm, for example, within the abdicator's psychoscape. Whereas Almereyda's refers the drama of Hamlet, probably the most psychological of Shakespeaer's plays, to the level of (to roll out that tired term) the image.
I don't know how easy it is to get your hands on the Brook. Although, I know it was released on 16mm. Even harder to get, I'm sure, would be a film of his historic stage version "Midsummer Night's Dream," which transformed Shakespearean stage production. You might get your hands on something, somehow, at the Royal Shakespear Theater.
And then, you could torture them with Gounod.
Finally, there is very entertaining recent documentary concerning the argument that C. Marlowe wrote most of the Shakespearean canon and including interviews with members of the Marlowe Society and their opponents.
It's another example of Mr Shakespeare pandering to his audience's baser instincts.
Oh, I don't know. Maybe the highblown passages were a sop for the Jacobean intelligentsia, so they wouldn't feel so guilty about enjoying all the sex and violence. Come to think of it, they wouldn't have had a problem with any of it. It took later generations to tut-tut and tsk-tsk certain passages in WS' texts. Reminds me of the folks who wrote new libretti for Così fan tutte in the 19th century, because they couldn't stand Mozart's divine music embellishing whorish words.
Yes, we will read R&J all the way through. I'm going to introduce the play with Zefferelli's interpretation, which is my favorite.
I remember, from my own High School days, that the Zefferelli version contains some nudity, too (if that is something to worry about). I remember my gruff old English teacher silencing the requisite giggles and snickers with an exasperated, "Oh, come on. It's nothing you haven't seen before."
Personally I loved the recent Baz Luhrmann version. While the acting wasn't top notch, it was at least good, and the combination of incredible stylized modern visuals with the (almost complete) orginal script is striking and, I would guess, helpful to young people not used to WS.
They might be interested to know that Shakepseare has more to say to business people nowadays than some of the CEO's who are making headlines:
Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Leading and Succeeding On the Business StageIn fact, Shakespeare might help explain why and how some of those CEOs are making those headlines.
http://www.powerhomebiz.com/vol82/shakespeare.htm
But, I can't really answer for their æsthetics.- and -
...highblown passages were a sop for the Jacobean intelligentsia, so they wouldn't feel so guilty about enjoying all the sex and violence. Come to think of it, they wouldn't have had a problem with any of it.Not that morals and æsthetics need a stake driven between, but.
they couldn't stand Mozart's divine music embellishing whorish words"Whorish words" had some standing in Mozart's day, jheem.
And others simply applauding.
This will be a three-week unit on Romeo and Juliet, which is in our curriculum guide. It won't be a film festival on Shakespeare, though I'd love that!
I want my students to assume the roles of groundlings at their 21st century virgin viewing of Shakespeare--I'll give the bare bones plot summary and set Zefferelli upon them. The nudity is minimal--and, after reviewing the DVD over Easter, if I think it's over the line, I can always censor. But I don't think it will be necessary. What I love about the Zefferelli is the high-pitched and natural enthusiasm of the lovers. Very believable.
I know you all have seen the list of insults--you put three Shakespearean terms together to form an insult. I thought my kids might like creating an insult and then performing it as part of a class recording. We have a DVD camera, so the kids can see themselves delivering insults. I also read about an opening activity in which words and phrases of the prologue are read in-the-round--we may try this activity.
I hope that the unit will be fun, aural, dramatic and realistic in the sense that the kids will see there is a connection between teens of today and those four hundred years ago.
Thanks, as always, for your comments. Faldage, your suggestion about 'Shakespeare in Love' is terrific! I will follow through on that one!
You might want to try a movie with actors that they'll reconize. A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999 version) with:
Kevin Kline....Nick Bottom
Michelle Pfeiffer....Titania
Stanley Tucci....Puck (Robin Goodfellow)
Rupert Everett....Oberon
Calista Flockhart....Helena
That was my point. Da Ponte's words are inseparable, for me, from Mozart's music.
Wordmariah, give this a look.. fwiw.
http://snipurl.com/5ewl
In reply to:
I'll give the bare bones plot summary and set Zefferelli upon them.
Don't give too much of the plot away, Wordwind. When the recent-ish version with Claire Daines and Leonardo DiCaprio was in cinemas here in Indonesia, I went to see it with Candi, who only knew that this was supposed to be one of the great love stories of all time. He was absolutely devastated when Juliet didn't wake up in time to forestall Romeo's suicide. He still thinks it would have been better if she had.
Bingley
Faldage, your suggestion about "Shakespeare in Love" was terrific.
Think that was TEdRem, Wordwind.
"Er, perhaps you should SEE "Shakespeare in Love" before screening it for a bunch of ninth-graders."
He still thinks it would have been better if she had.
Mebbe he'd prefer the opera version (cain't have no final duet with no dead soprano).
Wordmariah --seeing this gave me a shock: our dog's name is Mariah. And she does speak (though not in words).
He still thinks it would have been better if she had. And I still agree with him.
He still thinks it would have been better if she had. And I still agree with him.
But then it wouldn't have been a tragedy, but a romantic comedy or some such. I wonder if Dryden rewrote R&J to have a happy ending. He made Lear into a musical with a happy ending. He could do just about anything.
a romantic comedy or some such
As I am sure it was originally intended to be. I mean, Romeo and Ethel, the Sea Pirate's Daughter?
GASP! You mean that people over there procreate without clothes on? How unBabtist!
Indeed! How unMormon, even!
In reply to:
If they won't let you do it for the reasons outlined above you can rally spark the kids interest in Shakespeare by explaining that you wanted to do it but the teen-sex and violence made it inappropriate for their tender little minds.
- Faldage
wordminstrel: In one of my posts above, I told Faldage that his idea about Shakespeare in Love was fantastic. What I was driving at was his statement I've quoted above, which essentially was spotting the film as forbidden fruit, hard to resist. So, this particular idea was Faldage's and not Ted R's...yes?
I don't know if it's the same now, and the same in the US, as it was when I wert a lad, but we got a kick out of "emulating" speech from Shakespeare's time. How about trying to get your kids addressing each other in 16th/17th century terms - you know, the politeness of speech, like "Good morrow, kind sir!"
Another objection has occurred to me. Much of the enjoyment of Shakespeare in Love comes from recognizing the lines from his plays being bandied about by people on the street.
Faldo, a lot of people who enjoyed Shakespeare in Love had never read one of the bard's plays right through. The plot itself was good enough, if a bit lightweight. I was embarrassed, when I went to see it, to find myself laughing at the script's unscrupulous mispositioning of lines of dialogue - and to find that I was the only one laughing!
For the record, it was Capfka who first mentioned Shakespeare in Love. Not to steal your thunder, F, but.
About Shakespeare in Love and Faldage and wordminstrel and now fiberb':
I was not thanking Faldage for mentioning Shakespeare in Love. I was thanking Faldage for his idea of telling the kids that I wanted to show it to them, but it was too risque (or graphic...or off-limits) to show to them in school. Faldage's psychology was simply to offer them forbidden fruit and to say, sorry, you cannot have it--which would be a sure-fire way of getting them to see them film.
Lord, lord, we do have to be very, very specific here online, don't we? I will try to specify more specifically in the future, but probably will screw up again as usual and always.
there, there, Windage; some of us knew what you meant.
-ron obtund
I don't know if this will really help or apply to the situation, but here's my two cents as an actor who has appeared in several Shakespeare plays and as an English major...
The best way to learn about Shakespeare and to deeply aprpeciate his works is to act in and produce one of the plays. I learned more from playing a bit part in Macbeth one summer than I did reading the play in my college Shakespeare class. Plus, I got to die on stage in a sword fight, which was cool.
I think the ideal experience would be a class in which, in a single semester, the entire class would pruduce exactly one of his plays. Students would do everything necessary to put the play on. If you had more students than roles (both on-stage and off-stage roles, e.g. stage manager) then you could have understudies/double casting of parts. The time spent immersed in one play leads one invariably to appreciate the subtleties of Shakespeare's genius and incites a self-fueling interest to investigate his other works.
An acceptable compromise might be to produce scenes from the plays, but I think that lacks the sense of accomplishment that comes with tackling a whole play.
Here's another thing that might be of interest:
http://207.70.82.73/pages/descriptions/02/218.htmlIt's a
This American Life story about a group of prisoners in a high security prison putting on a production of Hamlet. A story about murder and its consequences done by people who are murderers and understand the consequences.
Reminds me of Martin Esslin's story in the preface to Theater of the Absurd of a production of Waiting for Godot in San Quentin in the early '60s. The inmates there seemed to get it.
That's a great undertaking, but the sense of accomplishment would be enormous. The understanding that would come from such a performance would be make it worthwhile.
It would be no small thing for a teacher to keep them on task and focussed.
k
Well that's why the whole class is devoted to that, rather than a side project for a class that has a syllabus of several other works of literature to cover.