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Screwing Courage in Macbeth
This lesson is designed to engage students with the text and examine the motivations behind the behavior of characters as they seek to accomplish their goals. The lesson begins with some basic acting exercises designed …
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Shakespeare Sound Out: Building Atmosphere
Based on the language and environment created with words in song and rhyme, students will determine the type of mood that is being set within scenes from Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Students will …
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Shakespeare's Secret Weddings: Historical Context in Performance
This lesson builds on student knowledge/experience of modern romance to provide a historical context for the clandestine (secret) marriages in Shakespearean texts, and asks students to synthesize the modern and historical understanding for …
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"Showing the Picture": Character and Passage Illuminations in Twelfth Night
By creating an illumination of the text, students will come to a greater understanding of a character or a speech from
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"To Show Virtue Her Own Feature," Insider's Guide to Hamlet: Ophelia’s Madness
The class will break into five groups of equal numbers to create a photographic "Illustrated Ophelia" series, similar to the tradition of editions of the Complete Works, primarily in the 19th. c., where drawings were used to …
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Twelfth Night: What's so funny?
This activity tries to focus students' attention on the comic elements of Twelfth Night by drawing parallels to examples of humor in popular culture. After brainstorming and analyzing modern examples of humor, they use their results to …
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When...Then...So... Sonnet 29
In this lesson, students will explore Shakespeare's Sonnet 29. Students will also create an original poem, loosely based on the sonnet covered, using a "when" / "then" / "so" structure in order to describe a change in emotional …
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Enter Players: Constructing Character Connections in Hamlet
Because the names of Shakespeare's characters are unfamiliar to many students, and because students may be unfamiliar with reading and performing drama, this can lead to problems that interfere with comprehension. By allowing students to …
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Lesson 14: Vox Populi: Brutus's Speech and the Response of the Plebeians
This exercise will teach students to identify two rhetorical strategies (ethos and audience appeals) and to analyze their effects in Brutus's speech in
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Star-Crossed Scramble
Students will explore the idea of star-crossed lovers and create their own unique combinations of star-crossed pairs to enhance their understanding of Romeo and Juliet. This activity will allow students to better understand the …
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Pre-Reading Hamlet with "Hamlet: An Insider’s Guide"
Using the Insider's Guide video for Hamlet, students will work with famous quotes from the play in an active way to introduce them to the play’s language and issues; to engage with the play’s cultural …
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Performing Sonnets
Poetry can seem difficult on the page, but it comes alive in performance—think of the popularity of slams, freestyles, and "dis" sessions. By working on a Shakespearean sonnet in pairs by performing just one or two lines, and …
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Shakespeare, the 900-pound Guerilla: or Performing Scenes for Unsuspecting Audiences
In groups, students will produce and perform a scene by Shakespeare as a piece of guerilla theater: in other words, they will perform in a public setting, in front of an unsuspecting audience. Performances do not need to be "perfect" as this …
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"Music Be the Food of Love": Found Poetry with Shakespeare and Hip Hop
In this lesson, students will create found poetry using lines from hip hop songs and Shakespeare’s works. This activity will help them to demystify Shakespeare's …
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Introducing the Ghost: Asking Questions and Finding Answers
Shakespeare introduces the Ghost in the first Act of the play and immediately raises questions: Who is he? Why is he here? Is he an illusion? What role will he play in shaping the events of the story?
This lesson seeks to find answers …
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Lesson 11:Cutting Antony's speeches: "I am meek and gentle with these butchers"
This lesson will allow students to identify Mark Antony's scheming brilliance which is couched in his three major speeches in the second half of
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Reader's Theater, King Lear, and the Language of Gesture
Reader's Theater is a performance technique that can allow students to delve into a text in a different way from reading, staging, or viewing a scene. Its preplanned and choreographed movements, often stylized, can work on a symbolic as well as a …
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Tickling the Brain
Today students will improvise a few scenarios which relate to the plot of Much Ado About Nothing. They should have no previous knowledge of the play; they have not read any scenes or learned character names. This activity will force them to …
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A Close Reading of Shakespeare On Your Feet
What happens when students read with their entire bodies working as hard as their minds?
American …
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Survivor: Illyria
This lesson uses a game with a strong popular culture reference to introduce students to the characters in Twelfth Night. As students role play various characters, they see how various alliances form, especially along status lines. The …
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