Eight strategies for teaching Shakespeare to your students for the first time.
Category: Shakespeare
5 Things to Avoid While Teaching Shakespeare
Introducing Shakespeare to high school students is daunting. Getting them to care about Shakespeare is even more intimidating. Though we often have the best intentions, many of us fall into the following teaching traps when we turn to the Bard. I'm certainly guilty of doing this, and I've tried to make up for these transgressions…
Downloadable Shakespeare Map for Your Classroom
The settings of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays cast a wide net across Europe. The majority are set outside of England, providing his audiences with intriguing, foreign lands and allowing for flexibility in expressing social and political commentary. Our free, downloadable map of Shakespeare's plays features the locations and dates of his comedies, tragedies, and histories across Europe,…
How to Understand Shakespeare’s Language
Admit it: reading Shakespeare is not your cup of tea. At first, trying to read Shakespeare's works may seem like learning a foreign language. Performed for audiences over four centuries ago, Shakespeare's plays were written in Early Modern English, so it’s natural to feel confused by word choices and sentence structures that have evolved since…
A Piece of Shakespearean History: The First Folio Visits Seattle
Seattle Shakespeare fans got to celebrate in the run-up to the Bard’s birthday (or deathday, if you’re the glass-half-empty sort) with the arrival of the First Folio at the Central Library. An impressive gilt-edged tome of nine hundred pages, the first compilation of Shakespeare’s plays was opened to Hamlet’s “to be or not to be”…
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Not Just About Two Kids in Love: Top R&J Q&A
April is a fabulous month for all sorts of reasons: the sun is brighter, the temperature is higher, the flowers are blooming... And this month has a lot to do with Shakespeare. If you haven't already noticed, we at the 'Notes are big fans of the Bard, and April gives us even more excuses to…
Shakespeare’s 400th Commemoration Contest WINNERS!
We asked you why you think William Shakespeare is still relevant, even 400 years after his death, and we are excited to share the winners below! Runners-up will receive 50 eNotes credits (to use on academic Q&A, essay review, and live tutoring) and the grand prize winner will receive $400 cash, a 1-year eNotes subscription, and…
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Macbeth Unlocked
William Shakespeare remains, hands down, one of the most well-known and influential writers in recent history. Throughout his career, he published a truly impressive library of sonnets, poems, verses, plays, and tales. Among these works, Shakespeare is credited with the writing of four major tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and, of course, Macbeth. Macbeth is, in addition to being…