Eight strategies for teaching Shakespeare to your students for the first time.
Tag: teaching 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…
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…
Shakespeare Lives! Making the Bard Relevant to Your Millennial Students
In “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad,” Victorian poet Robert Browning declares wistfully, “Oh, to be in England / Now that April’s there . . .” Well, it’s April again, and this month would be an especially great time to be in England since it’s the four-hundred-year anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death on April 23, 1616. It’s also the…
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A Shakespearean Mash Up
This summer the Los Angeles based Troubadour Theater Company is reprising its role as masters of the Shakespearean mash up. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you A Midsummer Saturday Night's Fever Dream. You may have guessed it, though you might not believe it: one theater company has poured all the funk, bellbottoms, and embarrassing dance…