On Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays
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How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare
Written by Ken Ludwig
Winner of the Falstaff Award for Best Shakespeare Book, How To Teach Your Children Shakespeare is a foolproof, enormously fun method of teaching your children the classic works of William Shakespeare by Tony-Award winning playwright, Ken Ludwig.
To know some Shakespeare provides a head start in life. His plays are among the great bedrocks of Western civilization and contain the finest writing of the past 450 years. Many of the best novels, plays, poems, and films in the English language produced since Shakespeare’s death in 1616—from Pride and Prejudice to The Godfather—are heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s stories, characters, language, and themes. In How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare, acclaimed playwright Ken Ludwig provides the tools you need to inspire an understanding, and a love, of Shakespeare’s works in your children, and to have fun together along the way.
Ken Ludwig devised his friendly, easy-to-master methods while teaching his own children. Beginning with memorizing short passages from the plays, his technique then instills children with cultural references they will utilize for years to come. Ludwig’s approach includes understanding of the time period and implications of Shakespeare’s diction as well as the invaluable lessons behind his words and stories. Colorfully incorporating the history of Shakespearean theater and society, How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare guides readers on an informed and adventurous journey through the world in which the Bard wrote.
This book’s simple process allows anyone to impart to children the wisdom of plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet. And there’s fun to be had throughout. Shakespeare novices and experts and readers of all ages will each find something delightfully irresistible in How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare.
Written by Mike LoMonico
Middle school students Emma and Peter are assigned Act I of Romeo and Juliet to read for homework. Peter wants to get a better copy than his tattered paperback. So he climbs up onto a chair in his mother’s study to retrieve her heavy Riverside Shakespeare. Just as he tugs on it, the chair moves and the book hits him on the head. When Peter regains consciousness, he can speak only in lines from Shakespeare. So instead of saying a simple "hello," he might say something like, "How dost thou?" or instead of a simple "goodbye" he might say, "Parting is such sweet sorrow."
Emma Malcolm narrates this appealing young adult fantasy. She describes herself and her neighbor Peter Marlowe as “happy nerds.” Yet when Peter suddenly becomes unable to speak modern English, everything changes. As hard as Peter tries to speak for himself, his words come out as Shakespeare’s own. His strange speech irritates Emma at the school bus stop and embarrasses her in the baseball stadium. He is sent to the principal and the school psychologist for acting up—no one seems to realize that Peter would cheerfully speak modern English if only he could. Luckily, he understands contemporary English despite being unable to speak it. His family believes that he is faking, at least at first. Emma thinks so, too, but she soon realizes that he cannot help himself. However, when he discovers that he can text and instant message in modern English, Emma becomes his translator.
English is Peter’s favorite class, and Ms. Hastings is his favorite teacher. Ms. Hastings decides to guide the class even further into Shakespeare’s world. She determines to help them put on the 30-Minute version of Romeo and Juliet. Peter and Emma will be the leads, the play’s star-crossed lovers—after all, Romeo and Juliet were about their age. Emma has never kissed a boy, and she realizes that she is about to experience her first kiss in front of the whole school.
While the play is in the rehearsal stage, a newspaper reporter interviews Peter and his parents, and the resulting article makes Peter a local celebrity. Then a classmate makes a video of Peter speaking Shakespeare’s words and it goes viral. Peter and Emma are invited to appear on the Today Show. Peter greets America with the words, “Fair thoughts and happy hours attend on you.” Appearing on the show turns out to be more exciting than expected, especially when the interview ends with a romantic surprise for Emma. Finally, it is time for the play to begin. The leading actors perform their scenes flawlessly, and at last they kiss. Romeo and Juliet turns out to have a plot twist, at least for Peter and Emma.
This engaging comedy introduces Shakespeare’s language gracefully, making it part of a light and charming fantasy about language and first love.
Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach
Written by Ayanna Thompson & Laura Turchi
What does it mean to teach Shakespeare with purpose? It means freeing teachers from the notion that teaching Shakespeare means teaching everything, or teaching “Western Civilisation” and universal themes. Instead, this invigorating new book equips teachers to enable student-centered discovery of these complex texts.
Because Shakespeare's plays are excellent vehicles for many topics -history, socio-cultural norms and mores, vocabulary, rhetoric, literary tropes and terminology, performance history, performance strategies - it is tempting to teach his plays as though they are good for teaching everything. This lens-free approach, however, often centers the classroom on the teacher as the expert and renders Shakespeare's plays as fixed, determined, and dead. Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose shows teachers how to approach Shakespeare's works as vehicles for collaborative exploration, to develop intentional frames for discovery, and to release the texts from over-determined interpretations. In other words, this book presents how to teach Shakespeare's plays as living, breathing, and evolving texts.
ShakesFear and How to Cure It: The Complete Handbook for Teaching Shakespeare
Written by Ralph Alan Cohen
For teachers and lovers of Shakespeare, ShakesFear and How to Cure It provides a comprehensive approach to the challenge and rewards of teaching Shakespeare and gives teachers both an overview of each of Shakespeare's 38 plays and specific classroom tools for teaching it. Written by a celebrated teacher, scholar and director of Shakespeare, it shows teachers how to use the text to make the words and the moments come alive for their students. It refutes the idea that Shakespeare's language is difficult and provides a survey of the plays by someone who has lived intimately with them on the page and on the stage.
Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth & A Midsummer Night's Dream
Written by Peggy O’Brien
A teaching guide to the works of Shakespeare is the first of three volumes and is based on the conviction that students best learn Shakespeare by performing Shakespeare.
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