From The Winter’s Tale:
There is a sickness
Which puts some of us in distemper, but
I cannot name the disease; and it is caught
Of you that yet are well.
Shift around the letters, and it becomes:
Methinks today’s pandemic is not the fiercest I set, because in my era we had the plague.
Swine flu is not as harsh, so cut it out.
Ladies and Gentlemen, set your DVRs. Via the Shakespeare Geek, we learn that the Ian McKellen King Lear will be on PBS tonight. Check your local listings. Here in New York, it will be on Thirteen at 8pm.
I saw McKellen play King Lear live, and I can highly recommend this production.
I’d like to start a new weekly feature where I discuss the teaching of Shakespeare. I know – that’s the last thing you’d expect from this blog – but let’s give it a try and see how it goes. Over the next few months, I’m planning to teach The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Hamlet to different eighth-grade classes, plus I’ll be doing Macbeth and Shakespeare in general with my graduate students, so I should have a lot to share over the next few months.
This week, I began working with an eighth-grade class on The Merchant of Venice. These students will be creating a video (similar to the Cymbeline video the same teacher’s class created last year). I came in to give students an introduction to the play. I happen to be working with the same students in their Social Studies class on our Civil Rights unit, and I’m looking to make cross-curricular connections, so we began by looking at Shylock’s speech from Act I, Scene iii:
Signior Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances:
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spet upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
Well then, it now appears you need my help:
Go to then; you come to me, and you say,
‘Shylock, we would have moneys:’ you say so;
You, that did void your rheum upon my beard,
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold: moneys is your suit.
What should I say to you? Should I not say,
‘Hath a dog money? Is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’ or
Shall I bend low, and in a bondman’s key,
With bated breath, and whispering humbleness,
Say this:—
‘Fair sir, you spet on me on Wednesday last;
You spurn’d me such a day; another time
You call’d me dog; and for these courtesies
I’ll lend you thus much moneys?’
I asked the students to interpret the speech, and they seemed to have no trouble at all understanding what Shylock was saying. We went through the rest of the scene and the students understood the deal being made and the motivations behind it on both sides. When we got to the last lines of the scene…
Come on: in this there can be no dismay;
My ships come home a month before the day.
…the students understood that Antonio’s ships would not be coming in. The teacher made a nice connection to the current financial crisis that caught everyone by surprise. We also covered Portia’s father’s challenge by reading Morocco’s examination of the three caskets in the next scene. Before we looked at Morocco’s choice, the students predicted that the lead casket was the correct one, because it’s always the most unlikely one. One student (who “hates Shakespeare”) explained that Portia’s father didn’t want someone for his daughter who was selfish or greedy. I’m really going to enjoy working with this class.
We showed them the Cymbeline video and invited them to start thinking about what they might want to do with The Merchant of Venice. And now that the students’ interest is piqued, the teacher is going to go back and cover the characters and themes before the students start reading the play.
More next week!
From Hamlet:
The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
Shift around the letters, and it becomes:
There is a dearth of depth to this hit online platform.
Do trendy photos without hugs please?
The word of the week is community.
It’s a word I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, as I’ve been doing a lot of leaning on my own community over the past few weeks. I’ve also been thinking about how new technologies and changes in society affect our idea of community.
Today is Wednesday. Since last Wednesday, I…
Traditional community structures such as family, school, religion, and professional networks are supplemented and even augmented (though never replaced) by technology and an increased focus on interconnectivity and collaboration. What I learned this week, though, is that there’s no substitute for being there in person.
Welcome to the world, Elena. You have big shoes to fill.
From Measure for Measure:
What sin you do to save a brother’s life,
Nature dispenses with the deed so far
That it becomes a virtue.
Shift around the letters, and it becomes:
Obama, with no hesitation, waives the defeated Bush’s evil order to stop test research in future days.
The Shakespeare Teacher is out. It’s your move.
Today’s challenge is based on the Shakespeare Lipogram experiment.
I will give you a speech. Choose two vowels (A, E, I, O, or U) and rewrite the speech without using those vowels. Try to come as close to the original meaning as possible.
From Romeo and Juliet:
’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself though, not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O! be some other name:
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.
Entries are due by March 10, and a winner will be chosen.
The Shakespeare Teacher is out. It’s your move.
For the anagram challenge, I’ve chosen a passage from Henry IV, Part Two. The dying King Henry IV is giving advice to his son Hal, who will soon become King Henry V. He suggests that Hal take his nation to war in a foreign country to distract them from the illegitimacy of his rule.
From Henry IV, Part Two:
Therefore, my Harry,
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out,
May waste the memory of the former days.
Shift around the letters, and it becomes…?
Entries should use all of the letters in the original quote without adding any. Punctuation may be changed freely, but you may not add numerals or use any punctuation that needs to be pronounced (such as & or @). The best anagrams have some thematic resonance with the original quote. See earlier anagrams for samples. You may find this a useful tool along the way, and you can check your final anagram here before posting.
Entries are due by March 10, and a winner will be chosen after that time.
From A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evil comes
From our debate, from our dissension:
We are their parents and original.
Shift around the letters, and it becomes:
A sharp column in the Washington Post this month, wherein faded global warming is reframed in some depth as a hidden security issue, hit home.
In this column, he described three harsh ways that these few overwhelming horrors can render war: rampant scarcity from hotter, drier lands; renewed open-handed abundance; and fresh issues of common sovereignty, making two geopolitical zones of tension.
We should take this solemn threat to our security seriously, or we’re finished.
I subscribe to a service called “SiteMeter” which allows me to see a limited amount of information about my visitors. One thing that I can see is if someone finds my site via a Google search, and what they were searching for.
Once a week (or so), I check in on what searches people have done to find themselves at Shakespeare Teacher, and to respond to those search terms in the name of fun and public service. All of the following searches brought people to this site in the past week.
At long last, this site is the first hit in a Google search for “Shakespeare Teacher” which means that it’s the default for the “I’m Feeling Lucky” option. So you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky. Well, do ya, punk?
Abraham Lincoln didn’t die while reading Macbeth; he was shot in the back of the head while attending the theatre. The play wasn’t Shakespeare, but the assassin was Edwin Booth’s brother, so that’s close enough.
Lincoln was a huge fan of Macbeth. Five days before his own assassination, he read aloud passages from the play that dealt with Duncan’s assassination to the Marquis de Chambrun. These passages haunted him, much as the chilling coincidence has the power to haunt us.
The Tudors were a dynasty of English monarchs that rose to power when Henry Tudor defeated King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 to become King Henry VII. The line ended with the death of his granddaughter Queen Elizabeth I in 1603.
Shakespeare was born in England in 1564, during the reign of Elizabeth, and therefore spent most of his life living under Tudor rule. There are also Tudor connections in two of Shakespeare’s history plays. Richard III ends with Henry VII coming to power, and Henry VIII is the story of Elizabeth’s famous father.
I’m not sure. The last vision is, I believe, the show of eight kings, and it seems like Macbeth gets the message: Banquo will be the father to a line of kings. However, Macbeth does go on to try to change his fate, which doesn’t seem to be possible in this world, so maybe that’s the message Macbeth doesn’t get.
My take is that he understands the prophecies, and accepts them as long as they are to his advantage, but when things go badly, he decides to take matters into his own hands, trying vainly (!) to usurp fate as he had usurped so much else.
Evince!
Great question! Usually if I’m teaching Shakespeare, I’m teaching a particular play. If students are new to Shakespeare, I don’t jump into the language right away. I try to structure activities that interest students in the world of the play, the themes, the characters, and the plot.
When I am ready to introduce students to Shakespeare’s language, I do so by giving them a speech from the play we’re about to read, as well as the lyrics to a popular rap song. We then compare and contrast the way language is used in both texts.
I leave the task of responding to the remaining search terms to my readers:
what rule did shakespeare change
how shakespeare affected Galileo
why was shakespeare so successful
a physical description of puck the mischievous sprite
henry the eighth for 10 year olds
shakespeare’s idea of humor