APOLOGIES THAT AT THE MOMENT (15/3/03) IN THE PLAY EXTRACTS, THE VOCABULARY IS NOT  YET ALIGNED. ( "front page" problems!)

 

For particular plays in shortened form or scenes from Shakespeare click on: 

Shakespeare's language.

King Lear Act 1.     Lear awakes Act IV      Hamlet.  Act 1        Hamlet.  final scene    

Hamlet.  opening scene.   Hamlet     To be or not to be     Hamlet.   Grave diggers

  Romeo and Juliet.   Balcony scene.    

Macbeth.  murder of Duncan        Richard III Muder of Clarence.

Richard II.  Murder scene in prison.              return to teachers' home page

SHAKESPEARE AND HOW TO MAKE IT ACCESSIBLE TO FOREIGN CHILDREN
  • The main fact is that the plays and the various scenes are very actable. It's good theatre.
  • The language presents some difficulty but in my experience as long as the quantity to learn is never more than 40 lines, and there is adequate translation, then foreign children can appreciate what I could call the " blood and thunder" quality of the langauge. I have seen over many years how they respond to its pictorial eloquence! Each year we make videos and some of the performances are quite touching. 

VARIOUS PROBLEMS

LENGTH    1. Cut the whole play, dividing up the main parts into sections of 30 -40 lines so that for example you can have 6 or 7 Macbeths or Lady Macbeths. This allows you to do a whole play and include a large number of participants. However this means that often the actors won't have much idea of the details of the other parts because they will concentrate on just doing their own. 

In Richard III the murder of Clarence has to be done with few cuts. Here one could divide the "Clarence's dream" for  2 successive actors.(35 and 30 lines each). Brackenbury has a sensible 25 lines. The 2 murderers have a text  reduced to similar size: 26 and 30 lines each. This is a good example of the main two options. Either a larger area of the play with very extensive cuts, or dramatic moments where one only has to cut 1. very intricate language or 2.  over long passages.

 Clarence's dream is given with little cutting because it seems such a beautifully organic description. Similarly the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet is maimed with too much cutting so it's best to just do the short, sharp focus approach.  

2.  Take certain key scene from a play. This will usually involve 2 lead actors and some subsidary parts. Possibly make several pairs do the same scene in some sort of competition. This way the one scene will be very well understood by everyone. Give yourself time to try versions of just a few key lines - almost as a sort of game / competition to see who can recite the most effctively and dramatically. make sure all the difficult words have really been looked at in the margins. Test the students for the meaning of whole lines. Refer them to the translations. (There is a cd rom of all Shakespeare with facing Italian and English by Garzanti).  To compare  translation with a simple vocabulary gloss (as I have done) is very revealing. Glossing the word allows one to lose much less of the original. See an example of this in the extensive unpeeling of meaning / vocabulary in my page on a passage of metaphor from Romeo and Juliet: "summer's ripening breath" defies translation because Italian can't stick 3 words together as English does here in a form of eloquent crescendo. Translation loses this where glossing conserves it.

3. Take a series of main scenes from a play and fit them together by means of a narrator telling the intervening story.

COSTUME

It is worth getting the actors to use costume. Black dustbin liners are very useful for making Renaissance clothes. Silver and gold pens can be used to decorate the black plastic. White "scych" tape can be stuck on also as ornament which can itself be coloured with felt pens. Silver and gold spray is effective decoration on these plastic bin liners.

Simple lengths of cloth can be made to look like tunics or jackets by using belts or cord to pull them in at the waist.

Cardboard can make effective hats. Woolen tights look like renaissance leggings. Swords can be made out of ply wood using a handheld jigsaw.

LEARNING THE PARTS. Explain that to learn the parts the students should remember to learn the lines in chunks of sense.(2 -4 lines together). Some of the longer parts could be recorded by a teacher or English friend onto a tape so that the students could study the pronunciation with their walkman.
ACTING It is important that the actors are helped in stage position and movement. Make them repeat certain lines with variant stage movements (a hidden form of drilling the speaking of the part). Emphasise that slow speaking is effective with poetry. When they know the lines there is a tendency to gabble.

for particular plays in shortened form or scenes from Shakespeare: 

King Lear Act 1                                    Lear awakes Act IV                        

Romeo and Juliet Balcony scene.                

Richard II  Murder scene in prison.     

Macbeth:  murder of Duncan 

Richard III  Murder of Clarence          

Hamlet grave diggers' scene            Hamlet Act 1         Hamlet final scene      

Hamlet.  King, Laertes - Opelia's death.

Hamlet. To be or not to be.

 

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