Thee, thou, and you: Pronouns in the Sonnets Day 5 of TSI

During this month’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute, some of our Summer Scholars have chosen to blog their experiences on their own sites, and have given permission to share some of them here. Today we’ll look back on yesterday’s very full day of activities with Greta Brasgalla:

And we are back for another week!  Today was a bit strange because we had lectures all day including an extra one in the evening.

Morning Lecture:  David Schalkwyk on The Sonnets

David is the epitome of the Shakespearean professor–suit, tie, errant hair, and British accent.  In short, completely charming to listen to.  He discussed the sonnets and some of the themes that are present.  He framed his lecture by saying his son was getting married and he wanted to read a sonnet at the wedding.  He soon discovered that none of them are appropriate.

Helen Vendler says that unlike a play, the lyric is empty of any particular voice.  Any person who speaks them, becomes them.

We learned the importance of pronouns in the sonnets.  For those of you who have no idea about this (as I did), here is a summary

• thee and thou are used for close family, for God, and from Master to servant
• you is more formal
• this is similar to the use of tu and usted in Spanish

As one looks through the sonnets ( we looked at 13, 57, 58, 121, 135, 126) you see Shakespeare making use of these pronouns to emphasize his intimacy with the subject and his displeasure with their relationship.

Interesting fact:  The phrase “Do you love me?” is only used once in Shakespeare (the Tempest). “Dost thou love me?” is used many times.

Independent Research and Lunchtime Colloquium on LUNA database

We had some time after lecture to go into the Reading Room and begin research, or work with Stephen [Dickey] and Margaret [Maurer, two of TSI's resident instructing scholars] on EEBO (Early English Books Online).  Both of them really helped me find some items on my research topic:  Venice as another  “other” in Merchant and Othello.

At lunch, we learned about the LUNA database which is accessible to the public.  It hold digital images of everything the Folger has photographed over the years.  You can search “Hamlet” and find pics of costumes and renderings of productions as well as pics of the Folio.  Really great for showing your students different ways of staging a play.  Click on the link and check it out!

Curriculum Presentation:  Mary Ellen Dakin “Reading Shakespeare with Young Adults”

MaryEllen had us doing some video projects today using her idea of the relationship between the Literary/Theatrical/Cinematic connection.  MaryEllen calls this “transmediation.”

Our assignment was to film a scene, but add in scenes of us planning, expert advice, and other tidbits.  MaryEllen used the sample of Al Pacino’s “Looking for Richard” for this.  We filmed our scene and my friend Melanie did some speed editing on Moviemaker.

After dinner, we went back to the Folger for a great lecture by Ralph Cohen about the Blackfriars Theater.  Interesting that the seating in the BF was exactly the opposite of the Globe:  rich people were onstage and in the front of the theater to be seen.

A great day today made even better by the mild weather over here!

Greta heads the English Department at El Dorado Ninth Grade Academy in El Paso, TX.  She holds a Master of Arts degree in English and American Literature and a Bachelor of Arts in English and Theatre Arts from the University of Texas at El Paso, and now has 20 years of classroom experience.

Check back during the month of July for more “TSI Experiences” from participants and staff!

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@Hamlet: Twitter in the Classroom

The internet is a growing teaching resource and tool, especially when approaching Shakespeare and literature. Digital Theatre projects like Such Tweet Sorrow and Much Ado About N<3thing doubled as insights into familiar characters as well as cautionary tales regarding responsibility, communication, and cyber-bullying. We’ve discussed Twitter and Facebook’s influence on student-teacher communication before, but one teacher has recently been commendably profiled for using Twitter to teach Hamlet.

As part of their Shakespeare unit, students create Twitter accounts for characters from Hamlet — from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Ophelia and Queen Gertrude — and send out tweets as they work through the acts.

“You can make the role as big as you wanted.” Barker said. “It wasn’t . . . tweeting for the sake of tweeting. It was more like a strategy to get them to focus on what was really happening in the play and to become really invested in what was happening.”

It’s not fabulous that they’re not playing with the actual language, nor are they exactly on their feet with the text - however, you can’t deny that Mrs. Barker’s students are invested in the play.

Barker gets her students to blog regularly as part of their novel studies unit. She posts discussion questions to the blogging site Ning and students have to write entries, comment on classmates’ posts and use content tags.

“It’s, like, a collective knowledge. You can look back at last year’s blog posts,” said Erin Kope, 17.

Classmate Connor Swick, 17, agrees that blogging is a great educational tool, especially for collaborating with other students.

“If it was in essay form it’s not like you could go over and read everybody’s essay. People get their ideas out and everyone can share it,’ he said.

We do a similar project with our High School Fellowship classes where each day of the course a different student is asked to blog their perspective on the lecture, discussion, rehearsal, or performance, and everyone is required to comment a certain number of times. Sometimes the discussions that blossom without our involvement are pretty spectacular.

What do you think? Is this #Shakespeare approach going to help students relate to Shakespeare better? Are we sacrificing language and performance to use it? Could they be incorporated together?

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Don’t Miss Out On “Experiencing Shakespeare”

Only two weeks to go before “Experiencing Shakespeare”, Folger Education’s first electronic field trip, brings thousands of students in grades 6-12 to the Folger Shakespeare Library. Are you registered? If not, click here to register for this free one-hour program. I wrote about the program in a February 7th blog posting, and it occurred to me today that there might be teachers who read this blog who have participated in electronic or virtual field trips before who might comment on that experience. If you have been part of an electronic or virtual field trip, what was the experience like for you and your students? What was the benefit for you and your students to visit a place you physically couldn’t get to from your school? Where did you go on this trip? Our partner in this program, Alabama Public Television, recently conducted an electronic field trip to Mount Vernon, and thousands of students participated. Could electronic and/or virtual field trips make the world even smaller for teachers and students?

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Experiencing Shakespeare: An Electronic Field Trip to the Folger Shakespeare Library

“Speak the speech, I pray you, … trippingly on the tongue,”  Hamlet’s advice to the players.

 

 

When teachers assign their students to perform a scene from a play by William Shakespeare, what should their students do to get ready?  How can teachers best support their students in preparing their scenes?  Steer them away from “translated” texts of the play, for starters.  Students can handle Shakespeare’s language.  Help them to understand the language. How can using a performance-based teaching approach help?  Performance-based teaching promotes getting students up and on their feet, speaking Shakespeare’s language out loud; it is a close reading of the text using intellectual, vocal, and physical exercises to make sense of it.

On March 6th, from 1-2 pm EST, teachers and their students from around the country will be able to visit the Folger Shakespeare Library without leaving their classrooms.  Experiencing Shakespeare is a free one-hour trip that will take students into the vault of the Library to see rare books and to talk with Dr. Michael Witmore, Director, about the treasures contained within it.  They’ll hear from scholar, Dr. Gail Kern Paster, about the ways scholars examine texts to look at language, watch students and actors engage Shakespeare’s text as they prepare to perform scenes, and they’ll have the opportunity submit their own performances of Shakespeare’s work to be included in the program.  In short, students and teachers will be involved in the intellectual, physical, and vocal exercises and activities they need to do in order to engage Shakespeare’s text and make meaning of it for themselves.

Join teachers and students from around the country on their journey to find out what they need to know to put Shakespeare’s language up on its feet in this hour-long electronic field trip.  Register by clicking here.

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New Year, Same Class, New Ideas?

Happy New Year!

SSO student interpretation of the "Queen Mab" speech from Romeo and Juliet

As we tear into a new Gregorian calendar, we celebrate new beginnings, fresh starts, and new goals. But we returned to our offices and classrooms today to continue a school-year already in progress. How can we infuse our lesson plans with the same fresh fervor as we intend to apply to our new workout routines?

What if they worked together?

I’ve trumpeted audio-plays before, as assistants to students reading new Shakespearean texts for the first time, but they’re also great to listen to during a workout. Engaged listening takes your mind off of any physical stress, and it can’t be much easier to count reps than with iambic pentameter – 2 lines equals a set!

In the same way, students could engage with the text aurally either by listening to and miming a scene along with an audio play to get at what’s happening in the play, by recording their own audio play for the class (complete with sound effects?), or even by simply listening to a passage and drawing the imagery that comes through – as we do with the Shakespeare Steps Out classes.

Just one idea, anyhow. How are you approaching a new calendar year with your class?

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Words, Words, Words (again)

I’ve recently rediscovered the joy of podcasts – listening to a story or discussion while I walk to work instead of the eclectic playlist I haven’t updated in 18 months.  This past weekend I was enjoying a 2010 Radiolab podcast on Words in which they explored how we use words to think and communicate with each other. To my surprise, they had a whole segment with James Shapiro discussing the variety of words Shakespeare invented, or was, Shapiro hastened to clarify, “the first to use it in print or on stage”

We give away posters at NCTE featuring quotes we know Shakespeare was the first to use, many of which Shapiro cited in this interview. What I love best about recognizing the scope of what Shakespeare coined in our vernacular is how we teach it to our youngest students in our Shakespeare Steps Out residency program.

Telling the students that Shakespeare made up words to fit what he needed them to mean (even by adding an “un” before a word to make it “not” what it was, ie: unreal) widens their eyes to the possibility that they can do the same thing. We give them a handout with blanks on them for new words and ask them to make up words to fit in the blanks (not scanning for iambs, but who says the latest music player on the streets isn’t a “boomshaka”?).

It’s also great to be able to tell kids that words they recognize, words they use were first used by the man who wrote the play they’re about to study. It takes away a bit of the the intimidation factor that comes with preparing to read Shakespeare, who may seem foreign to new readers.

What say you? Are your students surprised to learn that Shakespeare used the first Knock Knock joke? Or that he created the word “eyeball”? Tell us in the comments!

Shameless reminder of offerings: Folger has its own series of podcasts! Look us up in iTunes, or online to stream them.

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Lend me your ears!

This afternoon, Lucretia asked me if I knew of any audiobooks of Shakespeare’s plays for kids. One of this year’s Shakespeare Steps Out teachers had asked for recommendations for the listening stations for students in her class.

When I was a kid (and I think it’s been well-established that young Caitlin had more than a little Shakespeare in her life) I had a favorite audio book on cassette tape of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which went with an abridged graphic novel of the play. The internet can be magical, and that book (and audio recording) and I have been reunited. However, it is with great disappointment that I find that none of the original text is used in this series. Yes, there are a dozen plays in this series of Illustrated Classics, but they use “modernized” language and occasionally bungle up the story (click on the sample of Hamlet if you don’t believe me!).

So at the moment, I have failed my colleague and the SSO teacher. I would imagine that there could be some abridged Shakespeare in audio out there somewhere, and I would hope (because I am biased) that it would come from the Shakespeare: The Animated Tales texts, as those are wonderful abridgements with true text.

If you’re up for the full play on audio, you can’t beat the Arkangel’s fully dramatized recordings. But what if you want only 30 minutes for kids? Where do you turn?

Do you have any suggestions? Tell us in the comments!

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Who We’re Reading

We are definitely not the only Shakespeare-related blog on the internet. Far from it! Here are some of our favorite people to follow for Shakespeare discussions, news, ideas, and insights.

Shakespeare Geek – the self-titled Geek asks insightful questions and posits interesting ideas for Shakespeare enthusiasts to discuss and consider.

Bardfilm – KJ collects Shakespeare-related film clips, books, and related items to show how the Bard has influenced our entertainment culture.

Shake & Tumble – a delightful little tumblr account of paintings, quotes, and gifs related to Shakespeare in performance and art.

Drown My Books – shameless self-promoter, Caitlin Griffin, keeps a blog of Shakespeare book and movie adaptations as she finds them.

Who do you follow?

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Take a [digital] bow

As a follow-up to last week’s post about the Facebook Much Ado, below are my three favorite entries. As you can see, there WAS some original language used!

 And even when there wasn’t language by Shakespeare, it stayed fairly true to the intent. For example, almost all of Doug Berry and Verges Headborough’s exchanges had me giggling on the metro, and John Zaragoza’s moody posts were as anti-verbose as the original character was.

I was a little disappointed that there was no fake death for Hero. If we’re talking internet rumours, that would have been a doozy! All we got was that she had locked herself in her room and wasn’t talking to anyone. Hardly the dramatic climax we were looking for!

Did anyone follow along, or heard anything from their students? A full account of the newsfeed begins HERE.

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Shakespeare has poked Benedick

Click here for the ways Folger connects!

The big news in Shakespeare geek circles this week is the “production” of Much Ado About Nothing taking place on FACEBOOK beginning tomorrow. Sixteen characters have been added to facebook, and if you “like” all of them you can watch their story unfold in real time on the internet. Benedick Salvador will flame Beatrice Grant’s wall, while John Zaragoza cyber-bullies Claudio Firenze into making a huge mistake.

This comes in the wake of last year’s award-winning Such Tweet Sorrow, a real-time twitter “production” of Romeo and Juliet. The characters tweeted to and about each other over 3 days, culminating in a familiar tragic scene.

Shakespeare has been introduced to social media before. Perhaps the first public memory is of Sarah Schmelling’s book-spawning entry for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency of Hamlet’s News Feed in 2008 (which was performed for NPR last October). These items condense the plays into quick, recognizable media that students understand.

But where’s the language?

One of our high school fellows in 2009 created several facebook profiles for the characters of As You Like It to examine the ways in which characters hide their identity either by disguise or by using a different online persona to test the waters. She did use conversations between Orlando and Rosalind (and Ganymede) to map out how they would converse online over a week’s time – with Shakespeare’s text.

Would it be so hard to use the text in these social productions? Or would the point be totally lost in a medium reliant on breezy comprehension?

I look forward to checking in on the Much Ado gang (without liking all of their characters, hopefully!) to see how it goes. Do you incorporate social media in the classroom? How could this work for other plays?

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