Popular YA author John Green tackles the Bard’s best romance in his educational YouTube series, which explores staples of high school English Literature in a funny, relatable, and enlightening way.
Part two here
(Source: youtube.com)
Cambridge University Press and developer Agant have teamed up to launch two iPad apps providing an interactive spin on two of Shakespeare’s most famous plays: Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet.
“Both apps – Romeo and Juliet: Explore Shakespeare and Macbeth: Explore Shakespeare – include the full texts of the plays, along with audio performances, photographs of professional productions, glossary definitions, plot summaries, notes and articles by experts.
They also offer interactive word clouds for individual scenes and characters, diagrams (or “circles”) showing the relationships between characters in any given scene, and “theme-lines” to show how key themes wind their way through the texts.”
Read more here.
Both apps cost £9.99 on the App Store
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One thing that is sorely missing is video. Despite the app developer’s argument that “If you include video, people will watch the video and they won’t look at the text”, video and the visual are an important part of how for multimodal learners process information. When my students struggle with understanding the language of Shakespeare, I get them to watch a video of a performance. The meaning (read: interpretation, since all performance of Shakespeare’s works is interpretation) comes through in the aural and the visual, and suddenly students go “oh, so that’s what those strange words on the page mean”. All without having to look up No Fear Shakespeare’s often over-simplified “plain English” text.
A company of actors is being sponsored to take Shakespeare to south-east Queensland schools affected by last year’s floods.
The Shakespearean Birthplace Trust’s recent webinar on ‘Filming Shakespeare’ is now online. Pretty excited about this as I missed listening to the webinar live due to the time difference in Australia.
“Thousands of children in the UK will get the chance to stage a Shakespeare play in a theatre to mark the 450th anniversary of his birth in 2014…”
A new Shakespeare app that may be of interest to teachers who follow this blog. I recently bought the Shakespearience edition of Hamlet, and am currently enjoying perusing the annotated text, accompanying media, and fascinating supplementary scholarly material, including an article on Hamlet in pop culture by Douglas Lanier, whose work on Shakespeare and pop culture I admire immensely:
“Explore Shakespeare’s plays in unexpected and exciting new ways with The Shakesperience, which combine an engagingly touchable interface with remarkable audio, video, photos, and illustrations to create an interactive, hands-on Shakespeare experience unlike any you’ve ever seen before.
Harnessing the most current and dynamic features of the innovative authoring tool, iBooks Author, The Shakesperience brings Shakespeare’s plays to life in interesting and engaging new ways.
Features include:
- A complete glossary with explanations embedded, which allows for immediate translation of words into contemporary English (for example, Othello has over 1,400 embedded terms).
- Scene-setting audio introductions by award-winning actor Sir Derek Jacobi.
- Legendary performances integrated and embedded alongside the text. Hear some of the best Shakespeare performances from around the world, including Dame Judi Dench, Kenneth Branagh, Orson Welles, Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud, and Paul Robeson.
- Multiple audio and visual performances of particular scenes, allowing readers to experience the differences produced in various approaches to Shakespeare’s language.
- Rare, private recordings by Edwin Booth, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others.
- Spectacular image galleries with photographs, production notes, set renderings, and costume design that help the play burst off the page.
- A Voice Coach’s Perspective on Speaking Shakespeare by Andrew Wade, former voice coach to the Royal Shakespeare Company
- A view from the director’s chair including interviews with a full cast of actors on how they
approached their roles, and much more…”
For more information, visit the Shakespearience website.
It now comes down to the call of individual teachers.”
I get quite disappointed when the use of popular culture is translated as “dumbing down” - especially when it comes from Shakespearean academics.
My understanding of the article is that it comes down to an individual teacher’s choice as to what texts are taught in English level 3 NCEA in NZ schools. There are naturally going to be teachers who choose not to tackle Shakespeare - that’s their choice, albeit a disappointing one. I also lament the lack of funding for the Shakespeare’s Globe Centre because I’m sure they do amazing work - but attacking the the so-called “easy literature” mentioned in this article is not the solution.
This is why I advocate the use of pop. culture representations of Shakespeare as tools to help teaching what are arguably difficult texts. I seem to recall Twilight includes references to Romeo and Juliet - take a text students are familiar with (and understand and relate to) and use it as a spring board to introduce more demanding texts, such as Early Modern performance texts. Shakespeare only becomes irrelevant if you make it so.
Shakespeare will be expelled from NCEA exams at the end of the year and won’t be back any time soon.
Instead, pupils are critically examining Twilight and The Hunger Games series.
Kiwis, what are you doing?
Came across this nifty looking book while researching my conference paper, Introducing Shakespeare: A Graphic Guide. For a look inside, click here.
Speak the Speech is a non-profit organisation dedicated to providing free audio recordings of Shakespearean plays in their entirety. Visitors may download performances and read along as trained actors and actresses perform a variety of Shakespearean comedies, tragedies, histories, and romances for your enjoyment.
