This book contains some well-formatted entertaining plays that allow children to act out the stories while the teacher feeds them lines. I tried out the warm-up exercises and two other plays, "Friends 1 and 2 have an argument" and "Goldilocks and the Many Bears" on children ages 4-9 and the kids had a great time! I asked the kids what they thought of the plays and they said, "They were fun!" The kids and I look forward to performing more of these charming little plays.
In this addition to the Arden Shakespeare series, approximately 3000 quotations, both familiar and little-known, are drawn from throughout Shakespeare's work, both plays and poems. Quotations are selected for their intrinsic interest and organised by topic, as being both user-friendly and stimulating for the casual reader, with speaker and play reference, and with some annotation to give a context to the quotation. Included are: a Shakespeare biography; a chronology of plays; a keyword index; and selections from Arden glossary.
Added by: englishcology | Karma: 4552.52 | Fiction literature | 10 April 2009
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Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus plays, Euripides' Medea and Bacchae, and Aristophanes' Birds and Lysistrata are discussed in this lively and scholarly volume. The author's experience teaching these plays to gifted high school students makes this volume particularly useful. The drama festivals, the adaptations of myth, the relevance of Aristotelian criteria, and the political and cultural background of each play are described fully, and the nature of tragedy and comedy, plot construction, stagecraft, theme, character, imagery and individual odes and speeches are analyzed in depth.
This book has short plays that can be performed by only one person because there are only two characters on stage at any given time. There are patterns for the characters in each play as well as instructions and patterns for several different types of puppets, along with suggestions on how to finish them with hair and clothing. Even though the plays can be presented by only one person, there are enough parts for several kids if they each take one. My elementary students have used the plays for readers' theater and have also presented the them with puppets for other classes. The plays are simple and echo familiar fairy tales, but they are interesting enough even for 7th and 8th graders to enjoy. This book is great for anyone who teaches or presents to children.
The most familiar assertion of Shakespeare scholarship is that he is our contemporary. Shakespeare After Theory provocatively argues that he is not, but what value he has for us must at least begin with a recognition of his distance from us. Only then can we be sure that what we hear are his concerns, rather than the projections of our own. Shakespeare After Theory sees Shakespeare's artistry as it is realized in the earliest conditions of its materialization and intelligibility: in the collaborations of the theatre in which the plays were acted, in the practices of the book trade in which they were published, in the unstable political world of late Tudor and Stuart England in which the plays were engaged by various publics.
