SHAKESPEARE, THE BOOK OF THOMAS MORE & THE STRANGERS' CASE

If they banished you from your country, where would you go? Would you like to find a nation as barbarous as yours who would spurn you like dogs?”

SHAKESPEARE, SONNET 116: LET ME NOT TO THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

TOM HIDDLESTON ON COMPASSION

What is compassion to you? Let's reflect on what compassion means with Tom Hiddleston, who's come to Hollywood fame as Loki, Thor's evil brother in The Avengers. 

Tom Hiddleston is a British actor, he was born in London in 1981.

Do you know that he screen tested for the title role in Thor (2011), maintaining a strict diet and gaining 20 pounds in muscle?However, Kenneth Branagh, the director,  decided he was more suitable for the role of Loki.

Below you find 2 videos  to work with. As usual   I have also prepared a worksheet that you can use and download.

You'll find the worksheet HERE or in the SHARING BOX ON THE RIGHT. The worksheet includes listening and reading comprehension activities, writing tasks .   

ROMEO & JULIET - THE PROLOGUE

ROMEO & JULIET - CHARACTERS, PLOT & ACTIVITIES

8 worksheets, 5 videos to work on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. 

NOTES & WORKSHEETS FOR MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Date and Sources

Much Ado About Nothing marks Shakespeare's greatest achievement in comedy with As You Like It and The Twelfth Night. The date of its first performance was 1598 and it was probably printed two years later. A story by Italian author Matteo Bandello is the source of the plot (as it happened for Romeo and Juliet too). Shakespeare read Bandello in the French version by Belleforest in his Histoires Tragiques.

Themes

The central part of the action turns on two main plots: the Hero-Claudio plot, which is a conventional story belonging to the tragi-comedy type, and the Beatrice-Benedick plot, belonging to the comedy of wit. In this way we are offered differrent views of the same reality, views which we might call respectively romantic and realistic, in whose clash and interrelatio lies a great part of the substance of the play. 

SHAKESPEARE'S OUTSIDERS: OTHELLO, THE MOOR OF VENICE

These are some of the materials we used in today's class about  Othello, Venice and the clash of Civilizations in Shakespeare's tragedy: 

The Clash of Civilizations

An introduction to Venice

Venetian Women

Othello's Pre-history and Christian slaves 

SHAKESPEARE THE POET - VENUS & ADONIS

By the early 1590s, we know for sure that Shakespeare had become an actor. He was working very closely with a group of actors. They moved between a number of different companies, but it  rapidly became apparent that the leading figure among them was Richard Burbage. He would go on to become Shakespeare's closest friend and the man for whom he wrote all the great parts (Romeo, King Lear, Richatd III)
Shakespeare and those actors, such as Burbage, were just establishing themselves as some of the leading players in the early 1590s when disaster struck. There was a major outbreak of plague, and the theatres had to be closed. The point of that was that public places with large crowds in close proximity to each other were very dangerous from the point of view of the spread of infection. So,  whenever a bad outbreak of plague hit London, immediately the theatres were closed. That was a problem for the actors. What they had to do was get out on the road, tour in the provinces, and the takings were always much poorer there than they were in the city with its huge population.

It seems, though, that in 1593 and 94 while various acting companies were out in the country, Shakespeare didn't go with them. It would seem that just as he was establishing himself as a playwright, he decided on an alternative, or an additional course, for his writing. He decided to write poetry.

AT THE CINEMA - MACBETH

 "... a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  

It came out on the 5th this month and,  at last, I came to see it this morning. It's the latest film version of Shakespeare's Macbeth. I saw it at the cinema with 4scA, one of my classes. 

It is a great movie: dark, gloomy, violent, impressive. It was not my first Macbeth, of course, but it was certainly an outstanding one. Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard are giant actors and I expected them to be remarkable  as the two protagonists.  But they were beyond perfection. As Macbeth was doomed to be king and Lady Macbeth his Queen, Fassbender and Cotillard were born to embody these two icon figures.  They were not simply remarkable but incredibly intense, impeccable in their renditions. 

GO ON READING THIS  REVIEW AT MY FLY HIGH BLOG!

HAMLET & MELANCHOLY

Worksheet  -  Transcript

SHALL I COMPARE THEE ...? SHAKESPEARE IN MUSIC

Watch the video and listen to the song. It's one of Shakespeare's sonnets sung by David Gilmour (Pink Floyd): Sonnet 18 - Shall I compare thee

Worsheet   (poem and text analysis questions) .

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE - HATH NOT A JEW EYES?

                             Watch the video then answer the questions in the worksheet HERE

ANONYMOUS - WAS SHAKESPEARE A FRAUD?

READ THE ARTICLE + WATCH THE VIDEOS AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS IN THE WORKSHEET HERE

Scholars and intellectuals have argued the subject for centuries. Was William Shakespeare, the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, the “true” writer who penned the scope of work attributed to him? Or, was the name “Shakespeare” merely a cloaked facade to shield the identity of the works’ authentic author? Have we all been “played”?

Those who believe William Shakespeare did not pen the work are called Anti-Stratfordians; these scholars believe that Shakespeare’s “life doesn’t link up to his work.” They hold that only an aristocrat would have been able to pen such articulate and elevated prose.

Anti-Stratfordian scholars that hold to the “Oxfordian Theory of Shakespeare Authorship” believe that we’ve been “played” by a very talented, stealth Elizabethan courtier named Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. These specific scholars call themselves “Oxfordians.”

Oxfordians maintain that Edward de Vere’s biographical life matches that of the author of Shakespeare’s canon (at least more so than the biography of William Shakespeare of Stratford).

HAMLET

  

Imagine you are a young university student ... Imagine you love Philosophy and Poetry ... You've got friends as well as  a beautiful girl you start fancying about...But your happy ordinary world is suddenly turned upside down by the news of your father's death. You grieve and mourn but you can cope with it...What you really can't stand is ... your mother's behaviour...After just few weeks,  she gets married again, with your uncle, your father's brother...You find it unbearable but nobody else seems to notice that unacceptable exhibition of joy and love. Then something even worse happens: your father's ghost comes back from hell, reveals you the tragic truth of his death and orders you to avenge him! Your uncle Claudius has murdered him and now he is your mother's new husband!

What would you do? Would you respect your father's will? 

This is what happens in the first act of Shakespeare's "Hamlet", one of  the most popular tragedies of all times.

SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III IN MOVIES - VIDEO COMPARISON

While historians and historical fiction writers have re-discovered and re-written what people for centuries have thought of Richard III, the only image we have on stage and in films is the one we inherited from Shakespeare.

"The history of the world, like letters without poetry, flowers without perfume, or thought without imagination, would be a dry matter indeed without its legends, and many of these, though scorned by proof a hundred times, seem worth preserving for their own familiar sakes". (from the preamble of Richard III 1955)

On Imdb you can find a detailed list of all the filmed works dedicated to or  focusing on Richard III,  and including even those movies just featuring him as a minor character. But, except for The Black Arrow (adaptation of R. L. Stevenson's historical novel in which young Richard of Gloucester helps the protagonist Richard - Dick - Shelton), in all of them we have him portrayed as the wicked villain. 

WAS RICHARD III REALLY THE VILLAIN SHAKESPEARE PORTRAYS?

Was Richard III really the scheming, villanous tyrant Shakespeare so powerfully  depicted in his tragedy? 

The Richard III Society, believes it untrue. They state: 

 "… the purpose and indeed the strength of the Richard III Society derive from the belief that the truth is more powerful than lies - a faith that even after all these centuries the truth is important. It is proof of our sense of civilised values that something as esoteric and as fragile as reputation is worth campaigning for." 

What they reject is the portrait Shakespeare drew from Sir Thomas More's biography of the last Plantagenet kings, Edward IV first, his younger brother Richard III then.

What was the full Thomas More treatment, that still seems to be current in some quarters?  Let us look at the dossier that has been built up against Richard III: