Language Arts Guides: Hamlet

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click on Stage, Yard, Middle or Upper to select a view in this 4 part virtual tour

from PBS- see videos on "the Globe Theater" and more!

From Restoration to the 21st century.

interactive timeline

interactive timeline

resources from the Folger Shakespeare Library

Examples of engaging Shakespeare lessons from many different classrooms

detailed example units from several teachers on multiple works. Check out "Hamlet for High School" and facing student disinterest with "Caesar in the Hood"-from the Pittsburgh Teachers Institute

"David Tennant meets fellow actors who’ve taken on Hamlet and compares notes on how to play a character that’s been played, probably, a million different ways.
Tennant looks into the text about the doomed Danish Prince alongside the actors Jude Law, Simon Russell Beale and Ben Whishaw. - from PBS

Mel Gibson talks to high school students about his role as Hamlet in Zeffirelli’s film.

sample detailed lesson plan using Hamlet and Taming of the Shrew

click on "Handout" for guide

"There’s something about modern-day acting—the style that is famously associated with Lee Strasberg’s Method and that gained currency from his Actors Studio and its offshoots—that inclines toward deformations of character. That modern school, which links emotional moments from a performer’s own life to that of a character, and which conceives characters in terms of complete and filled-out lives that actors imagine and inhabit, asks too much of performers."

“Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.” One night he took an Ambien, which failed to work. He took a second one and fell into a stupor, only to wake up an hour later, his mind still racing."

after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence.-- NYTimes