Title – Shakespearean Writing Lesson

By – Keith Medlin

Subject – Language Arts

Grade Level – 9-12

Objectives:

1. To get the students to better understand Shakespearean writing.

2. To get students to understand how they can write these sometimes difficult phrases.

3. To give students an insight into the writings of Shakespeare.

Materials:

1. The current Shakespeare work you are going to be using in the class. (NOTE: Sonnets may not work well with this lesson.)

2. Pictures from magazines. (Provided by the students, but be sure to bring extra for all those who weren’t there, weren’t paying attention, etc.)

3. 10-12 notecards with an emotion written on them to be distributed to each group. On the back of each notecard put a particularly difficult passage from Shakespeare on it. Make sure that this is the same for all the cards.

Procedure:

1. About 1 week before the exercise tell the students to start looking through magazines for pictures of people, pretty pictures, landscapes, etc. that they might want to do a short writing exercise with.

2. When the students get to class, split them up into groups of 3-4 students and distribute the notecards with the emotions on them.

3. Lead a discussion about what the students think the passage means, is about, etc. Most likely they will have problems with it and be confused by the language in the passage.

4. Explain that this is a tricky language to read in until you are used to it. Explain the following steps to them.

5. They need to choose 1 picture from the pictures that the students had brought in to write about.

6. Tell them that each of them has the power to write just like Shakespeare, and that in this exercise they will need to do so.

7. Analyze the Shakespeare passage with the students looking in particular at how flowery his descriptions are and how simple his actual statements of actions among the characters are.

8. Have the students write a flowery description about their picture using the emotion given to them on the front of the notecard. Anything they write is just fine, the point isn’t good writing, but merely to get them to understand how the language works in Shakespeare.

9. Have a few groups share their passage with the class. Then have each group add a single action to the description such as “your person leaves the room,” or, “the sun in the picture sets.”

10. Have them rewrite the whole thing adding it all together and have them read a few so they can see just how similar their own writing is to Shakespeare’s and that they can understand it if they understand the component parts!

Conclusions:

1. Hopefully the students will get to have a fun time doing this.

2. It should allow them some insight into the writing and language that eluded them at first.

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Keith Medlin

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