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Teaching Literature at Key Stage 3 and 4
Drama
Approaches to Shakespeare
A variety of perspectives
Ask student teachers to discuss what Shakespeare means to each of the five writers quoted below? Explain why they agree or disagree with each of them. What would they want to add?
Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature: the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life (Samuel Johnson writing in 1765).
A Shakespeare play is a dramatic poem. It uses action, gesture, formal grouping and symbols, and it relies upon the general conventions governing Elizabethan plays. But, we cannot too often remind ourselves, its end is to communicate a rich and controlled experience by means of words .... (L.C. Knights writing in 1933).
'Shakespeare' is not a fixed entity but a concept produced in specific political conditions, a powerful cultural token, a site of struggle and change (Alan Sinfield writing in1985).
The plays of Shakespeare and the King James Bible established the English language as the greatest glory of Western civilization (Kenneth Baker writing in 1988).
'What is my nation?' What if Shakespeare asked that question now? I would reply that his has been many nations and can potentially be every nation, and that is why he matters more than any other writer there has ever been (Jonathan Bate writing in 1997). |
 
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