Approaches to Shakespeare Activities to consider the whole play
Student teachers can be encouraged to think of a number of ways of encouraging pupils to look at the play as a whole. Themes can be tracked through the play, or recurring images or uses of language – 'blood' or references to clothing in Macbeth for example. Tension graphs can be plotted to get a sense of how the structure of a play might work, exploring – where relevant – links between plot/subplot, or the use of parallel scenes or characters. Another activity, adapted from the Shakespeare in Schools Project (Gibson, 1998), involves the teacher choosing ten quotes – the shorter the better – that tell the whole story, and dividing the class into ten groups, allocating one quote to each group. Each group has a few minutes to explore their line, devising a performance of it that must end in a tableau or freeze-frame. The ten groups then perform their lines in sequence.
