Handouts

• Miller Outdoor Theater – Thursday, August 3rd
  Pre-show talk on Twelfth Night or What You Will.

• Student Information Sheet

Backgrounds

• A Chronology of Shakespeare’s Work
  A list of Shakespeare’s plays and poems in order of composition.
• Shakespeare’s Playhouses
  An illustrated overview of the kinds of theatrical spaces Shakespeare used.

Shakespeare’s Language

• Reading Shakespeare: A Primer
  Some suggestions on how to read Shakespeare with greater understanding and enjoyment.
• Shakespeare in Modern English
  Two examples of the difference between Shakespeare’s original language and modern prose translations of it.
• Shakespeare’s Blank Verse
  An overview of Shakespeare’s primary verse form.
• Thou and You in Shakespeare
  Here’s how early modern English speakers used second person pronouns.

Study Guides

These Study Guides may help you focus your attention on how Shakespeare’s plays work and encourage you to pay attention to details you might otherwise not notice.

• The Taming of the Shrew
• Titus Andronicus
• The Comedy of Errors
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• The Merchant of Venice
• Twelfth Night or What You Will

Sources and Adaptations

• The Barge Speech from Antony and Cleopatra
  A side-by-side comparison of Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra in her barge and the North translation of Plutarch’s Lives that Shakespeare used as his source.
• Nahum Tate’s King Lear
  The (once very popular!) happy ending that Tate wrote for King Lear.

Plays

• The Structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.2
  An analysis of the scene’s dramatic structure.
• The Lovers’ Verse in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  Examples of the expressive power of heroic couplets.
• Parts & Dogs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  A list of references to part and to dogs in the play.

• 1 Henry IV – Background & Genealogy
  A character chart and genealogy for 1 Henry IV and a brief summary of Richard II.
• Prince Hal’s Soliloquy
  An analysis of the Prince’s soliloquy at the end of Act 1, scene 2.
• The Structure of 1 Henry IV 2.4
  An analysis of the scene’s dramatic structure.

• Patterns in Macbeth’s Tomorrow Speech
  Some of the patterns of sound and sense in the most famous speech from Macbeth.

• Bears in The Winter’s Tale
  A list of bear/bare/born/bourn references in the play.

Writing

• Sample Essay
  This essay is adapted from Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology 2nd edition by Helen Vendler (Bedford, 2002) pages 312-13.
• Sample Works Cited Page
  This sample Works Cited page demonstrates the correct format for several common types of sources.
• A Sample Stylistic Analysis
  Russ McDonald’s analysis of a few lines from the beginning of Macbeth 2.1.

Videos

• Rehearsing Twelfth Night 2.4 (1982):
  

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• Twelfth Night 3.4 (2012):
  

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