“SHAKE-UP”

Like Shakespeare, teachers are forced to simplify their knowledge to gratify the bad tastes of the ‘rank-scented many’

Thomas Hinton, Oakhill College

Why is Shakespeare relevant in the 21st Century Classroom?

There are many answers to this contemporary student query or complaint. The obvious answers relate to Shakespeare’s genius and mastery of poetry and prose, or the complexity and authenticity of his characters, or the universality of his themes. However, the common approach of demanding that students recognise these assertions and proclaiming Shakespeare’s perennial significance is an obsolete teaching strategy which is doomed to fail in the 21st Century Classroom. The 21st Century student must discover Shakespeare on their own terms through the teacher’s guided focus on “appropriation”. Once students are able to nominate contemporary equivalents for Shakespearean characters, scenarios and language they will, to some extent, recognise Shakespeare’s universal significance. In order for students to embrace the process of appropriation, teachers should introduce students to Shakespeare’s own sources and methods of adaptation, analyse and evaluate various Shakespearean film appropriations and assist students in creating their own modern appropriation of a Shakespearean scene. In addition students should compare Shakespeare’s poetry to modern rap songs in terms of metre, rhyme and content to find a 21st Century Shakespearean voice; and thereby affirm that Shakespeare’s work is relevant and integral to the 21st Century Classroom.

Contents

I- Shakespeare in the 21st Century

II- Shakespeare’s World

III- To Appropriate or not to Appropriate?

IV- Shakespearean Film Appropriations

V- Modernising Shakespearean Language

VI- Shake-Up

VII- Units of Study

I- Shakespeare in the 21st Century

“He was not of an age, but for all

time”- Ben Jonson

Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford,2002)

‘The distinction between Shakespeare and popular

culture epitomizes the great divide in culture over the last century between highbrow and lowbrow.’

• During Restoration Drama, Shakespeare was modernised to eliminate what was perceived as archaic or unsophisticated, and plots were recast to serve royalist perspectives.

• It was not until the early eighteenth century that notions of textual fidelity would have any purchase on the appropriation of Shakespeare, popular or otherwise- suggesting the language became more and more sacred with time.

• The ‘educated minority’ appreciate Shakespeare aesthetically as ‘poetry’, whereas for the ‘groundlings’, Shakespeare is all story, character and spectacle.

• Finding a suitable medium, style, or genre for bridging that gap between cultural registers, one that might preserve Shakespeare’s cultural authority while addressing a mass audience, has been a recurrent issue in modern popular appropriations of Shakespeare.

• Jonson’s influential image of Shakespeare as a fixed star in an artistic firmament is, then, misleading. Rather we might more profitably imagine Shakespeare…in a more contemporary sense as a figure whose importance and survival depends upon skilfully navigating the ever-changing politics of the establishment and the street.

Richard Burt, Shakespeare “Glo-cali-zation,” Race, and The Small Screens of Post-Popular Culture (London,

2003)

‘The implicit claim is that the Shakespearean language is not universal but the plots, narrative conflicts, and/or character issues are. Yet plot and character are what traditionally was taught as inessential, borrowed, not-Shakespeare. Popularization does not return us, then, to the fuller, original and essential Shakespeare; it is the essence of Shakespeare.’

Paul Prescott, Shakespeare and popular culture (Cambridge, 2010)

‘What sense does it make to couple Shakespeare- Bard of Avon, icon of genius, highbrow extraordinaire- with ‘popular culture’? If his writings are widely valued for their complexity, timelessness and universal human truths, popular culture is for many synonymous with banality, the ephemeral and the trivial. If Shakespeare is deep and difficult, the typical products of popular culture are shallow and all too accessible. To enjoy Shakespeare, the argument might run, requires training, time and long-term investment; the consumption of popular culture, by definition, requires little or no effort. From the perspective of these stark contrasts, ‘Shakespeare and popular culture’ looks like a dead-end of incompatibility’

Where would you sit?Where would your students sit?

The “pit” & groundlings

The galleries

‘The public theatre was situated near the bottom of the cultural spectrum…a gathering place for mixed crowds relatively unregulated by authorities and thus it contributed to the erosion of social and cultural order and the expression of popular licence, both on stage and in the behaviour of the audience, which was raucous and participatory.’

- Douglas Lanier

We are “groundlings”

Teachers are groundlings

&

Students are groundlings

• “Given the choice, these critics argue, Shakespeare would never have written so many dirty jokes, low comic routines, sword fights and other crowd-pleasing spectacles. He was shackled to his trade, forced to prostitute his talent to gratify the bad tastes of the ‘rank-scented many’ (Coriolanus, 3,1,170)” – Prescott

• “Shakespop appropriations do not necessarily lead to ‘dumbing down’, though they do often fit poorly with high cultural standards of verbal sophistication” – Lanier

Essence

As aurally-challenged “groundlings” in the 21st Century perhaps all we can attain is the essence of Shakespeare.

The fuller, original and essential Shakespeare is beyond the realm of our comprehension.

However, if the essence of Shakespeare can produce :

• The first Shakespeare recorded outside Europe, an English merchant ship off the coast of what is now Sierra Leone became in 1607 a stage for Hamlet, with an African guest providing a running translation in Portuguese (and probably Temne)

• Love’s Labour’s Lost in a bomb-scarred Mughal garden in Kabul over five nights in September 2005. For the Kabul’s Love’s Labour’s Lost eleven Afghan actors gathered under direction of a Canadian actress and a US aid worker to perform a text adapted into Dari by two Afghan writers from a Farsi translation prepared by an Iranian scholar.

- Anston Bosman, Shakespeare and Globalization (Cambridge, 2010)

Surely, the essence can satisfy and engage Year 7-10 students.

Teachers should not alienate or intimidate students with the foreign

language of Shakespeare

until Year 11.

Teaching philosophies such as the 21st Century Solution Fluencies and other project-based learning initiatives promote:

• Relevance- interest precedes learning• Creativity enhances the value of the function

through the form.

By teaching students to appropriate Shakespearean plays to modern settings, a teacher can convince students :

1) Shakespeare is relevant to their world

2) Shakespeare can enhance their creativity.

• However, before one can effectively appropriate a Shakespearean play to a modern setting, one must understand Shakespeare’s appropriation of sources.

• In order for one to understand Shakespeare’s art of appropriation one must have knowledge of Shakespeare’s world

Modern Shakespearean Appropriation

Shakespeare: Master of Appropriation

Shakespeare’s World

II- Shakespeare’s World

If you had a time machine and could live, for one month, anywhere in the history of

civilisation. Where and When would you live?

• List your top 3 choices

What did you choose?

…Ensure Shakespearean London is in your top 3.

The greater your knowledge and passion of Shakespearean London, the more likely you are to present Shakespeare’s world in a

relevant and creative way

What are your fondest Shakespearean experiences?

• Titus Andronicus at The Globe

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Sydney Botanical Gardens

• Kevin Spacey in Richard III

• Shake-Up Cup…

WHAT Statementsbrought to you by

Bill Bryson & Stephen Greenblatt

In the Elizabethan period the average life expectancy was 40 years and

1/5 of children died before the age of 10

WHAT!In 1564 England had a population between three and five

million. Due to the plague and diseases such as tuberculosis, small pox and scurvy, the previous decade had seen a 6 per cent fall in national population.

The plague outbreak in 1564 resulted in at least 200 deaths in Stratford which included nearly two-thirds of the infants.

A person uprooted from his family and community in Elizabethan England was generally a person in trouble. This was a society deeply suspicious of vagrancy

Vagabond Act of 1604- if a vagrant could not show that he had land of his own or a master whom he was serving, he was tied to a post and publicly whipped.

WHAT! Then he was either returned to his place of birth- to

resume the work he was born to do- or put to labour or placed in stocks until someone took him into service

The gates of the city were locked at dusk (later in winter), and no one was allowed in or out till dawn.

WHAT! A curfew took effect with darkness, at which time

taverns were shut and citizens forbidden to be out, though the fact that the night constables and watchmen were nearly always portrayed in the theatre as laughable dimwits suggests that they were not regarded with much fear.

Stuck on the poles on the Great Stone Gate, two arches from the Southwark side, were severed heads, some completely reduced to skulls, others parboiled and tanned, still identifiable...

WHAT!The heads on the bridge visitors were duly informed,

were those of gentlemen and nobles who suffered the fate of traitors. A foreign visitor to London in 1592 counted thirty-four of them.

London was a non stop theatre of punishments. Almost daily people watched the state brand, cut and kill those it deemed offenders

WHAT?In some cases of murder the offender’s right

hand was cut off at or near the place where the crime was committed and the bleeding malefactor was then paraded through the streets to the execution site.

According to one estimate at least 70 per cent of men and 90 per cent of women of the Elizabethan period could not sign their names

WHAT?Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway signed her name with

an “x”.

Illiteracy was present in the recording of names. More than eighty spellings of Shakespeare’s name have been

recorded, from Shappere to Shaxberd.

WHAT?

Shakespeare was a renowned neologist

WHAT?A neologism is a newly coined word or expression

Shakespeare coined- or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of- 2,035 words.

If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide, then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception.

A particular challenge for audience and performers alike was the practice of putting young male players in female parts. The fear was that spectators would be attracted to both the female character and the boy beneath, thus becoming doubly corrupted.

WHAT?This disdain for female actors was a northern European

tradition. In Spain, France and Italy, women were played by women- a fact that astonished British travellers, who seem often to have been genuinely surprised to find that women could play women as competently onstage as in life.

Shakespeare was routinely guilty of anatopisms, particularly with regard to Italy.

WHAT!An anatopism is, getting one’s geography wrong.

In The Taming of the Shrew he puts a sailmaker in Bergamo, approximately the most landlocked city in the whole of Italy, while in The Tempest and The Two Gentlemen of Verona he has Prospero and Valentine set sail from, respectively, Milan and Verona, even though both cities were a good two days’ travel from salt water.

Henry VIII bequeathed to his royal children a loe of seeing bulls and bears “baited”, that is penned up in a ring or chained to a stake and set upon by fierce dogs

WHAT!The public entertainment helped bear the cost of

keeping the animals.

In a popular variation, an ape was tied to the back of a pony, which was then attacked by the dogs

WHAT!An observer wrote: “To see the animal kicking

amongst the dogs, with the screams of the ape beholding the curs hanging from the ears and neck of the pony is very laughable.

Shakespeare was bullied by a group of playwrights called The University Wits

WHAT!Rehearsing the old rivalry between poets and players, Robert

Greene warned his gentlemen friends Marlowe, Nashe and Peele not to trust those “puppets,” the actors, that “speak from our mouths.” Actors were mere burrs that cleave to the garments of writers. They would be virtually invisible were they not “garnished in our colours”

“Yet trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shakescene in a country”

The Avenue of Film

Anonymous (dir. Ronald Emmerich, 2011)

• Opening scene of Ben Jonson’s comedy deemed seditious.

• 32nd min- Henry V play• 50th min- series of plays.

Project Tasks

• Web Research on the University Wits• Create an 8 Episode Mini-Series set in

Shakespearean London

Series 1- Shakespeare’s arrival in London

Series 2- Rivalry or Respect

until Marlowe’s death• Cross- curriculum focus on Shakespeare’s world-

English, art, history, drama, music and science- for an entire term

III- To Appropriate or not to Appropriate?

‘Shakespeare didn’t scruple to steal plots, dialogue, names and titles- whatever suited his purpose. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare was a wonderful teller of stories so long as someone else had told them first.’

- Bill Bryson

Summary

Of Shakespeare’s 38 plays, only five are thought to be original plots:

-Titus Andronicus (1592)- Love Labour’s Lost (1594-5)- A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595)- The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597-8)- The Tempest (1611)

• Shakespeare used Raphael Holinshed’s, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587) as the principal source for 11 of his plays.

• Approximately nine plays were modelled on Italian works of the past few centuries.

• The Two Gentleman of Verona (1590-1), All’s Well that Ends Well (1604-5) and Cymbeline (1610) were all influenced by Giovanni Boccacio’s, The Decameron.

“Half-Wits”In addition, there are several plays influenced by the

“University Wits”:• As You Like It (1600)- Thomas Lodge’s novel,

Rosalynde(1590), made over as a romantic satire by Shakespeare’s addition of Jacques and Touchstone.

• The Winter’s Tale (1609)- Robert Greene, Pandosto, a romantic ‘novel’ published in 1588 and reprinted in 1607. Shakespeare changed the tone and style of this original, provided a new ending (the statue coming to life) and added Autolycus, Antigonus, Paulina and the rustics.

• It is thought that Christopher Marlowe significantly influenced Shakespeare’s early history plays and Titus Andronicus.

Morality Plays

• Influenced by morality plays which instilled two crucial expectations in their audiences:

1. Drama worth seeing would get at something central to human destiny.

2. It should not only reach the educated elite but also the great mass of ordinary people.

• But Shakespeare learned something else from morality plays; he learned that the boundary between comedy and tragedy is surprisingly porous

• “Shakespeare grasped that the spectacle of human destiny was, in fact, vastly more compelling when it was attached not to generalized abstractions but to particular named people, people realized with an unprecedented intensity of individuation: not Youth but Prince Hal, not Everyman but Othello”

- Greenblatt

Royal Orders• Queen Elizabeth commanded the author to write a play

showing Falstaff in love. In two weeks time, or so it is said, The Merry Wives of Windsor was written, to be first performed on April 23, 1597 at the annual feast to commemorate the founding of the Order of the Garter.

• “Shakespeare constructed Macbeth as a piece of flattery. King James is honoured not for his wisdom or learning or statecraft but for his place in a line of legitimate descent that leads all the way from his noble ancestor in the distant past to the sons that promise an unbroken succession. In order to enhance this point Shakespeare had to twist the historical record”

- Greenblatt

Master of Appropriation

“Greene and his crowd, despite their drunken recklessness and bohemian snobbery, saw something frightening in Shakespeare, a usurper’s knack for displaying as his own what he had plucked from others, an alarming ability to plunder, appropriate and absorb”

Shakespeare understood his world in the ways that we understand our world- his experiences, like ours, were mediated by whatever stories and images were available to him. When he was in a tavern and encountered a loudmouthed soldier who bragged about his daring adventures, Shakespeare saw that soldier through the lens of characters he had read in fiction, and at that same time he adjusted his image of those fictional characters by means of the actual person standing before him.

- Greenblatt

The Making of Macbeth

On November 4, 1605, carrying a watch, a fuse, and tinder, Guy Fawkes intended to put into execution a desperate plot devised by a small group of conspirators, embittered by what they perceived as James’s unwillingness to extend toleration to Roman Catholics...Among those arrested and brought to trial for the Gunpowder Plot was Father Henry Garnet, the head of the clandestine Jesuit mission in England...Convicted of treason, Garnet was dragged on a hurdle to Saint Paul’s Churchyard for execution, his severed head then joining the others displayed on pikes on London Bridge.

On March 22, a false rumour quickly spread that the king had been stabbed with an envenomed knife, some said by English Jesuits, some by Scots in women’s apparel, some by Spaniards and Frenchmen. Gates were locked, soldiers were levied...until the king issued a proclamation insisting he was alive...In Macbeth, Shakespeare seems to have set out to write a play that would function as a collective ritual of reassurance...The staging of the events of eleventh-century Scotland- the treacherous murder of the king, the collapse of order and decency, the long struggle to wrest the realm from the bloody hands of traitors- allowed its seventeenth-century audience to face a symbolic version of this disaster and to witness the triumphant restoration of order.

Porter scene- he imagines that he is the gatekeeper in hell, opening the door to new arrivals. “Here’s an equivocator,” he says of one of these imaginary sinners, “that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator” (2.3.8-11). This treasonous equivocator knocking on hell’s gate is almost certainly an allusion to the recently executed Jesuit Henry Garnet.

The Sources• Shakespeare’s chief source for Macbeth was Raphael Holinshed’s

Chronicles (1578 edition). Holinshed had gone for most of his material to Hector Boece, Scotorum Historiae (1526-27)

• Shakespeare may have used George Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582), a Latin history not translated in Shakespeare’s lifetime, presenting a more complex psychological portrait of the protagonist than in Holinshed.

• Finally, Shakespeare may have used King James I’s Daemonology (1597), John Studley’s early seventeenth-century version of Seneca’s Medea, Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603), and accounts of the Scottish witch trials published around 1590.

• By the time Holinshed found it, the story of Macbeth had become more fiction than fact. The historical Macbeth, who ruled from 1040 to 1057, did take the throne by killing Duncan, but in a civil conflict between two clans contending for the kingship

Alterations

Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1578 edition)

• Duncan is a king with a soft and gentle nature, negligent in punishing his enemies and thereby an unwitting encourager of sedition

• It falls to his cousin, Macbeth, a critic of this soft line, and to Banquo, the Thane of Lochaber, to defend Scotland against her enemies: first against Macdowald (Macdonwald in Shakespeare), with his Irish kerns and gallowglasses, and then against Sueno, King of Norway.

Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606)

• Duncan is no longer an ineffectual king

• Shakespeare fuses these battles into one.

Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles

• Duncan names his eldest but still underage son Malcolm to be Prince of Cumberland and heir to the throne. Macbeth’s resentment at this is understandable, since Scottish law provides that, until the King’s son is of age, the “next of blood unto him”- that is, Macbeth himself, as Duncan’s cousin- should reign.

Shakespeare, Macbeth

• Macbeth can no longer justify his claim to the throne.

Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles

• Banquo is one of many trusted friends with whose support Macbeth slays the King at Inverness or at Bothgowanan (no mention is made of a visit to Macbeth’s castle)

• Macbeth is at first no brutal tyrant, as in Shakespeare. For some ten years he rules well using great liberality and correcting the laxity of his predecessor’s reign.

Shakespeare, Macbeth

• Banquo is no longer partner in a broadly based though secret conspiracy against Duncan. Banquo is, after all, ancestor of James I (at least according to this legendary history), and so his hands must be kept scrupulously clean; King James disapproved of all tyrannicides, whatever the circumstances.

• Macbeth is no longer a just lawgiver

Other Alterations

• The return of Banquo’s ghost to Macbeth’s banqueting table is an added scene

• Macbeth hears the prophecy about Birnam Wood and Macduff from the Weird Sisters, not, as in Holinshed, from some witch.

• Lady Macbeth’s role is considerably enhanced, and her sleepwalking scene is original.

• Shakespeare compresses time, as he usually does.

Another Holinshed Source?• In making some of these alterations, Shakespeare turned to another

story in Holinshed’s chronicle of Scotland: the murder of King Duff by Donwald. King Duff, never suspecting any treachery in Donwald, often spends time at the castle of Forres, where Donwald is captain of the castle.

• On one occasion, Donwald’s wife, bearing great malice toward the King, shows Donwald (who already bears a grudge against Duff) “the means whereby he might soonest accomplish” the murder. The husband and wife ply Duff’s few chamberlains with much to eat and drink. Donwald abhors the act “greatly in heart” but perseveres “through instigation of his wife.” Four of Donwald’s serants actually commit the murder under his instruction. Next morning, Donwald breaks into the King’s chamber and slays the chamberlains, as though believing them guilty. Donwald is so overzealous in his instigations of the murder that many lords begin to suspect him of having done it. For six months afterward, the sun refuses to appear by day and the moon by night

Risk-Taking• “To a king who paled at the sight of sharp steel (fencing phobia), Macbeth

offered the insistent spectacle of a bloody dagger, both a real danger and what Macbeth calls a dagger of the mind. True, the pageant promises the throne to an endless succession of Banquo’s heirs. True as well, the restoration of order in the tragedy’s final moments could be seen as a representation of the order that had been restored to the realm after the Gunpowder Plot: the severed head of Macbeth, carried onstage at the concluding moment by the victorious Macduff, was a reminder of the conspirator’s heads that members of the audience could see every time they walked across London Bridge. Yet Macbeth hardly sits comfortably with the functions of prince-pleasing or popular reassurance. The materials Shakespeare worked with touched off something extremely peculiar in him, something that does not fit the overarching scheme. Shakespeare was a professional risk-taker. He wrote under pressure- judging from its unusual brevity, Macbeth was composed in a very short time- and he went where his imagination took him.”

-Greenblatt

Origins of Othello

Shakespeare’s main source for Othello (1603-4) was the seventh story from the third decade of G.B Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1565). Cinthio was available in French but not in English translation during Shakespeare’s lifetime. The verbal echoes in Shakespeare’s play are usually closer to the Italian original than to Gabriel Chappuy’s French version of 1584. Cinthio’s account may have been based on an actual incident occurring in Venice around 1508 .

Shakespeare’s Additions & Alterations

• Brabantio- he provides Desdemona with a caring and saddened father

• Roderigo is a brilliantly invented character used to reveal Iago’s skill in manipulation.

• Bianca- Shakespeare finds a suggestion for Bianca

• Emilia becomes a more complex figure than the ensign’s wife

• The handkerchief plot

• In his complex portrayal of a consuming and irrational jealousy in Iago, Shakespeare goes far beyond his source, making use as well of the inventive villainy of The Vice in the English late medieval morality play.

• Shakespeare’s ending is more unified, and brings both Othello and Iago to account for the deeds they have committed in the play.

Most importantly, Shakespeare transforms a sensational murder story into a moving

tragedy of love.

IV- Shakespearean Film Appropriations

• Adaptation- like ‘transposition’ implies that only minor particularities of setting idiom, plot or character have been altered and that the essence of the original remains intact

• Appropriation- Shakespeare is moved from one cultural realm or interpretive frame to another acknowledges that by simply changing the context in which Shakespeare’s words appear- without changing the words themselves- we radically alter their meaning.

- Douglas Lanier

From Stage to Screen

• The large majority of Elizabethan plays were performed on a stage that was entirely bare, a challenge that called for the playwright’s maximum linguistic skill

• Nineteenth Century stage adapted itself to a more and more popular audience. Performances aimed at reaching the most credible realism through more and more spectacular means

• Nineteenth Century Shakespeare’s play performances climaxed in stunning visual interpolations and featured sets in three dimensions with real trees, real animals and even water in the form of small lakes or falling rain…There was no way to progress towards greater illusionist realism without going into another mode of presentation, into another medium cinema

– Sarah Hatchuel, Shakespeare from Stage to Screen

Branagh• Branagh’s approach has undoubtedly influenced the

wave of post 1990 Shakespearean films.• New adaptations present readings of the plays

according to two major principles:

1) To film Shakespeare in an accessible way by finding a relationship of immediate support for the story and characters in order to clear away the effect of strangeness produced by Shakespeare’s language.

2) To shoot the plays like cinema films expressing with cinematic means a vision not yet explored

• Baz Luhrmann also followed these two principles.

Shakespearean Film Appropriation Taxonomy

1) Original Elizabethan Language- more or less respect the plot and original text but transform it more or less extensively through cutting and changing the order of the scenes

• William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 1996)

• Hamlet (dir. Michael Almereyda, 2000)• Coriolanus (dir Ralph Fiennes, 2011)

2) Contemporary Lingo- films that respect the plot but use a translated adapted text.

• O (dir. Tim Blake Nelson, 2001)• Men of Respect (dir William Reilly, 1991)• ShakespeaRe-Told (2005)- Macbeth- Much Ado About Nothing- The Taming of the Shrew - A Midsummer Night’s Dream

3) Shakespearean “spin-off” plot-inspired films- framework is inspired by the plot of a play.

• 10 Things I Hate About You (dir. Gil Junger, 1999)• The Street King (dir. James Gavin Bedford, 2003)• She’s the Man (dir. Andy Fickman, 2006)

4) Films that use Shakespeare extracts but whose framework does not follow the plot of any play.

V- Modernising Shakespearean Language

Why has popular culture been so interested in transposing Shakespeare into hip-hop? One obvious answer is that rap offers Shakespeare a hip veneer.. rap and Shakespearian language; both are poetry designed for performance, not the page; both feature language delivered against a strong beat and display a mastery of rhythmic effects; both use what is for mainstream speakers of English a largely non-standard vocabulary dense in allusions; both are self-consciously virtuosic in their wordplay.

- Douglas Lanier

Akala: Hip-Hopwww.hiphopshakespeare.com

Roebucks- a journal/reflection based on a Shakespeare quote

Lysander: Who will not change a raven for a dove? (Act 2, Scene 2, 87)

Macbeth Roebucks

• Fair is foul and foul is fair• Look like the innocent flower,

But be the serpent under it. • A little water clears us of this deed• Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor

player, that struts and frets his hour upon the

stage,And then is heard no more.

VI- Shake-Up Cup

Character ComparisonsTonya Harding- Macbeth or Iago?

• In 1991, Tonya Harding won her first national title and became the first woman to complete a triple axle in competition.

• On January 6, 1994, she earned notoriety when she was involved in the knee clubbing of fellow competitor Nancy Kerrigan at the Olympic trials. Harding pleaded guilty to hindering the investigation into Kerrigan’s attack and was subsequently banned from competing in the U.S for life.

Year 9- Macbeth In groups of 4 or 5, students will select one of

the allocated Macbeth scenes to appropriate into a modern text using contemporary language.

• Act 1 Scene 3- Witches’ prophecies• Act 2 Scene 3- Duncan is found murdered• Act 3 Scene 4- Banquo’s ghost• Act 5 Scenes 3 & 5 or Act 5 Scenes 5 & 7

Macbeth’s response to Lady Macbeth’s death

• The task requires students to submit a written transcript, which includes the script and justification of the appropriation (explaining the choice setting and characters) and perform the appropriation to their English class.

• The best performance from each class will advance to the Shake-Up Cup Final to be performed in front of the entire year group.

FinalistsAppropriation settings included:• Lawyers, street scene (Witches’ prophecies)• Australian Rugby club (Witches’ prophecies)• Western Sydney Wanderers game (Witches’ prophecies)• US Army- War in Iraq (Duncan is murdered)• Macbeth actors, play within a play (Duncan is murdered)• Famous actors at Starbucks (Witches’ prophecies)• Australian Schoolboys Soccer Team (Duncan is

murdered)• The Lion King, the Elephant Grave Yard ( Witches’

prophecies)

Year 10- Romeo and Juliet

In groups of 4 or 5, students will select one of the allocated Romeo and Juliet scenes to appropriate into a modern text using contemporary language.

• Act 1 Scene 1- Third Civil Brawl• Act 1 Scene 4- Queen Mab• Act 1 Scene 5- The lovers meet• Act 3 Scene 1- Mercutio and Tybalt die• Act 3 Scene 5- Juliet’s disobedience

Finalists

Appropriation settings included:• Cricket Pitch (Mercutio & Tybalt die)• Gold Coast “Schoolies” (Queen Mab)• Monaco, group rivals- MI6 vs KGB (Mercutio & Tybalt

die)• Soccer Game (Civil Brawl)• Music dept vs Drama dept (Civil Brawl)• Parliament House (Mercutio & Tybalt die)• Gangland Kings Cross (Mercutio & Tybalt die)• Priest disloyalty (Juliet’s Disobedience)

VII- Units of Study

Stage 4• A Midsummer Night’s Dream: What is drama?

“How Not to Act” by The Popular Mechanics.

- Using the film A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. Michael Hoffman, 1999) and excerpts comparing the lovers’ scenes with the popular mechanics.

• Much Ado About Nothing: Introduction to Appropriation comparing Branagh’s film to ShakespeaRe-Told.

Stage 5• Appropriation focused Shake-Up Cup using

Macbeth or Othello• Language focused Shake-Up Cup using

Romeo and Julliet- Assessment 1: Reading Task (HSC style)- Assessment 2: Group Appropriation

Performance

ConclusionThe answer to the question

“Why Shakespeare?” must be

“Who else is there?”

We keep returning to Shakespeare because we need him; no one else gives us so much

of the world most of us take to be fact – Harold Bloom