Students will examine Hamlet 4.5 through a variety of lenses: performance, social media, and writing. Students will analyze how social media uses urgency and emotional appeals to develop a story. Students will create short, powerful messages within a 140 character limit. Students will discover how news becomes universal by using targeted key words (hashtags).

Students will analyze ambiguity in Shakespeare's meter using imperfect iambic pentameter lines from Julius Caesar 1.2.1-71. Students will evaluate how the lines reveal character motivation.

Raphael Holinshed published his Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande in 1577. The second edition, published in 1587, was Shakespeare's primary reference work for most of his histories and many of his other plays, including Macbeth. The woodcut image appears only in the 1577 edition—it is the only image in the edition that is not repeated elsewhere in the book. The other excerpts are taken from the 1587 edition.

Students will examine primary source materials on history and the supernatural which relate to Julius Caesar. By acting out the scene based on different historical understandings, they will identify facts, theories and similarities in the sources which help explain characters' motivations, decisions, and reactions.

A brief history of the life of William Shakespeare given by the experts at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Includes sections on his early life, his successful years in London, and his enduring legacy.

In this activity, you and your students will explore Elizabethan stage practices as the rustic yet enthusiastic amateur actors from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. While it's not necessary to teach Shakespeare's biography while studying his plays, sometimes opportunities to explore his world through his own eyes present themselves in his text. Students' new insights into the text will provide them with a deeper appreciation for Shakespeare’s world. This activity will take one or two class periods.

Students will connect stage directions/movements to textual evidence. Students will analyze a scene and then create a performance that contains appropriate movement and tone.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "The Taming of the Shrew" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "The Tempest" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

Students will critique Shakespeare's Macbeth text in terms of plot, themes, character motivation, and character development through a comparative analysis with Holinshed's 1577 book, The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Hamlet" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of King Lear to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Macbeth" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Othello" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Romeo and Juliet" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Twelfth Night" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

Students will create "silent scenes" of Shakespeare's Julis Caesar rejecting and then accepting the crown, in order to better understand the story and its significance.