"Шекспир или не Шекспир?"

Lesson Plan

                                               Topic:  Shakespeare or not Shakespeare?

Aim:

- to learn about Shakespeare and his contemporaries

- to practice reading and auding skills

- to develop speaking skills

Age: 12-13 year-old students

Time: 40 minutes

Material:

Reading texts.

Internet resources:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osSH0jBaFow

              http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/short-stories/william-shakespeare

  Task 1 – Try to guess who we are going to speak about. (Power Point Presentation)

1.       No one knows what he looked like.

2.       No one knows his actual date of birth.

3.       He was the third of eight children in his family.

4.       He was born during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

5.       He introduced such words as lonely, gossip, champion, bedroom, fashionable and some others.

6.       He introduced dozens of well-known phrases.

7.       At the age of 18 he had to marry a woman 8 years older than himself.

8.       He had 3 children.

9.       In his will there is not a word about his works.

10.   His writing is the second most quoted after the Bible.

11.   He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Today we are going to speak about Shakespeare but in an unusual way. You see, there are a lot of uncertain facts in his biography that is why some people doubt if he really existed.  So, paraphrasing his famous “To be or not to be?” we get the topic of our lesson – “Shakespeare or not Shakespeare?”  Now you will see a short extract from a TV program “The Greatest Show on the Earth”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osSH0jBaFow

(1.05-2.05. min) Well, we are not going to speak about all 64 candidates, we shall speak only about five of them. On your tables there is some information about these people.

Task 2 – Work in pairs. Read the texts to yourself than one of you will prove that it was you who wrote all those works of fiction and the other will prove that it is not so.

Thank you, but there are some more facts that prove that it was Shakespeare who wrote all these works.

-          All these people were rich; they were philosophers and aristocrats and didn’t know theatrical life as well as Shakespeare did.

-          He wrote his plays for a certain company. Every part was written for a definite actor, the number of main characters depended on the number of actors in the company. There were only about 16 actors and Shakespeare wrote his plays so that they could change their clothes.

-          He also knew that actors playing the main parts were tired. That is why he lined up the action so that Othello, Hamlet, Romeo didn’t appeared in every scene.

-          He also thought about the audience. After dramatic scenes fools appeared on the stage.

-          And if you ask why most of Shakespeare’s  works  were not published during his life I can answer that his plays were not written for publishing or reading, they were written for the scene.

-          In those times very few people knew the names of playwrights, no one called them before the curtains even after “Hamlet” or “King Lear”.

Task 3. Now I want you to watch a short cartoon about Shakespeare. Your task is to watch it and answer the questions about his theatre.

 http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/short-stories/william-shakespeare

And now answer my questions:

1.       When was the globe theatre opened?

2.       What shape did the theatre have?

3.       How many people could watch the performance?

4.       Could the audience shout, clap or laugh during the performance?

5.       Who created special noises to make the plays more exciting?

6.       Did women act in Shakespeare’s time?

7.       Who played all the parts?

Answers:

1.       In 1599.

2.       A round shape.

3.       3 000.

4.       Yes, they could.

5.       Musicians.

6.       No, they didn’t.

7.       Men and boys.

At the beginning of our lesson you were told that he introduced dozens of well-known phrases.

Task 4. Let us see how well you know them. Look at this table. You are to match the beginning of the phrase with its end.  (Worksheet 1)

          Answers: 1-f; 2-a; 3-h; 4-b; 5-g; 6-c; 7-e; 8-d; 9-j;10-i.

Task 5. Besides all these phrases there are some idioms that belong to Shakespeare. Look through these idioms and choose the best one for the following situation: (Worksheet 1)

Answers: 1-a; 2-e; 3-f; 4-b; 5-g; 6-c; 7-d.

 Well done, pupils. Thanks for cooperation.

Reflection

 Now I want you to finish these sentences:

-          I knew that ……

-          I didn’t know that…..

-          I was surprised to know that……

Well, in conclusion I would like to say that there have been and will always be people who doubt        “Shakespeare or not Shakespeare”, but I want to say that the crucial thing is that it was a HUMAN BEING who created all these goddess works of arts.