'King Lear' Quizlet 5
Act 5: Quizlet flashcards for recalling and thinking about quotations.
Read MorePatrick Page on Iago
Patrick Page goes deep into Iago’s character in this fascinating talk for Red Bull Theatre’s Chicago 2020 project.
Read MoreUsing a Visualiser in the English Classroom
Visualisers have been around a while. They’re making a comeback in the ‘pandemic classroom’. Here are some ideas for English teachers.
Read More'King Lear' Quizlet 4
Act 4: Quizlet flashcards for recalling and thinking about quotations.
Read More'King Lear' Quizlet 3
A Quizlet of quotation flashcards for Act 3: for prompting thinking, and retrieval practice.
Read More'King Lear': the end
The famously bleak ending of King Lear could so easily have been different. In fact, so different it could have been a comedy, a knife-edge that makes it all the more cheerless, dark and deadly.
Read MoreRunning the Room
Tom Bennett’s new book Running the Room: the teacher’s guide to behaviour is a rich source of advice on the most fundamental thing for all learning. If behaviour is poor in a classroom, all pupils’ learning suffers.
Read More'King Lear': blindness and seeing
The central metaphor of King Lear is blindness and seeing: this essay explores that idea.
Read More'King Lear': Albany and Kent
Kent and Albany are lesser characters in King Lear, but each plays an important part, giving us insights into key ideas of the play.
Read More'King Lear' Quizlet 2
Act 2: Quizlet flashcards for recalling and thinking about quotations.
Read MoreWhy the Moon Travels
Oein DeBhairduin’s collection Why the Moon Travels is a trove of fresh stories and reflections from a tradition hardly present in Irish literature so far.
Read MoreJames Shapiro on 'King Lear'
James Shapiro’s outstanding 1606: Shakespeare and the year of Lear, is a great resource for teachers of the play, as well as of the other two plays Shakespeare wrote in that extraordinary period, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Here are some notes that refer to Lear, especially from the chapter ‘Leir to Lear’, in which Shapiro examines how Shakespeare reshaped the main source text, King Leir.
Read More'King Lear': cheerless, dark and deadly
This essay examines the utter bleakness of King Lear, a play in which there is no mitigation of darkness, no religious consolation.
Read More'King Lear': the opening scene
Shakespeare doesn’t waste time at the starts of his great tragedies; in fact, all four open disconcertingly with a sense of confusion and un-ease. In King Lear again we are pitched straight into the middle of a rather flustered conversation, which hits on a central theme of this play – division and disorder.
Read More'King Lear' Quizlet Act 1
Quizlet of quotations from Act 1 of King Lear to use for revision and retrieval practice.
Read MoreIntimations
Zadie Smith’s new book is both slight and capacious. Intimations: six essays is just 81 pages long in small format paperback, but into these pages Smith packs an enormous amount.
Read MoreTeaching Walkthrus
Teaching Walkthrus is a stimulating resource: practical ideas are laid down with great precision. It will help a lot of teachers to clarify their practice.
Read MoreThe Fortnight in September
The constant undertow of R.C. Sherriff’s 1931 novel The Fortnight in September is time. The two significant words in the title are about time, and it colours everything that follows, but this is not a melancholic story.
Read MoreJames Shapiro on Manifest Destiny
James Shapiro is a superb analyst of Shakespeare. In a recent podcast interview by Peter Moore from Travels from Time he concentrates on one year, 1845 (of course, Shapiro has written book-length studies of 1599 and 1606), including two extraordinary stories: Ulysses S. Grant’s casting as Desdemona and Charlotte Cushman’s performance as Romeo.
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