Much Ado About Nothing: A teacher's guide

Abstract:

This teacher’s guide, Much Ado About Nothing: Word! is intended to help guide students through this particular thicket of playful language that Shakespeare employs here. It has been posited that language is the primary tool through which we construct our own reality, and the characters are certainly lying, pretending, manipulating, and delighting all through the use of words in order to get what they want. An easy way to understand even complicated language such as this is to see language as action – as powerful and with as palpable an effect as physical movement.
An actor is always using the text to look for “why”. Why does a character do what he does, and how does the language give us clues? For an actor, each sentence a character utters is to advance the character’s own concept of who they are and what they want. For a writer, arguably each sentence a character utters is to express what the writer would like the audience to know about the character. Cal Shakes provides a fresh approach to make these old words come alive again in the context of our modern lives.

Subject:

Arts

Grade Level:

Primary, Secondary

Collection:

Individual Authors