These tutorials focusing on "Shakespeare in Context" present viewers with background and contextual material to particular plays and a series of challenges based on that material.
"Focus on 'Henry V'" is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, digital Open Educational Resource co-authored and co-produced by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates on the innovative digital publishing platform Scalar. Chapters include guides to early printed editions, sources, and performance and cinematic histories of the play, as well as teaching resources and in-depth case-studies of particular scenes. All chapters include rich multimedia and audio recordings of body text and image captions. In addition to a traditional Table of Contents, the digital book allows users to navigate the materials through multiple pathways and visualizations. In this way the book offers not only a cutting-edge, renewable OER for college and K-12 teachers but also a model for maximizing the affordances of the digital medium.
Many books and university courses, trying to compensate for a history of the neglect or mistrust of plays as performance, use the phrase "from page to stage" to think about the dramatic possibilities of their texts. In fact, for the early modern theatre, the phrase needs to be the other way around--from stage to page. Plays were performances first, and only later, and then only sometimes, books. This section of Great Writers gathers resources--podcasts, eBooks, websites--to explore the two interconnected lives of the early modern play--as an event in time and space on the stage of the Globe or Blackfriars theatre, and as a material printed object, on sale to Elizabethan and Jacobean readers in the booksellers' quarter around St Paul's Churchyard.
This section brings together resources from the across the Great Writers Inspire site to illustrate how these can be used as a starting point for exploration of or classroom discussion about genre. The 'Questions of Genre' essay introduces a series of topics and questions and gives examples of resources to explore. It is aimed at teachers, students and anyone who is interested in literature who wants to put text into context and be inspired by Great Writers.
This collection contains essays, eBooks and other material related to or created during the time of reformation and reform in England.
The Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres specialized in new plays which had relatively few performances over a period of a few weeks. There was thus a huge appetite for fresh writing, and hundreds of plays, many now lost, were produced, often collaboratively. In this section of Great Writers Inspire some of these non-Shakespearean plays and authors are introduced through a combination of podcasts, eBooks and supporting materials.
From Dickens to Shakespeare, from Chaucer to Kipling and from Austen to Blake, this significant collection contains inspirational short talks freely available to the public and the education community worldwide. This series is aimed primarily at first year undergraduates but will be of interest to school students preparing for university and anyone who would like to know more about the world's great writers. The talks were produced as part of the Great Writers Inspire Project which makes a significant body of material freely available on the subject of great works of literature and their authors.
ePub version of text The First Part of Henry the Fourth, with the Life and Death of Henry Sirnamed Hot-Spvrre by William Shakepeare, 1564-1616.
ePub version of text The Life of Henry the Fift by William Shakepeare, 1564-1616.
ePub version of text The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight by William Shakepeare, 1564-1616.
ePub version of text The first Part of Henry the Sixt by William Shakepeare, 1564-1616.
ePub version of text The third Part of Henry the Sixt, with the death of the Duke of Yorke by William Shakepeare, 1564-1616.
ePub version of text The second Part of Henry the Sixt, with the death of the Good Duke Hvmfrey by William Shakepeare, 1564-1616.
Let the power of imagination and inference serve as a ńtime machineî to bring Benjamin Franklin into the classroom! History and science come to life in a dialogue with Franklin the inventor, developed through lesson activities that incorporate research, imagination, writing, visual arts, and drama.
It is a project designed to improve the attention skills of pre-school students.The project was implemented on the eTwinning Platform. Turkey and Poland is a project partner.(Be Careful Project)https://spark.adobe.com/page/bdjdnu8UNr7Zz/
This course is a study of the history of theater art and practice from its origins to the modern period, including its roles in non-western cultures. Special attention is given to the relationship between the literary and performative dimensions of drama, and the relationship between drama and its cultural context.
Drama combines the literary arts of storytelling and poetry with the world of live performance. As a form of ritual as well as entertainment, drama has served to unite communities and challenge social norms, to vitalize and disturb its audiences. In order to understand this rich art form more fully, we will study and discuss a sampling of plays that exemplify different kinds of dramatic structure; class members will also participate in, attend, and review dramatic performances.
Lecture notes, internet links and vocabulary lists for a core curriculum Introduction to Theatre college level course.
This is a module framework. It can be viewed online or downloaded as a zip file.
As taught in Autumn Semester 2010.
This module is designed to provide an introduction to the analysis and performance of drama. It has three main aims:
1) To provide an introduction to the analysis of drama;
2) To give a taste of the wide range of performance convention in history, from Ancient Greek tragedy to nineteenth-century naturalism;
3) To foreground drama as a performance medium rather than a form of literature.
At Nottingham, we approach drama as a performance medium: an event within a specific time, space and locale, in which real people and objects are presented to other people in real, shared space. It is always a social event, so we learn to think about the people who do the performing, the place they perform in, and the people they perform to. Written texts may be looked at as much for information about the modes and places of performance as for what they represent or ‘say’. It is to be understood that the space itself and the mode of performing in it create meaning as much as do pre-scripted words.
We emphasise the fact that performance analysis is not literary criticism, and that play scripts should not be read simply as texts. The interpretation and analysis of drama requires different skills. The seminars on the module will provide opportunities for you to develop these skills yourself, while the lectures are designed to provide you with the kind of information necessary for an analysis of performance as an event in real historical time and space.
The module also aims to introduce a range of historical examples of theatre practice, drawn from several different moments in theatre history. The lectures will explore what we know about the performance conventions of Greek tragedy, medieval religious plays, Shakespeare's plays and Restoration/Augustan comedy, turning lastly to the arrival of naturalism as an approach to performance in the late nineteenth century.
Finally, we believe that a seminal way of learning to understand how theatre works is getting involved in performance itself. The workshops held in the Autumn semester provide structured opportunities to discuss the kind of decisions that are taken when a script is realised on stage and to experience the practical consequences of a theatre director’s decision making. More information on the format of workshops is provided below.
Suitable for study at undergraduate level 1.
Dr James Moran, School of English Studies.
Dr Moran's research is primarily concerned with modern drama. His monograph Staging the Easter Rising (2005) explores the connections between literature and politics, and was reviewed as 'a brave, confident book' in the Times Literary Supplement and as a 'terrific read' in the Irish Times. He also edited Four Irish Rebel Plays (2007), a volume described as 'fascinating' by Books Ireland and by Studies in Theatre and Performance. His latest monograph, Irish Birmingham: A History (2010), has been published by Liverpool University Press and reviewed as follows in the Irish Times: 'Even if you have no ties with Birmingham, if you are interested in culture or history, you'll enjoy Irish Birmingham: A History...Moran is a splendid writer, and a very engaging one'.
Dr Moran is currently Head of Drama at the University of Nottingham.
ePub version of text The life and death of King Iohn by William Shakepeare, 1564-1616.