WHAT SHAKESPEARE CHARACTER SHOULD YOU PLAY?
My friend has been reading Tales From Shakespeare aloud to her classes!
(These are ten-to-twelve-year-olds, and like most groups of kids that age, they run the gamut from won’t-read-anything-but-the-funnies-page to attempting-Hamlet-on-their-own.)
In honor of Shakespeare’s Birthday and also the insane amount of remote-teaching stress everyone is under, I made some very silly, more-or-less age appropriate quizzes.
(Should I have included Measure For Measure? Could I have spared myself that excruciating search for euphemisms with a nervous first year teacher? GOOD QUESTIONS.)
Again, these are for a group of high energy kiddos, and they are very silly, but I stayed up all night working on them, damn it, and they have links and pictures and shiny stuff, so I wanted to share with my Shakespeeps.
WHAT SHAKESPEARIAN HERO SHOULD YOU PLAY?
WAIT! Both boys and girls should take this quiz. In Shakespeare’s day, it was illegal for women to act on stage. But his plays are full of women who dress up as men to have adventures or save themselves from danger. There are also lots of books and movies about women who disguise themselves as men to be Elizabethan actors, and even girls pretending to be boys pretending to be girls! Today it is common to cast both men and women as Shakespeare’s characters. Many famous actresses have played roles like Hamlet, King Lear, and Prince Hal.
WHAT SHAKESPEARIAN HEROINE SHOULD YOU PLAY?
WAIT! Both boys and girls should take this quiz. In Shakespeare’s day, all of the women’s parts were played by boys, because it was illegal for women to be professional actors. If you were a young man who wanted to be a famous actor, you had to be good at playing romantic ingenues or regal queens! Today it is common to cast both men and women as Shakespeare’s characters. Sometimes you will even see plays done in “original practice,” meaning they try to make it as close as possible to how it would have been in the 16th century, including with men as all the women.