Creating Choral Work

Performance Option 3: Creating Choral Work Using Themed Pieces.

Materials: Selected Shakespearean text(s).
Grade: K-12
Goal(s): To explore a topic or theme through many works and words of Shakespeare.

This resource is not so much an ACTivity as it is a compass to point you toward other ways of performing Shakespearean text beyond scenes and monologues. One way of developing a performance of Shakespeare for an audience is to work from a theme. Here are some themes that appear in many of Shakespeare's plays:

Nautical/Ocean/Shipwrecks
Love
Jealousy
War/Politics
Parents
Death
Friendship
Water/Fire/Earth
Natural Elements/Nature
Battle of the Sexes
Royalty
Magic
England
God/Spirituality
Madness
Monsters/Villains

A variety of texts can be collected from different plays and sonnets then weaved together. Such a performance gives both the actors and their audience a unique opportunity to hear how Shakespeare wrote on a subject in different ways. The ACTivities in Stage 3: Creating Characters, Learning Language and Taking the Spotlight are all designed to help explore and create Shakespeare's text into performance opportunities.

Once you have identified a theme, an easy way to gather text is by using the Shakespeare Lexicon (Alexander Schmidt; Dover Publications; ISBN: 0-486-22726-X and 0-486-22727-8). This two-volume set locates and defines every word that Shakespeare wrote.

Here are some other reference books that might be helpful in discovering themes to explore:
A Dictionary of Quotations from Shakespeare; Miner and Rawson; ISBN: 0-452-01127-2
Shakespeare Set Free; Peggy O'Brien; The Folger Library;(this is a series); ISBN: 0-671-76046-7
Something Rich and Strange; Gina Pollinger; Kingfisher; ISBN: 1-85697-597-5
Cliff Notes can also be very helpful.

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