Listen to a teacher explaining the reason for Macbeth being her favorite Shakespeare play to teach
A teacher explains why Macbeth is her favourite Shakespeare play to teach.
Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library; CC-BY-SA 4.0 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.At the feast of the Phaeacians, Odysseus relates the story of his blinding of Polyphemus, the Cyclops.
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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.What do a frog and a poet have in common? Ask Robert Frost.
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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Odysseus convinces Penelope that he is her husband by knowing a particular and secret detail of the construction of their bed.
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Courtesy of the British Film InstitutePuck putting “a girdle round about the earth” to gather the love-in-idleness flower in the 1909 silent film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. This scene occurs in Act II, scene 1, of Shakespeare's play.
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Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library; CC-BY-SA 4.0 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)Learn how Abraham Lincoln's studying of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible helped him to compose perhaps the best-remembered address in American history.
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Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library; CC-BY-SA 4.0 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)How a teacher uses Twitter to teach Shakespeare.
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Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library; CC-BY-SA 4.0 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)A look at an illustrated manuscript by Ralph Brooke, a herald in the English College of Arms in the 1590s. During that period, the college granted coats of arms to a prominent fishmonger and to William Shakespeare, but Brooke considered both applicants unworthy.
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Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING] MELANIE WHITELEY: My favorite play to teach is Macbeth. I love Macbeth particularly because the students really get into the supernatural and the blood and guts and gore and the relationships that are there. And even though it's taking place in Scotland all this time ago, they really get into how this can kind of relate to their own life. Another thing about Macbeth is that there's so many different film versions that are available that you can kind of take apart and look at and then have students construct their own performance based on the words of what the Bard actually wrote, what Shakespeare actually wrote.
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