Strategies
The students will ultimately create portraits of a particular Shakespearean character. First, they will do research on several characters from Shakespeare in order to be able to begin to draw conclusions about the character's identity. In the second part of the lesson, we will look at the history of portraiture, focusing in on portraits from the Tudor periods. The third part of the lesson will enable the students to have the opportunity to apply the knowledge that they have learned: they will "stage" a self-portrait by dressing and posing as their selected character from Shakespeare. By "staging" a portrait, I want the students to be able to apply their ideas about their character's identity, using the information that they have learned about the character, Tudor portraits, and symbolism in art.
From this staging of their chosen character, the students will create an oil pastel drawing. Their final portrait should have the iconography that enables others to "read" their character. After the students have made the artistic decisions about their own portrait and have finished it, I will use, as closure to the unit, an aesthetic and art criticism activity that will focus on how other artists, since the time of Shakespeare, have created art that uses Shakespeare as the subject matter. We will look at these examples of Shakespearean art—in addition to their art historical context—in terms of how successfully the students feel that the artist has captured the character or the scene depicted. We will look at how mood, technique, composition, pose, setting, expression and costume either contribute to or detract from what the students perceive to be the essence of the character or the play. I feel this unit will be appealing to all of the students as they will have an open-ended problem to solve and will need to think creatively to solve it.
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