The Shakespeare characters
Running concurrently with my unit, the English teacher will be doing a unit on Romeo and Juliet. In her class the students will be introduced to the language of Shakespeare, and will view two film versions of the play, as well as reading the play in its entirety. As I want to model for the students the thought processes I will be expecting them to use, and as the students will become very familiar with Romeo and Juliet and the characters in it, I will be using characters from this play as my models.
I will introduce the students to three other plays by Shakespeare: Macbeth, Othello, and The Taming of the Shrew. After going over the narratives of each play, the students will select one character from one of the plays that appeals to them and that they would like to explore further. The characters from which they will be able to choose are:
*Macbeth
Macbeth is the main character who begins as a loyal supporter of King Duncan and ends up killing Duncan so that he, Macbeth, will become king. To maintain being king and to cover up the murder, he ends up killing more before he gets his comeuppance.
*Lady Macbeth
Lady Macbeth is an ambitious, powerful woman who encourages her husband to murder Duncan and eventually cracks under the pressure and kills herself.
*Macduff
From the beginning he suspected Macbeth of the murder. He is honorable and loyal, but he flees to England to avoid Macbeth, leaving his wife and son to be murdered by Macbeth's men.
*Othello
This black Moor is a well-respected military officer. He desperately loves his wife, Desdemona, whom he kills in jealousy, having been influenced by Iago's web of lies.
*Desdemona
Othello's wife is beautiful, kind, intelligent and loyal. Despite Othello's untrue allegations, she continues to love and defend him.
*Iago
Here is a truly malevolent character who manipulates and lies to everyone to achieve his goal, the destruction of Othello. He is very cunning and able to pretend to be Othello's friend while he is plotting and conniving behind this façade.
*Katherina
Better known as Kate, she is a smart, fiercely independent, hot-tempered young lady who does exactly what she wants. She meets her match in Petruchio, whom she eventually marries but with whom there are tremendous clashes.
*Petruchio
Headstrong and eccentric, Petruchio is enticed by Kate's looks, spirit and above all, inheritance. He determines to wed and "tame" her.
*Bianca
Bianca is Kate's younger sister who appears to be a submissive, docile young lady who manages to get her way, but in a less obvious way than Kate.
Once the students have selected the character that they wish to explore, I will provide them with several graphic organizers to be used in conjunction with their reading of their selected play. While reading the play, they will be finding any physical description or any implied physical traits and selecting adjectives that they feel describe their character. They will also be focusing on extracting from the text what the character says and does and what other characters say about him or her. After practicing these close reading skills, we will use the same skills, close observation and analysis, to view portraiture.
We will begin by looking at the history of portraiture, exploring the context in which changes in portraiture occurred. Next, we will focus on Tudor portraits, which, besides being the visual art of Shakespeare's time, are a wonderful type of portrait to use for this unit because they are highly iconographical and are deliberate, conscious depictions of identity in terms of class status.
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