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Hi there, the focus of these sessions is going to be working with Shakespeare

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and getting to know Shakespeare's time, Shakespeare's work

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and exploring a few mysteries

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and we'll look at the relevance of Shakespeare in modern day society in the 21st century.

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The first focus will be on life in Elizabethan England

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because obviously Shakespeare was a contemporary of of the Ranta's and so

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the students should have some idea of what life was like back then and this

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page the students can click on different links for example fashion or weddings

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for example and it's quite an interesting site so once they've

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to establish that they know a bit more about Elizabethan England, we'll move on to Shakespeare.

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And this timeline, I quite like the way it's been presented. It's very user-friendly. So

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they'll look at that a bit. But I'm going to focus on a couple of mysteries that go

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into Shakespeare's life. Firstly, Shakespeare's lost years because in a period of about four

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years Shakespeare disappeared off the face of the earth and people don't really know what happened

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to him. And what the students will have to do is to investigate a little bit and come up with

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different theories of what they think happened to Shakespeare. And here as you can see there

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are different links. So the idea is that students will go to the links and come up with what

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I hope will be interesting but also realistic theories of what could have happened to Shakespeare

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in these years. And the following mystery relating to Shakespeare's life is, was Shakespeare

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really Shakespeare? Did Shakespeare really exist as a playwright? Or was he one of the

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following authors using Shakespeare as a pseudonym. Edward de Vere, Sir Francis Bacon, and so

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on and so on. So the idea is that students will investigate and come up with their own

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theory of whether Shakespeare was really Shakespeare or whether he was actually somebody else using

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Shakespeare as a pseudonym. The second half of the focus on Shakespeare will be to look

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at Shakespeare's relevance for modern-day 21st century and I'll focus on two areas.

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One is the language Shakespeare used, the language Shakespeare invented, if it still

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has relevance. And this short video shows that it is indeed relevant and hopefully students

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can think of more examples. And another one thinking about Shakespeare's works. So I've

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looked at Shakespeare's language and I've looked at Shakespeare's work. And maybe the

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students will say, oh, well, it's Shakespeare, right? And they can investigate here. I was

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looking at Romeo and Juliet. So it's a good website which gives you all Shakespeare's

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work so you can access all the different scenes and all those plays so that students can click

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on it and investigate a little bit the complete works of Shakespeare. And now looking towards

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the 21st century, what I'd want the students to do is to find modern day examples of Shakespeare's

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in cinema and modern day adaptations. And the students will find that there's abundance

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of work and also to be able to relate the modern-day film versions back to the

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original play. And the idea about all this activity relating to

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Shakespeare is that not only will they get to know more about Elizabethan England

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but they'll get to know more about Shakespeare, the man, Shakespeare, his work

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and most importantly the relevance that Shakespeare has for us in the 21st century.