January 19-20, 2016
Common Assessment #1

A little background.

William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare’s influence extends from theatre and literature to presentday movies, Western philosophy, and the English language itself. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the history of the English language, and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. Shakespeare transformed European theatre by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through innovation in characterization, plot, language and genre. Shakespeare's writings have also impacted a large number of notable novelists and poets over the years, including
Herman Melville and Charles Dickens, and continue to influence new authors even today. Shakespeare is the most quoted writer in the history of the Englishspeaking world after the various writers of the Bible; many of his quotations and neologisms have passed into everyday usage in English and other languages.

10 Reasons Why William
Shakespeare is awesome.
1. HE GAVE US A LOT OF NEW WORDS
Just say some words real quick and you’ll probably say one he coined – nearly 10% of his 20,000-word vocabulary was new to his audiences. You may consider yourself quite fashionable or softhearted. You may consider this post to be lackluster. But you couldn’t consider any of those things to be those ways if
Shakespeare hadn’t made up the words for you.

10 Reasons Why William
Shakespeare is awesome.
2. HE INSPIRED AN ASSASSIN
On November 25, 1864, actor John Wilkes Booth starred as Marc Antony alongside his brothers, Edwin as Brutus and Junius, Jr. as Cassius, in a one-night benefit performance of Julius Caesar at New York City’s Winter
Garden Theatre — incidentally raising money to place a statue of
Shakespeare on Central Park’s Literary Walk. Five months later, on April
14, 1865, JWB would put on a more impactful performance at
Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC, as a real-life Brutus, assassinating the leader of a nation.

10 Reasons Why William
Shakespeare is awesome.
3. HE INADVERTENTLY CAUSED A PIGEON PROBLEM
His statue in Central Park is covered in pigeon droppings, and strangely it's kind of his fault. (Yes, the same statue for which the Booth brothers’ benefit raised the funds). It's hard to believe that the veritable starling infestation of New York City came as the direct result of an innocent bird-lovin’, Bard-lovin’ pharmaceutical manufacturer named Eugene Schieffelin but, alas, ‘tis true.
In March of 1860, Schieffelin released a mere sixty starlings into the Central Park air as a part of his effort to introduce every bird mentioned in Shakespeare to North
America. Scientists estimate that the descendants of this and another small
1891 Schiefflin-released flock now number in the area of 200 million.

10 Reasons Why William
Shakespeare is awesome.
4. HE NAMED A LOT OF BABIES
Simpson, Biel and Rabbit, just to name a few. The name
“Jessica” first appears in Shakespeare. The original
Jessica was Shylock’s daughter in The Merchant of
Venice.

10 Reasons Why William
Shakespeare is awesome.
5. HE CLEARED THE PATH FOR FREUD
Shakespeare thought sexual repression was for the birds. His plays are bawdier than anything the Farrely Brothers have devised and, while his own rowdy Globe Theatre crowds ate it up
(they were all drunk anyway), future generations found it necessary to censor the Bard substantially. Bell’s Shakespeare from 1773, the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays as they were performed on the English stage, contained only 2/3 of the original material.

10 Reasons Why William
Shakespeare is awesome.
6. HE HELPED US UNDERSTAND TEEN ANGST
Those who want to see Romeo and Juliet as the embodiments of purity and love, like 18th-century English playwright David Garrick, are met with an imposing editorial task. Garrick’s first cut was the elimination of the character of Rosaline, the source of Romeo’s heartsickness at the play’s outset (she’s the one making his “sad hours seem long” in Act I, Scene 1) and one of many examples of the young man’s rash and impetuous teenage behavior. Apparently, people enjoyed the wishful notion of the purity and sensibility of teenage love, Garrick’s edited version of the play survived, unchanged, for over a hundred years.

10 Reasons Why William
Shakespeare is awesome.
7. HE INVIGORATED NAZIS AND ANTI-NAZIS ALIKE
While it's difficult to categorize Shakespearean politics, it's easy to find justification of one’s own prejudices and beliefs in the Shakespeare canon. Many groups and movements have sought to claim him as their own. Shortly after
Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the Nazi Party issued a pamphlet entitled Shakespeare – A Germanic Writer. Three years later, during the height of
Hitler's rule, there were more performances of Shakespeare’s works in Germany than the rest of the world combined.
But those opposed to Hitler’s ideals could also find support in Shakespeare’s works, particularly in Shylock’s well-known speech from The Merchant of Venice.

10 Reasons Why William
Shakespeare is awesome.
8. HE RAISED QUESTIONS ABOUT RACE AND
PREJUDICE
Just ask Paul Robeson - African-American actor, athlete, activist, and all-around rock star who, in 1943, played the role of Othello on Broadway. To this day, that show’s run of 296 shows is the longest ever for a Shakespeare play on Broadway.

10 Reasons Why William
Shakespeare is awesome.
9. HE TICKED OFF TOLSTOY
Big time. The works of the very-bearded Russian great aside, Shakespeare’s literary influence is immeasurable. Dickens and Keats credited nobody more. Eliot claimed that the modern world can essentially be divided into two categories: those things influenced by Shakespeare and those influenced by Dante. William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, Vladimir Nabokov, and David Foster
Wallace each titled one of their works directly from a line in Shakespeare.
But perhaps the influence Shakespeare had on Tolstoy’s writing was even more profound, since
Tolstoy wrote a whole book about his disdain for the Bard. Tolstoy on Shakespeare reveals, unequivocally, that Tolstoy did not merely lack delight in Shakespeare’s work, he derived from it,
“irresistible repulsion and tedium” and found the literary world’s reliance on and reference for
Shakespeare to be “a great evil – as is every untruth.” Yowza.

10 Reasons Why William
Shakespeare is awesome.
10. HE KILLED A TREE IN BIDFORD
And he did so years after his own death! Legend has it that a retired lush of a Bard stumbled under said tree – the crab variety – and slept off a night of competitive drinking with Bidford’s supposedly prolific booze hounds.
Tourists tore the poor tree to shreds, taking home souvenirs of old Willy’s wild night. In the absence of any really reliable biography, we cling to legends and potentialities to help us understand anything at all about the man whose writing has helped us to understand so much.

MAcbeTh….i MeAn The ScoTTiSh
Play!
THE PLAY IS CURSED!

Shakespeare’s play Macbeth is said to be cursed, so actors avoid saying its name when in the theatre (the euphemism "The Scottish Play" is used instead).
Actors also avoid even quoting the lines from Macbeth before performances, particularly the Witches' incantations. Outside a theatre and after a performance, the play can be spoken of openly. If an actor speaks the name
"Macbeth" in a theatre prior to one of the performances, he or she is required to leave the theatre building, spin around three times, spit, curse, and then knock to be allowed back in.
One version of this legend claims that it was the actor who played Lady
Macbeth who died during the play's first production run and that Shakespeare himself had to assume the role. There is no evidence that either version of this legend is factual.

Check out this link! Read it with your shoulder partner. What do you think?
http://www.edu.pe.ca/gray/class_pages/jecutcliffe/english621/macbeth/Curse.html

Vocabulary for Macbeth is important!
■
The quickest way to get lost when reading this play is to ignore the vocabulary. Practice the vocabulary list on vocabulary.com!
■ https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/931952

■ What is “fate”?
■ Is fate a real thing?
■ Do we control it?
■ Describe “masculine” traits.
■ Describe “feminine traits.
■ Is one better than the other?
■ How are they the same? How are they different?

Option #1
Has there ever been a time in your life when someone told you that something improbable would happen and it did? Did the fact that the event was “predicted” cause you to behave differently than you would have otherwise and make it more likely for the event to occur? Or, did the event simply seem to occur without any assistance from you?
Do you think that people sometimes hear predictions or stereotypes about themselves and make them true (self-fulfilling prophecies)? For example, if someone told you that they
knew you were going to graduate college with honors, and it happened, was it because they were right in their prediction or did you work extra hard because you believed it was true.
Would it have happened with or without the prediction?

Option #2
What does it mean if someone says “be a man?” What does it imply? Can you “be a woman” or is that not possible or something different? Explain and/or give examples.