Simon Rodberg Sonnets Lesson Plan
Teaching Shakespeare Institute 2006
“What Is’t that Moves Your Highness?
Simon Rodberg teaches English at the
Plays/Scenes Covered
Macbeth 3.4
NCTE Standards
Covered
1, 2, 3, 4, 11, 12
What’s On for Today
and Why
Thinking like a director can help students understand both theater and the text at hand. Directors need to read closely, infer constantly, and visualize creatively. By transferring a written script to an enacted scene, students will actively use these skills. Tableaux – living pictures in which people, frozen in a pose, speak a line, then change to another pose and speak another line – are a useful intermediate step between a read-aloud and a fully staged scene.
This lesson places students in three groups for a close reading and tableaux presentation of Macbeth 3.4, in which Macbeth, while hosting a dinner for his thanes, is visited by Banquo’s ghost. Each group will create five tableaux using lines from the scene: one group focusing on Macbeth, one group focusing on Lady Macbeth, and one group focusing on the other characters. The groups will each read the scene carefully through a particular lens, using questions on a handout to help guide their reading. Each group will then create tableaux to present a coherent summary of the scene. Depending on the group of students, this lesson may take one or two days.
What to Do
1. As a warm-up, ask students to write about the following questions: When and why do some people think they see ghosts? What would you say if someone near you saw a ghost?
2. Explain the day’s lesson to students, and define tableaux: frozen pictures using living bodies. Model the assignment using several students and Macbeth’s first line (“You know your own degrees; sit down”): create a frozen picture of the dinner, including Macbeth, to dramatize this line; then have Macbeth speak his line from the picture.
3. Divide the students into three groups: one focusing on Macbeth, one on Lady Macbeth, and one on the other characters. Give each group copies of the handout, and remind them of the purpose of their reading. Direct them to read through the scene in their groups. They may read it through switching speakers for each character, or at each major punctuation mark.
4. Students should now complete the handout. The major part of the assignment is to choose five lines spoken by their character (or, for the third group, their characters) which, taken together along with visual representations, summarize the scene. The students should then create tableaux, including everyone in the scene (Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and others) and all of the students in their group, for each of the five lines. The students should rehearse their presentation.
5. Each group should present their tableaux: five group poses, with one spoken line each, as a summary of the scene.
6. Discuss the varieties of scenes: each group will have created a different focus and a different interpretation. Discuss the process as well: what did the students do to make sense of the scene? How could they use a similar process on their own with a future scene or other reading?
What You Need
Copies of Macbeth for every student
Copies of the handout
Space for three groups to rehearse
How Did It Go?
Did the students choose lines and
create tableaux which accurately and creatively summarized the scene? If so,
they read carefully and approached the scene like directors. In the closing
discussion, did they explain their thinking? If so, they will be able to use
close reading, inferring, and visualizing to make
sense of future texts.