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GCSE – Shakespeare

Interactive tour of the Globe Visit the animated Virtual Globe:
Full Version with Sound
Low Bandwidth Version

  • You will need Adobe Flash Player in order to access this resource.
  • An animated ‘tour’ of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, designed to introduce pupils to the world in which Shakespeare was writing.
  • Pupils ‘meet’ a range of characters from Elizabethan life, from boy actors playing women’s roles to an African immigrant in the audience.
  • Pupils can discover increasing amounts of information, depending on their level of interest, from a brief introduction suitable for KS2, up to information which would be genuinely useful for University students!
  • There is a quiz which students can fill in as they explore the site.
  • The resource can be used on the interactive whiteboard or with students accessing it individually. However, unless your school has a fast internet connections, having 15 computers accessing it at once may cause difficulties,
    as it is a big file!
  • The resource includes sound, but this is not vital. The low-bandwidth version comes without sound.
  • See our teachers’ guide for more ideas on how to use this in the classroom.
for KS3 students
for KS4 students
for AS and A2 students
an interactive, multimedia resource
great for whiteboards
Interactive tour of the Globe An Interactive 3D version of Shakespeare’s Globe

  • You will need Adobe Shockwave Player to access this resource.
  • A 3D version of the Globe Theatre, designed for students to get an idea of Shakespeare’s theatre.
  • This will take a short while to download, depending on the speed of your internet connection.
for KS3 students
for KS4 students
for AS and A2 students
an interactive, multimedia resource
a good starter
great for whiteboards

Plotsquares
Busy revising? Want to check out how much you’ve remembered of your Shakespeare plays?

  • In this resource, pupils revise the events of their set Shakespeare play, by putting them into the right order.
  • The resource comes in two versions: one in which they have to distinguish the genuine from the fake events, and one
    in which all events are genuine but have to be put in the right order.
  • This was designed by a teacher specifically to be used with the interactive whiteboard, with students coming up to the
    board one at a time to identify the next plot event.
  • This can be a very fun way to revise a play!
for KS3 students
for KS4 students
an interactive, multimedia resource
a good starter
great for whiteboards

Shakespeare's Special Effects
Try your hand as Shakespeare’s Special Effects expert

  • Pupils look at three moments from Shakespeare’s plays, and are asked to decide how they would stage them in the theatre.
  • The resource is designed to be a light-hearted way to encourage pupils to think about Shakespeare’s plays in performance.
  • The students begin by looking at how Elizabethan actors could create a ghost (as in Hamlet or Macbeth), then at how
    they create a special entrance for a King, and then how they would represent a bear on stage (as in The Winter’s Tale)
  • However, students are not expected to have previous knowledge of these particular plays: it is designed to get students thinking more generally
    about how Shakespeare wrote for the theatre.
for KS3 students
for KS4 students
an interactive, multimedia resource
great for whiteboards

Puritans
How did Elizabethan Puritans react to Shakespeare’s drama?

  • In the resource, students read a facsimile of a 16th century Puritan attack on the theatre.
  • The original source is ‘The School of Abuse’, by Stephen Gosson.
  • Students begin by looking at the book, and attempt to read the black letter printing. They
    then look at three most significant quotations from the book and consider what these
    quotations tell us about a Puritan’s attitude to the theatre.
  • The resource is intended to give students a better insight into the context in which Shakespeare was writing.
  • It would be particularly useful for students studying ‘Measure for Measure’.
for KS3 students
for KS4 students
for AS and A2 students
an interactive, multimedia resource

Shakespeare's Insults
Insult your friends with Shakespeare’s worst insults.

  • Pupils experiment with creating insults based on Shakespeare’s plays. They combine nouns and adjectives to find the most innovative insult, which they can
    then email to a friend.
  • This resource is intended as a light-hearted way to start students thinking about the way that Shakespeare used language.
  • Possible topics include looking at what words we no longer use today, and thinking about language change; looking
    at how adding adjectives to nouns can make them more descriptive and fun.
for KS3 students
for KS4 students
an interactive, multimedia resource
a good starter
great for whiteboards