Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
Overview
A study of the Shakespearian play A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Pupils will be introduced to William Shakespeare and the historical context of the play (Elizabethan era, Globe, religion etc). Using their contextual understanding, pupils will be able to understand Shakespeare’s influences to help them analyse key characters and the plot.
Unit aims:
- To appreciate and engage with a Shakespearian play and understand the development of a character in Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- To gain understanding of what truth/reality is compared to illusion and how/why Shakespeare uses these ideas in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
- To create evocative descriptions based on moments from the play
- To know how Shakespeare uses dramatic techniques to illustrate his scenes
- To track the development of characters throughout the play
Example Key Words
Playscript
A written version of a play or other dramatic composition; used in preparing for a performance.
Narrator
A person who narrates something, especially a character who recounts the events of a novel or narrative poem.
Didactic
Intended to teach, particularly in having moral instruction as an ulterior motive.
Prosodics
The patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry.
Intonation
The rise and fall of the voice in speaking.
Assonance
Resemblance of sound between syllables of nearby words, arising particularly from the rhyming of two or more stressed vowels, but not consonants (e.g., sonnet, porridge), but also from the use of identical consonants with different vowels (e.g., killed, cold, culled).