Tag Archives: drama/theater

Marcus Junius Brutus

Posted on December 13, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on Marcus Junius Brutus along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Yes, this is the Brutus who was in up to his neck on the assassination plot against Julius Caesar, and to whom Caesar said, in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, “Et tu, Brute?”

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Social Sciences, Worksheets

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Leitmotif

Posted on December 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Leitmotif: (German Leitmotiv ‘leading motif’) A term coined by Hans von Wolzugen to designate a musical theme associated throughout a whole work with a particular object, denote a recurrent theme (q.v.) or unit. It is occasionally used as a literary term in the same sense that Mann intended, and also on a broader sense to refer to an author’s favorite themes: for example, the hunted man and betrayal in the novels of Graham Greene.”

Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.

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Two-Bit (adj)

Posted on November 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective two-bit. I wonder if anyone knows these days that two bits means twenty-five cents. Two-bit, therefore, means “cheap or trivial of its kind,” “petty, and “small-time”; this document is keyed to those definitions as well.

Unless you plan to teach a reading unit on Damon Runyon, or cast a production of Guys and Dolls, I can’t imagine why any student needs to learn this vanishing adjective. I can, however, imagine, that this was the Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster at a moment in life when I had some time on my hands.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Women Beware Women

Posted on November 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Women Beware Women: A tragedy by Thomas Middleton (1580-1627). It has not been established when he wrote it (some time before 1622), but the works was published posthumously in 1657. The admonitory title primarily refers to the character Livia (although none of the other characters is particularly savoury). In the main plot Livia distracts Leontio’s mother with a game of chess while the duke seduces Leontio’s wife, Bianca. In the subplot Livia persuades her niece Isabella that she is not related to Uncle Hippolito, Livia’s brother, so that mutual lust may be consummated. The corpse count by the end of the play is high. Apparently T.S. Eliot was alluding to the scene featuring the game of chess in the title of Part II of The Waste Land (1922), ‘A Game of Chess’, although the only reference to chess is in the lines:

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

Middleton’s political satire, A Game at Chess, which he wrote in 1624, was also admired by Eliot.”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

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The Master and Margarita

Posted on November 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

“The Master and Margarita: (Russian title: Master i Margarita). A novel by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), combining dark humor, satire, fantasy and philosophy. It was completed in 1938, but not published in Russia until 1966-7 (in serial form); the English edition was published in 1967. In the 1930s the Devil visits Moscow, and, with the aid of a naked girl and a gun-toting, cigar-smoking, man-sized cat, spreads chaos and mayhem and shows up the moral inadequacies of Soviet society. Standing apart from all this is the Master, a novelist of great integrity, and his beloved, Margarita. He is writing a book about the appearance of Jesus before Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, long sections of which are included by Bulgakov. The book is prefaced by quotation from Goethe’s Faust.”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

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Ariel

Posted on September 30, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Ariel: (1900) An essay by Jose Enrique Rod, which had a tremendous impact on Hispanic American Intellectuals. Rodo appealed to the youth of Spanish American to aspire to be the spirituality, idealism, and rationality symbolized by Shakespeare’s Ariel and to reject the brutishness and sensuality represented by Caliban. Because Rodo censured U.S. materialism and utilitarianism in the essay, many readers erroneously assumed that he was pitting Anglo-Saxon crassness against Latin idealism. A later essay by Fernandes Retamar made a quite different interpretation of Caliban, as the native and victim of imperialism.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Elocution

Posted on August 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Elocution: The study and practice of oral delivery, including control of breath, voice, pronunciation, stance, and gesture (Has he taken elocution lessons?); the way in which someone speaks or reads aloud, especially in public (flawless elocution). An early meaning of the term was literary style as distinct from content, and relates to the Latin meaning of elocutio (‘speaking out’), one of the canons or departments of rhetoric. Elocution training in how to speak ‘properly’ (as in taking elocution lessons) was a feature of education, particularly for girls, in the 18th and 19th century. Shaw, who gave an extended dramatic treatment to elocution in Pygmalion (1912), added to his will in 1913 a clause giving some of the residue of his estate to ‘The substitution or a scientific training in phonetics for the makeshifts of so-called elocution lessons by actors and others who have hitherto prevailed in the teaching of oratory.””

Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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3 Playwrights of Athens’ Golden Age

Posted on August 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Aeschylus * Sophocles * Euripides

The apogee of Classical Athens’ two-century-long golden age of literature was the generation who thought and wrote between 461 and 431 BC. Theatre-going Greeks of this time witnessed the high-minded and complex tragedies of Aeschylus, the graceful, measured characterization of Sophocles and the more emotional and passionately charged creations of Euripides.

It is fitting that they are remembered as a trio, for each year three tragic playwrights produced a trilogy of tragedies (and a farcical comedy) that was performed over three consecutive days to honor Dionysus. These festivals were held around the time of the spring equinox. No more than three actors were permitted on the stage at any one time, their faces and that of the chorus covered in masks. At the end of the festival, one of the playwrights was voted the winner and given the prize of a goat, for the word ‘tragedy’ derives from ‘goat song.’”

Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.

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The Algonquin Wits: Heywood Brown on the Marx Brothers

Posted on August 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Broun, who was totally captivated by the Marx Brothers, went to see their shows—each one—as many times as possible (he saw Cocoanuts twenty-one times). Concerning this particular passion, he remarked: ‘Very likely my epitaph will read, “Here lies Heywood Broun (who?), killed by getting in the way of some scene shifters at a Marx Brothers show.”’”

Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.

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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Posted on June 30, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A play (1962) by the US playwright Edward Albee (1928-2016) depicting the tense relationship between a sharp-tongued college professor and his embittered wife. Filmed in 1966 with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the two main roles, the play owed its memorable title to a line of graffiti scribbled in soap on a mirror in a bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village that the author happened visit in the 1950s. The quip, evidently derived from the song title ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf’ from the Disney cartoon The Three Little Pigs (1933), was later redefined by Albee as meaning ‘who’s afraid of living without false illusions.’”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002. 

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