Tools for Teaching Shakespeare

Tools for Studying Shakespeare and Contemporaries

These materials will help you use an electronic text of Shakespeare to teach particular plays (for college students at all levels).
Christy Desmet has a splendid set of course materials generated in her Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama classes (university-level).
Frank Hildy maintains the Shakespeare Globe Center--Southeast home page for information about the original Globe Playhouse (for all levels).
This page will help you find books and articles on Shakespeare and his contemporaries (for advanced students, or for students who want to become advanced).
This page will explain matters of form in writing a formal scholarly essay about Renaissance dramatists (for advanced students).
Readers in Georgia might be interested in the handsome Georgia Shakespeare Festival site.
At Emory University, one finds the handsome site that Harry Rusche maintains: Shakespeare Illustrated.
Away from the University of Georgia campus, the finest page for information about matters Shakespearean is Terry Gray's Mr. William Shakespeare on the Internet. As the credits at the bottom of this page suggest, one particularly handsome site is Anniina Jokinen's Luminarium.

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Shakespeare Exercises for an Electronic Text

Section One: A Summer Shakespeare Project
Section Two: Using Word Cruncher
Section Three: The Plays

Section Four: Possible Student Projects

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This guide begins with a short essay about the problems and rewards of one such course on Shakespeare; that narrative will give you a quick overview of what combining literature and computers can offer. Next a section explains what Word Cruncher is and how to use its special features. The third section offers teaching materials and exercises for several Shakespeare plays. Finally, a fourth section offers suggestions about possible research projects for undergraduate and graduate students to carry out using the electronic texts of Shakespeare.

Some of these exercises can be used with any electronic text that has a search engine; other exercises are designed specifically for the Word Cruncher software that is keyed to the Riverside Shakespeare text. If you are not using the Word Cruncher program, (Terry Gray says that the best Shakespeare search engine currently available is this one by Matty Farrow.) Using a search engine with an electronic text allows students to find particular words and phrases quickly and easily; they can see a list of every place those words are used in a canon or read through a particular text in which words are highlighted. It can also be useful to seek absence; if some element isn't present when students think it should be, they can try to figure out why it's not there. The Word Cruncher program provides frequency information and allows students to copy passages quickly and easily.
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The illustrations are linked to the remarkable site, Shakespeare Illustrated. The various wallpapers come from a variety of sources: Windy's Fashionable Web Page Designs, Bimsan's. The banners and the Shakespeare icon are from Randy's IconBazaar. For good counsel thanks to Frank Gillespie and the OID; to Joe Sigalas, and to Aus Meyer. For good models, thanks to Terry Gray, Harry Rusche, and Annina Jokinen. Tricia McElroy patiently tested the material and wrote most of the advice page for using Word Cruncher. Finally, the source for many of the exercises is John Velz, who remains the best Shakespeare professor I ever had; Patsy Worrall, who helped so much with that first computer class, is another rich source of intelligent ideas.