‘Who’s Macduff again, Sir?‘
Teaching Shakespeare’s not easy at the best of times – and this is something I’ll really need to get stuck into over the next few weeks. Not least because I am currently attempting to teach Macbeth online …
Once you get over the usual barriers, I’ve regularly found myself sketching little family trees during lessons to remind students of, well, ‘who’s who‘. Interestingly, frustratingly, this NEVER happens teaching any other texts. I think it’s largely psychological, although even I have been known to come a cropper with Hermia and Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And don’t get me started on The Comedy of Errors.
So here’s the deal. This is the first in a suite of these I am producing. Note the ‘Upstart‘ logo in the bottom right – it is related to ‘the other place‘ – and note that if you suspected Shakespeare and I might have fallen out, that was never the case, even when I wanted to branch away from him. My intentions are that they’re:
- as clear as possible, covering only the major players, which is why reluctantly, the ‘egg’ doesn’t get a look in here
- FREE to download (despite the branding)
- A4
- available in two versions, with a white and a dark background
- when the world returns to teaching in classrooms, I envisage printing the white backgrounds for students so that they can stick them into their books and write on them – character traits, key quotations, etc. Projecting this version also allows me to draw on it with whiteboard markers;
- the dark backgrounds are more for electronic display, and in keeping with the current fad for ‘dark mode’, which I’ve fully embraced. As my eldest said, this fits the mood of Macbeth better, anyway. I suspect I’ll print these and put them in my classroom, too
OK, I want one …
For a WHITE background, click here.
For a DARK background, like the one above, click here.
The Boar's Head, Eastcheap 
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