The final tool in The Shakespeare Toolkit is Stage Directions. This tool uses the complete First Folio text to identify any directions written into the play’s dialogue.
For the final three tools in the toolkit, a complete First Folio version of the scene or play will need to be provided to learners. These tools will not work with the cue scripts.
Begin by informing learners that, in Shakespeare’s theatre, actors did not rehearse a play as they currently do in the twenty-first century. Actors in Shakespeare’s theatre had no formal rehearsals and often only had clues in their text to give them direction. As such, clues to the physical activity and actions were written into the dialogue rather than in the stage direction format of a twentieth or twenty-first-century script. There are roughly three thousand stage directions written into the dialogue across Shakespeare’s 38 plays.
Instruct learners to go through their scenes and identify any Stage Directions in the text.
Once identified, engage learners in a discussion about how these discoveries might affect the scene they have developed at this stage. Ass with the other tools in this tray, keep the conversation centred in the characters intentions.
Conclude this tool by allowing learners to experiment with the application of any new discoveries through practice to finalise the development of the scene.
Tray Four : Back to the Text