Week 6, Renaissance Man

As I mentioned in my previous post, the Classical Conversation's history memory work was on key figures of the Renaissance, including Shakespeare.

Now, my own Shakespearean education included a reading of Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew in high school English class.  We also sang a couple of his sonnets in choir (I still can remember some of the words).  Suffice it to say, I don't know much 'bout Shakespeare.  It's one of the many holes in my education that I hope to fill while providing an education to my children.  I don't believe six and three is too early to start to get them familiar with his works.

We began our little Shakespearean adventure with some general information about the man himself.  We read two picture books, Aliki's William Shakespeare and The Globe:

And Lois Burdett's A Child's Portrait of Shakespeare:

Of the two, the three of us unanimously picked the second as our favorite as we're fond of those rhyming couplets and the kids really enjoyed the children's illustrations, but both were good.

Now, here's where I prove that I'm Shakespeare illiterate.  I decided to delve into one of his plays, and for my two young children I chose, A Midsummer Night's Dream.  Mistake.  I found that kids cannot  relate to lovers' triangles.  Plus, the back and forth of affections between the four, almost indistinguishable, main characters is reminiscent of a 'who's on first' skit.  Their little heads were spinning.  But, I chose it based on my one bit of knowledge--that it was a comedy.  

It was not a total loss, as they did find Puck and a man named Bottom amusing.  We persevered and now they've been exposed.  I hope they caught some of it.  We ended up considering four different versions:

Edith Nesbitt's from Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare:

Lois Burdett's, which, despite the rhyming couplets and illustrations, we found too long and detailed:

The BBC video version from here.

And finally, Bruce Coville's version:

This Coville version was our favorite.  It was the last one we read and we had watched the video version, so they were catching on to the story by them.  Plus the illustrations in this one are great.