James and Teddy blog trip to Stratford

Year 7 blog their English trip to Stratford!

 

The Workshop:

The first activity of our day in Stratford was a workshop on “The Tempest” with our instructor Robin from the RSC. We started with some warm-ups to get us moving. Next we had to embody a monster in groups of 5. We had to be “poisonous”. We looked at some scripts of dialogue between Prospero and Ariel, with Prospero being threatening. When we were looking at Ariel, we did a movement exercise where you had to follow someone’s hand with your face – a game about who holds the power. We practised the dialogue in groups, with each group doing a different section of the speech and adding physical actions. The final exercise was to walk around saying Prospero’s final speech in the play, when he throws his books into the ocean and goes back to Milan.

 Shakespeare’s Birthplace:

When we went to Shakespeare’s birthplace in Henley Street, we learned that people slept sitting up in bed as they believed the Devil came round at night and if you were lying down, you would look dead and the Devil would take you off to Hell! I also learned that all the boys in the family from age 6 – 18 would sleep in one small bed and it was the same for the girls. Babies would sleep with their parents.

Shakespeare’s dad was a glove maker and made all kinds of gloves. He would mainly make them out of leather and open his window to sell them to anyone coming past. He was a rich man and had a big house for the time. As a welcome present, the house came with a family of rats that would bite you all night! People were just used to this and expected to wake up with three or four bites