How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare by Ken Ludwig
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A book for all lovers, and potential lovers, of Shakespeare. Like nothing else, it creates a magical home theater for parents and their children.
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—J. D. McClatchy, Yale University
Ken Ludwig’s enthusiasm for Shakespeare and his lucid, accessible and inspiring book on How To Teach Your Children Shakespeare is a rare treat. You and your children will be transformed into the magic and mystery of Shakespeare and his stories in an instant. I highly recommend the book to all 50% who have a love of language and history. Conference Discount —Sir Derek Jacobi, CBE
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illiam Shakespeare’s plays are among the great bedrocks of Western civilization and contain the finest writing of the past 450 years. Many of the best novels, plays, poetry, and films in the English language produced since Shakespeare’s death in 1616—from Jane Austen to The Godfather—are heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s stories, characters, language, and themes. In a sense, his works are a kind of Bible for the modern world, bringing us together intellectually and spiritually. Hamlet, Juliet, Macbeth, Ophelia, and a vast array of other singular Shakespearean characters have become the archetypes of our consciousness. In How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare, playwright Ken Ludwig provides the tools you need to instill an understanding, and a love, of Shakespeare’s works in your children, and to have fun together along the way. Ken Ludwig devised his methods while teaching his own children, and his approach is friendly and easy to master. Beginning with memorizing short specific passages from Shakespeare’s plays, this method then instills children with cultural references they will utilize for years to come. Ludwig’s approach includes understanding of the time period and implications of Shakespeare’s diction as well as the invaluable lessons behind his words and stories. Colorfully incorporating the history of Shakespearean theater and society, How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare guides readers on an informed and adventurous journey through the world in which the Bard wrote. This book’s simple process allows anyone to impart to children the wisdom of plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet. highschool@randomhouse.com
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Crown
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HC v 978-0-307-95149-6 $25.00/$29.95 Can.
e-Book: 978-0-307-95151-9
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v
368pp.
$12.99
KEN LUDWIG is an internationally acclaimed playwright who has had numerous hits on Broadway, in London’s West End, and throughout the world. He has won two Laurence Olivier Awards (England’s highest theater honor), received three Tony Award nominations, and won two Helen Hayes Awards and the Edgar Award. His work has been commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and has been performed in at least thirty countries in over twenty languages. Some of his Broadway and West End shows include Crazy for You, Lend Me a Tenor, Moon Over Buffalo, Twentieth Century, and adaptations of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island. He studied music at Harvard with Leonard Bernstein and theater history at Cambridge University in England.
U www.kenludwig.com SPECIAL CONVENTION DISCOUNT To receive a 50% discount, use the coupon code “HOWTO13” during checkout at www.randomhouse.com /randomhousehighschool
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A Message from the Author
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ince my early teens, I’ve felt strongly about the value of Shakespeare, but it wasn’t until I became a father that I figured out how to share my passion with the people I love. One day, my daughter came home from first grade spouting a line of
Shakespeare—“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream— and at that moment, a light bulb went off in my head. Starting that weekend, I set up a routine. My daughter and I would spend two hours each week memorizing speeches from Shakespeare’s plays. We started with short passages from the comedies and, gradually, increased the length and complexity of the passages we studied. To my delight, my daughter took to it immediately, and the hours we spent learning Shakespeare together were some of the best family times of our lives. What I have tried to do in How To Teach Your Children Shakespeare is to offer parents and educators the techniques I developed over the years for my own children. So, for example, I explain the difficult words in each passage; I explain how to use the rhythm of the poetry to make learning easier; and I use the passages in each case as a window into the stories, characters and moral lessons in Shakespeare’s plays. There is no doubt in my mind that knowing Shakespeare will make our children better readers and better writers. It will introduce them to the rich world of great literature, and it will give them academic confidence which they will use the rest of their lives. On a practical level, this will help them on tests and essays for school. More importantly, it will make them more moral human beings as they begin to see the world through a Shakespearean lens. To quote Hamlet, this is “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” —Ken Ludwig
Parents/Educators Visit the Website HowtoTeachYourChildrenShakespeare.com which has downloadable quotation sheets to aid in memorizing the passages, beautiful audio recordings of the passages in the book by actors Derek Jacobi, Richard Clifford, and Frances Barber, posters, and a book excerpt. highschool@randomhouse.com
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