"I am a pirate with a wooden leg": Stomping Iambic Pentameter

Ta DUM, ta DUM, ta DUM, ta DUM, ta DUM. The force will be strong in the hearts of your young Jedi as they use their lightsabers to strike the accentted syllables in lines from Ian Doescher's William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, A New...

Does any word rhyme with orange? Young poets try their hand at crafting a Shakespearean sonnet by first creating list of rhyming words. They then examine the use of unstressed and stressed syllables in iambic pentameter and the rhyme...

How does an author's choice of artistic medium influence an audience? What about how an author chooses to transform original source material? These are the questions class members grapple with as they compare scenes from episode IV...

Double, double scholars' appreciation of the Scottish Play with a guide that adds a rich brew of pre-reading background information, chapter discussion questions, activities, and writing prompts to provide readers with a "firm and good"...

"Now is the summer of our happiness/Made winter by this sudden, fierce attack!" Luke Skywalker meets Hamlet in a 10-lesson unit based on Ian Doescher's William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, a New Hope. Using Star Wars® as source...

Two sonnets, both alike in theme and story, break from ancient language to new glory. The prologue to Act I of Romeo and Juliet provides scholars with an opportunity to examine the language Shakespeare uses to create timeless stories....

Thinking about using Romeo and Juliet with your honors or AP class? Consider showing this video as an introduction and overview to Shakespeare, Elizabethan theatre, and the play. The narrator's obvious scholarship, fast pace, and quirky...

Spice up your traditional approach to teaching poetic structure with a wonderful animated video, which not only covers such terms as foot, meter, verse, but also stresses Shakespeare's unique use of iambic pentameter to convey...

Shakespeare sometimes gets a bad rap in high schools for his complex plots and antiquated language. But a quick peek into the rhythm of his words reveals a poet deeply rooted in the way people spoke in his time- and still speak today....

Handout from the Purdue University writing lab that explains poetic meter and scansion. Explains several terms, including the following: syllabic, accentual, accentual-syllabic, quantitative, scansion, accented, unaccented, poetic foot,...