General

Shakespeare ZA continues to grow as a portal for the sharing of teaching and learning resources.

We invite you to share with us the materials and websites that you have found useful in the classroom or when working on your own!

As part of our current resources, you will find articles, reviews, interviews, slideshows, images, videos, links and lots of other documentation related to Roemo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, Hamlet, Coriolanus and Macbeth, which have been selected as Grade 12 set works for English Home Language learners by the Department of Basic Education (DBE) and the Independent Examinations Board (IEB) in recent years. Various other Shakespeare plays are currently set works in South African schools. Let’s keep building our collection of resources!

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Are you ready

... to start a conversation
about what it means to teach and learn Shakespeare in SA today?

To think about some of the general questions - misgivings? - teachers and learners may have about studying Shakespeare in SA today, you can

  • download this presentation by Nina Nathanson (prepared in response to the IEB Common Assessment Task topic in 2018, which raised the problem of Shakespeare’s relevance/irrelevance), and

  • take a look at the following presentations from the “my shakespeare” workshop (click here for the programme) for teachers held at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town, May 2019:

. . . and here is Lauren Bates, from the same event, talking about “Integrating Shakespeare across the curriculum” - or, “How to use Shakespeare to teach everything”!

A 400 year old book?

To find out more about the First Folio, its relationship to the conditions under which Shakespeare’s plays were first performed, and how this (incomplete) volume of “collected works” came to be published in 1623, download a lecture by Professor Paul Walters commemorating the quatercentenary of the book’s publication.

Are you interested in the translation of Shakespeare’s plays into South African languages?

To access information on the history of translation in South Africa, and to access digitised versions of translations of Shakespeare’s plays into South African languages, click here.

Other links and resources