Curriculum

13 Ways to Celebrate Shakespeare’s 450th Birthday

By Helen Yoshida — April 24, 2014 1 min read
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Born in April 1564, William Shakespeare remains one of the most influential poets, actors, and playwrights in the English language. Yesterday, the world celebrated what would have been Shakespeare’s 450th birthday. I have put together a brief list of educational resources and news coverage on the Bard and his works.

Bring on the Bard

The Folger Shakespeare Library offers a wealth of online resources for students and educators, including the new Folger Digital Text, a free digital library of Shakespeare’s plays. You can view more resources on The New York Times’ The Learning Network blog as well as the PBS and British Shakespeare Association websites.

Socialize With Shakespeare

The Piled Higher and Deeper (PHD) Comics team travels to London to find why Shakespeare remains fascinating, while Open University’s short animated video outlines how he contributed 2,000 words to the English language. For a humorous bent on the Bard, try the Shakespearean Insulter, a website featuring a collection of insults from his plays, or follow one of a number of parody Shakespeare accounts on Twitter.

Shakespearean Swagger

The online edition of the British newspaper The Independent brings Shakespeare into the present day with 50 phrases from his plays. NPR’s Lakshmi Gandhi links literature and music with a discussion about the origins the “swagger,” a term first coined by Shakespeare. For more commentary about the playwright, you can read coverage from The Atlantic on how convicts may be the ideal audience for Shakespeare’s work, an article in The Paris Review about how a sold-out telecast production of the Bard’s Coriolanus embodies a universal and transatlantic appeal, and an essay from the online magazine The Millions about how women relate to and are affected by his work.

How are you celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter at @EWBookMarks.

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A version of this news article first appeared in the BookMarks blog.