All corners else o’ the earth let liberty make use of; space enough have I in such a prison…

The Shakespeare's Globe Learning team have developed a number of activities to support those home schooling and learning during the lockdown. ‘Teach Shakespeare’ aims to support parents who are home-schooling, while ‘The Globe Playground’ is suitable for younger children, and ‘Staging It!’ for budding directors, allows users to direct scenes online.

Web learning resources put together to accompany the Playing Shakespeare production of Macbeth remain online and are of value to anyone studying the play, even without seeing the production in question – a review by a KS3 student on page 38 of this issue of D&T also gives further detail.

For general audiences, and also of value to those in education at all levels, other digital content includes:

• 1) The theatre's video-on-demand service, Globe Player, hosting all 37 ‘Complete Walk’ short fi lms for free. These fi lms celebrated the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death with an all-star cast in 10-minute short fi lms shot on location in the real setting of each plot. Also hosted for free are all 34 Globe to Globe titles fi lmed throughout the 2012 festival which brought together artists from all over the world to speak the plays in their own language on the Globe stage. And six Shakespeare's Globe productions are rotating free, one at a time for two weeks each: Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Winter's Tale, The Two Noble Kinsmen and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
• 2) Podcast ‘Such Stuff’, which has been broadcasting new content from Tuesday 31 March, opening with an episode on the fi lm 10 Things I Hate About You. Episodes include sonnets from the ‘Shakespeare & Love in Isolation’ project, starring artists in times of solitude and from their place of sanctuary; new writing venture Metamorphoses; Michelle Terry and Paul Ready's Shakespeare Diaries, in which the two actors discuss some of their favourite plays and why art, theatre and Shakespeare remain important in times of global crisis; and exclusive interviews with the Globe's Scriptorium writers (Sami Ibrahim, Laura Lomas, and Sabrina Mahfouz) on writing in isolation.

www.shakespearesglobe.com

You counterfeit, you puppet, you!

As part of its #EveryHomeATheatre initiative, charity Mousetrap Theatre Projects has launched a challenge called Shakespeare's Puppet Pandemonium, in which the public is asked to turn its favourite Shakespeare scenes into mini puppet shows, using puppets you have to hand, or make yourself. Sharing videos of your performances using the hashtag will put you or your students in the running to win theatre tickets. Go to www.mousetrap.org.uk/every-home-a-theatre and scroll to Challenge 4.

Our cage we make a choir, as doth the prison’d bird, and sing our bondage freely…

The RSC is working in partnership with the BBC to deliver two focused weeks of GCSE lesson plans themed around Shakespeare's Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice. The ‘Shakespeare weeks’ will take place between Monday 11 – Friday 15 May and Monday 15 – Friday 19 June, and will involve daily Shakespeare lessons developed by the RSC for Year 10 students to help unlock Shakespeare's work and language.

The Shakespeare teaching weeks are in addition to the six RSC plays that will be broadcast by the BBC as part of its Culture in Quarantine programme, and which have all been chosen to link into the curriculum: Hamlet, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice will be available via BBC Four and BBC iPlayer between now and September. 15-minute Activity Toolkits are focused around these six productions.

Furthermore, the RSC's Homework Help initiative gave young people everywhere the opportunity to pose questions about Shakespeare and drama studies to working actors and alumni from the RSC. Those wishing to pose questions were asked to email them to homeworkhelp@rsc.org.uk, or share them using the hashtag #RSCHomeworkHelp on Twitter or Instagram by no later than Sun 10 May. A selection of video or written answers from RSC actors will be shared via the RSC website from 11 May to coincide with the first BBC Bitesize Teaching Shakespeare week.

Home-learners can also explore the award-winning Shakespeare Learning Zone, an interactive web resource featuring comprehensive materials arranged by play title. The RSC YouTube channel also features introductions to language terms such as iambic pentameter, actor-led tutorials exploring the techniques they use to get to grips with a text; and full online performances including Tim Crouch's I, Cinna; and the RSC website offers teacher packs by play and Key Stage.

Schools and home-educators can access streamed versions of many RSC productions via Drama Online and Digital Theatre+, while general audiences can fi nd them on www.marquee.tv, the on-demand streaming service for arts and culture. Subscriptions are £8.99/month or (for a limited time) £62.99 for the first year, and a 30-day trial is free.