In honor of Shakespeare's 444th birthday, we ditched school and spent the day making merry with all things Elizabethan and Shakespearean. Normally my older boys are just too cool for something like this, but when you add no school + anything they usually come around. There is some question as to what day Shakespeare was actually born, we know he died on April 23rd, but his birth is a bit of a mystery. After a very quick, rather unscientific search of the web I settled on April 23. After all, if this date is good enough for STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, it's good enough for me. Plus it's St. George's Day, and we got to include a little bit on him as well because Ethan loves St. George.

First we had to do a little bit of decoration, we colored pictures and hung streamers. As we decorated we listened to an audio version of A&E's Biography: William Shakespeare, it's on iTunes for only $0.95.

I had hoped to begin our time of celebration outside, but Ben is allergic to grass and oak tree pollen and both are now in full force here. Our kitchen stood in for the stage (instead of our deck) and we groundlings watched from the pit (our family room.) We recited sonnets and portions of plays. This was a little out of the comfort zone of my teenage boys, but they had fun in spite of themselves. After our oratory practice, lunch was served.  We dined on duck, cheese, pears, really good bread, strawberries and clotted cream.

Next we played a file folder game I made, you can download it here. The game is called Quote to The Globe. Players must correctly identify various Shakespearean quotes in order to advance, there's a wee bit of history thrown in too. The first player to make it to The Globe wins. Suffices to say, who ever paid attention for our stage portion did well with the game. I served as reader since I knew all the answers. I also came across some fun online games at Bantam.

We ended our day with one of my favorite movies, Much Ado About Nothing. I think Kenneth Branagh is hysterical in it, and I will admit that it upsets me that he and Emma Thompson are no longer together.  :-/ And that's all I have to say about that.

Our Favorite Sonnets

SONNET 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.


SONNET 73
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.


SONNET 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Zach: "...The wicked knight leapt suddenly upon him, cutting off the top of the crown which the unction of sacred chrism had dedicated to God. Next he received a second blow on the head, but still he stood firm and immovable. At the third blow he fell on his knees and elbows, offering himself a living sacrifice, and saying in a low voice, 'For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church, I am ready to embrace death.' But the third knight inflicted a terrible wound as he lay prostrate. By this stroke, the crown of his head was separated from the head in such a way that the blood white with the brain, and the brain no less red from the blood, dyed the floor of the cathedral. The same clerk who had entered with the knights placed his foot on the neck of the holy priest and precious martyr, and, horrible to relate, scattered the brains and blood about the pavements, crying to the others, 'Let us away, knights; this fellow will arise no more." Edward Grim was a clerk from Cambridge who was visiting Canterbury Cathedral on Tuesday 29 December 1170 when Thomas Becket was murdered.

 

 
 
 

I will admit that on first view I was not very fond of the new version of Jane Eyre.
Upon further review, and after reading the book yet again, I now like it very much.

 The one thing I love about Jane the most is her character.  In the scene where Rochester tries to persuade Jane that it would not be wrong to stay with him and live as his wife he says, "Is it better to drive a fellow creature to despair than to transgress a mere human law - no man being injured by the breach? For you have neither relatives nor  acquaintances whom you need fear to offend by living with me."

Jane replies, "I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am,  the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad - as I am now. Laws and principles are not  for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise  in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have worth - so I have always believed;  and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane - quite insane: with my veins running fire,  and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions,  foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot."

We wrote Jane's response in our commonplace book this week
as a reminder for when we are faced with temptation.

Waiting By the Gate
by William Cullen Bryant

On the WTM boards today there was a question posted about what some of us have had our children memorize. I got to look back at two of my favorites from this year and wanted to share them here.

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This song was made famous by Oliver Wendell Holmes and is often attributed to him. It is actually a Romanian folk song from The Bard of Dimbovitza according to a wonderful old book I own titled "The School Speaker and Reader" by William Dewitt-Hyde ©1900.

I Am Content
A spindle of hazel-wood had I;
Into the mill-stream it fell one day -
The water has brought it me back no more.

As he lay a-dying, the soldier spake:
                                                   "I am content.
Let my mother be told in the village there,
And my bride in the hut be told,
That they must pray with folded hands,
With folded hands for me."
The soldier is dead - and with folded hands
His bride and his mother pray.
On the field of battle they dug his grave,
And red with his life-blood the earth was dyed,
The earth they laid him in.
The sun looked down on him there and spake:
And flowers bloomed thickly upon his grave,
And were glad they blossomed there.

And when the wind in the tree-tops roared,
The soldier asked the deep, dark grave:
"Did the banner flutter then?"
"Not so, my hero." the wind replied,
"The fight is done, but the banner won,
Thy comrades of old have borne it hence,
Have borne it in triumph hence."
Then the soldier spake from the deep, dark grave
                                                  "I am content."

And again he heard the shepherds pass
And the flocks go wandering by,
And the soldier asked: "Is the sound I hear
The sound of the battle's roar?"
And they all replied: "My hero, Nay!
Thou art dead and the fight is o'er,
Our country joyful and free."
Then the soldier spake from the deep, dark grave:
                                                 "I am content."

Then he heareth the lovers laughing pass,
And the soldier asks once more:
"Are these not the voices of them that love,
That love and remember me?"
"Not so, my hero," the lovers say,
"We are those that remember not;
For the spring has come and the earth has smiled,
And the dead must be forgot."
Then the soldier spake from the deep, dark grave:
                                                  "I am content."
A spindle of hazel-wood had I;
Into the mill-stream it fell one day -
The water has brought it me back no more.

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After watching the movie "Glory", the boys and I read an historical account of the assault on Fort Wagner and memorized a portion of the oration given by William James at the unveiling of the Shaw Memorial in 1897.

One piece of trivia learned is that Matthew Broderick, who starred in the movie  Glory, is a distant relation to Shaw. I think the resemblance is remarkable.
  

I've linked the complete speech above, here is the portion we memorized:

"The men who do brave deeds are usually unconscious of their picturesqueness. For two nights previous to the assault upon Fort Wagner, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment had been afoot, making forced marches in the rain; and on the day of the battle the men had had no food since early morning. As they lay there in the evening twilight, hungry and wet, against the cold sands of Morris Island, with the sea-fog drifting over them, their eyes fixed on the huge bulk of the fortress looming darkly three-quarters of a mile ahead against the sky, and their hearts beating in expectation of the word that was to bring them to their feet and launch them on their desperate charge, neither officers nor men could have been in any holiday mood of contemplation. Many and different must have been the thoughts that came and went in them during that hour of bodeful reverie; but however free the flights of fancy of some of them may have been, it is improbable that any one who lay there had so wild and whirling an imagination as to foresee in prophetic vision this morning of a future May, when we, the people of a richer and more splendid Boston, with mayor and governor, and troops from other States, and every circumstance of ceremony, should meet together to celebrate their conduct on that evening, and do their memory this conspicuous honor.

How, indeed, comes it that out of all the great engagements of the war, engagements in many of which the troops of Massachusetts had borne the most distinguished part, this officer, only a young colonel, this regiment of black men and its maiden battle, - a battle, moreover, which was lost, - should be picked out for such unusual commemoration?

The historic significance of an event is measured neither by its material magnitude, nor by its immediate success. Thermopylae was a defeat; but to the Greek imagination, Leonidas and his few Spartans stood for the whole worth of Grecian life. Bunker Hill was a defeat; but for our people, the fight over that breastwork has always seemed to show as well as any victory that our fore-fathers were men of a temper not to be finally overcome. And so here. The war for our Union, with all the constitutional questions which it settled, and all the military lessons which it gathered in, has throughout its dilatory length but one meaning in the eye of history. And nowhere was that meaning better symbolized and embodied than in the constitution of this first Northern negro regiment.

Look at the monument and read the story; - see the mingling of elements which the sculptor's genius has brought so vividly before the eye. There on foot go the dark outcasts, so true to nature that one can almost hear them breathing as they march. State after State by its laws had denied them to be human persons. The Southern leaders in congressional debates, insolent in their security, loved most to designate them by the contemptuous collective epithet of "this peculiar kind of property." There they march, warm-blooded champions of a better day for man. There on horseback, among them, in his very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune, upon whose happy youth every divinity had smiled. Onward they move together, a single resolution kindled in their eyes, and animating their otherwise so different frames. The bronze that makes their memory eternal betrays the very soul and secret of those awful years."