It’s time once again to check in on what searches people have done to find themselves at Shakespeare Teacher, and to respond in the name of fun and public service. All of the following searches brought people to this site in the past week.

The following image was found on a hard drive from a laptop that dates back to the early 17th century. Some have speculated that it might be from Shakespeare’s famous Macbeth PowerPoint, otherwise lost to history.

Oh, you probably meant a PowerPoint about Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Nevermind.

I’ll assume you meant the man and not the play, since Elizabeth was the only Tudor left by the time the play was written. But either way, the answer would probably be the same. In the early 13th century, King John showed open defiance against Pope Innocent III over church appointments in England. An ongoing battle of wills resulted in John’s excommunication from the church. When King Henry VIII willfully broke from the church in the 16th century, King John was a convenient symbol of English independence from Rome.

Here it is:

If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not; and, I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.

It is the end of an epilogue spoken by the actor who played Rosalind in the play, who in Shakespeare’s time would have been male. In the play, Rosalind (a young woman) disguises herself as Ganymede (a young man), and then agrees to pretend to be Rosalind. The line “if I were a woman…” is funny because it reminds us that what we’ve just seen was a boy playing a girl playing a boy playing a girl.

King Henry the Seventh.

King Henry the Eighth died before Shakespeare was born. But Shakespeare wrote a play about him.

When I’m working with 6th-grade students specifically, I like to choose a play that has resonance with ancient civilizations, which is what they’ll be learning about in social studies. Julius Caesar is probably the most age appropriate selection of that group.

I leave the task of responding to the remaining search terms to my readers:

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 11:55 pm and is filed under As You Like It, Googleplex, History, Humor, Information Literacy, Instruction, Macbeth, Religion, Shakespeare, The Letter Y, The Tudors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.