Page 293 - SpringBoard_ELA_Grade6_Flipbook

AcTIvITy 4.6
continued
Understanding Shakespeare’s
Language
My Notes
Implied Stage Action
9 Finally, in reading Shakespeare’s plays you should always remember that what you are reading is a performance script. The dialogue is written to be spoken by actors who, at the same time, are moving, gesturing, picking up objects, weeping, shaking their fists. Some stage action is described in what are called “stage directions”; some is suggested within the dialogue itself. Learn to be alert to such signals as you stage the play in your imagination.
[Conclusion]
10 It is immensely rewarding to work carefully with Shakespeare’s language so that the words, the sentences, the wordplay, and the implied stage action all become clear—as readers for the past [five] centuries have discovered. The joy of being
able to stage one of Shakespeare’s plays in one’s imagination, to return to passages that continue to yield further meanings (or further questions) the more one reads them—these are pleasures that certainly make it worth considerable effort to “break the code” of Elizabethan poetic drama and let free the remarkable language that makes up a Shakespeare text.
Second Read
• Reread the essay to answer these text-dependent questions.
• Write any additional questions you have about the text in your Reader/Writer Notebook.
1. Craft and Structure: How does the first paragraph of the essay classify the challenging parts of Shakespeare’s language into syntax and diction? How does this contribute to the development of ideas in the essay?
2. Key Ideas and Details: How is the idea that some of Shakespeare’s words are no longer used the same way illustrated in the third paragraph?
3. Craft and Structure: What is the connotative meaning of the word puzzled in paragraph 7?
266 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 6
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