Saturday marks the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare‘s death.
Delphi Classics just sent out a special offer: free e-book downloads of all of Shakespeare’s work, with bonus features and extra content.
The e-books appear to be drawn from their earlier Shakespeare compilation, which you can also buy at a discount, along with several other Renaissance titles. Link here.
Of course, you can get free Shakespeare from a variety of places. Still, it’s always nice to get them nicely formatted. And Shakespeare, even 400 years later, can still be a lot of fun. We’re doing it at school this term, and the kids have been eating it up.
In our first lesson in my classroom, we used a short video from the excellent Brain Pop series to introduce them to the Bard (above image from video), shared some Shakespeare trivia with them, then played a game using a Shakespeare Insult Generator to introduce them to Shakespearian language.
We had our second lesson this past Tuesday and used this excellent BBC website to get them practicing the language right away. We explained what a soliloquy was, then picked two to focus on. The site has both the text and a video; my students enjoyed watching the video and then giving the speech a try themselves. We asked them to focus on the emotion—even if they did not understand every word, they still understood that Titania was angry and Romeo was sad. It was fun seeing these hip, modern kids try their hands at Romeo and Juliet.
We are planning to do some work on ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ for the reminder our of lessons. Since the kid’s book we have lacks the whole script (it is an adaptation), I will probably download the real book just for reference. So, thanks for the freebie, Delphi Classics.
Wow. This is great, many thanks for the heads-up. I fell in love with the works of Shakespeare back when I was a very young girl of thirteen. It was summer break, and the 3rd day I broke my ankle and wound up stuck for the entire summer (casts were big, heavy, plaster clunky things back then – remember I was born before dust was invented). 😀 My mom’s solution to my boredom (she didn’t drive at that time so we couldn’t easily get to the library), was to help me hobble out to the picnic table in the back yard and leave me with a pitcher of iced tea and this huge tome of all of Shakespeare’s play. It was a beautiful book with a blue leather cover, but it was BIG in both width and length as well as weighing several pounds. So once I was seated, I was pretty much stuck. I figured I might as well amuse my mom, so I started reading. I was totally captivated, and read the entire volume. I made notes, I wrote short reviews, and when school started I managed to ace the classic portion of English lit because we studied Shakespeare. Now I’m off to pick up some of these treasures and revisit my youth.
That’s 11 free downloads, not all.
Otherwise (at the link) “Buy the single file edition of our Shakespeare eBook or the Parts Edition now for only half price.”
So $1.49, $2.49 or (both) £2.99 for all of Shakespeare+