How to Read Shakespeare: Escape Shakespeare's World

This fun and versatile digital escape room lesson is designed to use with high school students as an introduction to important Elizabethan ideas that appear in Shakespeare’s plays and that affect language, characterization, symbolism, and themes. It can be used with any play. I use it before reading as an introduction, but it can be used at any time during the reading.

This is meant to be a low-stakes introduction to the Renaissance concepts of the Wheel of Fortune (Rota Fortunae), the four humors, the Great Chain of Being, and Renaissance superstitions in regards to supernatural beings—ghosts, witches, and fairies. Each task introduces the concept and links to a short article or video explaining it; provides a related game based on common game shows or board games, which are meant to reinforce the concept and have students interact with Shakespearean texts in some way (see below for details); and asks students to solve one to five related locks using the information from the articles and clues in the game.

This zip file also contains four fully animated PowerPoint games that can be used as templates for other lessons. There is a Wheel of Fortune-type game, a Family Feud-type game, an Operation-type game, and a Clue/D&D hybrid game.

This zip file contains:

1. Teacher notes with all links to the Google Forms, directions for digital and in-person use, and an answer key to the escape room locks.

2. Four PowerPoint game files that are fully automated for game play when in presentation mode. In addition, all four of these PowerPoint files can be used for templates for the teacher to repurpose for other units.

3. Two Google Form links for the digital escape room—one with the PowerPoint links, one without the PowerPoint links (see below)

4. A paper handout version of the Google Form, if the teacher prefers to have students do the lesson in class on paper.

NOTE: Using the PowerPoint games on Macs or with older versions of the software may result in animations glitches that interfere with the playing of the games.