Two-Line Scenes with Faustus

Today, I was finally able to use another one of the strategies I learned this summer at the Folger:  two-line scenes.  Although we had originally done this with Hamlet this summer, I combed through the play we're currently reading, Doctor Faustus, and created a set of lines from it.  Some of them were thematically important. We had the famous "face that launched a thousand ships" and "Man, fly!"  We told each other that this was hell, nor were we out of it....  Some of them were just fun. We burned our books, became apes and dogs, and told each other we could not read. I was eager to see how the students would handle it.

They drew their lines, found their partners, and started scrounging around my room for props.  I have two huge boxes of things I use to dress up my Shakespeare bust for the various holidays, and his costumes got pretty thoroughly pillaged.  I had students in fezzes, in boas made of holiday garland, in goofy glasses, and in a hat shaped like a cooked turkey.  They used squeezy stress balls, sets of National Honor Society cords, and foam swords.  They found sound effects and video clips of flame to use on their phones.  It was fabulous.

They commandeered every part of the room, the front, all the furniture, and even the shower curtains I use to hide all the obnoxious nastiness in my classroom.  One group took a mountain trek over the seats of one row of desks.  That same group finished by lassoed a display clothesline with silver-and-gold-star garland to swing away from the "hell" their line indicated they were in.

I had the best time.  I loved watching them create meaning from the random combination of lines.  With the exception of a few words they wanted to look up (fustian, sixpence), they were independent of everything except the text.  All of them engaged.  All of them had wonderful little vignettes.  We all laughed and cheered at every dramatic effort.

When I told them afterward that all the lines had come from the play we were about to read, they were excited.  They were eager to find out where "their" line was going to come into the larger story.  As a preparatory activity, I don't see how it could have gone better.  It gave us a break from the stress and hustle of the semester's end, and it piqued their interest in the text ahead.  They left the classroom smiling and talking about the experience, reliving it on the ubiquitous SnapChat.  What a great activity!