Cheap Standard Deviants TV: Shakespeare (Video) (Standard Deviants TV) Price

Promising "we're going to get to the bottom of this Shakespeare guy," the Standard Deviants, an energetic gang of young performers, provide a lively and offbeat introduction to the life and work of the immortal bard. The basic facts of the writer's life are provided by a narration accompanied by a slide show of vintage prints and paintings as well as animated depictions of Shakespeare that may annoy purists, but may also provide memorable and thereby helpful images for students. This video is actually a fairly sedate offering by the Standard Deviants, though their typical approach, to provide solid information that's irreverent and offbeat enough to be memorable, is still used to good effect. Once the biographical segment is out of the way, the video gets into an explanation of Shakespeare's use of language, with succinct explanations of iambs, and his predilection for composing in iambic pentameter. A brief introduction of Elizabethan drama is presented that emphasizes how plays in Shakespeare's day were primarily a verbal, rather than a visual, event, and the concepts of dramatic art and tragedy are discussed. Specific Shakespearean tragedies, including King Lear and Macbeth, are described briefly. This video is a quite credible and engaging introduction to Shakespeare and would serve as a refresher and review for anyone whose student readings of some of the plays are fading into distant memory. --Robert J. McNamara

ACTORS:	Standard Deviants TV
CATEGORY:	Video
THEATRICAL RELEASE DATE:	01 January, 2000
MANUFACTURER:	Cerebellum Corp.
MPAA RATING:	NR (Not Rated)
FEATURES:	Color, NTSC
TYPE:	Literature
MEDIA:	VHS Tape
# OF MEDIA:	1
UPC:	631865023431