Middle School Shakespeare Monologue Contest
Inauguration Year 2004

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Shakespeare Comic Monologues

The purpose of the Inaugural Middle School SHAKESPEARE COMPETITION is to enhance students’ appreciation for and understanding of the globe’s most influential writer and to help them refine their ability to convey psychological, thematic, and aesthetic insights skillfully to an audience. Participants should be encouraged to bring the poet’s lyric and dramatic works to life in their own ways, and to express his words with feeling, clarity, and a well-informed sense of their implications. They should be reminded that gesture and movement are expected to flow directly from the language, and should always be employed with discretion and restraint. We hope that as you integrate COMPETITION-related initiatives into your curriculum, you’ll find ways to benefit entire classes rather than confining your offerings solely to after-school activities in which only a few students take part. We’ve learned that festivities that culminate during a general assembly ordinarily provide the most rewarding experience and elicit the greatest amount of enthusiasm.

As you prepare for this year’s contest, you should be cognizant of the following guidelines.

• a school must first hold its own competition, normally with at least three students taking part in the exercise. The school competition should be judged, if possible, by at least three qualified observers, to be drawn from teachers, actors, directors, or others in the community who are knowledgeable about Shakespeare.
• students must be in the 6th, 7th, 8th or 9th grades and must be permanent residents of the United States. They cannot have received, or be scheduled to receive, payment for a professional or semi-professional acting performance during the school year in which the COMPETITION occurs.
• Each entrant in the regional COMPETITION is expected to select, memorize, and present a Shakespearean monologue, which must be at least 20 lines long but must not exceed 25 lines (verse) or 20 lines (prose).
• Students should endeavor to speak as naturally as possible, not with an affected or artificial voice, and they should use their normal accent (that is, American speech for most students, rather than, say, a British accent that is not native to them) unless the passage they’ve selected can be credibly rendered only with another mode of delivery.
• Contestants should not wear costumes or make use of any props.
• A student’s introduction to his or her monologue should be limited to two sentences at most, identifying the selection and, if necessary, situating it in the context of the play from which it is taken.
  

Co-sponsored by the Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies, the English-Speaking Union, and the Washington Episcopal School.