Educational Resources / Lesson Plans
Twenty ready-to-teach sessions on the Spanish comedia, each one with its objectives, its materials and its timings already worked out. Take one as it stands or lift the part you need. Every plan is a free PDF.
Index
Scansion, stanza and rhyme, the skills a class needs before it can read a comedia out loud.
Cómputo silábico en la poesía española
Counting syllables in a Spanish line, with hiatus, diphthong and sinalefa, so a class can tell an octosílabo from an endecasílabo.
El romance, las redondillas y las quintillas
Three verse forms defined and illustrated with passages from Ángela de Azevedo, followed by exercises in scansion.
El soneto
The sonnet from Petrarch onward: fourteen lines, a fixed rhyme and a logical structure, with texts to analyze.
Teaching Rhyme Schemes in Spanish Poetry
Consonancia and asonancia, arte mayor and arte menor, with stanzas to letter and mark up.
The figures that carry the meaning, each one traced back into a text students are reading.
Allegory
Jars of colored water lead the class to define allegory before they meet it in painting, sculpture and on stage.
Paradoja, antítesis y oxímoron
Three figures defined and traced through Santa Teresa, Lope, Oscar Wilde and Yogi Berra.
La personificación y el apóstrofe en La vida es sueño
Both devices located in the text of La vida es sueño, and then written by the students themselves.
Two points of Spanish that the comedia teaches better than a textbook does.
El subjuntivo en la comedia
Why Spanish keeps the subjunctive and what it does, tracked through passages of a comedia.
Vosotros
The second person plural, formal against informal, explained in Spanish and in English.
How the plays were staged, watched and heard, and the rules the audience knew by heart.
Corral de comedias
The parts of the public playhouse, and how its layout changed the way a play was watched and performed.
Stock Characters
Reading a character from appearance and action, with the social types of the Spanish stage. Written for elementary school and easy to raise.
The Fourth Wall
What the fourth wall is, what happens when a play breaks it, and how to tell the two cases apart.
Music in the Golden Age
Ronda music and the instruments of the period, listened to beside El retrato vivo and beside what students listen to now.
Sessions built around one author or one title, ready to use before or after a reading.
Lope de Vega
Lope’s life turned into short skits, opening with the comparison to Shakespeare that a class always makes first.
Moreto
Moreto introduced by way of film directors the students already know, and then a scene of their own to write.
Convent Theater
The restrictions and the freedoms of the cloister, and the plays written inside it, approached through Sor Marcela.
La muerte del apetito
Sor Marcela’s allegorical play read in context, starting from what a virtue and a vice look like as characters.
Virtues and Vices
How Catholic doctrine shapes the convent play, and why Sor Marcela treats it with humour.
The society the plays came out of and the way of thinking that shaped them.
Life and Society in Golden Age Spain
Hierarchy, dress, food and entertainment, and the ways the theater of the period gave them back to its audience.
The Spanish Baroque Period: Skepticism and Desengaño
Skepticism and desengaño set against Renaissance and baroque painting, with El retrato vivo and La vida es sueño as readings.
These lesson plans were written by students and faculty of the Golden Age theater course at Brigham Young University and given to the AHCT for free use. Have you taught something that works? Write to us at secretary@comedias.org and we will add it.
