DRAMATIZATION SELECTIONS FROM ENGLISH CLASSICS BY SARAH E. SIMONS HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS To Mrs. Elizabeth R. Walton, whose work in the Dramatic Interpretation of Literature has been the inspiration of young students in the City of Washington for many years, we gratefully dedicate this book. PREFACE It is the aim of this volume to give practical suggestions for the dramatization of high school classics. The teaching experience of the authors leads them to believe that dramatization of the literature studied is one of the most successful of all devices for vitalizing the work of the English class. Moreover, the imagined difficulties in the way of high school dramatization vanish entirely on nearer view or become, in the working out, a stimulus to invention. The selections here treated are familiar to students in the secondary schools. The dramatic illustrations offered are type studies and are intended as a working basis for teachers and pupils in developing similar exercises. To facilitate their use in the classroom, they are grouped, according to the usual high school English course, in four parts, one for each year respectively; and are published independently in pamphlet form expressly for the convenience of pupils. Their purpose is to instruct, the idea of amusement and entertainment, from the nature of the case, being wholly incidental. This book is sent to high school teachers with the earnest hope that it may point the way to making the regular, not the holiday, dramatization of literature an effective instrument in the teaching of English. Let us turn literature into life for the pupil and we shall give him an amulet, at whose magic touch new worlds are opened,-we shall give him in deed and in truth "that old enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens doors;-doors, not of robbers', but of Kings' Treasuries." S. E. S. C. I. O. 256423 |