It’s Party Time! How to wish Will a happy 450th

What better way to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday than to throw a party!  With ten or more guests and liberal use of the suggestions below, it could be a night to remember.  

But wait! think’st thou.  Parties take a lot of planning and expense and just plain work!  Yes, but if you get your homeschool group, room mothers, or team leaders involved, you can spread the work and double the fun.  Peruse these ideas, and see if they don’t get some creative juices flowing:

COSTUME CONTEST: all participants come in as many Elizabethan costume elements as they can manage, adapted from thrift-store basics and ordinary household items like old sheets and pillowcases, curtains, aluminum foil, coffee filters, crepe paper streamers, etc.  No fair enlisting a needle-handy grandma to whip up a RenFair outfit with real velvet and gold lace. 

OR, collect a bunch of these materials, divide into teams and give everybody half an hour to come up with their own costume elements.  Have pictures available to go by—there are thousands of them online, or check out costume books from the library. Here are some hints and links:

Ask everyone to come in a white shirt.  With flowing sleeves if possible.

The ruff is essential.  Cut strips of felt or paper to fit around the neck.  Cut out the flat part of several regular-size coffee filters, fold the ruffly part and staple or hot-glue to the band. To see how this might look, check out the pictures here and here.

Headgear.  Flat caps for guys and hoods for the ladies are true to the period and easy to make.  This site gives step-by-step instructions for a flat cap and a tall hat (the cap was worn by all classes and generally guys only; the hat was for upper classes and sometimes worn by fine ladies as well as men).  Here are easy instructions for making a “northern coif,” which ladies wore to protect their hair and keep it reasonably clean, in an age of little bathing.  Both these sites give sewing directions, which would be impractical for a party setting.  But felt, sturdy paper (or crepe paper) and a glue gun could get close to the same results.

Puffy pants (breeches, or  the worst idea in men’s fashion ever), can be suggested by cutting crepe paper streamers in strips, gluing one end of each strip to a wide ribbon waistband, and dividing the others ends in half and gluing each half to shorter ribbons that will tie just above each knee.  (Loose-fitting shorts should be worn underneath!)  I hope that makes sense.  I don’t have any pictures of this idea to show you because it just came out of my own head, but the resulting pants should look something like this (though not so elegant):

The same idea might also work to suggest “slashed sleeves,” as in the picture below.

Doublets can be made by cutting the sleeves off an old jacket and stuffing the front lightly.  The ruff will tie it all together

Bodices: This lady has some fun ideas.

Skirts: Here’s where the curtains and sheets come in handy.  Elizabethan skirts were supposed to stand out sideways from the hips, so small pillows to tie around the waist will give the outfit real pizzazz.  (Actually, it wasn’t a golden age of women’s fashion either.)

More ideas at this e-how link.  And if you find any more good costume sites, let us know!

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FOOD:  If you’re an adventurous cook, you’ve found your era. The Elizabethan period was a time of exploration and discovery, with foods from the New World and the Orient shaking up settled English palettes.  Cooks liked experimenting with new spices and combining sweets and savories, like fruit and meat.  You probably don’t want to go so far as roasted peacock or suckling pig, but how about a carrot tart or parsnips with orange and marigold?  If you have an herb garden, the English herb and flower salad with honey sounds yummy, with pickled mushrooms on the side. If everybody is staying over for dinner, try the spiced pork and fruit.  (All the previous recipes are from the UK, meaning metric measurements.  The parsnip recipe comes with a handy conversion chart, though.)  A heavy brown or steamed bread with butter makes a delicious snack if served warm. No potatoes or tomatoes, which were still too weird for European tastes, but sugared nuts were a favorite, then and now.  In fact, the English were notorious for putting sugar in anything.  “Sack” was a favorite drink, especially with Falstaff: Spanish wine with sugar added.  

Authentic drinks for your party are a bit of a problem unless you want to brew up some homemade beer (as water was unsafe to drink, even children drank beer or ale).  But cider was a popular substitute during harvest time. Heated up with cloves and cinnamon sticks, you can pretend it’s mulled wine. Nix the caffeine, though.  Strangely enough, coffee predates tea in England—it was just over the horizon and would make its appearance during the reign of James I.  Tea would have to wait until James’ grandson Charles II, in the late 1600’s, when it would take the Brits by storm and for good.

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GAMES and ACTIVITIES

Be sure to reserve time to stage Julius Caesar’s assassination!  Details on Tuesday.

The Insult game.  I don’t particularly get off on Shakespearean insults, but here’s a way to play it that doesn’t exactly, you know, insult anybody.  There are many insult sources online, such as this one, or you can generate your own.  Choose several elaborate, multi-syllabic examples, write them on slips of paper and place them in a jar.  Everyone chooses an insult in turn, and tries to say it at least five times in a row, quickly, without messing up.

Trivia games: To warm up, hand out copies of Shakespeare Fill-in-the-Blank (it’s not a .pdf file so you’ll have to type it up yourself) and give all participants five minutes to fill in the missing words.  The participant with the most correct titles wins.  For other trivia games, divide players into two teams who will consult together to come up with the answers for the quiz questions.  Sporcle.com has lots of games under the Shakespeare trivia heading; choose a couple according to the age level and interests of your group.  Try, for example, Shakespeare or Batman?, The Bible or Shakespeare?, or Spoiler Alert: Shakespeare Edition.  Some of these are pretty challenging, so try not to make it too hard.  All the Sporkle games are meant to be played online, meaning you have to actually play to get the answers. 

You might also print out copies of Will’s One-Stop, divide into teams of three or four, and see if players can find all 21 visual clues to specific plays in the picture.

“The Play’s the Thing” Charades: Write play titles on cards and have the players on each team take turns acting out the title for their own team to guess. 

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