Making Much Ado About the Elizabethan Era

Bedecked in Elizabethan-era garb, students and teachers at Ensign Intermediate School returned to the enlightened days of the Renaissance Friday, eating meat off the bone and smashing assorted crockery against a classroom wall.

“To be or not to be,” intoned a young Will Shakespeare as feedback from the school’s outdoor public address system muffled his next line. Undaunted, Shakespeare impersonator Sean Tupy, 13, continued his soliloquy from “Hamlet,” followed by a brief biographical sketch of the Bard.

About 500 seventh-graders took part in the school’s first Renaissance Fair, an event educators hoped would bring their classroom lectures to life.

“It’s kind of like imagining you’re back in this time,” said Tupy, who acknowledged that questions remain as to the authenticity and identity of Shakespeare.

“I think he was real,” Tupy said, as a brown-robed monk wearing a wooden cross around his neck walked by, carrying a half-eaten dill pickle in one hand.

The schoolyard air was filled with the uncharacteristic sound of smashing plates during much of the two-hour festival. Students wrote the names of those they disparaged on back of the plates, then hurled them gleefully against an outside wall. An ancient custom, teachers said.

A stone’s throw away, a group of students played farkel, a dice game requiring the patience born of another age. First one to reach 10,000 wins.

“This is a way to make sure our students understand these times, by dressing up and doing these activities,” said Principal Scott Paulsen, wearing a royal purple robe and tights.

After students ate the meat off their rib bones, they competed in the King Henry VIII bone toss. In another corner of the campus, students tried to “guess thy weight in stone” by estimating the number of rocks it would take to offset their weight.

“Whoa! Eighteen rocks!” cried out one surprised participant.

Costumes ranged from the picturesque to the admittedly pathetic.

“I left my costume at home,” said Kyle Bean, 13, wearing a Medieval-looking trash bag with improvised arm openings, cinched by a belt. But Colleen Farrell, 12, her left cheek adorned with a painted flower, wore an elaborately tailored lace dress. “It was my mother’s wedding dress,” she confessed.

“Doth thou hath unpleasant odor?” asked a hand-painted sign stapled to the end of a picnic table. Students there fashioned sweet-smelling pomander balls to wear around their necks by pressing cloves into ripe oranges strung with twine.

“It’s living history,” said teacher Donna Kelsen, who coordinated the event with teacher Lisa Mosqueda.

“They get a touch of everything. They’re living it. They’ll remember it.”