Halloween decorations in our town are over the top. Families have inflatables, anamatronics, and orange lights everywhere. So while hosting our Shakespeare Club, we decided to create Shakespeare-inspired Halloween decorations. We started with the witches from Macbeth. We found styrofoam heads at our local craft store and placed them securely on sturdy dowel rods. Using lots and lots of hot glue, we secured black garden fabric around each dowel rod and then topped that fabric with some sheer black fabric. Finally we glued a witches hat to each head. We placed the witches in the wooded part of our yard with a cauldron in front of them. I printed out a sign that read: “Double, double, toil and trouble;/Fire burn and cauldron bubble ” Using modge podge, I affixed the paper to a wooden sign and placed it beside the witches.
With lots of plastic skulls, we decided to pay tribute to Hamlet as well. For many years we had placed our full-size plastic skeleton in an adirondack chair. We turned him into young Prince Hamlet by placing a crown on his head. We then took a small skull and placed it in his hand. Beside him, we placed a wooden sign with Hamlet’s line: “Alas poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.”
Finally, we paid tribute to the magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We remade a scarecrow by placing a donkey’s head on him in honor of Bottom. Then we used Puck’s line: “If we shadows have offended,/ Think but this, and all is mended,/That you have but slumber’d here/While these visions did appear.”
As can be seen in the pictures, these decorations sat alongside our other decorations. We still used our spiderwebs, scarecrows, and inflatable. The Shakespeare-inspired decorations just added a point of interest, especially on days when we hosted Shakespeare Club. Our members had great fun acting out the scenes and becoming the characters themselves.
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