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Home / Publications / Books / Free Downloads / Bessie Dunlop, the Witch o Dalry by John Hodgart

Bessie Dunlop, the Witch o Dalry by John Hodgart

BESSIE DUNLOP, THE WITCH O DALRY

John Hodgart

By: Association for Scottish Literature
Published in: PDF


Click here to watch John Hodgart’s talk on Bessie Dunlop: The Witch o Dalry plus other videos from the 2021 ASLS Schools Conference. 


Available here as a free PDF download, Bessie Dunlop, the Witch o Dalry is a three-act play for schools suitable for BGE and S3–S4 students. Based on the historical record of Bessie’s ‘confession’ to witchcraft in sixteenth-century Scotland, the episodic structure of the play shows the many characters and events that supposedly made up the catalogue of her crimes, but which in fact testify to her innocence and goodness. Bessie Dunlop, the Witch o Dalry introduces students to different levels and varieties of Scots and English and contains teaching notes, suggestions for classroom activities, and questions for discussion or writing. 

The original version of Bessie Dunlop, the Witch o Dalry was written by John Hodgart and Martin Clarke in 1977. Hodgart rewrote the play for an EIS Drama competition before revising it again for Hodder and Staunton who published it as a school text in 1995. This 2021 shorter edition is the fourth version of the play. 


CONTENTS 
Introduction 
A Note on Spelling and Pronunciation 
Cast List 
Bessie Dunlop, the Witch o Dalry
             Act One
             Act Two             
             Act Three  
Glossary  
Music  
Reading and Discussion Questions, and Other Classroom Activities

Primary Sidebar

Retrieving and Renewing: a poem for ASL

   Forget your literature? – forget your soul.
   If you want to see your country hale and whole
   Turn back the pages of fourteen hundred years.
   Surely not? Oh yes, did you expect woad and spears?
   In Altus Prosator the bristly blustery land
   Bursts in buzz and fouth within a grand
   Music of metrical thought. Breathes there the man
   With soul so dead—? Probably! But a scan
   Would show his fault was ignorance:
   Don’t follow him. Cosmic circumstance
   Hides in nearest, most ordinary things.
   Find Scotland – find inalienable springs.
  Edwin Morgan, 2004

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