Teacher Process
This project lends itself well to the students being responsible for much of what they shoudl be doing. One important teacher role is the deciding on famous characters to assign the students. I think it would work best to assign these roles so there is a breadth of characters and a limited amount of fighting over these characters. I imagined that the teacher would give each student a slip of paper with a name on it as the students entered the classroom, before the discussion of the project happened. I think this would be an excellent anticipatory to the web quest.
The daily historical journals would also require some prompting. Each day students should be prompted to write about a different aspect of their life as their character. This would promote their needing to research all aspects of their character's life.
I would assume that with all of the parts to this web quest, this project might take around 2 weeks. I can see this accompanying the reading of a play, or happening before the reading of a play. At 12th grade students should have had some exposure to Shakespeare and should be able to complete the project without having read a play recently. I would suggest that the teacher allow for a substantial amount of class time to allow students to work on this project, as groups often have trouble meeting outside of class.