In How and Why We Teach Shakespeare: College Teachers and Directors Share How They Explore the Playwright's Works with Their Students from Focal Press, 19 distinguished college teachers and directors draw from their personal experiences and share their methods and the reasons why they teach Shakespeare. The collection is divided into four sections: studying the text as a script for performance, exploring Shakespeare by performing, implementing specific techniques for getting into the plays, and working in different classrooms and settings.
For fellow instructors of Shakespeare, the contributors address their own philosophies of teaching, the relation between scholarship and performance, and — perhaps most of all — why in this age the study of Shakespeare is so important.
- Working with cues in Shakespeare, such as line and mid-line endings that lead to questions of interpretation
- Seeing Shakespeare’s stage directions and the Elizabethan playhouse itself as contributing to a play’s meaning
- Using the "gamified" learning model or cue-cards to get into the text
- Thinking of the classroom as a rehearsal
- Playing the Friar to a student’s Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet
- Teaching Shakespeare to inner-city students or in a country torn by political and social upheavals.
Sidney Homan
Section 1: Encountering Shakespeare’s Verbal and Visual Text with Students
1. Theatricality and the Resistance of Thesis
Andrew Hartley
2. ‘That’s a question: How shall we try it?’ (The Comedy of Errors 5.1)
Nick Hutchison
3. Re-Entering Macbeth: ‘Witches Vanish’ and Other Stage Directions
S. P. Cerasano
4. Seeing the Elizabethan Playhouse in Richard II
Joseph Candido
Section 2: Learning through Performance
5. Acting and Ownership in the Shakespeare Classroom
James Bulman and Beth Watkins
6. Performing Hamlet
Russell Jackson
7. ‘Gladly Would He Learn and Gladly Teach’: Empowering Students with Shakespeare
Sidney Homan
8. Uncertain Text: Student and Teacher Find Their Way Onstage in Romeo and Juliet
Jerry Harp and Erica Terpening
9. ‘In Practice Let Us Put It Presently’: Learning with Much Ado
Fran Teague and Kristin Kundert
Section 3: Approaching Shakespeare from Some Specific Angles
10. Shakespeeding into Macbeth and The Tempest: Teaching with the Shakespeare Reloaded Website
Liam Semler
11. ‘And so everyone according to his cue’: Practice-led Teaching and Cue-scripts in the Classroom
Miranda Fay Thomas
12. Collaborating with Shakespeare
Frederick Kiefer
13. Shakespeare without Print
Paul Menzer
Section 4: Shakespeare in Various Classrooms
14. That Depends: What Do You Want Two Plus Two To Be?
Cary Mazer
15. ‘Who's there?’ ‘Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself’: Attending to Students in Diversified Settings
Naomi Conn Liebler
16. Unpicking the Turkish Tapestry: Teaching Shakespeare in Anatolia
Patrick Hart
17. Teaching Shakespeare to Retirees in the OLLI Program
Alan Dessen
Afterword: Cur Non?
June Schlueter