Teaching Shakespeare

This contemplative anthology offers personal essays by noted scholars on a range of topics related to the teaching of Shakespeare. Ideal for the graduate student, it addresses many of the primary concerns and rewards of the discipline, drawing on the variety of special skills, interests, and experiences brought to the classroom by the volume's distinguished contributors.

• Offers insight into the classroom practices, special skills, interests, and experiences of some of the most distinguished Shakespearean scholars in the field
• Features essayists who reflect on the experience of teaching Shakespeare at university level; how they approach the subject and why they think it is important to teach
• Provides anecdotal and practical advice for any reader interested in teaching the works of Shakespeare
• Engagingly candid

Notes on Contributors.

Acknowledgments.

Introduction: Passing it On (Skip Shand, Glendon College, York University).

Part I: Mentoring.

1 Teaching Shakespeare, Mentoring Shakespeareans (Jean E. Howard, Columbia University).

Part II: Text.

2 Planned Obsolescence or Working at the Words (Russ McDonald, Goldsmiths College, University of London).

3 The Words: Teacher as Editor, Editor as Teacher (David Bevington, University of Chicago).

4 Questions That Have No Answers (Alexander Leggatt, University of Toronto).

Part III: Text and Performance.

5 Teaching the Script (Anthony B. Dawson, University of British Columbia).

6 A Test of Character (Miriam Gilbert, University of Iowa).

7 The Last Shakespeare Picture Show or Going to the Barricades (Barbara Hodgdon, University of Michigan).

Part IV: Contexts (Institutional, Cultural, Historical).

8 Dancing and Thinking: Teaching “Shakespeare” in the Twenty-First Century (Kate McLuskie, Director, Shakespeare Institute).

9 Communicating Differences: Gender, Feminism, and Queer Studies in the Changing Shakespeare Curriculum (Ramona Wray, Queen’s University, Belfast).

10 Teaching Shakespeare and Race in the New Empire (Ania Loomba, University of Pennsylvania).

11 Learning to Listen: Shakespeare and Contexts (Frances E. Dolan, University of California, Davis).

12 Divided by a Common Bard? Learning and Teaching Shakespeare in the UK and USA (Richard Dutton, Ohio State University).

Part V: And in Conclusion....

13 Playing Hercules or Laboring in My Vocation (Carol Chillington Rutter, University of Warwick).

Index.

"The focus of this often inspiring book is the teaching of Shakespeare at uni­versity level. It had never occurred to me that anything as sophisticated as a pedagogy might actually underpin university teaching." (Early Theatre, 2010)

G. B. Shand, Senior Scholar at York University's Glendon College, writes on teaching early modern drama, and on text and performance. He edited both prose and poetry for Oxford's Complete Middleton. As text coach, he has assisted on professional productions in Canada and at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. His mentors in graduate school were the quietly gifted Guy Hamel, and the formidable yet unfailingly generous Clifford Leech. This collection of personal essays offers a reflective window into the lifelong calling that is Shakespeare in the university classroom. It acknowledges the traditions in which these scholars work and the teachers who have advised and inspired them. Representing a broad range of approaches to the discipline and the profession, the essayists write about why teaching Shakespeare matters, and why they do it the way they do. Deliberately designed not to be a manual, this is a contemplative anthology of anecdotal and practical advice from experienced teachers, many of whom have been publicly honored for their teaching. The essays are engagingly candid: reading them is like being a fly on the wall of some of the most exciting classrooms on both sides of the Atlantic.

No one who teaches Shakespeare, or who is contemplating teaching it, will fail to be encouraged and instructed – even mentored – by the personal reflections found within this volume.

"This is a dangerous book: it induces intense envy of the students who take classes with these brilliant Shakespeare teachers and it encourages immediate theft for our own courses of the classroom ideas that the authors so exhilaratingly describe in their chapters. Above all it forces us to reconsider how we teach Shakespeare and to rethink what kinds of discovery we want to make with our students. Shand and his team are wonderful guides, helping us profoundly to understand the contexts and circumstances of our teaching and our learning."
–Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame