How and Why We Teach Shakespeare

<p>In <i>How and Why We Teach Shakespeare</i> 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.</p><p>The contributors offer a rich variety of topics including: </p><ul> <li>working with cues in Shakespeare such as line and mid-line endings that lead to questions of interpretation</li> <li>seeing Shakespeare's stage directions and the Elizabethan playhouse itself as contributing to a play's meaning</li> <li>using the gamified learning model or cue-cards to get into the text</li> <li>thinking of the classroom as a rehearsal</li> <li>playing the Friar to a student's Juliet in a production of <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> </li> <li>teaching Shakespeare to inner-city students or in a country torn by political and social upheavals.</li> </ul><p>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.</p><p>Chapter 10 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http: //www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. </p>