Approaches To Teaching Shakespeare S English History Plays

Shakespeare's history plays make up nearly a third of his corpus and feature iconic characters like Falstaff, the young Prince Hal, and Richard III--as well as unforgettable scenes like the storming of Harfleur. But these plays also present challenges for teachers, who need to help students understand shifting dynastic feuds, manifold concepts of political power, and early modern ideas of the body politic, kingship, and nationhood. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," introduces instructors to the many editions of the plays, the wealth of contextual and critical writings available, and other resources. Part 2, "Approaches," contains essays on topics as various as masculinity and gender, using the plays in the composition classroom, and teaching the plays through Shakespeare's own sources, film, television, and the Web. The essays help instructors teach works that are poetically and emotionally rich as well as fascinating in how they depict Shakespeare's vision of his nation's past and present.

Describes a performance approach to teaching Shakespeare's plays in high school and college, using performance activities that include analyzing casting, rehearsing, and performing parts of plays.

This teaching guide for high school college instructors begins with an introduction on "Shakespeare and the American Landscape," by Samuel Crowl, and includes the following 32 essays: "Some 'Basics' in Shakespearean Study" (Gladys V. Veidemanis); "Teaching Shakespeare's Dramatic Dialogue" (Sharon A. Beehler); "Shakespearean Role Models" (Ruth Ann Gerrard); "The Use of Quotations in Teaching Shakespeare" (Leila Christenbury); "Getting To Know a Play Five Ways" (Martha Tuck Rozett); "Toward a Teachable Shakespeare Syllabus" (Robert F. Willson, Jr.); "Shakespeare off the Page" (J. L. Styan); "Goals and Limits in Student Performance of Shakespeare" (Charles H. Frey); "Using Improvisational Exercises to Teach Shakespeare" (Annette Drew-Bear); "Enacting Shakespeare's Language in'Macbeth' and 'Romeo and Juliet'" (Elizabeth Oakes); "Sparking: A Methodology to Encourage Student Performance" (Joan Ozark Holmer); "Changing the W's in Shakespeare's Plays" (Michael Flachmann); "Love, Sighs, and Videotape: An Approach to Teaching Shakespeare's Comedies" (Michael J. Collins); "Shakespearean Festivals: The Popular Roots of Performance" (Demar C. Homan); "Introducing Shakespeare with First Folio Advertisements" (Daniel J. Pinti); "Versions of 'Henry V': Laurence Olivier vs. Kenneth Branagh" (Harry Brent); "Picturing Shakespeare: Using Film in the Classroom to Turn Text into Theater" (James Hirsh); "Shakespeare Enters the Electronic Age" (Roy Flannagan); "Shakespeare Is Not Just for Eggheads: An Interview with Two Successful Teachers" (Linda Johnson); "Teaching Shakespeare against the Grain" (Ronald Strickland); "Shakespeare and the At-Risk Student" (David B. Gleaves and others); "Decentering the Instructor in Large Classes" (Robert Carl Johnson); "Where There's a 'Will,' There's a Way!" (Mary T. Christel and Ann Legore Christiansen); "Digging into 'Julius Caesar through Character Analysis" (Larry R. Johannessen); "A Whole Language Approach to 'Romeo and Juliet'" (John Wilson Swope); "'Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care': Responding to 'Macbeth' through Metaphorical Character Journals" (Gregory L. Rubano and Phillip M. Anderson); "Building a Bridge to Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' with Cormier's 'The Chocolate War'" (Margo A. Figgins and Alan Smiley); "Three Writing Activities to Use with 'Macbeth'" (Ken Spurlock); "The Centrality of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'" (Hugh M. Richmond); "If Only One, Then 'Henry IV, Part 1' for the General Education Course" (Sherry Bevins Darrell); "Teaching 'The Taming of the Shrew': Kate, Closure, and Eighteenth-Century Editions" (Loreen L. Giese); and "'Measure for Measure': Links to Our Time" (John S. Simmons). (SAM)

This collection offers practical suggestions for the integration of non-Shakespearean drama into the teaching of Shakespeare. It shows both the ways in which Shakespearean drama is typical of its period and of the ways in which it is distinctive, by looking at Shakespeare and other writers who influenced and developed the genres in which he worked.

Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy is an international collection of fresh digital approaches for teaching Shakespeare. It describes 15 methodologies, resources and tools recently developed, updated and used by a diverse range of contributors in Great Britain, Australia, Asia and the United States. Contributors explore how these digital resources meet classroom needs and help facilitate conversations about academic literacy, race and identity, local and global cultures, performance and interdisciplinary thought. Chapters describe each case study in depth, recounting needs, collaborations and challenges during design, as well as sharing effective classroom uses and offering accessible, usable content for both teachers and learners. The book will appeal to a broad range of readers. College and high school instructors will find a rich trove of usable teaching content and suggestions for mounting digital units in the classroom, while digital humanities and education specialists will find a snapshot of and theories about the field itself. With access to exciting new content from local archives and global networks, the collection aids teaching, research and reflection on Shakespeare for the 21st century.

This book provides diverse perspectives on Shakespeare and early modern literature that engage innovation, collaboration, and forward-looking practices.

The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface provides a ground-breaking investigation into media-specific spaces where Shakespeare is experienced. While such operations may be largely invisible to the average reader or viewer, the interface properties of books, screens, and stages profoundly mediate our cognitive engagement with Shakespeare. This volume considers contemporary debates and questions including how mobile devices mediate the experience of Shakespeare; the impact of rapidly evolving virtual reality technologies and the interface architectures which condition Shakespearean plays; and how design elements of hypertext, menus, and screen navigation operate within internet Shakespeare spaces. Charting new frontiers, this diverse collection delivers fresh insight into human–computer interaction and user-experience theory, cognitive ecology, and critical approaches such as historical phenomenology. This volume also highlights the application of media and interface design theory to questions related to the medium of the play and its crucial interface with the body and mind.

This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women’s political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the "historical affects"—financial, emotional, and socio-political—that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces the most personal, unspeakable passions in matrices defined in part by financial exchange, by erotic desire, by gender, by the material body, and by theatricality itself. As it encourages this conversation to take place, the collection provides scholars and students alike with a series of new perspectives, not only on the plays, emotions, and histories discussed in its pages, but also on broader shifts and pressures animating literary studies today.