How And Why We Teach Shakespeare

Outlines an engaging way to instill an understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare's classic works in children, outlining a family-friendly method that incorporates the history of Shakespearean theater and society.

In How and Why We Teach Shakespeare, 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. The contributors offer a rich variety of topics, including: 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. 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.

An improved, larger-format edition of the Cambridge School Shakespeare plays, extensively rewritten, expanded and produced in an attractive new design.

Shakespeare in Modern English breaks the taboo about Shakespeare’s texts, which have long been regarded as sacred and untouchable while being widely and freely translated into foreign languages. It is designed to make Shakespeare more easily understood in the theatre without dumbing down or simplifying the content. Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’, ‘Coriolanus’ and ‘The Tempest’ are presented in Macdonald’s book in modern English. They show that these great plays lose nothing by being acted or read in the language we all use today. Shakespeare’s language is poetic, elaborately rich and memorable, but much of it is very difficult to comprehend in the theatre when we have no notes to explain allusions, obsolete vocabulary and whimsical humour. Foreign translations of Shakespeare are normally into their modern language. So why not ours too? The purpose in rendering Shakespeare into modern English is to enhance the enjoyment and understanding of audiences in the theatre. The translations are not designed for children or dummies, but for those who want to understand Shakespeare better, especially in the theatre. Shakespeare in Modern English will appeal to those who want to understand the rich and poetical language of Shakespeare in a more comprehensible way. It is also a useful tool for older students studying Shakespeare.

This is a teacher’s resource book tailor-made for EFL teachers who want to bring Shakespeare into their classes. It includes forty innovative lesson plans with ready-to-use worksheets, hands-on games and student-oriented activities that help EFL learners achieve higher levels of English proficiency and cultural sensitivity. By introducing the plots, characters, and language arts employed in Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice, the book conveys English grammatical rules and aspects like a walk in the garden; complicated rhetorical features such as stress, meter, rhyme, homonymy, irony, simile, metaphor, euphemism, parallelism, unusual word order, etc. are taught through meaning-driven games and exercises. Besides developing EFL learners’ English language skills, it also includes practical extended tasks that enhance higher-order thinking skills, encouraging reflection on the central themes in Shakespeare’s plays.

Through the discursive political lenses of Occupy Wall Street and the 99%, this volume of essays examines the study of Shakespeare and of literature more generally in today’s climate of educational and professional uncertainty. Acknowledging the problematic relationship of higher education to the production of inequity and hierarchy in our society, essays in this book examine the profession, our pedagogy, and our scholarship in an effort to direct Shakespeare studies, literary studies, and higher education itself toward greater equity for students and professors. Covering a range of topics from diverse positions and perspectives, these essays confront and question foundational assumptions about higher education, and hence society, including intellectual merit and institutional status. These essays comprise a timely conversation critical for understanding our profession in “post-Occupy” America.