TEACHING AND LEARNING SHAKESPEARE THROUGH THEATRE-BASED PRACTICE By Tracy Irish & Jennifer Kitchen

Published by Bloomsbury, The Arden Shakespeare

Shakespeare remains educationally significant, contrary to all the current trends which dent the arts. And using practical theatre-based methods in both schools and universities embeds the learning in a way that no desk-based study ever will. Students need to be on their feet actively performing the text with their voices and bodies and that transforms the classroom into a quasi-rehearsal room.

This book presents an overview of Shakespeare and education. And it includes lots of contributions from practitioners ranging from theatre education directors such as Darren Raymond, who runs Intermission Theatre, and Jacqui O’Hanlon at the RSC. With interesting thoughts about why/ whether Shakespeare matters so much, through to more substantial essays such as Karen McGivern on how Shakespeare fits into initial teacher training and Nobulali Dangazele on the huge, vexed question of decolonising Shakespeare, especially in South Africa where there are moves afoot to remove him from the curriculum.

There’s a lot here to think about for anyone interested in teaching Shakespeare and the best ways of doing that, but it’s a thoughtful discussion book rather than a how-to manual and it’s probably best absorbed in small bites. A work which includes sentence like this one is one for serious study rather than a bedtime browse: “The language of using Shakespeare as a vehicle for enquiry about our own times is common across active theatre-based Shakespeare: organisations and practitioners appear in many cases to be embracing the potential of interculturally democratic models of Shakespeare’s cultural value.”