- Contributor
- Editors
- Publisher
- Year
- ISBN
- Language
- Janice Bland
- Christiane Lütge & Maria Eisenmann
- Universitätsverlag Winter
- 2014
- 9783825362362
- English
This volume provides new perspectives and innovative insights into current topics and approaches for teaching Shakespeare to all ages, and gives an overview of contemporary Shakespeare scholarship as well as practical examples that have proven successful in a wide range of classroom situations. This is particularly relevant in times of universal Shakespearean topics and competence and output orientation. The articles presented deal with Shakespeare’s texts in all respects, with his comedies, tragedies, histories and sonnets, and offer fresh methods for interacting with them in the classroom, introducing analytical, interactive, performative and creative approaches. Consequently, the volume serves perfectly as an introduction to Shakespeare pedagogy, and transmits profound knowledge to university students and university lecturers as well as teachers.
Susan Cooper’s time-slip young adult novel King of Shadows (1999), and Adrian Mitchell’s play script adaptation (2011) throw light on their pretext A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Shakespearian theatre. Through the time-slip trope, students simultaneously experience the Elizabethan playhouse world, and become an actor in it, much like the protagonist Nat who has slipped back in time. The play includes short passages from A Midsummer Night’s Dream both in a contemporary play-within-the-play in the London Globe of 1999 and an Elizabethan production in 1599 in Shakespeare’s Globe. This chapter highlights the importance of emotional involvement through story, providing a more visceral introductory experience of Shakespeare, and the significance of the Globe for an initial understanding of Elizabethan theatre. Furthermore it suggests the immortal “even to the edge of doom” splendour of Shakespearian poetry (Sonnet 116, another inter-text) can more impressively reach students through their performing the language from within the aesthetic illusion of the Elizabethan storyworld.
