Reimagining Shakespeare Education: Teaching and Learning through Collaboration 1108478670, 9781108478670

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REIMAGINING SHAKESPEARE EDUCATION

Shakespeare education is being reimagined around the world. This book delves into the important role of collaborative projects in this extraordinary transformation. Over twenty innovative Shakespeare partnerships from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, Europe and South America are critically explored by their leaders and participants. Structured into thematic sections covering engagement with schools, universities, the public, the digital and performance, this book offers vivid insights into what it means to teach, learn and experience Shakespeare in collaboration with others. Diversity, equality, identity, incarceration, disability, community and culture are key factors in these initiatives, which together reveal how complex and humane Shakespeare education can be. Whether you are interested in practice or theory, this collection showcases an abundance of rich, inspiring and informative perspectives on Shakespeare education in our contemporary world. L i a m E. Semler is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Sydney, where he also leads the Better Strangers project. He is co-editor (with Gillian Woods) of the Cambridge Elements Shakespeare and Pedagogy series. His recent books include The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents (2019) and Coriolanus: A Critical Reader (2021). Cl a ir e H a nsen is Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. Her research interests include place-based approaches to Shakespeare, ecocriticism, the blue humanities and health humanities. She is the author of Shakespeare and Place-based Learning (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and Shakespeare and Complexity Theory (2017). Jacquel ine M a nuel is Professor of English Education in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. Her areas of research, scholarship and publication include student engagement with literature, creativity in English education, English curriculum history and Shakespeare education.

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R E I M AG I N I NG S H A K E S PE A R E E DUC AT ION Teaching and Learning through Collaboration Edited by L I A M E . SE M L ER The University of Sydney

CL A IR E H A NSEN The Australian National University

JACQU E L I N E M A N U E L The University of Sydney

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108478670 DOI: 10.1017/9781108778510 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Semler, L. E., editor. | Hansen, Claire, editor. | Manuel, Jacqueline, editor. title: Reimagining Shakespeare education : teaching and learning through collaboration / edited by Liam E. Semler, The University of Sydney ; Claire Hansen, Australian National University ; Jacqueline Manuel, University of Sydney. description: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2022036450 | isbn 9781108478670 (hardback) | isbn 9781108778510 (ebook) subjects: lcsh: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Study and teaching. | Group work in education. | lcgft: Essays. classification: lcc PR2987 .R45 2023 | ddc 822.3/3–dc23/eng/20220912 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022036450 ISBN 978-1-108-47867-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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To the teachers, scholars, artists and students whose ‘passion lends them power’ to inspire and reimagine Shakespeare in education.

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Contents

List of Figures page x List of Tables xii Notes on Contributors xiii Acknowledgements xxiii

Introduction: Projecting Shakespeare

Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen and Jacqueline Manuel

1

Part I Reimagining Shakespeare with/in Schools

Introduction

Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen and Jacqueline Manuel

23

1 Shakespeare Schools Foundation: The Classroom as Theatre

27

2 Shakespeare and Citizenship in France

41

3 Bell Shakespeare: Exploring the Power of Shakespeare in Primary School Contexts

54

4 The Better Strangers/Shakespeare Reloaded Project: Seeking Educational Ardenspaces

69

Stuart Rathe and Francesca Ellis Florence March

Joanna Erskine and Robyn Ewing AM

Andrew Hood and Liam E. Semler

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Contents

Part II Reimagining Shakespeare with/in Universities

Introduction

Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen and Jacqueline Manuel

5 ‘Radical Mischief’: The Other Place Collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company and the University of Birmingham Mary Davies

87

91

6 The Shakespeare’s Globe/King’s College London MA Shakespeare Studies: The First Twenty Years of Collaboration

102

7 The Warwick–Monash Co-teaching Initiative: Shakespeare and Portal Pedagogy

113

8 Shakespeare In and Out of Prison: A Collaboration between the World Shakespeare Project and Shakespeare Central

127

Farah Karim-Cooper, Gordon McMullan, Lucy Munro and Will Tosh

Fiona Gregory, Gabriel García Ochoa and Paul Prescott

Sheila T. Cavanagh and Steve Rowland

Part III Public Reimaginings

Introduction

Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen and Jacqueline Manuel

141

9 Hecate: Adaptation, Education and Cultural Activism

145

10 ‘I’ll Teach you Differences’: Learning across Languages and Cultures with Fórum Shakespeare (Brazil)

159

11 The Pop-up Globe: Designing and Learning to Play an ‘Empathy Drum’

174

12 The Place of Shakespeare North: Histories, Dynamics and Educational Aims

188

Clint Bracknell with Kylie Bracknell

Catherine Silverstone, Bridget Escolme and Paul Heritage

Miles Gregory and Tim Fitzpatrick

Elspeth Graham

Part IV Digital Reimaginings

Introduction

Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen and Jacqueline Manuel

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205

Contents

ix

13 Reimagining Shakespeare, Linking Archives and the ‘Living Variorum’

209

14 Collaborative Rhizomatic Learning and Global Shakespeares

225

15 Linked Early Modern Drama Online: A New Editorial and Encoding Platform for Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

239

16 Play the Knave Theatre Videogame in Schools: From Glitchy Connections to Virtual Collaboration

251

Peter S. Donaldson Alexa Alice Joubin

Janelle Jenstad

Gina Bloom and Amanda Shores

Part V Reimagining Performance

Introduction

Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen and Jacqueline Manuel

267

17 Flute Theatre, Shakespeare and Autism

271

18 The Viola Project: Learning to Defy Gender Norms On Stage and Off

281

19 ‘All Corners Else o’th’Earth Let Liberty Make Use Of’: The Shakespeare Prison Project

295

Kelly Hunter and Robert Shaughnessy

Skyler Schrempp

Steve Dunne and Rob Pensalfini

20 Teaching Shakespeare in Oman: Exploring Shared Humanity and Cultural Difference through Shakespeare’s Texts 307 Tracy Irish and Aileen Gonsalves

21 Edward’s Boys in the South of France: Inventing an International, Collaborative Ardenspace

319



332

Perry Mills and Janice Valls-Russell

Afterword: Majestic Visions

Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen and Jacqueline Manuel

Index 334

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Figures

3.1 Bell Shakespeare’s The Players perform Just Macbeth! for primary school students. Photograph by Justin Batchelor page 59 4.1 The Shakespeare Reloaded project originally designed as an ardenspace operating as a complex system 72 4.2 Lucy’s story exemplifies emergence and the unpredicted impact of participation in Better Strangers/Shakespeare Reloaded from 2008 to 2018 75 9.1 Production still from Hecate performed at Perth Festival 2020, ‘The Murder of McDuff’s family’. Photograph by Dana Weeks 149 11.1 Much Ado About Nothing, Pop-up Globe Auckland, 2017 (Photo: Peter Meecham) 175 11.2 Henry V (Chris Huntly-Turner) embraces an audience member in the yard while Westmoreland (Joel Herbert) looks on from the stage, Pop-up Globe Auckland, 2017 (Photo: Peter Meecham) 182 11.3 Henry V (Chris Huntly-Turner) and young audience members, Pop-up Globe Melbourne, 2017 (by the 183 author with permission provided by Tim Fitzpatrick) 11.4 Three young fans, wearing elements of costume at Pop-up Globe Auckland, 2017 (Photo: Peter Meecham) 184 13.1 Anonymous, ‘Mr Irving as Hamlet’. Folger Shakespeare Library, Source Call Number (STC): Art Flat a26, no. 82, image 002110. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library216 13.2 H. C. Selous, ‘Now might I do it pat, now he is praying’, engraved by F. Wentworth. Charles and Mary Chowden Clarke, The Plays of William Shakespeare (London: Cassell, x

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List of Figures

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Petter & Galpin, [1868]), Vol. 3, 421. STC: PR2755.C6 C1a Sh.Col, image 002734. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library 217 13.3 Hamlet, directed by Yoshihiro Kurita (Japan) (2007). Image courtesy of the Ryutopia Niigata City Performing Arts Center. MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive 218 13.4 Walney Costa in the film Ham-let, directed by Tadeu Jungle, from the play Ham-let directed by José Celso Martinez Corrêa (known as Zé Celso) (1993). Courtesy of Teatro Oficina Uzina Uzona. MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive 219 14.1 Screenshot of the MIT Global Shakespeares webpage, restricted to students who are given access via courses 234 16.1 Screenshot of Play the Knave showing menu options for Shakespeare’s tragedies 252 16.2 Students performing Hamlet scenes from Play the Knave, Epstein School, Atlanta, GA, 4 April 2017. Photograph by Gina Bloom 252 16.3 Screenshot of Play the Knave showing menu options of some of the thirty avatars 254 21.1 The Woman in the Moon, directed by Perry Mills for Edward’s Boys: Pandora (Joe Pocknell), Gunophilus (Jack Hawkins). Rehearsal, Stratford-upon-Avon. Photograph courtesy of Nick Browning (2018) for King Edward VI School and Edward’s Boys, www.nickbimages.com/329

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Tables

4.1 Some activities created by the Better Strangers/Shakespeare Reloaded project page 80 15.1 LEMDO editorial notes 246

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Notes on Contributors

Gina Bloom is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) and Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2018) and coeditor with Tom Bishop and Erika T. Lin of Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). Bloom’s current research focuses on high school Shakespeare education in the United States and South Africa. Clint Bracknell is a Noongar musician from the south coast of Western Australia and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Queensland. He holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Western Australia and is Deputy Chair of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies council. Clint has ­composed extensively for Australian theatre, ­winning Best Composition in the Performing Arts WA Awards. He leads the development of Noongar language and performance resources at mayakeniny.com. K y lie Br ack nell is an accomplished Noongar performer, writer, ­producer and director from the southwest of Western Australia and recipient of the prestigious Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award. She has led the development of innovative works completely in Noongar language, including a reimagining of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and a ­complete dubbed version of the feature film Fist of Fury. Both are world-firsts for languages of Australia. Sheil a T. C ava nagh is Professor of English at Emory University and Director of the World Shakespeare Project and the Emory Women Writers Resource Project. Author of Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: xiii

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Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene (Indiana University Press, 1994) and Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (Duquesne University Press, 2001), she has written many articles on early modern literature and pedagogy. She served as the Global Shakespeare Centre/Fulbright Distinguished Chair, the MasseMartin/NEH Distinguished Teaching Chair and is on the Board of the Society of Woman Geographers. She is writing a monograph entitled Multisensory Shakespeare for Specialised Communities. M a ry Dav ies is a recent doctoral graduate of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. She was awarded the University of Birmingham Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) The Other Place PhD scholarship in 2017, and her research investigated the intentions behind the re-opening of the new The Other Place, the studio theatre belonging to the RSC, in Stratford-upon-Avon. Aside from her research, Mary also works as a freelance dramaturg with a keen interest in new work development. Peter S. Dona ldson is Ford Professor of Humanities at MIT where he has taught classes in literature and film since 1969. His early publications include two books published by Cambridge on Machiavelli’s influence in England and Europe. From the late 1980s his focus shifted to the study of Shakespeare across media. His book Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors was published in 1990 (Routledge) and since that time he has directed major digital education projects including Shakespeare Electronic Archive, Hamlet on the Ramparts, XMAS (Crossmedia Annotation System) and the MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive. Steve Du nne is a married man, father of two, and son of a loving mother. He is a philosopher, humanitarian, musician and student. Steven is a paroled convicted murderer. Having understood how his habits of thought and early experiences led to his criminal activity, he reverse-engineered his perceptions, identity, communication style and understanding of personal responsibility. Steven has degrees in history, literature and theology, and believes his work in Shakespearean plays is pivotal to his continuing success. Fr a ncesc a Ellis is Head of Creative and Programmes for Shakespeare Schools Foundation, leading in the creation of their programmes and workshop content. Having worked for the charity for over a decade, she is still blown away by the power of Shakespeare to transform young lives.

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Joa nna Er sk ine is a playwright, teacher and arts education specialist. She is head of education at Bell Shakespeare, Australia’s national theatre company that specialises in Shakespeare. Joanna oversees the artistic direction and delivery of the company’s renowned national education programme that reaches over 80,000 students and teachers face to face each year across all states and territories. A former secondary teacher, Joanna is also an award-winning playwright and writes Bell Shakespeare’s in-schools performances for The Players. Br idget Escol me is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Queen Mary University of London. She currently teaches and researches in the field of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in performance, creative arts and mental health and costume history. She is author of Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (Routledge, 2005), Antony and Cleopatra in the Palgrave Shakespeare Handbooks series (Palgrave, 2006), Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage (Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury, 2014) and Shakespeare and Costume in Practice (Palgrave, 2020). Roby n Ew ing AM is Professor Emerita and Co-director of the Creativity in Research, Engaging the Arts, Transforming Education Health and Wellbeing (CREATE) Centre, University of Sydney. A former primary teacher, Robyn is a strong advocate for the central role that the arts should play in our lives and learning and has a commitment to innovative teaching and learning at all levels of education. She particularly enjoys working alongside educators and artists interested in reforming curriculum practices. T im Fitzpatr ick is Associate Professor (Honorary) at the University of Sydney. His research field is early modern European popular theatre. He has published on the oral/popular processes and origins of the Commedia dell’Arte and on staging at the public playhouses in London, concentrating on the spatial implications of Elizabethan play texts and on the iconographic evidence for the two Globe playhouses. His book Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company (Ashgate, 2011) deals with the evocation of fictional place in early modern staging. He is Founding Research Fellow of the Pop-up Globe, a full-scale reconstruction of his designs for the second Globe. G a br iel G a rcí a Ochoa was born in Mexico City and has lived in Australia for almost fifteen years. He is the director of the Bachelor

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Notes on Contributors

of Global Studies at Monash University. Gabriel is a writer, academic and professional translator. He studied at Harvard University’s Institute for World Literature, where his research focused on Latin American Literature. Gabriel has taught internationally, in Asia, Europe and North America. His research interests include global studies, intercultural communication and creative writing. A ileen Gonsa lves is Founder and Chief Artistic Director of Butterfly Theatre Collective, founded in 2011. Aileen’s work with Butterfly and as the head of the MA in acting at Arts Ed have helped develop her own approach to acting: the Gonsalves Method. Aileen trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama and works professionally across film, theatre, television and radio. She is an education associate practitioner for the RSC and directed their First Encounters Tempest at the Swan Theatre in 2017. Elspet h Gr a h a m is Professor of Early Modern Literature at Liverpool John Moores University and has written on a range of early modern topics: women’s writing; autobiography; dissenting traditions; and animal–human relationships. She initiated, and was a co-creator of, the Shakespeare North project to build the Shakespeare North Playhouse in Knowsley, Liverpool City Region, contributing centrally to the project’s development. She edited the special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin, 38.3, autumn 2020, entitled ‘The Earls of Derby and the Early Modern Performance Culture of North West England’. Fiona Gr egory lectures in the literary studies and critical performance studies programmes in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, where she teaches theatre history, historiography and Shakespearean performance. Her research on celebrity representation and performance identity has appeared in a wide range of journals, including Theatre Survey, New Theatre Quarterly and Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film, and her book Actresses and Mental Illness: Histrionic Heroines was published by Routledge in 2019. Miles Gr egory studied at the universities of Durham and Exeter, receiving his MFA in staging Shakespeare before completing his PhD in Shakespeare in Performance at Bristol University in 2008. He founded the Bristol Shakespeare Festival, served as the artistic director and chief executive officer of the Maltings Theatre, Berwick-upon-Tweed, and most recently conceived, founded and served as the artistic director of Pop-up Globe, a full-scale temporary touring replica of Shakespeare’s

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second Globe Theatre, which played to over 700,000 people in four Australasian cities between 2016 and 2020. Cl a ir e H a nsen is a lecturer in English at the Australian National University. Her research interests include place-based approaches to Shakespeare, ecocriticism and the blue humanities and Shakespearean health humanities. She is co-chair of the Blue Humanities Lab and cofounder of the interdisciplinary Heart of the Matter health humanities project. She is the author of Shakespeare and Place-Based Learning (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Shakespeare and Complexity Theory (Routledge, 2017). Claire is a member of the Better Strangers project, which hosts the Shakespeare Reloaded website. Paul Her itage is Professor of Drama and Performance at Queen Mary University of London and Director of People’s Palace Projects. In 1995 Paul created Fórum Shakespeare, which has taken place in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, São Paulo, Brasília and Belo Horizonte (1995–2016). During 2021, Paul led a research collaboration with Flute Theatre (United Kingdom) and La Plaza Theatre (Peru) that engaged young people with autism in performing Shakespeare. Paul’s current research focuses on relationships between arts and wellbeing, cultural value, Indigenous cultural exchange and climate action. A ndr ew Hood is Director of Academic Writing and Oratory at Barker College. For eleven years, he was head of English at Barker during the ongoing Shakespeare Reloaded/Better Strangers relationship with the University of Sydney. He has presented for the English Teachers Association and the Association of Independent Schools on senior English courses and has research interests in Shakespeare and academic writing. Kelly Hu nter is an actor, director and educator who has worked with the RSC and the National Theatre. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Heartbeat: Drama Games for Children with Autism (Routledge, 2015) and the founder and artistic director of Flute Theatre. Tr ac y Ir ish is an experienced teacher, theatre practitioner and scholar. She has been a core member of the RSC’s education team since 2008 and Butterfly Theatre Collective since 2014. She also teaches on postgraduate programmes at the University of Birmingham and the University of Warwick. Tracy has authored a range of resources and publications including RSC School Shakespeare editions and Shakespeare and Meisner

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(with Aileen Gonsalves, Bloomsbury, 2021). She is currently writing Teaching and Learning Shakespeare through Theatre-based Practice, for publication in 2023. Janelle Jenstad is Professor of English at the University of Victoria. She directs The Map of Early Modern London and Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (Routledge, 2018). Her essays and book chapters have appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin, Elizabethan Theatre, EMLS, JMEMS, DHQ, Digital Studies and other venues. Ale x a Alice Joubin teaches in the English Department at George Washington University where she co-directs the Digital Humanities Institute. She holds the John M. Kirk, Jr. Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Middlebury College Bread Loaf School of English. She is the author of Shakespeare and East Asia (Oxford University Press, 2021), co-author of Race (with Martin Orkin, Routledge, 2018) and co-editor of Onscreen Allusions to Shakespeare (Palgrave, 2022), Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance (Palgrave, 2018) and Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (Palgrave, 2014). Fa r a h K a r i m- Cooper is Professor of Shakespeare Studies, King’s College London and Co-Director of Education at Shakespeare’s Globe. She has served as president of the Shakespeare Association of America and is an executive board member for RaceB4Race. She has published extensively in early modern studies and is a general editor for Arden’s Shakespeare in the Theatre series and their Critical Intersections Series. She is editor and co-editor of numerous books and author of Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh University Press, 2006; rev. 2019) and The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016). She is currently writing a book on Shakespeare and race called The Great White Bard with One World and Viking/Penguin. Jacqueline M a nuel is Professor of English Education in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. Her areas of research, scholarship and publications include teacher professional development; theory, pedagogy and student achievement in literary education, reading and writing; creativity in English education; Shakespeare in English education; secondary English curriculum and policy; teacher motivation and retention; and English curriculum

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history. Jackie is a member of the Better Strangers project, which hosts the Shakespeare Reloaded website. Flor ence M a rch is Professor in Early Modern English Drama at University Paul-Valéry Montpellier in France and director of the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-classical Era and the Enlightenment, at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Currently, her research focuses on Shakespeare’s legacy in twentieth- and twenty-first-century France. She has published extensively on Shakespeare’s structural function in southern-France festivals (Avignon, Montpellier, Nice) and his founding role in the history of French theatre for all and of popular education. She is co-editor in chief of Cahiers Élisabéthains, a journal of English Renaissance Studies. Gor don M c Mull a n is Professor of English and Director of the London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College London. He is a general editor of Arden Early Modern Drama and a general textual editor of the Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edn. His publications include The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), the Arden 3 edition of Henry VIII (Methuen Drama, 2000), Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2007), the collaborative monograph Antipodal Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2018) and several edited collections. Per ry Mills is Deputy Headmaster at King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon. He has directed plays throughout his career, and leads workshops on topics relating to the teaching of English and drama. He has edited The Taming of the Shrew (Cambridge School Shakespeare series) and authored the Cambridge Shakespeare Student Guide on As You Like It. Perry developed ‘Edward’s Boys’, an all-boy company ­comprising members of the school, in order to explore the neglected early modern repertoire of plays written for the boys’ companies. Luc y Mu nro is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at King’s College London. Her most recent publications include a monograph, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King’s Men (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2020), editions of Massinger’s The Picture (Routledge, 2020) and Shirley’s The Gentleman of Venice (Oxford University Press, 2022), and essays on theatrical investment, status and gender in Early Theatre, English Literary Renaissance and Shakespeare Quarterly. She is a co-investigator on Before Shakespeare and the international Engendering the Stage collaboration.

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Rob Pensa lfini is the Artistic Director of the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble and Associate Professor of Linguistics and Drama at the University of Queensland. A professional actor and director, he established the Ensemble’s Shakespeare Prison Project, Australia’s only ongoing Prison Shakespeare programme, in 2006. He is the author of Prison Shakespeare: For These Deep Shames and Great Indignities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), along with several books and a score of articles on Indigenous Australian languages. Paul Pr escot t is Professor of English and Theatre at the University of California Merced. He has acted, adapted and taught Shakespeare in a range of countries and contexts, from Cuba to Australia. His books include Reviewing Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and, as co-editor, Shakespeare on European Festival Stages (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2022), Shakespeare on the Global Stage (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015) and A Year of Shakespeare (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013). He has adapted many of Shakespeare’s plays for a range of professional companies, including the National Theatre of Great Britain. St ua rt R at he qualified as a teacher over a decade ago and has since worked across a range of primary school settings. His pedagogical specialism is Shakespeare for Key Stages 1 and 2. Between 2016 and 2018, he worked as education manager for Shakespeare Schools Foundation, creating a range of education products and co-creating workshop content. In 2019, he completed an MA in Shakespeare and education at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. Steve Row l a nd is a college educator and award-winning documentary director. He has taught Shakespeare in prisons for over ten years and is completing a documentary film called Time Out of Joint: Prison Reflections on Shakespeare. He is founder of an educational venture based on the film. Time Out of Joint hires former prisoners to lead Shakespearebased Zoom workshops in high schools and colleges. Topics include prison education, Shakespeare and transformation. Sk y ler Schr empp is an author and theatre-maker in her hometown, Chicago. Her debut children’s novel is Three Strike Summer (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2022). She has a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She was a recent artistic director of the Viola Project, an organisation dedicated to empowering youth through the exploration and performance of Shakespeare plays.

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Lia m E. Semler is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Sydney and leader of the Better Strangers project, which hosts the Shakespeare Reloaded website. He is editor of Coriolanus: A Critical Reader (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2021) and The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500–1700 (Routledge, 2019). He is author of Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning versus the System (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013) and co-editor (with Gillian Woods) of the Cambridge Elements Shakespeare and Pedagogy series. Robert Sh aughnessy is Professor of Theatre at Guildford School of Acting, University of Surrey. He has written extensively on Shakespeare and early modern drama, eighteenth-century theatre, contemporary performance, popular culture and adaptation for stage and screen. His books include Representing Shakespeare (Routledge, 1994), The Shakespeare Effect (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), The Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare (Routledge, 2011) and About Shakespeare: Bodies, Spaces and Texts (Cambridge Elements, 2020). His current research focuses on the intersections between Shakespeare, performance, disability and diversity. A m a nda Shor es is currently completing a Master of Science in Couples and Family Therapy degree at the University of Oregon. Prior to entering her graduate programme, she worked in schools for several years as a tutor and paraeducator. As a paraeducator, she primarily focused on teaching social and emotional learning skills to children through trauma-informed educational practices. She has also worked with school professionals to develop alternative instructional methods for increased student engagement and decreased barriers to learning for underserved populations. C at her ine Silver stone (1974–2020) was an esteemed scholar of ­ contemporary queer and decolonial approaches to Shakespeare. Catherine’s research developed to cover queer club performance, ­performances of queer affirmation, ‘queer afterlives’ and the films of Derek Jarman. In 2016 Catherine participated in Fórum Shakespeare, where she led workshops and lectures with Brazilian students in São Paulo. Leaning across languages and cultures, Catherine subtly ­subverted colonial legacies of performing Shakespeare by motivating actors, ­directors and students to find and to speak their own Shakespeare. W ill Tosh is Head of Research at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. He is the author of Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam

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Wanamaker Playhouse (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2018), Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare’s England (Palgrave, 2016) and Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare (Sceptre, 2024). Ja nice Va lls-Russell is Principal Research Associate, employed by the French CNRS and based in Montpellier. As performance reviews editor of Cahiers Élisabéthains, Janice has been following Edward’s Boys’ productions for a number of years. With Florence March, she leads a research action programme, Shakespeare and Citizenship. Recent publications include co-editing Thomas Heywood and the Classical Tradition (Manchester University Press, 2021) and Shakespeare’s Others in 21stcentury Performance: The Merchant of Venice and Othello (Bloomsbury, 2022).

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Acknowledgements

This book was called into being by the Shakespeare projects described in the chapters that follow. The projects themselves were called into being, or developed and extended, by the imagination and dedication of their leaders and participants. We are immensely grateful to these people, our fellow ‘projectors’, for kindly agreeing to compose for us critically reflective essays on their work. All books are collaborative and this one infinitely so as it explores networks of inspiration and influence that generate, propagate and interrogate collaborative teaching and learning. If we have learned one thing through this process it is that chapter authorship is but one part – often a richly multivocal part – of larger and more dynamic living systems of Shakespeare education, research and performance. We hope the book offers a valuable entrance into these complex worlds and we thank our authors and other Shakespeareans mentioned by them for helping us conceptually and practically to complete this project. This book has a large cast because many chapters are co-authored. We are thrilled to be in such inspiring company, yet deeply saddened that one of our number cannot be with us to celebrate this publication. Catherine Silverstone tragically passed away in 2020. Her friends and colleagues pay tribute to her in Chapter 10, which she co-authored. We add our love and respect here and are honoured to have her voice speaking in our collection. We are members of the Better Strangers/Shakespeare Reloaded project – an educational research partnership between the University of Sydney and Barker College (a school in Sydney) – and we are delighted to see in solid book form what began several years ago as a mere yearning to hear Shakespeare project leaders reflect on their educational work. As with most books, the process took longer than we imagined, and COVID-19 did us no favours, but Emily Hockley at Cambridge University Press was the most patient and supportive of guides without whom there would be no book. Thank you, Emily. We would also like to thank George Laver, editorial assistant at the press, for his diligence xxiii

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and responsiveness to our interminable emails. We appreciate the wise advice of the anonymous reviewers of the proposal and full text: your comments and suggestions lifted our work. We won’t run through a long list of names of colleagues and contributors here: you are our friends, interlocutors, colleagues, students and teachers in Australia and elsewhere. We all depend on each other, we are indebted to such professionalism and care, and this book is yours as much as ours.

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Introduction

Projecting Shakespeare Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen and Jacqueline Manuel

Shakespeare education is nothing if not paradoxical. It is a legacy beast, inherently authoritative and socially entrenched, stalking young people from the cover of the past. It is bound up with the history of eighteenthto twentieth-century Western education inside and outside the classroom, and has strong ties to empire, institutions, associations, popular culture, and social movements and norms (Levine, 1988; Court, 1992; Lanier, 2002; Graff, 2007 [1987]; Shaughnessy, 2007; Murphy, 2008; Kahn et al., 2011; Haughey, 2013; Olive, 2015; Flaherty, 2017). Educational uptake over the centuries is always interconnected with the ebb and flow of Shakespeare spoken and performed on stages (and on film), and Shakespeare edited and interpreted on pages (and on webpages). Myriad local conditions within the United Kingdom, the Anglophone world and the world at large powerfully reconfigure Shakespeare and yet, despite the differences, Shakespeare education in many regions carries with it claims of shared human values and high art that are widely (not universally) accepted and yet deeply problematic (Massai, 2005; Albanese, 2010; Bennett and Carson, 2013; Coles, 2013; Olive et al., 2021; cf. Manuel and Carter, 2017). The global brand power (Rumbold, 2011) of Shakespeare is so extraordinary that even plays with decidedly upsetting content in a twenty-first-century context – such as Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello and The Merchant of Venice – maintain their popularity on stage and their position on curricula. This positioning is made more complex by the important social justice work these very texts (and others in the canon) are called on to facilitate in classrooms.

The Landscape of Shakespeare Education If we think of formal education as land, Shakespeare has a sizeable property portfolio that endures through generations and, by virtue of incumbent power and path dependence, shapes both the present and future of education. Millions of young people are brought up on his estates – ‘Shakespeare 1

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is the most prescribed author across global curricula’ (Irish, 2022)1 – and are, consequently, beneficiaries of his largesse, a creative and ­intellectual gift that is extraordinary and inspiring, yet with ­powerful strings attached in the form of habits of thought, racialised poetics and ­cultural norms (Hendricks and Parker, 1994; Hall, 1995). No wonder then, that Shakespeare and the texts bearing his name echo through ­discussions of anti-racist reading and pedagogy, socially just ­teaching, and the ­ decolonisation of curricula (Hendricks, 1996; Smith, 2016; Sterling Brown, 2016; Eklund and Hyman, 2019; O’Dair and Francisco, 2019; Ruiter, 2020; N ­ gcongo-James and Pratt, 2020; Hendricks, 2021; ­Karim-Cooper, 2021; Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh, 2023), because there is only so much land, and those who have much need to relinquish or renegotiate their holdings if those who have little or none are to find their place in schools and ­universities and thus gain appropriate representation in public imaginaries and social policy. The degree to which the institutional past of Westernised Shakespeare education – its old industrial processes and imperial values – owns and curtails its future is largely up to us, because this is a question of what is imaginable by the living. For all its establishment power, Shakespeare education is being reimagined all the time – by everyone, everywhere. Such reimagining may be on a large or small scale, tending radical or conservative, driven by individuals or groups, conducted in theory or practice, or worked out in relation to countless other factors. We could valuably take Ewan Fernie’s insight – ‘Today … it is more important than ever to learn from Shakespeare that we’re free’ (Fernie, 2017: 275) – and sink it into the soil of Shakespeare education to see what emerges in response. His words are profound and they become more so when we interweave them with the query: ‘And what if we are not free, in society, in institutions, in the classroom?’ This is not to critique Fernie, but to digest his insight slowly in order to feel what this learning and this freedom might be. The reimagining of Shakespeare education entails the reimagining of both Shakespeare and education.2 When Shakespeare researchers and 1

2

Shakespeare’s presence in curricula around the world must be understood as a complex and highly variable phenomenon. On the challenges associated with attempting to quantify this presence, see Irish (2015) and Olive (2015: 88–9). We thank Tracy Irish for helping us understand this problem. In their exploration of Shakespeare education in ‘American intellectual and cultural life’ (14), Kahn et al. (2011: 14) similarly note how an expanded view of education prompts reciprocal questions: ‘We provide snapshots of the theories and varied practices of Shakespearean education in diversified social, cultural, and political milieus over three hundred years. In each case, we ask what constitutes education and what constitutes Shakespeare; cumulatively, we query the nature of education, the nature of citizenship in a democracy, and the roles of literature, elocution, theater, and performance in both.’

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practitioners rethink what is important about Shakespeare, they ­contribute to shifts of emphasis, praxis and enquiry that ultimately, or swiftly, inflect teaching. Conversely, as educational methods, tools and practices evolve more broadly across the sector they cause us to rethink our pedagogies and reconsider what it is about Shakespeare that we should or could teach. The flaws of Fordist approaches to uniform education regulated by ‘cells and bells’ are increasingly known and ameliorated in new school ­architectures, educational processes and philosophical values (Senge et al., 2012). Digitisation was already changing education before the COVID-19 global pandemic of 2020–2 gave it a massive lift in uptake (Lankshear and Knobel, 2011; Gee, 2013a; Battershill and Ross, 2017; Beetham and Sharpe, 2020). Collaborative education, creative expression, place-based and outdoor education, and problem- or enquiry-based learning are rising as new norms (Gruenewald, 2003; Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012: 103–47; Davidson and Major, 2014; Demarest, 2015 [2014]; Sharratt and Planche, 2016; Ewing and Saunders, 2017; Hargreaves and O’Connor, 2018; Porter, 2018; Jefferson and Anderson, 2021). A strong tradition of practical books on Shakespeare teaching continues to grow (for example: Rocklin, 2005; Gibson, 2008 [1998]; Stredder, 2009; Dakin, 2009, 2012; Doona, 2012; Semler, 2013a; Hunter, 2015; Winston, 2015; Lau and Tso, 2016; Thompson and Turchi, 2016; Banks, 2019 [2013]; Cohen, 2019 [2018]; Homan, 2019; Lopez, 2019; Whitfield, 2019; Henderson and Vitale, 2021; Stevens and Bickley, 2023). Various journals have recent education-themed issues including, for example, Shakespeare Survey, ­volume 74 (Smith, 2021), Research in Drama Education, volume 25, issue 1 (Bell and Borsuk, 2020), and Early Modern Culture, volume 14 (Olson and Pietros, 2019). The British Shakespeare Association’s Teaching Shakespeare magazine celebrated its twentieth issue in 2021, a year that also saw Cambridge University Press launch its ‘Shakespeare and Pedagogy’ ­ rofessional network community and Elements series. The RaceB4Race p conference series, Critical Race Theory, Premodern Critical Race Studies, and related scholarship and ­pedagogy from the late twentieth century through to the present are having an enduring structural impact on not only what is imaginable in Shakespeare education, but also on what ­freedom might look like in reading, researching, performing and teaching Shakespeare’s works (RaceB4Race; hooks 1994, 2003; MacDonald, 2002, 2020; Little, Jr., 2000, 2023; Erickson and Hunt, 2005; Hendricks, 2021; Espinosa, 2021; Thompson, 2021). This is, collectively, an extraordinary narrative of pedagogical rejuvenation that, nonetheless, finds itself weirdly coinciding with lingering

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old-style schooling practices, entrenched socio-cultural and educational inequities worldwide, and penetrating critiques of technology, software and data usage in education (Selwyn, 2014; Lynch, 2015; Williamson, 2017). Provocative questions abound: Why do we teach Shakespeare? What is Shakespeare? How should we teach Shakespeare? To whom should we teach Shakespeare? Should we teach Shakespeare? What is being learned when we teach Shakespeare? What does it mean to teach, to learn, to perform, to experience? What is education? These are live questions throughout this book because every project detailed in each chapter is, one way or another, not content with simply replicating the past of Shakespeare education.

Institutional Shakespeare People are not lacking in imagination. All children and adults, all teachers and students, all actors and audiences are gifted with beautiful powers of imagining. Yet, the prerequisite to imagining our way to exciting futures, is an ability to imagine our way out of present constraints. These constraints are complex and not always visible, and so seeing futures depends on actively seeing the present. This means seeing the present as a weave of historical and ideological structures and feeling able to critique or test them without, one hopes, over-simplifying or discarding extraordinary artistic or social constructs in the process. This need to see the present is why we must seek the views of the marginalised: while all views are of course partial, the marginalised see the present with a vividness that those at its centre can barely imagine. It is also why it is important for educators to see, hear and understand students and their worlds rather than simply imposing, year after year, the same old formula onto teaching and learning as if the world never changes. This is not easy, because in most schools and universities career educators age as the years pass while incoming cohorts of students do not. When many of us started teaching we were mistaken for students; now, decades later, we get mistaken for dinosaurs. That’s fine, so long as we embrace the present with empathy, intellectual interest and pedagogies of care. Without these, as our students bring new values and habits of mind to the classroom the natural tendency is for the two sides – teachers and students – to drift apart and only be held in dry relation by inanimate and enforceable institutional structures. With these, the scene of teaching and learning is reimagined all the time because it is collaboratively enabled and enlivened by the loving circulation of respect and expertise.

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If we think beyond schools and universities, as many authors in this book do so adeptly, we can see that embracing the present is far more than merely caring about the views of young people – it is, in fact, caring about all people and asking what good I might do in other spaces, and how might Shakespeare’s artistic contribution contribute ‘over there’, in partnership with me and with others. What vivid new experiences and formations might be called into being? This is not to deny that the imaginable is not always actionable and the actioned is not always precisely what was imagined. But this unevenness comes with the territory and is, in its way, deeply human. Inherited structures, assumptions and processes are hard to shift or elude and so deep paradoxes remain as the monuments of the past shimmer in the heat of the present. This book endeavours to capture something of the educational shimmer caused by the imaginative energies released through collaborative Shakespeare projects. We understand collaboration as a broad principle and an infinitely varied practice. It delivers more than the mere sum of its parts, and relies on sharing, receiving and co-developing ideas. It assumes everyone can learn from everyone. It anticipates new vistas. These projects make our normal landscapes dance and waver. They experiment, challenge and provoke us. They are suggestive – albeit partial, limited, targeted – recastings of Shakespeare education. They are imaginative forays actioned collectively. They are rarely independent of institutional power. In fact, most projects are institutional imaginings, prominences of energy arcing out from creative hotspots within institutional or organisational bases, and so while they usually do not imply the dissolution of inherited structures, they exemplify creative yearnings to reach out, rethink, reframe, do more, do different and do better. Institutions and organisations become points of origin or destination; models and guiderails; the backdrop or status quo against which to shine; or simply partners endeavouring to see each other more clearly and build passable bridges to new experiences and understandings. In some respects, this is a book about the good in institutions, about the desire of institutional beings to make extraordinary efforts to see what is outside their institutional boundaries and, more courageously, to understand themselves from the outside and seek to actualise improvements where they can. This is exciting because it exemplifies the professional, the expert, reaching beyond their natural habitat and learning how their professional self can morph and grow in different climates. While the concentrated power of institutions enables such creative adventures, there are also many extraordinary projects that have assembled

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themselves outside institutions from sheer human willpower, creativity and an ethical drive to bring good to the world and its people. Some of these wild-born projects become, in time, institutions themselves, while others persist or perish with greater fragility, and so the global ecosystem of formal and informal structures involving Shakespeare education evolves through time unevenly, complexly and by increments. There is something institutional about most of us – not a radical claim given so many of us work within organisational contexts – and this means we need to be generous to each other as we try to think our way out of, or forward through, larger structures that not only envelop, but also pervade us. When we think, when we imagine, even when we think against our institutions, there’s always something – a whisper, a tone, a bias – that is the institution thinking through us. This is not necessarily bad, nor is it necessarily avoidable, but it does mean that as we project new ideas and formations that we know are good or suspect may be so, our projections are often laden with institutional residues good and bad. We must acknowledge that as surely as the chapters in this book describe richly imaginative interventions in Shakespeare education, they also convey, implicitly and explicitly, complex political and ethical stories. This is important, because collaborative ventures by their very nature tend to make imagination, politics and ethics visible and up for discussion. When our work is confined within our native structures, imagination, politics and ethics are often normalised to the point of invisibility. Collaborative project work, on the other hand, sees us step out of cover, take risks and go places we have not been, troubling assumed or unseen rules and boundaries. This necessarily unveils some of our political and ethical biases, flaws and strengths that may otherwise – in a safer mindset, workspace or routine – have remained shielded from public view. Thus, it will be seen that openness and generosity, along with adventurousness despite the risks, are characteristics of collaborative Shakespeare projects. Shakespeare pedagogy has long been a field of innovative practice, and collaborative partnerships of disparate types and scales are a key feature of this inventiveness. There are infinite, unique Shakespeare projects that flourish around the world and deliver significant experiences and insights to participants, yet never become widely known as published case studies. Shakespeare projects come and go without ceasing because the stories once confined to walk the boards of the Globe now traverse our terrestrial globe in myriad guises: adapted, translated, appropriated, repurposed and remediated. Shakespeare is so much more than he ever was. Consequently, this collection is suggestive, rather than representative, of collaborative

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Shakespeare projects. We hope it is rich enough to provoke extended thinking about collaborative Shakespeare education and to prompt experimentation, but we know that many more books could be assembled – and we hope they will be – on the same collaborative theme with entirely ­different projects represented.

Projecting Shakespeare Since our volume’s focus is the reimagining of Shakespeare education through collaborative projects, we see it as testing the notion of projecting Shakespeare. What might it mean to ‘project’ Shakespeare, especially in a collaborative context? This idea blends outputs and processes: these collaborations are things (projects, partnerships, networks, structures, ­ products, arrangements, outputs) as well as experiences (journeys, reflections, realisations, acts of giving, receiving, feeling, understanding and transforming). The chapters present the views of their contributing authors on not just the content and thematics of their projects, but also the intentions and mechanics of their operations. We invited the creators and leaders of projects to write about their projects – from the inside, as it were – so that readers could hear their thinking because such thinking is worth sharing and is often lost as the hard work of any project tends to absorb participants’ time. We are aware that this means a certain loss of objectivity, but in its place we get insights into the humanity and complexity of project work and how processes and goals shift in practice. In any case, we urged contributors to be as objective as possible and to share their thoughts on the nature, significance and challenges of their projects. In Shakespeare’s time, the verb ‘to project’ could mean ‘to devise or design (an action, proceeding, scheme, or undertaking); to form a project of’ (OED, I.1.a), a meaning that evokes the ideation and design processes that modern creators of collaborative projects know so viscerally. Such work is often driven by ‘a mental conception, idea, or notion; speculation’ (OED, 1.b) and becomes ‘a planned or proposed undertaking; a scheme, a proposal; a purpose, an objective’ (OED, 2.a), to draw on two definitions of the noun ‘project’ in current use. Rather than simply doing one’s regular work, project creators and partners – projectors! – know the physiological thrill and anxiety of nursing a new undertaking into being and, as it grows, realising that one is not only pursuing an objective but being swept along by it as it becomes its own thing with its own momentum. Projectors are not just swept along, but also swept outward, out to sea where there are few markers and they must bravely chart their path.

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The image on our book’s cover, Gino Severini’s Dancer=Propeller=Sea (1915), gracefully suggests the enveloping turbulence to which we refer. The ontologically distinct components of dancer, propeller and sea – human, machine and nature – have somehow found their common spirit and ­co-perform, indeed co-project, a new world that delights by its unexpected harmonies. Structure remains, as do identifiable traits of the individual partners, yet in this space, a space tipped provocatively on its corner to make a startling diamond of a mundane square, they are all transformed into a new, entirely shared life (mark the equals signs in the painting’s title). There could hardly be a more appealing picture of complexity (or collaboration) as dynamism and difference, sympathy and responsiveness (note the interlocking shapes and soft colour gradations) cause the emergence of till-then-unseen truth. Extraordinary new worlds in the roiling sea may remind us of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Prospero’s enterprise is referred to in the play as a ‘project’ by him and his enforced collaborator Ariel (Shakespeare, 2013 [2011]: 2.1.300; 5.1.1). In the play’s Epilogue he makes the audience participants in his success by seeking their ‘gentle breath’ to fill his sails and carry him to Naples, ‘or else my project fails,/Which was to please’ (Epilogue.11–13). This double layering whereby Prospero is both a fictive, magical Duke and a real, theatrical performer reminds us that we have witnessed the execution of his project on the island unfold in more-­or-less real time as the afternoon hours on the island map directly onto the afternoon hours of playing time in the theatre. During the play we hear a lot about the project from its leader, Prospero, whose very name implies he is an accomplished project worker, and he is at the end triumphant. We see how he and Ariel work together, but their partnership is no good model for collaborative ventures because Ariel is effectively enslaved. Prospero’s approach to teamwork is coercive, not collaborative, and must be set aside. Despite this, an insight suggested by Prospero is that project leaders – and to varying degrees, all project participants – are straddling a real yet also imagined space, and thus simultaneously being and performing. They are performing, indeed inhabiting, something magical just above the plain of the world, something that is illusory in so far as it is created and maintained by strenuous dreaming, and yet, at its best, it seizes the real more powerfully than the quotidian structures of normalcy. Shakespeare projects do not define the world, they discover it. The authors of the chapters in this book are highly conscious of this task and are, by necessity, believers that their projects – their designs, notions, schemes – will be prospero,

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which is to say, ‘favourable, propitious, flourishing’ (Shakespeare, 2013 [2011]: 163n3). Such belief is not only forgivable; it is necessary. When a person or group of people project Shakespeare in this way we can say they lead with their imagination, draw others in to be co-sharers in the enterprise and collaboratively express (in increasingly concrete terms) a raised appetite for risk and the new. When one projects Shakespeare the claims of the present or an imagined future are validated, the legacies of the past are questioned, and the shape of Shakespeare changes. When one projects Shakespeare, research and communication are fully intermingled in a blend of analysis, adaptation and application. A Shakespeare project is a novel entity, simultaneously a new infrastructure and a new community that reaches in too many directions (indeed, dimensions) for its influences to be fully traced. Its irreducibility and lability are the point: it is not fully native to the way things are generally done and thus it has not been fully measured or known; it freely admits its live and risky status, its performativity in the world. It could all come crashing down. Sometimes it does, but other times it thrives. A project exists in its own space, a space it has invented and which never fully maps onto the disciplinary frames that guide regular Shakespeare education. In troubling familiar structures and finding the world beyond them, these projects raise new questions about Shakespeare and education. As the chapters in the book confirm, a collaborative project is imagined, designed, built according to plan and realised via implementation that involves innumerable variables that could not be fully conceptualised in the abstract. The planned structures endure minor tweaks or major overhauls in response to the exigencies of the human interactivity that flows through them once the project is underway. It is a living architecture and, ideally, a learning architecture. It is agile, yet also fragile. Shakespeare’s works are not solely plays to be performed or texts to be analysed. They are, of course, these things, but so much more is entailed when we shift our focus from ‘performing Shakespeare’ or ‘reading Shakespeare’, or even ‘teaching Shakespeare’, to ‘projecting Shakespeare’. We are conscious of vivid and contemporary notions such as ‘appropriating Shakespeare’ (Desmet et al., 2020; Fazel and Geddes, 2021), ‘using Shakespeare’ (Fazel and Geddes, 2017), ‘blogging Shakespeare’ (Carson and Kirwan, 2014), ‘upcycling Shakespeare’ (Iyengar, 2014), ‘broadcasting/YouTubing Shakespeare’ (O’Neill, 2014, 2017) and ‘civic Shakespeare’ (Edmondson and Fernie, 2018), yet for our purposes of foregrounding collaborative enterprises with an educational edge, we opt for ‘projecting Shakespeare’. The notion of ‘projection’ implies a pushing outward, a newly devised scheme via which to reach into the less known or unknown, a working of

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the gaps or connections between or across entities rather than fully within them. The consequence of projecting Shakespeare – understood simultaneously as collaborative and exploratory endeavour – is that our understanding and experience of Shakespeare education is loosened and heightened. The same goes for disciplinary boundaries, professional identity, the teacher:learner dichotomy, the analyst:maker division, the scholar:public interface, notions of inclusion, and the public good. Our idealising narrative is complicated by the pragmatics of making distinct parties function together and the necessary compromises that must be accepted as one’s interests are hybridised by cooperation with the interests of collaborators. This challenge will be starkly visible in some chapters. Sensitive questions of funding and viability are also rarely out of mind because collaborative partnerships depend on more than the captain’s vision to be kept afloat. To project Shakespeare is to feed new energy into the global Shakespeare system. This is especially important in respect to teaching and learning because institutional Shakespeare education is always subject to gradual ossification by the entrenching of inherited values and practices. As James Paul Gee neatly puts it: ‘Institutions are “frozen thought”’ (Gee, 2013b: 85). They ‘freeze a solution to a problem’ and over time people get so used to it that ‘it takes a lot of work to unfreeze it’ (Gee 2013b: 88). The natural process of routinisation is made worse in many jurisdictions of the education sector by rampant managerialism, neoliberalism and audit cultures masquerading as leadership, responsibility and professionalism (Ward, 2012; Ball, 2012). The Better Strangers project team (cf. Chapter 4), which includes the editors of this volume, has theorised the asphyxiating over-systematisation of institutional teaching and learning as ‘SysEd’, a condition where ‘system’ comes before and is valued above ‘education’ (Semler, 2017). SysEd is not a universal blight, but is certainly widespread, and vivid examples abound of how it overburdens and dispirits teachers and students, undoes professionalism and educator agency, dovetails with the worst aspects of neoliberalism and marketisation, and misunderstands the holistic and human essence of teaching and learning. Some of the worst examples of SysEd come from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States where oftentimes what is imagined by senior managers as best practice is actually the opposite: pointless administrative churn and managerial interference put the brakes on excellent teaching and professional maturity. Gee proposes non-institutional ‘passionate affinity spaces’ (Gee, 2013a: 133–9) as a way to rethink stale education: ‘If human learning and growth flourish in passionate affinity spaces, especially nurturing ones, then it is of

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some concern that school has so few features of such a space’ (Gee, 2013a: 134). With this in mind, it seems apt to recall Fernie’s plea that we ‘learn from Shakespeare that we’re free’. This may be what Better Strangers is doing when it argues the need for the ongoing generation of experimental ‘ardenspaces’ in which educators can temporarily elude institutional constraints and collaboratively find new energy and possibilities for teaching and learning (Semler, 2013a, 2013b, 2016). In Semler’s work, As You Like It and The Tempest are deployed as aesthetic tools to critique SysEd. Similarly, Sophie Ward uses Shakespeare’s plays to interrogate neoliberal education (Ward, 2017). The term ‘ardenspace’ is explained in Chapter 4, but in brief it designates a temporary space of creative co-learning that lies between or outside regular institutional structures and thus is free of the worst aspects of SysEd. The experience of an ardenspace can be not just enlightening, but also rejuvenating for educators and consequently highly beneficial for them and the work they do within educational organisations. The term is not limited to those working in schools and universities, but suitable for many projects that actualise creative, participatory, educational experiences in some newly imagined, shared space. We began by declaring Shakespeare education paradoxical. So it is, but a more productive and forward-looking word that takes account of the preceding discussion and the following chapters might be ‘complex’. It is a testament to the power of Shakespeare’s art that his works continue to offer us ways to tell our stories and move beyond habits of mind that have grown unfit for purpose. Shakespeare as a global phenomenon – of theatre, story, language, art, brand, inspiration and education – is certainly complex (Hansen, 2017). This Shakespeare is always morphing and multiplying in ways too numerous and intricate to fully predict or control. This Shakespeare is the ultimate complex adaptive system: magnificently open, generative and ungovernable, thriving on positive feedback loops and responding to the embrace of the other. Perhaps this is why Shakespeare often feels so constrained within formal educational systems, particularly those hobbled by SysEd, and so apt for innovative project work that has us speculating beyond the horizon. Education and complexity theory remain in uneasy relation (Morrison, 2002; Davis and Sumara, 2006; Mason, 2008; Morrison, 2010; Martin et al., 2019), partly because institutional education is necessarily characterised by clearly defined, outcome-focussed processes, but more because in the era of SysEd such processes are distorted and absorbed into punitive audit cultures that cannot properly understand, value or action complexivist principles. This is unfortunate because teaching and learning are

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profoundly complex and relational experiences, as innovative educators and educational philosophers have known for centuries, and creativity should be an essential and honoured component of them. To project Shakespeare is to reach for these more complex and relational experiences, to value education above system, to inhabit the edge of chaos and discover experientially what emergence of the new might mean.3 Such reaching will be visible in every chapter of this book. Every project here is collaborative and connects in multiple ways with educational thinking and practice. Although we have sorted twenty-one projects into five clearly designated parts – relating to schools, universities, the public, digitisation and performance – we emphasise here that such an arrangement does not contain them. On the contrary, all the projects spill out of the parts to which they are assigned and this is precisely the point we want to make about collaborative education, about ardenspaces, about projecting Shakespeare. The beauty of these projects is that they are complex and relational, and, as a consequence, those who teach and learn and that which is taught and learned within the projects elude reductive definition and summary. To project Shakespeare is to: contribute to inclusive forms of citizenship in France (Chapter 2), facilitate engagement with Noongar language and culture in Western Australia (Chapter 9), drive urban regeneration in the English town of Prescot (Chapter 12), expand opportunities for autistic people and their families (Chapter 17), pursue intercultural understanding in Brazil, Aotearoa New Zealand and Oman (Chapters 10 and 20), and construct forward-looking digital infrastructures focussed on connecting-up otherwise independent tools (Chapters 13 and 15). These are just a few examples from the chapters contained in this volume, but they are enough to show the multiplicity and complexity of each project. We have prefaced each part with an introduction that addresses the grouping and comments on: contexts, audiences, relationships; aims, processes, structures; and insights, challenges, takeaways. These introductions are not intended to flatten out the differences between projects, but to invite us into more sophisticated conversations about them. The structure of the chapters and modes of authorship vary from project to project. Many chapters are co-authored to represent the partnerships they describe better. For example, Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble’s Shakespeare Prison Project (Chapter 19) is accounted for by the combined insights 3

The complexivist terms ‘edge of chaos’ and ‘emergence’ are defined in Chapter 4.

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of the director and a participant who was a prisoner at the time of his contributions to the project; the Pop-up Globe is described by its founder and artistic director co-authoring with the lead academic researcher on the project (Chapter 11); and the Warwick-Monash Co-Teaching Initiative (Chapter 7) is described in one collective voice despite coming from participants located 17,000 kilometres (10,000 miles) apart. Some chapters, such as those addressing the partnerships between the University of Birmingham and the Royal Shakespeare Company and between Shakespeare’s Globe and King’s College London, are transcribed conversations between project leaders (Chapters 5 and 6) to allow us to eavesdrop on their freer expression of intentions, achievements and challenges. The voices of teachers, students and practitioners resonate throughout the collection as co-authors and directly quoted participants. Role boundaries dissolve in project spaces as teachers become students, students become teachers, and practitioners both. As the voices vary, so do the projects, which range starkly from The Viola Project’s focus on empowering girls and gender non-conforming youth in Chicago (Chapter 18), to the unique pedagogical adventure of Play the Knave (Chapter 16), through to the convention-busting theatre of Edward’s Boys (Chapter 21) and the vast scale of UK school involvement in the Shakespeare Schools Festival (Chapter 1). We get a close look at one scholar’s approach to collaborative rhizomatic learning in the digitally empowered university classroom (Chapter 14), a view into the arts-rich pedagogy of Bell Shakespeare in the primary (elementary) school context (Chapter 3), and a vivid snapshot of how peer co-learning between prisoners and university students functions in a partnership between the World Shakespeare Project and Shakespeare Central (Chapter 8). In all the chapters, new patterns – of practice, of pedagogy, of theory – emerge from the multidimensional exchanges nurtured within Shakespeare projects. The reimagining of Shakespeare education through collaborative project work is just one part of a larger paradigm-shift sweeping the entire field, redefining how we all teach and learn, and transforming how we understand and engage with Shakespeare. The present is waking up and becoming newly visible. Education is unfreezing. Creativity and care are stretching their wings. There is increased potential for everybody to participate in their own way and there is a sense that we are all learning and learning about learning. Projecting Shakespeare certainly has its imperfections – we are human, after all! – but collaboratively pursuing ardenspaces and other shared worlds is deeply nourishing and, at its best, generous and humane.

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References Albanese, Denise, 2010. Extramural Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Ball, Stephen J., 2012. Global Education Inc.: New Policy Networks and the NeoLiberal Imaginary (London and New York: Routledge). Banks, Fiona, 2019 [2013]. Creative Shakespeare: The Globe Education Guide to Practical Shakespeare (London: Arden Shakespeare). Battershill, Claire and Shawna Ross, 2017. Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students (London: Bloomsbury). Beetham, Helen and Rhona Sharpe (eds.), 2020. Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Principles and Practices of Design (London and New York: Routledge). Bell, Henry and Amy Borsuk (eds.), 2020. ‘Teaching Shakespeare: Digital Processes’, Research in Drama Education 25.1, 1–7. Bennett, Susan and Christie Carson (eds.), 2013. Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Carson, Christie and Peter Kirwan (eds.), 2014. Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Cohen, Ralph Alan, 2019 [2018]. ShakesFear and How to Cure It: The Complete Handbook for Teaching Shakespeare (London: Arden Shakespeare). Coles, Jane, 2013. ‘“Every Child’s Birthright”? Democratic Entitlement and the Role of Canonical Literature in the English National Curriculum’, The Curriculum Journal 24.1, 50–66. Court, Franklin E., 1992. Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750–1900 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Dadabhoy, Ambereen and Nedda Mehdizadeh, 2023. Anti-Racist Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Dakin, Mary Ellen, 2009. Reading Shakespeare with Young Adults (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English). Dakin, Mary Ellen, 2012. Reading Shakespeare Film First (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English). Davidson, Neil and Claire Howell Major, 2014. ‘Boundary Crossings: Cooperative Learning, Collaborative Learning, and Problem-Based Learning’, Journal on Excellence in College Teaching 25.3–4, 7–55. Davis, Brent and Dennis Sumara, 2006. Complexity and Education: Inquiries into Learning, Teaching, and Research (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). Demarest, Amy B., 2015 [2014]. Place-based Curriculum Design: Exceeding Standards through Local Investigations (New York and London: Routledge). Desmet, Christy, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson (eds.), 2020. The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (Abingdon and New York: Routledge). Doona, John, 2012. A Practical Guide to Shakespeare for the Primary School: 50 Lesson Plans Using Drama (Abingdon and New York: Routledge). Edmondson, Paul and Ewan Fernie (eds.), 2018. New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity (London: Bloomsbury).

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Eklund, Hillary and Wendy Beth Hyman (eds.), 2019. Teaching Social Justice through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Erickson, Peter and Maurice Hunt (eds.), 2005. Approaches to Teaching Othello (New York: MLA). Espinosa, Ruben, 2021. Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism (Abingdon and New York: Routledge). Ewing, Robyn and John Saunders, 2017. School Drama: Drama, Literature and Literacy in the Creative Classroom (Sydney: Currency Press). Fazel, Valerie M. and Louise Geddes (eds.), 2017. The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan). Fazel, Valerie M. and Louise Geddes (eds.), 2021. Variable Objects: Shakespeare and Speculative Appropriation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Fernie, Ewan, 2017. Shakespeare for Freedom: Why the Plays Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Flaherty, Kate, 2017. ‘Shakespeare and Education: The Making of an Unlikely Marriage’, in Jill L. Levenson and Robert Ormsby (eds.), The Shakespearean World (Abingdon and New York: Routledge), 361–76. Gee, James Paul, 2013a. Good Video Games + Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning and Literacy (2nd edn. New York: Peter Lang). Gee, James Paul, 2013b. The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin). Gibson, Rex, 2008 [1998]. Teaching Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Graff, Gerald, 2007 [1987]. Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Gruenewald, David A., 2003. ‘The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place’, Educational Researcher 32.4, 3–12. Hall, Kim F., 1995. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Hansen, Claire, 2017. Shakespeare and Complexity Theory (London and New York: Routledge). Hargreaves, Andy and Michael Fullan, 2012. Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School (New York and Toronto: Teachers College Press and Ontario Principals’ Council). Hargreaves, Andy and Michael T. O’Connor, 2018. Collaborative Professionalism: When Teaching Together means Learning for All (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin). Haughey, Joseph P., 2013. ‘The History of Shakespeare in American Education, 1620–1930’. Unpublished PhD. Western Michigan University. Henderson, Diana and Kyle Sebastian Vitale (eds.), 2021. Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy: Case Studies and Strategies (New York and London: Bloomsbury). Hendricks, Margo, 1996. ‘“Obscured by dreams”: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare Quarterly 47.1, 37–60.

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Hendricks, Margo, 2021. ‘Coloring the Past, Considerations on Our Future: RaceB4Race’, New Literary History 52, 365–84. Hendricks, Margo and Patricia Parker (eds.), 1994. Women, ‘Race’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period. New York and London: Routledge. Homan, Sidney (ed.), 2019. How and Why We Teach Shakespeare: College Teachers and Directors Share How They Explore the Playwright’s Works with Their Students (New York and London: Routledge). hooks, bell, 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York and London: Routledge). hooks, bell, 2003. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (New York and Milton Park: Routledge). Hunter, Kelly, 2015. Cracking Shakespeare: A Hands-on Guide for Actors and Directors + Video (London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama). Irish, Tracy, 2008. ‘Teaching Shakespeare: A History of the Teaching of Shakespeare in England’. RSC Education Department. Retrieved 16 August 2022. www.academia.edu/22169766/A_HISTORY_OF_THE_TEACHING_ OF_SHAKESPEARE_IN_ENGLAND?auto=download Irish, Tracy, 2015. ‘Interview with Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan’, in Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan (eds.), Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare), 65–77. Irish, Tracy, 2022. Personal email communication to Liam Semler. 27 November. Iyengar, Sujata, 2014. ‘Upcycling Shakespeare: Crafting Cultural Capital’, in Daniel Fischlin (ed.), OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 347–71. Jefferson, Miranda and Michael Anderson, 2021. Transforming Education: Reimagining Learning, Pedagogy and Curriculum (London and New York: Bloomsbury). Kahn, Coppélia, Heather S. Nathans, and Mimi Godfrey (eds.), 2011. Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance (Newark: University of Delaware Press). Karim-Cooper, Farah, 2021. ‘Shakespeare through Decolonization’, English 70.271, 319–24. Lanier, Douglas, 2002. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lankshear, Colin and Michele Knobel, 2011. New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning (Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill/Open University Press). Lau, Leung Che Miriam and Wing Bo Anna Tso, 2016. Teaching Shakespeare to ESL Students (Singapore: Springer). Levine, Lawrence W., 1988. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Little Jr., Arthur L., 2000. Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape and Sacrifice (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Little Jr., Arthur L. (ed.), 2023. White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture and the Elite (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare). Lopez, Jeremy, 2019. The Arden Introduction to Reading Shakespeare: Close Reading and Analysis (London: Bloomsbury).

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Lynch, Tom Liam, 2015. The Hidden Role of Software in Educational Research (Abingdon and New York: Routledge). MacDonald, Joyce Green, 2002. Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). MacDonald, Joyce Green, 2020. Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan). Manuel, Jacqueline and Don Carter, 2017. ‘Inscribing Culture: The History of Prescribed Text Lists in Senior Secondary English in NSW, 1945–1964’, in Tim Dolin, Joanne Jones, and Patricia Dowsett (eds.), Required Reading: Literature in Australian Schools since 1945 (Melbourne: Monash University Press), 78–105. Martin, Susan D., Vicki McQuitty, and Denise N. Morgan, 2019. ‘Complexity Theory and Teacher Education’. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Retrieved 5 July 2021, from https://oxfordre.com/education/view/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-479. Mason, Mark (ed.), 2008. Complexity Theory and the Philosophy of Education (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell). Massai, Sonia (ed.), 2005. World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (London and New York: Routledge). Morrison, Keith, 2002. School Leadership and Complexity Theory (London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer). Morrison, Keith, 2010. ‘Complexity Theory, School Leadership and Management: Questions for Theory and Practice’, Educational Management, Administration and Leadership, 38.3, 374–93. Murphy, Andrew, 2008. Shakespeare for the People: Working-Class Readers, 1800–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ngcongo-James, Nellie and Deirdre Pratt, 2021. ‘Brave New World: Decolonising Shakespeare in the Drama Education Curriculum’, in Kehdinga George Fomunyam and Simon Bheki Khoza (eds.), Curriculum Theory, Curriculum Theorising, and the Theoriser: The African Theorising Perspective (Leiden: Brill), 177–98. O’Dair, Sharon and Timothy Francisco (eds.), 2019. Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan). Olive, Sarah, 2015. Shakespeare Valued: Education Policy and Pedagogy 1989–2009 (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect). Olive, Sarah, Uchimaru Kohei, Adele Lee, and Rosalind Fielding, 2021. Shakespeare in East Asian Education (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Pivot). Olson, Rebecca and Stephanie Pietros (eds.), 2019. ‘First-Generation Shakespeare’, Early Modern Culture 14, article 2. O’Neill, Stephen, 2014. Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard (London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama). O’Neill, Stephen (ed.), 2017. Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change across Media (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare). Porter, Helen, 2018. Educating Outside: Curriculum-linked Outdoor Learning Ideas for Primary Teachers (New York and London: Bloomsbury).

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RaceB4Race. Dir. Ayanna Thompson. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. https://acmrs.asu.edu/RaceB4Race Rocklin, Edward L., 2005. Performance Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare (National Council of Teachers of English). Ruiter, David (ed.), 2020. The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare). Rumbold, Kate, 2011. ‘Brand Shakespeare?’, Shakespeare Survey 64, 25–37. Selwyn, Neil, 2014. Distrusting Educational Technology: Critical Questions for Changing Times (New York: Routledge). Semler, Liam E., 2013a. Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning versus the System (London and New York: Bloomsbury). Semler, Liam E., 2013b. ‘Emergence in Ardenspace: Shakespeare Pedagogy, As You Like It, and Modus Iferandi’, in Kate Flaherty, Penny Gay and Liam E. Semler (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare beyond the Centre: Australasian Perspectives (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan), 97–107. Semler, Liam E., 2016. ‘Prosperous Teaching and the Thing of Darkness: Raising a Tempest in the Classroom’, Cogent Arts and Humanities 3.1. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311983.2016.1235862 Semler, Liam E., 2017. ‘The Seeds of Time, Part 1: SysEd and the Leviathan of Learning’, mETAphor 1, 8–14. Senge, Peter, Timothy Lucas, Nelda Cambron-McCabe, Bryan Smith, Janis Dutton, and Art Kleiner, 2011. Schools that Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares about Education (London and Boston: Nicholas Brealey Publishing). Shakespeare, William, 2013 [2011]. The Tempest. Ed. by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare). Sharratt, Lyn and Beate Planche, 2016. Leading Collaborative Learning: Empowering Excellence (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin). Shaughnessy, Robert (ed.), 2007. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Smith, Emma (ed.), 2021. Shakespeare Survey 74: Shakespeare and Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Smith, Ian, 2016. ‘We are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1, 104–24. Sterling Brown, David, 2016. ‘(Early) Modern Literature: Crossing the ColorLine’, Radical Teacher 105, 69–77. Stevens, Jenny, and Pamela Bickley (eds.), 2023. Shakespeare, Education and Pedagogy: Representations, Interactions and Adaptations (New York and London: Routledge). Stredder, James, 2009. The North Face of Shakespeare: Activities for Teaching the Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Thompson, Ayanna (ed.), 2021. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Thompson, Ayanna and Laura Turchi, 2016. Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare). Ward, Sophie, 2017. Using Shakespeare’s Plays to Explore Education Policy Today: Neoliberalism through the Lens of Renaissance Humanism (New York and London: Routledge). Ward, Steven C., 2012. Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education (London and New York: Routledge). Whitfield, Petronilla, 2019. Teaching Strategies for Neurodiversity and Dyslexia in Actor Training: Sensing Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge). Williamson, Ben, 2017. Big Data in Education: The Digital Future of Learning, Policy and Practice (London: SAGE). Winston, Joe, 2015. Transforming the Teaching of Shakespeare with the Royal Shakespeare Company (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare).

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Part I

Reimagining Shakespeare with/in Schools

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Introduction Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen and Jacqueline Manuel

The four chapters in this opening section traverse the rich terrain of ­collaborative projects dedicated to reimagining Shakespeare education in primary and secondary schools. Each project coheres around a distinctive partnership that connects schools, teachers and students with, for example, theatre companies, actors, university academics, research institutes, and a cultural and educational charity. At the heart of each is a passionate commitment to enlivening the works and worlds of Shakespeare in schools for students and teachers through active collaborations with schools. From the distinct geographical locations of France, England and Australia, the projects bring to the fore the affordances and challenges of seeking to transcend the institutional, socio-economic, cultural and physical borders that have too often precluded or constrained young people’s meaningful and enjoyable experience of Shakespeare in schools.

Contexts, Audiences, Relationships The four projects share certain overarching features. Each project aspires in some way to engage the subjectivity of those involved in the partnership by: generating connections between their lived experience and Shakespeare’s works; designing collaborative ventures that honour the diverse backgrounds, contexts and capital of participants; and fostering inclusivity, collective agency and relationships to engender communities of practice and meaning making. Considered from this perspective, the projects’ focus on immersive, embodied experiences of Shakespeare can be understood as identity work, with emphases on national and cultural identity (Chapters 1, 2 and 3), professional identity (Chapter 4), and in each case, individual identity as it is socially mediated through personal and professional relationships. The Shakespeare and Citizenship in France project (Chapter 2), for instance, is explicit in its aim to engage the subjectivity of students and develop their identity as a pathway to social cohesion – also a goal of the 23

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Shakespeare Schools Foundation (Chapter 1) – and to deepen students’ and audiences’ insights into social, political, cultural and ethical issues ­relevant to national and global conflicts and crises. The projects establish the conditions for students and/or teachers to become co-creators of meaning, often through performance-based pedagogies and ‘play’ in its broadest sense (Chapters 1, 2 and 3), or in the case of the Better Strangers/Shakespeare Reloaded project (Chapter 4), through teacher-driven professional learning and innovative digital resources. Each project is shaped and adapted in collaboration with partners to ensure the project is purpose built for its unique context. In this way, the projects not only seek to reimagine Shakespeare with and in schools: they in fact reimagine the very idea of collaboration itself by pioneering inventive models of education that soften and even for a time dissolve the boundaries between schools and the worlds around them. As Andrew Hood and Liam Semler explain (Chapter 4), these forms of collaboration allow participants to ‘experience a form of rejuvenating “exile” in this more fluid and experimental space before returning with fresh and transformative ideas to their institutions’ (p. 72).

Aims, Processes, Structures A conspicuous quality of the four projects is the common impulse to ‘democratise’ access to and engagement with Shakespeare for both students and teachers. The democratic spirit extends to and informs the aims, processes and structures of the collaborations themselves: in each project, for example, the decision-making processes and structures are intentionally non-hierarchical. Elaborating on the ‘horizontal, dialogic approach’ (p. 49) to collaborations in the Shakespeare and Citizenship in France project, Florence March (Chapter 2) points out that ‘partners agree to a reciprocal relationship in which everyone needs the other because the other possesses an expertise they do not have’ (p. 50). This educational and social equity agenda is driven by principles that aim to disrupt conventional structures and pedagogies as they seek to transform (in the words of Stuart Rathe and Francesca Ellis) ‘“traditional” classroom approaches’ (p. 27) to Shakespeare. In Chapter 4, Hood and Semler describe this disruption-transformation paradigm in relation to the Better Strangers/Shakespeare Reloaded project as ‘a pursuit of dynamic educational spaces’ that ‘rejuvenate, inspire and productively upset the status quo’ (p. 71). These ‘ardenspaces’ are epitomised in a variety of original ways in each of the four projects. Two of the projects – the Shakespeare

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Schools Festival (Chapter 1) and the Bell Shakespeare Education programme (Chapter 3) – comprise collaborations with both primary and secondary school students and teachers, while the other two projects – Better Strangers/Shakespeare Reloaded (Chapter 4) and Shakespeare and Citizenship in France (Chapter 2) – have as their focus the sphere of secondary education. As Joanna Erskine and Robyn Ewing point out, ‘it is rare for children to be introduced to Shakespeare during their primary years’ (p. 55) because of preconceptions about primary students’ (in)capacity to creatively and critically engage with the language, characters, ideas and stories of Shakespeare. In secondary schools, however, Shakespeare’s works have long occupied a secure and often mandatory place in English Language Arts curricula around the world. Historical accounts of classroom practice underline the extent to which students’ experience of Shakespeare in secondary school settings has tended to be shaped by examination requirements and literary critical pedagogies that have treated the plays as a version of a novel: round-robin reading; close textual analysis; and disembodied scrutiny of ­characters and ideas. Yet paradoxically, the continued presence of Shakespeare in secondary schools and these text-based pedagogies have also been a catalyst for the projects in these chapters. Each in some manner aims to redress the normative treatment of Shakespeare in schools and the flow-through effect that has been well-documented through generations of students’ antipathy and resistance to Shakespeare in the curriculum (cf. Watson, 2003). Importantly, each chapter acknowledges that the learning experiences, synergies and relationships enabled and achieved through the processes of collaboration are at least as significant, if not more significant, than the end ‘products’ of the activities. Indeed, in Chapter 2, March concludes that from the project partnerships and activities there emerged a ‘transformational process that, from fiction onstage to social reality, open[ed] new possibilities for civility, civic awareness and solidarity’ (p. 51).

Insights, Challenges, Takeaways These chapters offer many insights into the value of taking schools beyond the classroom, Shakespeare beyond the curriculum and pedagogy beyond the norm. The authors reveal challenges and tensions that have arisen and their strategies for managing and in many cases, overcoming these obstacles. For example, each project relies on financial support that inevitably determines the scope, depth and longevity of the programmes and activities. There

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are particular challenges associated with ‘translating’ Shakespeare, whether this be translating language from English to French (Chapter 2), adapting Shakespeare for younger student participants (Chapters 1 and 3) or translating project insights into school curriculum reform (Chapter 4). These projects show that such challenges are actually rich possibilities. The authors discuss the far-reaching and often unexpected benefits of their projects when collaborations transcend traditional sector-bound paradigms of education and ‘suggest new, cross-border paths’ to open ‘a d ­ oorway to a lifetime of discovering meaning in Shakespeare’ (Cox, 2008: 173). For students, the benefits of participating in the projects include demonstrably increased levels of: self-confidence; engagement in learning; literacy and vocabulary; inter-relational skills; pride in their achievements; and enthusiasm to continue in the project. Threaded throughout the ­chapters are accounts of the benefits of these collaborative projects for teachers and the wider community, including parents. The projects showcased in this section contribute to a growing body of evidence that Shakespeare in schools is being reimagined through projecting Shakespeare with schools.

References Cox, Carole, 2008. Teaching Language Arts: A Student-Centered Classroom (6th edn. New York: Pearson). Watson, Ken, 2003. ‘Shakespeare in New South Wales Secondary Schools: A Brief History’, English in Australia 136: 12–18.

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chapter 1

Shakespeare Schools Foundation The Classroom as Theatre

Stuart Rathe and Francesca Ellis

In a 2016 interview with the Times Educational Supplement, Sir Ian McKellen said: I don’t think Shakespeare belongs in the classroom. I’d much rather Shakespeare was a wonderful extra – that you left the classroom and went out and joined the real world, and Shakespeare could be a part of that. (Bloom, 2016)

Of ‘traditional’ classroom approaches to Shakespeare he added, ‘I’ve never heard anybody say, “Oh, we had the most wonderful class where we read Act I, Scene 3”’ (Bloom, 2016). In this chapter, I examine the work of the Shakespeare Schools Foundation (SSF):1 a UK-based cultural and education charity that introduces the work of Shakespeare to primary and secondary pupils in a ‘real-world’, active context, via several projects and partnerships including: • its flagship programme – the world’s largest youth drama festival, the Shakespeare Schools Festival; • partnerships with primary, secondary and Special Educational Needs (SEN) teachers to improve the teaching of Shakespeare, via workshops and curriculum schemes of work; and, • residential partnerships with SEN settings, exploring sensory worlds, communication and language skills. As a Shakespeare educator, and previously education manager of SSF, I will describe how SSF encourages engagement with Shakespeare’s text in collaborative teacher–practitioner–pupil partnerships, with a focus on

1

While we both worked on this chapter, its primary author, and the owner of its ‘I’, is Stuart. In April 2020, SSF became Coram Shakespeare Schools Foundation (CSSF). Our chapter, written in 2019, describes SSF in the period before it became part of the Coram Group of charities and before the COVID-19 pandemic.

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inclusivity and rehearsal room techniques. I suggest that teaching practice is enriched via the long-term benefits of SSF’s workshop training. Case studies of the SSF model explore how participants’ collaborative abilities and confidence increase and highlight participation among pupils from diverse settings and disadvantaged backgrounds.2 I will also consider how SSF’s active approach to Shakespeare contrasts with traditional instruction in the English classroom. Can the festival’s rehearsal room methodology, coupled with an enquiry-led teaching focus and an emphasis on the playful exploration of text be developed to become usefully incorporated into exam preparation? Finally, I will consider the challenges faced by SSF in providing its festival and other programmes in the current UK-education climate and look to the future of SSF.

Shakespeare Schools Festival – A Brief History and Overview of the Festival Process In Shakespeare’s trippy and genre-defying Cymbeline, the heroine, Innogen, flees to ‘blessed’ Milford Haven to find her banished husband, Posthumus. En route, her adventures include the discovery of her longlost royal brothers (unwittingly raised as hill-dwelling Welsh shepherds) and waking in a ditch with the decapitated body of her boorish wouldbe suitor, Cloten. I’ve always felt the genius of Cymbeline is in its daring improbability. With so many echoes of earlier Shakespeare plays, its place in the canon might be described as a sweeping, irreverent and joyous Shakespearean Greatest Hits. That tagline – a sweeping, irreverent and joyous Shakespearean Greatest Hits – could easily apply to the many SSF festival nights that take place all around the United Kingdom from October to December every year. How fitting then that this modern-day Greatest Hits began in Innogen’s ‘blessed’ Milford. Almost twenty years ago, a theatre in Milford Haven hosted the very first Shakespeare Schools Festival. It grew out of a demand from teachers for abridged performance scripts based on the popular S4C/BBC2 Animated Tales of the early 1990s (Sokolov et al., 2004). Over the course of two series, Eastern European filmmakers used innovative techniques to bring twelve Shakespeare plays to life as animated abridgements, retaining 2

Disadvantaged schools are defined by SSF as schools located in deciles 1 to 3 on the Index of Multiple Deprivation in England. The charity aims for at least one-third of the schools it works with each year to be in this category. See www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-indices-of-deprivation-2019.

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Shakespeare’s original language, supplemented by newly written voiceover to fill narrative gaps. The thirty-minute run time, all-star voice cast (a veritable who’s who of 1990s theatre) and the unusual and varied animation styles and puppetry caught the attention of teachers keen to enliven their classrooms and make Shakespeare more accessible to students. But some teachers wanted more than just the films: they wanted the abridged Animated scripts made available for performance so that their pupils could feasibly produce their own mini-Shakespeare performances. Realising this could be the start of something special, in 2000 the series producer Chris Grace created a small-scale festival in Milford to cater for the initial demand. From such humble beginnings (eight schools in one Welsh theatre), the festival now works annually with up to 20,000 youngsters across the United Kingdom, encompassing up to 1,000 primary, secondary and SEN schools, including Pupil Referral Units (alternative education settings for pupils unable to attend mainstream school, often because of special learning needs, or because they have been excluded from mainstream schools). These pupils give performances of selected abridged Shakespeare plays in approximately 130 professional theatres across the United Kingdom. In a brief overview, the festival process is structured as follows. Between December and May, UK teachers register their pupils to participate and receive abridged scripts and resources for their chosen play. In June/July teachers receive a day of regional Continuing Professional Development (CPD) training on how to direct their production: a core aspect of SSF’s pedagogy. The artist-led activities have their roots in active rehearsal exercises of a wide range of theatre makers and practitioners; Konstantin Stanislavski, Rudolf Laban, Jacques LeCoq and Cicely Berry. The activities have potentially transformative effects upon the pedagogical attitudes of participating teachers. As a previous participant, it gave me space to reflect upon my literacy and teaching practice and to consider how these active methods might be assimilated into the classroom. An additional day’s training is designed and delivered to teachers working in SEN-specialist settings. Midway through a cast’s rehearsal process, in late September/early October, pupils meet another festival cast at a bespoke half-day collaborative company workshop, usually in the professional space where they will perform on their festival night. During this half-day, the cast work with professional facilitators to fine tune their performance. Each cast’s rehearsal process is supported by regional festival coordinators at all stages and pupils are encouraged to co-direct, to produce marketing materials, to become involved in set and costume design and to plot lighting and sound effects using interactive tools available on the SSF website. These ‘technical

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students’ often mark up the tech script and have the opportunity to work with theatre technicians in the professional space on the festival night. From October to late November, each cast’s journey culminates in a performance night in the professional theatre space, with up to four schools showcasing their finished productions. There is usually a balance of comedy, tragedy and history, from a mix of primary, secondary and SEN pupils. The night fosters a collaborative ensemble feel among the varied students, who feel part of one ‘company’, and each night ends with a celebratory (but non-competitive) evaluation of every production, offered to the audience by a professional theatre practitioner, and with all casts invited onstage as an ensemble of theatrical collaborators. The festival has a proven, transformative impact on its young performers, their teachers and on whole communities, as evidenced by the following statistics from the 2018 SSF Impact Report: • 97 per cent of teachers reported more effective teamwork from students during/post-festival participation (sample size of 601 teachers); • 98 per cent of teachers reported pupils were more able to express themselves than before festival participation (sample size of 600 teachers); • 95 per cent of teachers reported pupils were now more able to empathise with others (sample size of 596 teachers); • 82 per cent of teachers reported pupils had improved academic attainment following festival participation (sample size of 581 teachers); and • 90 per cent of teachers reported their own teaching had improved following festival participation (sample size of 594 teachers) (Shakespeare Schools Foundation, 2018). The festival process and pedagogy underpinning it are distinct in the world of Shakespeare education, notably for: • Inclusivity – the festival is open to primary, secondary and SEN school participants, including pupils in alternative provision, who share stages across the country during festival nights. The festival timeline and processes encourage inter-cast collaboration, while final performance nights generate a sense of oneness among diverse casts. Ancillary projects such as bespoke secondary school General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) exam workshops, and in-house SEN residentials, strengthen SSF’s aim that Shakespeare should be relevant and available to all ages and abilities.

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• Experientiality – pupil investment in the project is across a range of disciplines (directorial, creative, performative, technical) and culminates on hundreds of national professional stages. The immersive nature of SSF’s teacher training at the SSF director workshop inducts teachers in a theatre-based and enquiry-focused teaching methodology; a process as experiential for teachers as the festival is for students. In the remainder of this chapter, I analyse the festival’s inclusivity, focusing on work in disadvantaged areas and SEN settings. I will also explore the challenges faced and lessons learned in running both the festival and SSF’s other educational projects in a climate where arts subjects in UK schools are marginalised, and teachers are time poor.

Impact and Inclusivity SSF is often perceived as a predominantly ‘Shakespeare’-based charity, with a literacy and cultural heritage focus. In fact, SSF’s stated objectives position Shakespeare firmly as the vehicle rather than the point. They are to: 1. promote life skills, social cohesion and ambition; 2. promote educational attainment, especially in literacy, literature and the performing arts; and 3. provide a unique cultural and creative experience to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds (Shakespeare Schools Foundation, 2018: 6). While the focus on life skills, ambition and literacy is transparent, the ­festival’s social cohesion aims and its focus on children from disadvantaged backgrounds deserve further consideration. In their 2016 report Every Child: Equality and Diversity in Arts and Culture, Arts Council England (Blood, Lomas, and Robinson, 2016) found that one of the main barriers to young people’s participation in arts activities is their socio-economic circumstances. Parents from higher socio-economic groups are, the report says, more than twice as likely to pay for music, drama and arts activities. This extra-curricular enrichment impacts on qualifications and career paths of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds; pupils from areas of higher deprivation (based on the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index) were ‘less likely to take most arts-based GCSEs than those from areas of low or medium deprivation, especially dance, music and drama’ (Blood, Lomas, and Robinson, 2016: 28). By bringing Shakespeare to schools around the United Kingdom

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(rather than targeting individual young people or families) and prioritising areas of higher deprivation, SSF brings participation in a cultural arts activity to young people from all walks of life. SSF data from their 2018 Impact Report show that 75 per cent of participating students enjoy going to the theatre, museums or galleries, while only 40 per cent say they often visit them. This means that 35 per cent of participants do not regularly have access to creative and cultural activities, despite a propensity towards those activities. A key aim of the festival is to provide these students with access to the arts in a professional theatre space. Because the festival culminates in a performance for a paying audience, the families of young participants are included within the cultural environment. This shared cultural experience lays the foundations for future extended family arts engagement, bridging the gap between those who enjoy but do not participate and those who fully participate in cultural and creative outlets. SSF evidence also suggests that the intergenerational nature of the festival (with young creative talent watched by an audience of parents, grandparents, carers and so on) produces an attitudinal outcome: in SSF’s 2019 audience survey 73 per cent of respondents said the event had positively changed their perception of young people in their community. SSF’s growing work with areas of deprivation is evidenced no more clearly than in the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley, Merseyside. In 2019, Knowsley appeared in each of the top three lists of the most deprived local authorities in the United Kingdom based on rank, score and proportion of Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOA) in the most deprived 10 per cent nationally (UK Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, 2019: 11). From an educational perspective, Knowsley is currently one of only a few English metropolitan authorities that has no A-level provision within its borders. SSF currently works with fifteen schools in Knowsley. The 2019 Knowsley SSF festival nights featured a typically eclectic selection of Shakespeare abridgements – from a horror-movie-themed Macbeth with witches in blood-spattered aprons, to a social-media inspired A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Knowsley Case Studies The following case studies demonstrate the effect of the festival on Knowsley teachers and students alike. They testify to the social benefits of the inclusive ensemble rehearsal process, the centrality of students and

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teachers to creative decision making when planning a production and the long-term benefits of the festival. They feature festival feedback from two teachers and an SSF student. Laura Hodgkiss, teacher, St Anne’s Catholic Primary School, Knowsley We did the festival last year for the very first time. We had a Year 5 class with very low confidence, and we wanted to nurture their speaking and listening skills. At the start of our festival journey, I asked who wanted a speaking part and absolutely no one volunteered. In the end, I had to pull names out of a hat. However, I stuck with it. I used the Macbeth scheme of work provided by SSF as a springboard. They loved the discussion activity about who was most at fault – was it the witches, Macbeth or Lady Macbeth? Suddenly, everyone was super engaged and wanted to voice an opinion. Initially, they were very self-conscious about saying lines, but through the drama activities they started to get more comfortable. I realised they especially liked scenes where the whole cast were on stage at once – like in the big battle scene – so I tried to do this as much as possible. No one felt on their own. Half-way through the rehearsal process they were clamouring to take on bigger parts. They started to love the Shakespearean language – lines like ‘turn hell-hound turn’ and ‘out, out damn spot’. I think they liked that the language is a bit naughty. The children quote Shakespeare in their writing to this day. The company workshop was brilliant. Seeing other children act made a huge difference. They raised their game. They realised that the ones who joined in most, stood out the least. I saw a huge change in the children. There was one girl who was incredibly shy and wouldn’t speak at all. On the night, there was a child who was ill. I asked her to go on and say his lines for him and she just did it with no hesitation at all. Her confidence was sky-high. Joanna Mousley, Headteacher, Saints Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Primary School, Knowsley Our school is situated in a hard community. Many of our parents are on low incomes. Children’s home lives can be chaotic and many of them see quite negative things. The festival is helping to transform lives of children at our school. To stand on a stage and soak up the admiration of an audience gives children an incredible feeling of pride. Lots of our children have very low confidence. As soon as they find something difficult, they want to give up, and often their parents will let them. The festival gives them a real sense of achievement. They must work hard to not just learn their lines but understand them too. They need to make sure they turn up to every rehearsal. They need to get along with other people.

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S. Rathe and F. Ellis Parents are amazed. To them, Shakespeare can seem ‘la-di-da’ and exclusive. They may have had negative experiences of studying it at school and so to see their children performing gives them such pride. Experiencing Shakespeare has also helped to raise literacy attainment at our school. There’s been a hike in vocabulary, children are much more engaged with language and we’ve seen an improvement in their speaking and listening skills. Our SATs3 results are reflecting this. By taking part in the festival, children realise they can achieve. They aspire to greater things and have the ambition to pursue their dreams. The confidence and communication skills they gain equips them for life in the big wide world. Meghan, 11, Saints Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Primary School, Knowsley The first time I took part I thought I would be so frightened I’d run off the stage. But through playing drama games and rehearsing with the rest of the cast, I got more confident. The first year, I played the part of someone’s servant and I only had a few lines. I was really pleased when I got a bigger part in last year’s production of The Tempest where I played Antonio. The thought of standing up in front of people doesn’t scare me as much now. I’d like to be a fashion designer when I’m older. I know that as a designer you don’t always get it right first time. You have to do lots of sketches and be prepared to make changes to things. I think taking part in the Shakespeare Schools Festival has been good preparation for this. There were lots of times we had to change things during our rehearsals. I now understand the importance of trying out different ideas and not giving up if you don’t get it right first time.

The content of these case studies – and hundreds more like them – map directly onto SSF’s stated aims. We see in testimonial form a rise in academic standards, both specifically (such as text-level engagement with the Macbeths’ guilt) and more widely (in the SATs results and the use of adventurous vocabulary in children’s day-to-day writing). We see a clear improvement in pupil confidence and aspiration, and a young pupil making links between the life skills required when working in a theatrical ensemble and a sophisticated future application of those skills to a possible career path. The potential for a transformative effect on the wider community is also glimpsed in some of the proud parents whose ingrained views on the elitist Shakespeare of their own schooldays are challenged and subverted by their children’s involvement in the festival. 3

Standardised Assessment Tests carried out in Year 2 and Year 6 by primary schools in England, covering reading, grammar, punctuation, spelling and mathematics.

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Varied Offerings – Not Just a Festival The festival is not the right project for every school. Reasons range from the geographic (e.g. lack of proximity to professional theatres) to the complex medical needs that make an out-of-school performance difficult. Aware of this, SSF has widened its scope, allowing more young people to access SSF’s practice and pedagogy. An example of this widened scope is new partnerships with SEN schools, providing training to SEN teachers and enabling bespoke, inclusive in-school performances. At Queensmill School in West London, a specialist school for children and young people aged three to twenty-five diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, SSF designed a residential programme in partnership with the school to ensure the often-complex needs of pupils were met. The sessions were focused on the building of sensory worlds based on The Tempest. A picture of the sea was projected onto the floorspace, with sand, water spray and fans representing the feel of the seashore. Sandboxes with wet and dry sand helped pupils to think about the difference between stormy and sun-soaked beaches. Non-verbal students were able to engage with the story via the sensory stimuli and responded to accompanying music prompts. Every pupil in the school took part in daily sessions over a three-week period, culminating in a scaffolded, inclusive performance piece, again involving all pupils. At the end of the project one of the teachers reflected on the process: ‘It was amazing seeing all the young people, all of whom have very complex autism, and generally extremely limited communication and interaction, with smiles on every face, really entering into character.’ Such projects are not, of course, without challenge. The residence at Queensmill School has had very successful student–teacher outcomes and broadened SSF’s impact on pupils who can’t engage with the festival process, though it is labour intensive and needs significant resourcing to reach a relatively small cohort. This challenge has been partially met by developing discrete SEN curriculum products, in consultation with expert SEN educators, for children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. These incorporate similar sensory experience opportunities, together with social stories, colourful symbols for Shakespearean characters and a flexible ‘menu’ approach catering to the varied needs of pupils within any SEN group. These products are offered free to SSF festival schools, but a further challenge exists in marketing these schemes to teachers with little previous experience using drama in a SEN classroom. Without the CPD element, they are more likely to be taken up by already-confident practitioners.

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Facing the Challenges of the UK Education System: The Development of a Synergic Shakespearean Pedagogy We have seen that SSF is not just a festival. Its expansion from a small single theatre project in Milford Haven to a large national festival has gone hand-in-hand with other expansions, including the development of side projects for settings that cannot access the festival directly. We have also seen testimonials from educators and evidence from SSF’s Impact Report of an oblique effect on academic attainment via festival participation. But could SSF’s rehearsal room methodology have a more direct impact on the study of Shakespeare in the classroom, including essential preparation for secondary school examinations? During my time at SSF this became a hot topic, and one which the charity chose to address. This endeavour is the focus of the final section of this chapter. Before considering SSF’s suggestions for the academic classroom, it is worth providing some historical context regarding the tension between active and passive approaches to Shakespeare in the classroom. Sadly, it isn’t easy to encourage teachers to use active methods to teach Shakespeare to young people, despite: • An argument for active teaching methods as a way of approaching Shakespeare’s text collaboratively (Gibson, 1998). • The Cox Report, which recommends a participatory–exploratory approach to text (Cox, 1989). • A three-year secondary-school case study showing positive impacts on student–teacher attitudes, teaching practice and written outcomes through active rehearsal room methods (Irish, 2011). • The Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Shakespeare for all Ages and Stages, which recommends using the play text as ‘script’ rather than a text to simply read (Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2008). • An assertion that active approaches facilitate confident analytical language work (Stredder, 2009). According to Tracy Irish, Higher Education Programme Manager (2018–19) at the RSC, there is a ‘perennial tension’ in the teaching of English. Generally, teachers are ‘holistic’ and prepared to be ‘messy’ rather than linear in their approach to student progress. Politicians, however, are more likely to look for the quantitative ‘quick wins’ of improved test and league table results (Irish, 2011). Moreover, UK attainment markers such as EBacc and Progress 8/Attainment 8 (Tandy, 2020) may have

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marginalised the place of the Arts in schools and potentially affected teachers’ willingness to try drama-based teaching strategies in the exam-ready English classroom. The result is that, in preparing students for exams, many secondary teachers entirely relinquish what some academics have termed the ‘anti-intellectualism’ (Wilson, 1997) of active approaches in favour of the teacher ‘chalk-and-talk’ pedagogical model that positions the students as more passive. In an attempt to bridge the divide between active and passive pedagogies, SSF have developed a synergic pedagogy, merging the active rehearsal room process inherent in SSF’s flagship festival and other projects with a clear alignment of workshop content to GCSE and other exam assessment objectives. During my time with SSF, we set about devising a workshop for the new 9–1 GCSE grading system and its assessment objectives. In brief, GCSE students are expected to develop informed, personal responses to Shakespearean texts, analyse language and textual structure and demonstrate understanding of the plays within a historical context. SSF’s pupil-led approach and the pedagogical legacy of the festival’s Teacher Director Workshop were both a starting point and barometer to which we returned in devising and testing our suggested activities. Links to current exam assessment objectives meant retooling or refocusing activities used in previous SSF workshops, while also creating new ones. This synthesis was necessary to make the value of the workshop clear to t­ eachers, shifting the structure rather than the focus of the exercises, with clear and chronological story familiarity, confidence with text and language and interpretative ideas about character at the heart of the workshop. There is not room here to discuss the devising and implementation of the SSF GCSE workshop in its entirety. By way of example, I present details of an introductory activity (a value continuum) and two classic rehearsal room practices: Role on the Wall and Hot Seating – simply but effectively reframed and retooled as part of the devising process to meet GCSE assessment criteria. In the value continuum introductory exercise, pupils imagine the classroom is bisected by a diagonal line, with each endpoint representing an extreme opinion – strongly agree and strongly disagree. The facilitator reads a series of statements and pupils move to an appropriate point on the line, representing their feelings on the statement. Pupils may find themselves anywhere from strongly agree to strongly disagree and might be asked to elaborate or contextualise their thinking. SSF wanted to include this to introduce the workshop with a collaborative and cooperative learning pedagogy from the outset, emphasising that a variety of justifiable personal opinions are all equally valid at GCSE study. We felt that this was an

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excellent entry point, allowing a clear expression of a quite specific opinion, without the need (at least initially) to vocalise. Role on the Wall and Hot Seating are classic rehearsal room exercises. A Role on the Wall is a gingerbread outline on paper, with external character attributes on the outside of the figure and internal thoughts and feelings on the inside. Hot Seating allows an actor to answer questions in the role of a character to further explore inner and outer worlds. For the workshop, we provided a set of key character quotations (said by and about the Role on the Wall character) to elicit textual justification about the character’s qualities, and we structured and scaffolded a character Hot Seating exercise via provision of higher-order question stems to encourage probing questioning. We set up the Hot Seating exercise as a direct sequel to the Role on the Wall, with a ‘J’accuse’ focus. For example, ‘Lady Macbeth, you were overheard to say, “Fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst ­cruelty” – we believe you to be a wicked character.’ We hoped to produce a dialogic environment in which pupils would explore differing viewpoints and interpretations at a deep textual level, while also allowing discussion of the play’s historical context, including regicide, military masculinity, loyalty to the king and the social status of women in Jacobean society. These workshops were rolled out in 2017 and 2018 with an accompanying set of teacher exercise notes, reminding teachers how they could facilitate our workshop exercises in the classroom themselves as part of their exam preparation, encouraging an ongoing pedagogical legacy for participating teachers and students. At the time of writing in 2019, a detailed evaluation of this nascent project is in early stages, but feedback from teachers suggests a viable market for workshops designed with the aim of helping with exam revision and catering for lower-ability GCSE students via a more kinaesthetic engagement with texts. Early participating teachers have suggested that the use of active approaches to a text is not commonplace in the exam classroom, but that the workshop had been either helpful or extremely helpful in revision and consolidation, exploring language and plot, developing pupils’ personal interpretations and exploring cultural, social and historical contexts. A 2018 application for funding from the Education Endowment Foundation to roll out the GCSE workshop, with its emphasis on the distinctive synergic pedagogy that links active techniques with exam assessment objectives, was unsuccessful. More proof of impact was deemed necessary for the project to be considered worthy of funding. The catch, of course, is that it is difficult for a relatively small charity to provide proof of widescale quantitative impact with workshop delivery and curriculum

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products. SSF remains a charity whose most significant and provably impactful project is the world’s largest youth drama festival. There is no other organisation that provides such a widescale Shakespeare drama project. Truthfully, however, there is significantly more competition in the workshop and curriculum product market in a saturated and politically challenging education marketplace.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have highlighted the work of SSF via its flagship festival project, residential projects and secondary education workshops. I have demonstrated the uniqueness of its festival project, its focus on inclusivity and experientiality, and its pedagogical development as a cultural education charity, attempting to meet the challenges of modern Shakespeare and drama education. At its heart, SSF is a truly collaborative project – reliant on the collaborative efforts of students, teachers, artistic associates and theatre staff to produce its annual festival. While this model is an established and successful collaborative venture, the true challenges lie in some of the intersections between an extra-curricular project and curriculum requirements. Looking to the future, SSF must exist not only as a yearly festival, regardless of the ongoing importance and success of that project. I have shown that the festival impacts – on skills such as confidence, communication, teamwork and aspiration – are quantifiable both from case studies and SSF impact reporting but are not perceived as tangible academic outcomes. This makes SSF’s recent expansion into the academic classroom all the more vital. Despite, and perhaps because of, the challenges and tensions in the current education system, SSF and other Shakespeare educators must continue to widen their aims, striving to develop and promote ‘active’ rehearsal room products with tangible and impactful links to curriculum outcomes, thereby reimagining Shakespeare education as a meeting of the rehearsal room and the academic classroom.

References Blood, Imogen, Mark Lomas, and Mark Robinson, 2016. Every Child: Equality and Diversity in Arts and Culture with, by and for Young People (Manchester: Arts Council England). www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/downloadfile/FINAL%20report%20web%20ready.pdf.

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Bloom, Adi, 2016. ‘Exclusive Video: Sir Ian McKellen on Why Shakespeare Does Not Belong in Schools’. www.tes.com/news/exclusive-video-sir-ian-mckellenwhy-shakespeare-does-not-belong-schools. Cox, Brian, 1989. The Cox Report: English for Ages 5–16 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office). Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2008. The National Strategies – Shakespeare for All Ages and Stages (Nottingham: DCSF Publications). Gibson, Rex, 1998. Teaching Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Irish, Tracy. 2011. ‘Would You Risk It for Shakespeare? A Case Study of Using Active Approaches in the English Classroom’, English in Education 45.1, 6–19. Shakespeare Schools Foundation, 2018. Impact Report (London: Shakespeare Schools Foundation). https://issuu.com/shakespeareschools/docs/issuu. Sokolov, Stanislav, Robert Saakiants, and Alexei Karayev (dirs.), 2004. The Animated Tales (Video recording), vol. 1 (New York: Ambrose Video). Stredder, James, 2009. The North Face of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Tandy, Lewis, 2020. ‘Attainment 8 and Progress 8 Explained’, The Locrating Blog. www.locrating.com/Blog/attainment-8-and-progress-8-explained.aspx. UK Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, 2019. The English Indices of Deprivation Statistical Release, 26 September. London: HMSO. www .gov.uk/government/statistics/english-indices-of-deprivation-2019. Wilson, Richard, 1997. ‘NATO’s Pharmacy: Shakespeare by Prescription’, in John J. Joughin (ed.), Shakespeare and National Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 58–81.

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chapter 2

Shakespeare and Citizenship in France Florence March

In 2016, France celebrated the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in the aftermath of devastating terrorist attacks that questioned the very notion of citizenship. After the tragic killings in the offices of the weekly satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on 7 January 2015 – the first of a series of killings committed on 7, 8 and 9 January – and at the Bataclan concert hall on 13 November 2015, the President of the French Republic, François Hollande, convened the members of Parliament in Versailles. In his address to deputies and senators on 16 November, he proposed to revise the Constitution, which he defined as a ‘collective pact’, a ‘common charter’, a ‘contract that unites all the citizens of the same country’, so as to authorise citizenship deprivation of dual nationals (including those born French) who were found guilty of terrorist acts.1 The proposal was dropped after triggering a nationwide controversy. This was the context in which the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Classical Age and the Enlightenment (IRCL), a joint research centre of University Paul-Valéry Montpellier and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), launched an innovative and experimental educational project on ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’, in partnership with Montpellier’s Printemps des comédiens, the second biggest theatre festival in France in terms of attendance and international visibility. Can theatre still be popular in today’s digital society? Can it still address everyone, regardless of their age, social background and ethnicity? Is it an appropriate medium to broach the notion of citizenship nowadays? Why turn to an English dramatist to reflect on citizenship in France? And 1

The speech can be found on the website of the French National Assembly: www.assemblee-nationale.fr/14/cri/congres/20154001.asp. Article 25 of the French Civil Code defines the very strict terms under which French citizens may be stripped of their nationality: www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do;jsessionid=3B63ACC608E16473FAFEB28FD86AAF35.tplgfr44s_1?idArticle=LEGIAR TI000006420131&cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006070721&dateTexte=19960722.

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why focus on early modern drama? These are some of the challenges that the partners have to face in this collaborative project of action research.

Nature and Aims of the Project ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’ involves six secondary schools with ­different social profiles in Montpellier from the city centre (collège Georges Clémenceau) to socially mixed areas (collèges Croix-d’Argent and Fontcarrade), zones of educational priority (collège Les Escholiers de la Mosson) and schools with international classes taught in English (collèges Camille Claudel and Simone Veil). During the school year, six classes of students aged fourteen to fifteen worked on a Shakespeare play with their English, French, history and civil education teachers, academics from the IRCL and actors hired by the primary funder of the festival: the Conseil départemental de l’Hérault (the General Council of the Hérault département of which Montpellier is the administrative centre). The project culminates with its own school festival: the Printemps des collégiens, whose name echoes the Printemps des comédiens within which it is embedded (collégiens designates secondary-school students, and comédiens means actors). The preparation of the festival is as important as the result, since the initiation to acting and spectating practices – which are first-time experiences for many of the students – enables the various partners to address the main values attached to the notion of citizenship. According to the official definition established by the French legal and administrative information department directly attached to the Prime Minister’s office, citizenship hinges upon three main values: civility, meaning recognition, acceptance of and respect for the other; civil rights and duties, meaning the articulation between individual and collective interests; and solidarity, meaning the capacity for building a common project, without which there can be no society.2 Even though national school programmes are expected to promote these values, in the context that has just been described citizenship education certainly needs to be readjusted and reinforced. On 16 October 2020, a civil education teacher in the Paris outer suburbs was savagely beheaded by an Islamist terrorist because during a lesson on freedom of expression – guaranteed by Article 11 of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 – he had shown his students the Charlie Hebdo cartoons caricaturing the Prophet

2

See: www.vie-publique.fr/fiches/23857-quelles-sont-les-valeurs-attachees-la-citoyennete.

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Muhammad, which allegedly triggered the 2015 attacks. His assassination took place as the Charlie Hebdo trial was being conducted. Since such sensitive issues are included in the national curriculum on civil education, there is a risk that teachers are targeted by terrorists who crusade against the civic values it is their mission to impart. ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’ is an alternative, collaborative project involving multiple participants, which both dilutes the risk of crystallising controversy on an individual and strengthens the institutional discourse as it is delivered collectively. Based on theatre practice, the project re-presents – presents again and anew – the institutional objectives by implementing Shakespeare’s model of civic theatre. Shakespeare’s theatre seems appropriate to meet these aims, as it encourages the traits that are included in France’s definition of citizenship. In French plural society, the acknowledgement of diversity combines living-together with debate rather than consensus. Broaching a wide range of social and political issues, Shakespeare’s plays do not only embrace a wide community of spectators: they invite questionings rather than provide answers. As live art, theatre induces a collective experience both onstage and in the audience. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream – the Shakespeare play most frequently performed in Montpellier’s festival and which inspired two school productions in 2016 and 2019 – the amateur actors learn about teamwork, as Peter Quince repeatedly insists on the importance of everyone attending rehearsals, being on time and knowing their lines, and on the individual’s sense of responsibility and commitment towards the group. The prologue to Henry V – a text the IRCL academics regularly quote in the classroom – famously highlights the role of the spectator as participant in the performance. As actors and spectators rely on one another, Shakespeare’s theatre provides a sense of sharing and belonging that can potentially generate social cohesion and solidarity. The students of all six schools attend each other’s performances during the festival, and the alternation of acting and spectating fosters empathy between stage and audience, as well as respect for one another’s work, for they are well aware of the effort behind a theatre production. Their initiation to the reception process also paves the way for making them familiar with the necessary articulation of individual and collective interests at the root of civil rights and duties: ‘spectating is a matter of twofold comprehension’ since the spectator’s own personal comprehension of the production must be reappraised in the light of his or her being comprehended in a community (Sarrazac, 1996: 17–23).3 As performing art, theatre involves 3

All translations from the French are mine, unless specified otherwise.

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role-playing, decentring oneself so as to step into a fictional character’s shoes. Viola/Cesario thus remarks in Twelfth Night, a comedy performed by collège Fontcarrade in 2017: ‘I am not what I am’ (Shakespeare, 2008: 3.1.139). Acting requires one to become momentarily estranged from oneself in order to experience otherness. Once the illusion is over and one goes back to social life and its plural reality, this experience opens up the possibility to foster civility, empathy and solidarity across differences. Both because they address people from all walks of life in an inclusive way – as epitomised by the Globe’s name (Mullaney, 1988) – and promote debate rather than consensus, Shakespeare’s plays connect theatre to the city, while constantly questioning the complex nature and function of this relationship, encouraged in this by the physical location of Elizabethan public playhouses, confined in the suburbs right outside the London wall. Facing the city across the Thames, Shakespeare’s Globe provides a unique space and time to reflect on the notion of citizenship. An experimental microcosm of London, hosting socially mixed, rowdy and uncivil audiences in an open-air theatre surrounded by a circular wall, this ‘wooden O’ may be viewed as a laboratory of citizenship. It is no wonder, then, that Shakespeare assumed such a structural function in the reinvention, in post–World War II France, of theatre as an essential contribution to social cohesion and national reconstruction (Jacquot, 1964; Kennedy, 2009; March, 2012). Humanist drama was inspiring insofar as it reflected on the role and place of people in society. An heir to the cultural policies of that time, the Printemps des comédiens has been committed to the promotion of art theatre for all since its foundation in Montpellier in 1987, and Shakespeare has been one of the cornerstones on which the festival’s directors have built this ethos. Not only have his plays been regularly programmed over the years, but the model of Elizabethan public theatre has inspired productions designed for large open-air audiences. The inclusiveness of the Shakespearean ‘wooden O’ is reflected in the names of the domaine d’O, the oval-shaped park hosting the festival, and of two of the venues: the Théâtre d’O and Amphithéâtre d’O, as well as in the circular seventeenth-century Grand Bassin that used to contain water for the city of Montpellier, a mineral O now used as a place of performance, and in the circus rings and tents scattered across the park, which recall both the arenas of the Elizabethan playhouses and the popular tradition behind the festival. A shared interest in early modern British drama resulted in the IRCL and the Printemps des comédiens signing a research partnership agreement in 2015. The ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’ project developed within this frame, the festival being particularly eager to draw in

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young audiences, who are generally not familiar with theatre, hoping that they will become tomorrow’s regular audiences.

Back to the Future: Challenging the Students with Shakespeare When, at the beginning of each academic year, the students are asked what theatre means for them, those attending schools in socially mixed areas and zones of educational priority frequently answer that it targets rich, white, elderly people. To those who have heard about him, Shakespeare suggests a dusty, elitist figure, with whom they cannot feel connected. As in the Renaissance, we need to work to deconstruct anti-theatrical prejudices. The inclusiveness of Shakespeare’s theatre is not taken for granted, it has to be experienced, leading us (the academics in the project) to put into perspective the very nature and legitimacy of our research object. Going back to the Renaissance and crossing the Channel, that is, transporting ourselves (academics, secondary-school staff, actors and students) to a different socio-cultural time and space, allows us to tackle burning issues in an oblique way. This detour establishes a necessary distance before bringing us back to deal with current socio-political crises. An instance of this back-and-forth movement occurred in 2017–18 when the students from a priority education network found themselves rehearsing Measure for Measure in the context of the #MeToo movement. They immediately identified the gender issues raised by the text and their critical reading led to creative writing. With a view to asserting their place and role in a play dominated by men, the girls chose to write their own prologue and epilogue in French, which they delivered collectively as a chorus, feeling safer to do so as a group. Thus, they significantly contributed not only to the production but to the global social debate. The girls opened and closed the performance, having the last say, and their paratexts glossed the play they framed. They added their collective voice to Shakespeare’s, engaging in a dialogue with the Elizabethan playwright 400 years after his death to show the limits of his treatment of Isabella’s future offstage: And the old duke […] gives his heart and power to Isabella who is about to become his wife […] So what? What? Can’t you see the problem? No? What about Isabella? Does it end well for her? May I remind you that she didn’t want a man? Her choice was to give herself to God. Who is listening to her?

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Since prologues and epilogues have a function of enabling the transition between fiction and reality, the girls rooted the dramatic debate in social reality. And since such paratexts also act as areas of transaction, the girls used them as an oblique strategy to negotiate with the boys, both onstage and in the audience. Thus, they turned the opposition between gender categories into negotiation, re-establishing gender equality in the theatre. Prologue and epilogue qualify as alternative textual spaces, which do not remain confined to the margins of the play since the paratextual detour brings the audience back to the central issue of the play. Shakespeare’s text qualifies as a catalyst for critical reading, collective debate about gender issues then and now, creative writing and freedom of expression. It empowered the girls to claim such democratic values as freedom, equality and solidarity, on which the acknowledgement of diversity relies in French society. The paratexts they co-authored provided an instance of such zones of cooperation and debate as are necessary in a society that does not view itself as a collection of individualist citizens but sees diversity as an asset. The previous year, in 2016–17, the historical, geographical and cultural ­distance separating twenty-first-century French teenagers from Shakespeare’s English had already helped to solve a problem in the same school. In keeping with the school’s project, which hinges upon multilingualism, they performed their production – a potpourri of different plays – in several languages: French, English, Wolof, Rif (spoken in the mountains of Northern Morocco) and Arabic. What the teachers had not foreseen was the students’ fierce confrontation over different Arabic languages and dialects, each one asserting the superiority of the Arabic spoken at home over other varieties, and claiming that he/she could understand Shakespeare’s English better than the other Arabic dialects. When the project turned Babelic and came to a standstill, we visited the classroom and explained how, in Renaissance England, English came to replace Latin as the official language, how the vernacular had to be enriched to become a literary, poetic language, and how it triggered off the so-called inkhorn controversy, opposing writers who thought that borrowing foreign words enriched English versus those who thought that hybridisation resulted in devaluation. Following the debate we had about this episode in the history of language, the students came to the conclusion that multilingualism was a reflection of their own diversity and as such, did not rely on a hierarchy of languages but on languages in conversation. As rehearsals resumed, the educational approach was revised so as to foster a horizontal dialogue between languages. The English and French teachers offered to take part in the production and to be cast in roles they would deliver in

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Arabic, a foreign language to them, thus becoming learners in their turn. Shakespeare’s English acted as a connector between the students’ native tongues and the foreign languages taught in the school, with, for instance, a student correcting his teacher: ‘You cannot say “Ahmed” properly and yet you can do an aspirate “h” when you say “Hamlet”. Well, it’s the same thing!’. This spontaneous detour via Shakespeare showed that the students had appropriated the school project on multilingualism and become actors of its implementation. In their own pragmatic way, they came to terms with Babelism and proved true the theory of the philosopher Marie-José Mondzain that ‘the diversity of languages is the only means to ensure the disagreement that will have men look outside themselves for what makes them bond together’ (Mondzain, 2007: 133). Negotiating with English Renaissance history thus helped the students transform antagonism into debate and promote diversity as an asset rather than a liability. This linguistic crisis both reinforced the synergy between educational and academic partners, and impacted upon the students’ relationship with languages, both native and foreign, leading them to revisit the objectives behind the language courses they are taught at school. Language was requalified, not merely as a medium of communication, but as political and poetic. The exploration of the wide range of language registers in Shakespeare’s plays also stimulated them into breaking out of what Cécile Ladjali, a French-Iranian teacher, writer and translator of Shakespeare, calls their ‘linguistic ghetto’.4 In an essay on the ‘unruly language’ spoken by teenagers in the north-eastern suburbs of Paris (Seine-Saint-Denis) she explains that one of the reasons why her students do not cross the Seine river to the capital city is that they feel they do not speak the same language as the Parisians. Viewing their own language as deficient and discriminating, they tend to favour geographical, social, cultural and linguistic grouping. To counter this, Ladjali advocates confronting them with the great classics of literature (Ladjali, 2007). The ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’ project impacts not only the teaching of languages but also that of literary classics in general, allowing the students to develop their own ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977), which is both distinct from the economic and social capitals and similar to them in that it is also an instrument of power and empowerment. An essential mission of French state schools consists of providing all students

4

On 9 November 2016, the IRCL organised a symposium on ‘Teaching the Classics’ as part of ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’. Ladjali was among the speakers.

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with a cultural capital and a taste for enlarging it, whatever their family environment, as a way to overcome social determinism and promote equality of opportunity. Involving six schools with very different profiles, in various areas of Montpellier, having their students congregate around Shakespeare’s canon whereas they would never have had an opportunity to cross paths otherwise, ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’ refocuses on this crucial educational necessity, infusing it with meaning as it makes it a tangible reality. Thus, the various appropriation processes implemented by the project led the students of all six schools to reconsider Shakespeare’s legacy as popular rather than elitist, and to reconsider culture as a way to bridge gaps rather than divide society. We experienced this when, after the migrant camp in Calais was dismantled in 2016, a young Afghan refugee arrived in Montpellier and the administrative centre for migrants registered him at collège Croix-d’Argent: one of the reasons behind the choice of that school was that, although he could not speak French, he was fluent in English and the project on ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’ was thought to be liable to help him settle in. The class was working on Richard II, he was cast in the title role and became a pillar of the project, gaining the other students’ admiration and respect. The rehearsals brought him close to the English teacher and little by little, he trusted him with bits and pieces of his own story, which he had never wanted or been able to tell anyone else since his arrival in Montpellier. As a foreigner, he felt he was treated according to French civil values: he was accepted and respected in the classroom, his own particular skills were valued by the community, and inclusion led to cooperation and solidarity. All the teachers involved in ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’ agree that the classroom atmosphere improves as the project builds up, providing better conditions of study. As the school year came to an end, after the festival in June 2019, a student from collège de la Mosson confessed to the actress who had been training them: ‘If it had not been for the theatre project, I would never have made it to the end of the year.’ He had turned sixteen during the year, the age to which school attendance is compulsory in France.

Collaborative Action Research: Challenging Partners to Build a Common Culture ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’ is the nexus between the various institutions working together on a project that reaches far beyond its initial educational purpose to confront and question methods, practices and policies, suggesting

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new, cross-border paths to explore collaboratively – all this in the jovial atmosphere of the Montpellier festival. As Léna R. from collège Clémenceau answered in a questionnaire about the experience she had gained from putting on a play for the 2019 school festival: ‘it is very stimulating to work in a team, but it can sometimes be complicated!’ Likewise, institutional partners have to find common ground between scientific, artistic, educational and socio-political logics. For instance, the issue of scale had to be negotiated: whereas the IRCL’s academic mission requires experimentation on a small scale over several years, the Conseil départemental de l’Hérault subsidises theatre projects in schools across Montpellier’s district with a view to reaching as many students as possible in the shortest possible time, as required by its social commitment to democratising art and culture. Collaboration between research and development raises difficulties, for knowledge and action are governed by different rationales and mobilise very different systems of legitimisation (Olivier de Sardan, 1996: 117–27). ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’ relies on a horizontal, dialogic approach, which involves negotiation between partners to find a solution acceptable to all. The IRCL has argued that the ultimate goal is to model ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’, so that it can be appropriated by other schools in Hérault and beyond, and perhaps even be transposed to other disciplines: Spanish teachers thus have displayed an interest in adapting it to the dramatic corpus of the Spanish Golden Age. The IRCL is also careful to anticipate the end of the academic involvement in the project and to ensure its sustainability, helping the different stakeholders to become progressively autonomous. It has designed a training course for teachers and actors focusing on the ‘theoretical and practical transmission of Shakespeare’ in cooperation with Irina Brook. An Anglo-French stage director, Brook was at the head of the Nice National Centre for Dramatic Art between 2014 and 2019; while at Nice, she founded the French Shakespeare festival Shake Nice! in 2015 and a school festival, Shake Freestyle, in 2016, the very same year as the Printemps des collégiens. Researchers from the IRCL, together with Brook and actors from her company, combined courses and workshops on Shakespeare twice a year, in Nice and Montpellier. This initiative was supported by local education authorities. This meant that both Montpellier’s education authority and the Conseil départemental de l’Hérault, which promotes alternative educational methods, had to prove flexible to serve a common project that resonated with their programmes and policies while questioning them. Now that Irina Brook’s mission on the Riviera has come to an end, the IRCL plans to set up a summer school.

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Not only does ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’ aim to contribute to social change through transformational action: it also engages in a process of self-reflexive critique, thus qualifying as a project of collaborative action research. In this type of project, partners agree to a reciprocal relationship in which everyone needs the other because the other possesses an expertise they do not have, in a cross-fertilisation process meant to produce innovative, collective practices, as well as an institutional questioning of one’s own frames of reference (Bourassa et al., 2007: 3–8). That is precisely what happened when tensions arising from the implementation of multilingualism turned into synergy, reinforcing the collaboration between the IRCL and collège de la Mosson, and inducing a ‘reflexive partnership’ (Bourassa et al., 2007: 1) between the school project and one of the IRCL’s research programmes on contemporary dynamics of Shakespearean legacies. Collaborative action research tests each partner’s ability to enter the sphere of action traditionally reserved for the other. Considering that most students will not continue practising theatre after the Printemps des ­collégiens, and demonstrating a commitment to introducing the ­possibility of cultural practices in their everyday lives, the project partners have set up a ‘School for Spectators’ in parallel with the school festival. Classes attend several performances during the year to become familiar with t­heatre codes and conventions and with playhouses where they can ­progressively feel more and more at home. Experience taught us that the selection of ­productions for uninitiated students is not easy, all the more so as ­living arts closely preserve their share of mystery. This aspect of the project would benefit from a closer dialogue between Montpellier’s festival and the ­teaching staff, who are more alert to the realities on the ground. The school festival traditionally ends with everyone attending together a professional performance programmed by the Printemps des comédiens. In 2019, students and partners were thus invited to Thom Luz’s production of The Girl from the Fog Machine Factory, but most students expected dramatic action and remained indifferent to this poetic instance of musical theatre. The show probably came at too early a stage of their introduction to spectating practices, as they proved unable to readjust their expectations and to decode the metatheatrical dimension. Interestingly enough, the most experienced students, who had already been several times to the theatre with their teachers during the year, were also those who fully committed themselves to the performance, out of sheer curiosity. This episode highlighted the importance of working from where the students stand, so as not to risk discouraging budding spectators.

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Another instance of mixed reception occurred in 2018 when the IRCL contributed to the ‘School for Spectators’ by inviting the Edward’s Boys Company, with which it has developed a privileged partnership over the past few years and whose production of Francis Beaumont’s The WomanHater in Montpellier in 2016 had been a hit with young audiences.5 Not only had the students identified with the actors from King Edward VI School, but the professionalism, self-discipline, cheerfulness and humility of the boy company had a huge impact on the students’ commitment to their own productions in progress. Two years later, the Edward’s Boys’ performance of John Lyly’s sexy comedy The Woman in the Moon raised objections from some students of collège de la Mosson, who saw it as a provocation that boys should play female roles, dress like girls, kiss and flirt, to the point of addressing them rather bluntly during the question-and-answer session that rounded off the show. The teachers and the actress in charge of the students confessed that it had been a hard task reviving their interest in the theatre p ­ roject. Yet, what the partners first viewed as a failure turned into an opportunity to start another debate about the value of civility attached to the notion of citizenship, involving mutual acknowledgement, acceptance and respect (see Chapter 21). The episode seems to confirm philosopher Régis Debray’s statement that ‘the fewer spectators there are, the fewer citizens there will be’ (Debray, 1996: 10), thus validating the necessity of implementing collaborative action research projects like ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’. If, as Mondzain contends, the spectator is ‘a citizen caught in the performance of an action that acts upon him and which he, in his turn, transforms into something’ (Mondzain, 2007: 15), then the IRCL, in synergy with the teachers, accompanied the transformational process that, from fiction onstage to social reality, opens new possibilities for civility, civic awareness and solidarity. The challenges raised by the project and the complications deriving from its implementation prevent the partners from being naively optimistic. There is occasionally a lack of buy-in to the aims of the project. Thus, in 2017–18, three students from collège Croix-d’Argent refused categorically to participate in the production for the school festival. Every year, as the school term draws to an end and the summer holidays are looming round the bend, a number of students from collège de la Mosson fail to 5

See Chapter 21 for more on Edward’s Boys’ performances in France.

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attend the last weeks of rehearsals, jeopardising their class’s participation in the school festival. Another example shows the difficulties of promoting equality of opportunity for all. ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’ involves the programme ‘On and behind the stage: discovering theatre-related professions’, which consists of visiting the Montpellier festival to acquaint the students with the wide range of theatre professions from actors to stage directors, from the stage crew to the cultural mediation team, so as to encourage them to broaden their horizons, overcome social determinism and allow themselves to redefine their own ambitions. They also meet the festival director, who discovered theatre when he was their age, in the drama club of his school, under the guidance of his teachers, and whose social background did not destine him to become the director of France’s second biggest theatre festival. At the end of one such visit, in April 2017, two students from collège de la Mosson, who seemed to show particular interest in what they were listening to, asked: ‘do you hire security officers?’ (a boy asking); ‘do you hire usherettes?’ (a girl asking). Their questions showed that they could see themselves working in some way in the arts, a professional sector they had never contemplated before, but that they seemed to be curtailing their own potentialities. Such ambivalence underlines how complex it can be to implement a programme promoting equality of opportunity. Nonetheless, we also experience modest but encouraging successes. That very same year, a girl from the same class, who had never been to the theatre before and had never practised it, successfully applied to a school with a specific section in performing arts. Since then, following in her footsteps, one or two students of the collège have enrolled in this school each year. Such pragmatic indicators allow us to assess the impact of the project by measuring the progress that is achieved rather than the aims. In September 2020, the French Ministry of Culture offered to support ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’ by signing a framework agreement with the IRCL, so as to help us finalise a model that can then be implemented on a wider scale. At the nexus between the Ministry of Culture, the National Centre for Scientific Research and the second most important theatre festival in France, the project claims to empower young citizens to participate in social, cultural and political life. Determined by a shared culture and a joint action, taking place in the here and now, in a festive atmosphere and in defiance of a darker social context, ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’ thus aims to contribute an answer to the current crises that question the French values of citizenship.

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References Bourassa, Michelle, Louise Bélair, and Jacques Chevalier, 2007. ‘Liminaire. Les Outils de la recherche participative’, in Michelle Bourassa, Louise Bélair, and Jacques Chevalier (eds.), Éducation et francophonie, XXXV: 2, 1–11. Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron, 1977. Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage). Debray, Régis, 1996. ‘Pourquoi le spectacle’, Cahiers de médiologie, 1, 5–13. Jacquot, Jean, 1964. Shakespeare en France. Mises en scène d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Le Temps). Kennedy, Dennis, 2009. The Spectator and the Spectacle. Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ladjali, Cécile, 2007. Mauvaise Langue (Paris: Le Seuil). March, Florence, 2012. Shakespeare au Festival d’Avignon (Montpellier: L’Entretemps). Mondzain, Marie-José, 2007. Homo Spectator (Paris: Bayard). Mullaney, Steven, 1988. The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre, 1996. ‘Amalgamating System Analysis, Participative Research and Action Research and Some Problems Concerning These Terms’, in Michel Sébillote (ed.), Systems-Oriented Research in Agriculture and Rural Development (Montpellier: CIRAD-SAR), 117–27. Sarrazac, Jean-Pierre, 1996. ‘Le spectateur, c’est celui qui comprend’, Du théâtre, 5, 17–23. Shakespeare, William, 2008. Twelfth Night or What You Will, ed. Keir Elam (London: Arden Shakespeare).

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chapter 3

Bell Shakespeare

Exploring the Power of Shakespeare in Primary School Contexts Joanna Erskine and Robyn Ewing AM

Prologue: Setting the Scene – About Bell Shakespeare Founded by John Bell in 1990, Bell Shakespeare is Australia’s national theatre company specialising in Shakespeare in performance, education and community settings. Its national education programme reaches more than 80,000 students and teachers face-to-face each year across, on average, 90 per cent of Australian federal electorates. The programme includes: in-school performances undertaken by an ensemble of six actors who tour schools (The Players); student workshops; teacher professional learning workshops; senior student seminars; a year-long Regional Teacher Mentorship for thirty teachers annually; and the John Bell Scholarship for regional students interested in a career as a performer. The programme also includes Artist-in-Residence programmes delivered in diverse locations including juvenile justice centres, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and remote mining communities. After years of productions and one-off workshops for primary audiences, the Company formalised their primary Shakespeare programme in 2013. This comprised in-school performances of Shakespeare’s plays specially scripted for young audiences, immersive workshops and teacher professional learning workshops. This chapter begins with two vignettes from the authors’ own lived experiences with Shakespeare’s work in their primary years of schooling. It then explains how Shakespeare is sometimes feared in secondary contexts before providing the rationale for introducing Shakespeare in primary school contexts. Several reasons for the primary school programme’s success from the perspective and experience of the Company as well as from participant teachers and students at several schools are discussed. Finally, some key principles for optimising the collaboration 54

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between Bell Shakespeare, schools and students using Shakespeare in primary contexts are suggested.

Two Vignettes Joanna1 When I was 11 years old I had my first experience with Shakespeare. My older brother had travelled around Europe and while visiting Stratford-­Upon-Avon, bought for me a black and white illustration of Titania doting on Bottom in her fairy bower. I was fascinated by the image, so much so that I asked my brother about the story, and consequently, about Shakespeare. My next experience came soon after when my Year 6 teacher set us a task to build a class model of the Globe Theatre, complete with thatched roof, the ‘Heavens’ and the infamous cannon. These early experiences meant that when I met Shakespeare in high school I had a reference point. An earlier memory and interest in the man and his plays. All because two people in my life hadn’t thought, ‘She’s too young. She won’t “get” Shakespeare’. Robyn2 From the time I was about 10 I was fortunate to attend Speech and Drama classes at the local youth club. We were introduced to excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays early: ‘The Witches Song’ from the opening of Macbeth comes to mind immediately especially: Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. Cool it with a baboon’s blood, Then the charm is firm and good.

(Shakespeare, 2015: 4.1.35–38)

We embodied that scene, playing with how we might say these words. Later, my friend and I, having enjoyed studying A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Year 7 at school, choreographed it for our fellow ballet students. It was performed at the annual concert. I never remember thinking Shakespeare was difficult or irrelevant.

Yet such experiences remain the exception, not the rule. It is rare for children to be introduced to Shakespeare during their primary years, and without early immersion, negative preconceived perceptions towards Shakespeare become problematic. The next section explores the negative views of Shakespeare sometimes found in secondary contexts. 1 2

Joanna Erskine is Head of Education, Bell Shakespeare. Robyn Ewing is Professor Emerita, University of Sydney.

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Scene 1: Fear of Shakespeare in the Early Secondary Years Every week Bell Shakespeare is invited into classrooms to ‘change the perception’ of teenagers towards Shakespeare and his writing. Teachers continue to report that their students: ‘hate Shakespeare’ … ‘They don’t get it’ … ‘They don’t see the relevance’ … ‘They think Shakespeare is like another language.’ It is important to acknowledge that many adults are either afraid of Shakespeare’s language or express dislike of, or sometimes hatred for his plays (see, for example, Strauss, 2015; Jongjin, 2017). Anecdotal evidence abounds that some adults or older siblings openly voice this disdain when they see their children, or younger sibling, commencing study of one of Shakespeare’s plays at school potentially because of their own prior experience. While Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets are designed to be performed with the texts as a blueprint for performance, the secondary curriculum is cramped and room for play and appreciation is often limited. So, in our experience, many English teachers treat Shakespeare’s plays as novels with line-by-line analysis, or round-robin reading in the classroom coupled with watching a film adaptation. Ironically, this kind of reading can consume a large amount of class time with prioritising ‘getting to the end’ of the play over playing with Shakespearean text through, for example, performance, and delving into themes and their relevance more deeply. We also need to understand that in secondary school contexts, Shakespeare is traditionally introduced to students when they are in the middle of puberty. Many already have metaphorical walls up against the world. When they hear the word ‘Shakespeare’ the barriers can be immediate. In many instances, the work Bell Shakespeare teaching artists do with high school students is thus, initially, about turning around such negative perceptions. The artists work to open up Shakespeare’s work to appreciation and interpretation. They succeed through using a combination of active learning, and a critical and creative engagement with the texts, enabling students to see their place in, and the relevance of, the plays and characters to their lives. And yet negative preconceptions about Shakespeare’s writing continue, Australia-wide. As Bell Shakespeare is a national company, all Australian states and territories are involved with performances, residences and workshops. In New South Wales (NSW) the study of Shakespeare is mandated for the Higher School Certificate Advanced English course,3 so it is a 3

The Higher School Certificate is the qualification attained upon successful completion of the final year of secondary schooling in NSW.

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core part of the curriculum. In several other Australian states, however, Shakespeare’s work is no longer mandatory, so often only those t­eachers who are most passionate about his work will teach it. Sadly, in many cases, Shakespeare’s work is only introduced in Year 9 or 10, while other students only study Shakespeare in Year 11 and then must complete a rigorous Year 12 exam question on one of his plays. As Bell Shakespeare’s Head of Education highlights, it is highly problematic to deny students an experience of Shakespeare’s writing until their senior school years and little wonder that many then struggle when faced with Hamlet.

Scene 2: Shakespeare’s Potential for Primary Students In looking for a way through the issues described above, Bell Shakespeare wondered whether introducing Shakespeare’s works into children’s lives earlier might build on young children’s innate positivity and openness to learning. Further, their lack of inhibitions and ingrained expectations may lead to a willingness to play with language confidently. Research in the United Kingdom (for example, Lindsay et al., 2016) and the United States (Cox, 2008; Ramnanan, 2013) suggests that there is much to be gained by introducing primary school students to Shakespeare. Lindsay et al.’s (2016) findings suggested experiences with Shakespeare engaged unmotivated students in disadvantaged contexts, leading to increased student confidence, improved student writing, and improved literacy and achievement more broadly across the curriculum. When working in England with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), Seymour concluded that: ‘the younger the learner, the more fearless they tend to be when working with Shakespeare’ (2016, n.p.). Seymour credits the theatre-based pedagogy used by the RSC as an important feature of this work. To date, however, there has been little systematic research about introducing Shakespeare in Australian primary school contexts. Our research included interviews with teachers in three diverse school contexts. These teachers include Robyn Floyd, Teacher-Librarian, Bankstown West Public School in western Sydney, where 97 per cent of the students are of a nonEnglish speaking background (NESB), and Jane Vaughan, Teacher and now Librarian, Railway Town Public School, a small school of about 127 students with 30 per cent Indigenous enrolment in remote Broken Hill, NSW. Both schools have collaborated with Bell Shakespeare for the past five years and have built strong relationships over time, with the Company designing programmes to meet the particular school contexts. The third school,

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John Colet School is a primary, independent multifaith school in Belrose on Sydney’s northern beaches. Its curriculum features an enriched Arts programme including the study of Shakespeare’s plays at every year level.

Scene 3: The Beginning Bell Shakespeare began introducing Shakespeare to primary students following requests from primary teachers, rather than deliberate strategic planning. For example, in one primary school, the Company was asked to work with a ‘gifted-and-talented’ class. The Company began performing shows, slightly adapted, to upper primary students, with resoundingly positive responses. Bell Shakespeare found that for primary students, Shakespeare’s language was fascinating, not confusing. Students wondered out loud about the words and were keen to play with new words and grammar and think about how words could mean different things in different contexts. In fact, meeting Shakespeare’s language for the first time meant that all children were learning something new: no one knew all the words. In addition, introducing Shakespeare’s plays to younger students seemed to garner some excitement. In her speech at the launch of Bell Shakespeare’s primary programme Erskine (2013) reflected on a number of early anecdotes: One year on a residency at a primary school in Moree, the students would beg our teaching artists to tell them other Shakespeare stories at recess. They devoured one play and wanted another. We toured our production ‘Midsummer Madness’ to primary and secondary schools across Australia. Puck performed a few magic tricks in that show. At the end of every high school performance, without exception, a key question would be: ‘How did you do that trick?’ After The Players answered ‘Magic!’, the next question was ‘But seriously how did you do it?’ In contrast, during the primary shows, the magic trick was never questioned. It was magic!

The Company commissioned popular Australian children’s author Andy Griffiths to adapt Macbeth for the stage in 2008. The result, Just Macbeth!, played to audiences from Melbourne to Edinburgh (see Figure 3.1). Erskine (2013) commented: Importantly, the show did not change the story of Macbeth: it presented the full plot, with all its gore, within a familiar and humorous framework. Young children walked out of the show understanding how a soliloquy functioned. They debated Macbeth’s moral dilemma in the foyers. It also had a powerful, positive impact on parents in the audience.

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Figure 3.1  Bell Shakespeare’s The Players perform Just Macbeth! for primary school students. Photograph by Justin Batchelor

Through these initial experiences the Company realised the potential impact and value of introducing Shakespeare to primary children and decided to formally launch a primary programme in 2013. The education team established a primary teachers’ advisory panel, wrote new scripts, designed new content and programmes and were full of hope and ­enthusiasm. Yet the media release triggered a public outcry and resistance, particularly from some radio journalists, again demonstrating some adults’ pre-existing negative attitudes to Shakespeare. As indicated earlier, some primary schools had already been involved in the programme. Others, however, found the very concept too difficult to even consider. In some instances, if Bell Shakespeare called a primary school, the receptionist would often respond, ‘We’re a primary school’ and hang up. While for secondary English and Drama teachers there is an expectation that they must teach Shakespeare, this has not been the case for primary school teachers. In the early years, if the Company was in a regional town with a gap in The Players’ schedule, they would often offer neighbouring primary schools a complimentary performance. Sometimes this offer was accepted despite some remaining scepticism about its appropriateness. Afterwards the teacher or Principal would contact Bell Shakespeare in a happy state of disbelief, sharing news of their students’ excitement and interest in the performance, often stating that they had never seen their students so

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engaged. Principals who had begrudgingly accepted a performance would ask when the Company would be returning. Initial reluctance was thus quickly overturned. Bankstown West Public School was a case in point: the school accepted Bell Shakespeare’s third invitation. Teacher-Librarian Robyn Floyd comments on her initial reservations: ‘Shakespeare was not on our horizon … because I was thinking about some kids that I had that couldn’t read … and I’m thinking “far out!”’ After the initial experience five years ago, Floyd remembers: There was a huge enthusiasm. That was the group that said ‘We want to do proper Shakespeare’ after seeing Just Macbeth! So then we did a little bit from Macbeth. And we decided to do a little bit of Julius Caesar because that was about ambition, power, treachery. That was Stage 3 [Years 5 to 6].

Following this experience, a now long-standing collaboration between the school and Bell Shakespeare has developed. Some primary school teachers, like Floyd, doubt their ability to teach Shakespeare. She comments: ‘When I’m teaching Shakespeare, I’m about ten minutes ahead of the kids. Because Shakespeare has not been part of my training … We just launch in, because if I think about it too much then I’d just get worried.’ This comment underlines the need for the provision of teacher professional learning workshops and high-quality resources for primary teachers so that the success with Bell Shakespeare’s programmes for students can be further developed after the Company has completed its residency. Bell Shakespeare provides professional learning workshops and mentorships for primary teachers who are experienced as well as for those new to working with Shakespeare. Schools are also encouraged to custom design a programme that specifically meets the needs of their context in consultation with the Company.4

Scene 4: The Pedagogy In teaching about Shakespeare and his literary works, Bell Shakespeare employs an arts-rich pedagogy (Ewing, 2019) or ‘performance-based approach’ (Ramnanan, 2013). There is an emphasis on drama-based processes and strategies (Ewing and Saunders, 2016) with the plot and characters explored through embodiment and enactment. Zoe Emanuel, drama teacher at John Colet School, explained: Shakespeare really is to be done on your feet to understand the depth of the characters and story and the subplots. The children get it to a certain 4

See www.bellshakespeare.com.au/whats-on/educations/professional-learning/

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level; and then the sub-plot deepens, the character becomes more dimensional, and that then gives them a huge depth of understanding of the human condition.

As children learn about different historical texts and enter fictional worlds, they see how the themes and characters’ experiences resonate with their own. Kathryn Parker (2016) writes: I’ve seen teachers introduce the idea of justice using King Lear or Julius Caesar, for example, to help learners build arguments, and debate. The way learners respond to this is different from how they would respond to something familiar like playground rules, in which they have an emotional stake. It can be freeing for them to step away from reality, and working with Shakespeare grants them that freedom.

The exploration of characters through drama strategies like Hot Seating can enable students to explore the spaces in the stories (Ewing and Saunders,  2016). Testing out the characters’ dilemmas when making a major decision through Conscience Alley enables the children to consider a range of alternative possibilities and see that there are no easy answers!5 As Germaine Greer (in Farrell, 2016) explained in an Australian Broadcasting Corporation programme, Q+A: ‘What actually happens in a Shakespeare play is you’re prevented from arriving at easy certainties.’ When working with young people the teacher/teaching artist facilitates deep learning through the provision of a safe learning context and structured but open-ended strategies and activities that foster students’ higherorder thinking. Students are encouraged to ask questions and develop their own understandings and interpretations. Floyd adds: Every child has been engaged. We’re not just teaching to the middle. The research says when you do mostly whole class teaching, 19%, that’s who you hit. It’s not very much, is it? Well I do not see that when we do Shakespeare. I see very close to 100 percent of students who are actively engaged, and that is just a perfect teaching opportunity.

These comments about inclusivity are echoed by Diane Renshaw, Deputy Headmistress, John Colet School, who says: The glory of Shakespeare is that it will extend your extension students as far as they can go, and it will work for your most challenged student as well. It covers that whole spectrum. We’ve had students with cerebral palsy who can’t speak, children in wheelchairs still able to participate … children with severe disabilities always able to participate … There is no one who doesn’t get a place in Shakespeare. 5

See Ewing and Saunders (2016) for detail about drama strategies.

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Scene 5: Bell Shakespeare’s Principles for Introducing Shakespeare There are several principles recommended by Bell Shakespeare when working with primary school students. Several of these are discussed briefly here. 1. Avoid the ‘S’ word initially Often a workshop will begin with a storytelling exercise without mentioning Shakespeare’s name, given his stories are just like other classic stories and great tales, at least in terms of content and narrative. They include witches, fairies, adventures on the high seas, magical potions, love, battles, swords and blood. For example: Bell Shakespeare’s Double Trouble was a show especially scripted for students aged five to seven featuring a medley of characters and narratives from more than ten plays from Shakespeare without hearing his name once. Once children are engaged and excited by the stories, then the man himself can be introduced. 2. Do not change the language Bell Shakespeare advocates using Shakespeare’s original language but chunking it into smaller units. For example: ‘Full of vexation come I with complaint against my child, my daughter Hermia’, becomes ‘Full of vexation come I!’ Questions are then introduced. For example: • What does the word ‘vexation’ mean? What do you think it might mean? • If you were ‘full of vexation’ how might you look? • How might you walk? Let’s walk around the room as if we are ‘full of vexation’. Then, a discussion about language develops into a physical exploration of Shakespeare’s language through drama in the classroom. As Jane Vaughan from Railway Town Public School, Broken Hill (also a recipient of Bell Shakespeare’s year-long Regional Teacher Mentorship programme) explained: The language is most overwhelming when you look at Shakespeare in huge slabs. Our teaching artist from Bell Shakespeare, Felix, broke it all down using body language, storyline, and inferential comprehension to understand the gist of it. Once they saw they could unpick it and bring their own experiences and understanding and they could embody it, it very quickly became almost normal language – micro pieces, a few lines between a couple of characters … piecing small themes together so they had a thread …

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Floyd provided another example: After we saw Bell Shakespeare’s ‘Bottom’s Dream’ I saw a six-year-old boy and girl in the playground, having an argument. The girl stormed off very dramatically, and the boy called out after her, ‘Well, you don’t have to be such a Queen Titania about it!’ Intertextuality in the playground!

And at John Colet School, Renshaw commented: ‘You see a total transformation in confidence. One year I taught a student with dyslexia … [and he] could do Shakespeare. And he was extraordinary … That boy has gone on to excel …’. Further, Zoe Emanuel, the school’s Drama teacher remembered how: that memory of the language is stored in their brains … there’s this beautiful story of a child from this school … they were in Year 2 and they were at a science party and they were in a lab and there was all this smoke, and they were mixing potions, and one of the children started saying ‘Double double toil and trouble …’ and then the whole party started reciting the witches’ speech from Macbeth. And the people running the party were like, ‘What? These are seven-year-old kids!’

Teachers at John Colet School have found consistently that early and extensive exposure to Shakespeare’s language connects their students with beautiful, expressive language that is then reflected in their own writing.6 3. Do not change the story In its primary programme Bell Shakespeare works with a vast range of plays from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest through to tragedies like Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. Although Macbeth is a dark and violent play, it is full of the supernatural, and at its conclusion, evil is defeated. There was much discussion in the Company when a workshop about Romeo and Juliet was first requested by a primary school. The Company was firm about not changing the plays, yet there was no avoiding the ending and the inevitable suicide of the main characters. As Erskine says, ‘No one wins in that play’ (Erskine, 2019). The workshop was designed to open with a dramatic staging of the Montague and Capulet brawl, with the class divided to represent the two families, and remaining in role for the workshop. Erskine explained: At the end of the workshop the class formed a circle in role as Montagues and Capulets alternating around the circle holding hands. Symbolic props on the 6

See: www.johncolet.nsw.edu.au/why-teach-shakespeare-to-primary-students.html

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J. Erskine and R. Ewing AM floor represented the characters who had died, replacing the students who had played the roles. The teaching artist then led the class through a reflective discussion of the play, its ending and what they had learnt. A hypothetical discussion was facilitated about how the story could have ended differently. The students worked through the many decisions the characters made and questioned each one, ensuring the exploration of the play ended on positive and constructive ‘What ifs?’ rather than its tragic ending. (Erskine, 2019)

This has led to deep and sophisticated conversations and more than a few amusing comments. For example, members of the Company recalled during one workshop when they asked students ‘What did we learn from Romeo and Juliet? What’s the moral of the story?’ a young student at Westmead Public School observed: ‘If you drink poison, you’re going to die.’ Bell Shakespeare has found it essential to introduce the idea that Shakespeare’s themes and ideas, how characters behave and how society functions in his work can and should be questioned early in children’s experience of the plays. Shakespeare did not make judgements about his characters but left room for interpretation and spaces to play (Williams, 1987). In this work, Shakespeare is not placed on a pedestal. Rather, his plays are shown to be living, breathing stories that we can pull apart, question and reflect against our modern world and experiences. 4. Make it cross-curricular Cross-curricular exploration is encouraged when introducing Shakespeare’s work and this is much easier in a primary classroom compared with secondary contexts where subjects are often siloed. The Company encourages teachers to explore the plays through drama, poetry, music, visual art, science, history and even mathematics (see Gibson and Ewing, 2020). In 2019 at Bankstown West Public School, Bell Shakespeare introduced the students to the function of iambic pentameter and the way Shakespeare used the rhythm to give clues about a character’s state of mind. This is traditionally a concept studied in the secondary English classroom, yet the students understood the theory. Floyd watched her students reading the text on their own, tapping the rhythm of a heartbeat on their chests, completing their own analysis of the character’s psychology through counting the metrical feet. Authentic integration of curriculum areas also addresses the overcrowded primary curriculum many teachers face and find of concern. Emanuel at John Colet School suggested that incorporating Shakespeare’s work ‘covers so much of the curriculum anyway because of the literacy, because of the language, because of the vocabulary, and even within the creative arts’.

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5. Make it meaningful Bell Shakespeare’s Teaching Artists continually find that students see contemporary relevance and sometimes surprising touchpoints with Shakespeare’s stories and their own lives. Traditionally, it has been assumed that Shakespeare’s themes and his characters’ experiences are beyond the comprehension of young students. Headmaster of John Colet School, Julian Wilcock, comments: ‘There’s an assumption out there that primary school children can’t handle big topics, big things.’ Floyd adds: ‘I just think that these kids understand an awful lot about the big human emotions and we do them a disservice by dumbing it down.’ In a primary school in Katherine, Northern Territory, James Evans, Teaching Artist and now Bell Shakespeare’s Associate Director, was presenting a workshop based on The Tempest. Evans was in role as Prospero and, during one activity, students who were mostly children of defence force men and women, could question Prospero. Children began with typical questions like: ‘How long have you been on the island?’; ‘How did you get here?’ Then, the only Aboriginal student in the class, asked: ‘Why did you take their land?’ The Company has found that young students eagerly grapple with big themes and emotions, and the high stakes that Shakespeare presents, even if they don’t fully understand them. Vaughan believes that: Shakespeare is relevant for children to understand more about themselves. There are lots of parallels between our experience of the world and how Shakespeare and people like him experienced the world. Even though it was 500 years ago, I think the world is very much the same. The language is so rich that it helps you understand that.

In fact, it is not the dark themes that children struggle with, it is more likely to be concepts such as romantic love. And in this respect, the Company employs simple workshop techniques such as blowing bubbles between two characters in love, in place of gestured blown kisses. 6. Aim high Teachers’ high expectations of all students encourages them to rise to the challenge (see for example, Sherwood, 2017). As Kathryn Parker (2016) asserts: ‘If we are truly to foster higher order thinking and enquiry in our students, this process of independent discovery … is essential to their independence as readers and interpreters of texts.’ With her low literacy students who struggle with contemporary English, Floyd encourages them to dive into the text and have a go:

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J. Erskine and R. Ewing AM It’s taught me that every child, no matter how poor their reading is, they can manage this ... We’ve got a couple of rules, and one of the rules is ‘You keep going’. You just keep going with the reading. It doesn’t matter to me if you mispronounce, you just keep going.

And once students can read Shakespeare, Floyd notes they are ready and willing to pick up other complex texts because their confidence has exponentially increased: ‘I think it has raised the students’ level of sophistication about how they view their engagement with texts.’ Examples of students exceeding their own teachers’ expectations with Shakespeare include the primary teachers’ experience at Railway Town Public School. Vaughan describes the impact of the school performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream after their programme with Bell Shakespeare: The whole school community’s reaction was amazing … it showed the teachers and parents that the students are fully capable of far more than we give them credit for. Our parents cried, our teachers cried. The children got a standing ovation. The kids were so proud of themselves that they had managed to do this amazing piece of literature and they had done it so well that everyone was so proud of them …

In addition, she describes the impact on one of her students: A Year 4 Indigenous boy who was Oberon bellowed ‘I am Oberon’. He had never been confident to read aloud before. He had literacy issues, and was usually very quiet. It was so amazing this little Indigenous boy now had this real belief in himself. He connected with Felix [the Teaching Artist] – a younger man who was interested in the arts, who was cool and cared about drama – a role model.

Epilogue: Some Conclusions The arts-rich pedagogy used by Bell Shakespeare’s teaching artists enables Shakespeare’s stories, characters and language to be introduced to children’s lives and imaginations before they are accompanied by others’ baggage and stereotypes. The Company’s experience in Australia is echoed by research in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Ramnanan’s comments resonate with Bell Shakespeare’s principles: Teaching Shakespeare early yields numerous advantages such as: increased student confidence, expanded literary abilities, lower levels of anxiety when more complex literature is introduced later, and a life-long appreciation of high-quality literature. Research presented about children’s language development supports the claim that 3–8 graders not only have the capacity to understand Shakespeare at an introductory level, but that this early time

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in their development is actually ideal to expose them to Shakespeare’s rich language and universal stories. (2013: ii)

Introducing Shakespeare’s work in the primary years provides students with ‘a doorway to a lifetime of discovering meaning in Shakespeare’ (Cox, 2008: 173). Groundwork has been laid as an important foundation for later study. Floyd remembered: ‘One of our former students came back to visit and she said: “In Year 7, Mrs Floyd, I was the only one who didn’t get all muddled up … I wasn’t concerned about doing Shakespeare. I could find myself in it”’ Bell Shakespeare continues to expand its collaboration with Australian primary schools, extending it to those primary teachers who already understand the value of a Shakespeare programme and introducing those who are more fearful or lack confidence as demonstrated by its five-year collaboration with primary schools like Bankstown West and Railway Town Public Schools. There is certainly a strong case to be made for all children to have experiences of Shakespeare in primary school. As Floyd notes: ‘Whenever I say “Shakespeare” the students say “Yes!”’

References Bell Shakespeare, www.bellshakespeare.com.au. Cox, Carole, 2008. Teaching Language Arts: A Student-Centered Classroom (6th edn. New York: Pearson). Erskine, Joanna, 2013. Speech, Bell Shakespeare Primary Program Launch, The Rocks, Sydney. Erskine, Joanna, 2019. Interview with Robyn Ewing. Sydney: The University of Sydney. Ewing, Robyn, 2019. Drama-rich Pedagogy and Becoming Deeply Literate (Brisbane: Drama Australia). Ewing, Robyn and John Nicholas Saunders, 2016. School Drama: Drama, Literature and Literacy in the Creative Classroom (Sydney: Currency Press). Farrell, Paul, 2016. ‘Germaine Greer Tells Q&A Shakespeare’s Timeless Lesson Is To Make Us Think’, The Guardian, 6 September. www.theguardian.com/ culture/2016/sep/06/germaine-greer-tells-qa-shakespeares-timeless-lesson-is-tomake-us-think#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWhat%20actually%20happens%20in%20 a,%E2%80%93%20because%20everything%20keeps%20shifting.%E2%80%9D Gibson, Robyn and Robyn Ewing, 2020. Transforming the Curriculum through the Arts (2nd edn. Cham, Switzerland: Springer). Griffiths, Andy and Terry Denton, 2009. Just Macbeth! (Sydney: Pan Macmillan). Jongjin, 2017. ‘Why Shakespeare Shouldn’t be Taught in Schools’. https:// medium.com/@jongjinpark/why-shakespeare-shouldnt-be-taught-in-schools5046411335c0

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Lindsay, Geoff, Joe Winston, Matthew Franks, and David Lees, 2016. The Work of Royal Shakespeare Company Education in the first year of the Associate Schools Programme (Warwick, UK: University of Warwick, Centre for Educational Development, Appraisal and Research). Parker, Kathryn, 2016. ‘Shakespearean Drama: A Vehicle for Explorative Learning and Higher-order Thinking’. www.educationmattersmag.com.au/ shakespearean-drama-explorative-learning/ Ramnanan, Angela, 2013. ‘Introducing Shakespeare Early. Why, When, Where and How to Teach Shakespeare to Elementary and Middle School Students’. Unpublished Master’s thesis (Washington DC: University of Georgetown). Seymour, Rae, 2016. ‘Why not to Fear Teaching Shakespeare for Young Learners’ (London: British Council). www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/why-notfear-teaching-shakespeare-young-learners Shakespeare, William, 2015. Macbeth, edited by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare). Strauss, Valerie, 2015. ‘Teacher: Why I Don’t Want to Assign Shakespeare Anymore (even though he’s in the Common Core)’. The Washington Post, 13 June 2015. www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/06/13/ teacher-why-i-dont-want-to-assign-shakespeare-anymore-even-though-hes-inthe-common-core/ Williams, Geoff, 1987. ‘Spaces to Play: The Use of Analyses of Narrative Structure in Classroom Work with Children’s Literature’, in M. Saxby and G. Winch (eds.), Give Them Wings: The Experience of Children’s Literature (Melbourne: Macmillan).

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chapter 4

The Better Strangers/Shakespeare Reloaded Project Seeking Educational Ardenspaces Andrew Hood and Liam E. Semler

Project Background and Principles: Seeking Ardenspace In 2008 the University of Sydney and an independent Sydney school, Barker College, commenced a three-year research project aimed at putting secondary and tertiary educators into open-ended conversation with each other around the teaching and learning of Shakespeare in Australia. The project was called ‘Shakespeare Reloaded’, a name inspired by the popular movie The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and intended to signal an opportunity for educators to reflect on and refresh their approaches to teaching Shakespeare’s works at school and university. The project was funded under the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects scheme, which supports partnerships between universities and industry. As the project drew to its conclusion in 2010, the university and school decided to continue developing the relationship, which had already provided an array of educational opportunities for students and teachers, co-hosted a conference on Shakespeare education, produced teaching materials and published scholarship in the field. In 2011 the project was renamed ‘Better Strangers’ – a term taken from Orlando’s quip to Jaques in As You Like It: ‘I do desire we may be better strangers’ (Shakespeare, 2006: 3.2.239) – and it has been funded since then as a series of rolling, three-year research agreements between the university and Barker College. In 2014 the project launched its open-access website, Shakespeare Reloaded (http://shakespearereloaded.edu.au/), which expands year-on-year with new educational activities and theoretical essays relating to Shakespeare, education and literary studies. The project team has also expanded. Initially, the project was led by Penny Gay, Kate Flaherty and Liam Semler (all based in the English Department at the University of Sydney) and Shauna Colnan who was Director of Curriculum at Barker College. Currently, the academic team comprises seven researchers: Liam Semler, Penny Gay and Jacqueline Manuel (all from the University of Sydney) Claire Hansen, Will Christie 69

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and Kate Flaherty (all from the Australian National University) and Lauren Weber (University of Sydney and Australian Catholic University). The Barker College team is led by Head of English Laura Craven and former Head of English now Director of Academic Writing and Oratory Andrew Hood. The project is distinctive in being grounded in systems theory. The initial concept of the project – to bring teachers and academics together as professional equals with a shared stake in a shared field (English and Literary Studies) – was driven by an awareness that most students are shaped by a powerful and complex educational system (formal schooling) before many of them transition to another equally powerful and complex, yet quite different, educational system (the university). Schools and universities are busy places, each thoroughly immersed in its own processes and objectives and often not particularly adept at helping students understand how the systems differ in pedagogical form, content and expectations. Consequently, as students transition from school to university they carry with them deeply embedded, institutional habits of thought and must figure out how to thrive in a new institutional context that is predicated on and driven by different disciplinary and educational assumptions. They must understand modes of teaching and learning, forms of assessment and disciplinary traits that are sometimes quite alien to what they have become used to at high school. They routinely discover that terminology and practice, even where these appear superficially familiar, are often fundamentally different at school and university and this impacts on their cognitive load, learning experiences and wellbeing. In adopting a systems approach to understanding teaching and learning the project team was not just thinking of student transition, but of how any individual student (child, teenager, adult, at school, university or elsewhere) might engage productively with a subject area within the various, interlocking constraints of a large educational institution. While it is a given that students’ and teachers’ ways of thinking are always, to greater or lesser degrees, structured and constrained by the institutional processes enveloping them, the situation in Australian schools was considered especially concerning because teachers were describing (in empirical studies and professional memoirs) the detrimental effects of having to teach a crowded, overly structured and examination-heavy curriculum under an increasingly burdensome and invasive compliance and accountability regime (Lingard, 2010; Lingard et al., 2016; McGrath-Champ et al., 2018; Manuel et al., 2018; Stroud, 2018; Hardy, 2020). The problem was particularly acute in New South Wales (NSW) where the Better Strangers project

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is based, but is widely reported around the world by school and university educators who feel their professional identity, agency and maturity are being limited and distorted by neoliberal audit cultures characterised by managerialism, standardisation, datafication and compliance (Ball, 2003; Ward, 2012; Sachs, 2016; Biesta, 2017; Hardy, 2020). The team coined the pejorative term ‘SysEd’ as shorthand for this over-systematisation of the educational sector, which is most visible in mainstream schools and universities (and less visible, although not absent, in alternative schools and home-schooling contexts). A driving question for the project became: how can teachers, students and subject areas such as English flourish in the context of SysEd that, by its standardising, auditing and contractual nature, tends to dampen possibilities and channel education along narrowly defined pathways to predetermined outcomes? To deal with a systems problem like this and seek ways to promote student and teacher agency, the project turned to a systems solution. That solution, which provides the grounds of a coherent theoretical critique of and practical response to overly prescriptive institutional structures, is complexity theory. Contrary to SysEd, which strives to contain and control every person and process within its domain in order to guarantee predictable outcomes, complexity theory recognises that many of the most fertile processes, interactions and developments occur when systems are pushed out of their usual routines and into more volatile states of disequilibrium on the so-called ‘edge of chaos’ (Tosey, 2007; Morrison, 2008). The project team felt that the growth of teachers as professionals, the flourishing of students as learners, and the enlivening of English and Literary Studies as subjects all stood to gain from a complexivist approach that would facilitate freer forms of professional learning, pedagogical expression and disciplinarity. This is not, we hasten to add, a reckless plunge into chaos, but rather a thoughtful pursuit of dynamic educational spaces that temporarily sit outside or alongside regular institutional domains and can rejuvenate, inspire and productively upset the status quo. We call these spaces, ‘ardenspaces’, after the Forest of Arden in As You Like It which seems to liberate, empower and unexpectedly transform various characters who seek refuge there.1 The Shakespeare Reloaded project was itself initially (2008–10) designed as an ardenspace operating as a complex system (Figure 4.1). The idea was 1

‘SysEd’ uses two capital letters as part of its emulation of some large corporation names and, relatedly, to signify reified structural power. Contrariwise, where grammar allows, ‘ardenspace’ is best spelt entirely in lower-case letters to signify non-reified spaces of potential.

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AcademicinResidence programme Website committee Shakespeare Reloaded (2008–10)

Master of Arts unit

Conference Travel Fellowships

University of Sydney

Linkage Project partnership

Barker College

Figure 4.1  The Shakespeare Reloaded project originally designed as an ardenspace operating as a complex system

that teachers and academics, analogous to Rosalind, Celia and Orlando in As You Like It, could temporarily ‘flee’ from their highly regulated daily contexts (at school and university) to experience a form of rejuvenating ‘exile’ in this more fluid and experimental space before returning with fresh and transformative ideas to their institutions (Flaherty, Gay, and Semler, 2013: 97–107). The project comprised five components functioning as permeable and loosely interrelated learning communities. Each component had distinct processes, timeframes and objectives: 1. An Academic-in-Residence programme located a member of the research team at the school for two days per term running workshops for teachers and Shakespeare presentations for students (2008–10). 2. Annual Travel Fellowships were offered to enable a teacher and an academic to experience a Shakespeare-focussed overseas trip as a pair of research partners sharing their perspectives with each other and then with their institutional colleagues on their return (2008–10).

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3. Two postgraduate Shakespeare units (from the University of Sydney) were taught on the school campus to help encourage teachers in the suburbs to pursue a Master of Arts degree (2008–9). 4. A website development committee met regularly (2008–10) to design the proposed website (which launched as the Shakespeare Reloaded website in 2014). 5. A Shakespeare education conference – ‘Drawing out Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Learning, Then and Now’ – was hosted at the University of Sydney and Barker College in collaboration with the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association (2010). Teachers and academics within the project could participate in whichever component or components they found most engaging or professionally useful and they were encouraged to share their experiences and discoveries with each other to maintain a rich exchange of ideas between participants and across components. Structural diversity and optional engagement were prioritised: those who wanted the benefits of studying towards a postgraduate degree participated in the Master of Arts course (the school contributed to covering their enrolment fees), those who liked the idea of a Shakespeare-focussed, teacher-academic research trip opted for the Travel Fellowship, some with ICT skills and aesthetic interests collaborated on designing the website, and others contributed to the conference, which was hosted on university and school grounds to appeal to academics, teachers and practitioners. Each component differed significantly from the others as a learning community, various people participated in more than one component, some components included people from outside the project, and the insights arising were shared with colleagues and influenced teaching practice at the school and university. Occasionally students were directly involved in project activities, but the operating norm was that this project worked primarily with educators who were free to determine how their experiences might flow into their classroom teaching. Additionally, the academic team members and doctoral students associated with the project pursued individual research topics that intersected variously with Shakespeare studies and education.2 2

The four University of Sydney PhDs associated with the project are: Linzy Brady, ‘Shakespearean Collaborations: The Professional Learning Experience of English Teachers in the Context of Inter-Disciplinary Teaching and Research Partnerships’ (2011); Claire Hansen, ‘Shakespeare and Complexity Theory’ (2015); Michael Marokakis, ‘Shakespeare, Again? Australian Literary Adaptations of Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults’ (2020); and Lauren Weber, ‘Reading the Curriculum: Empathic Education in Shakespeare, Keats and Haddon’ (2021).

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Thus, the overall project was a collaboratively designed enterprise of distinct yet interconnected learning communities unified by a shared focus on Shakespeare education and energised by internal diversity and freeflowing communication between participants and communities. The project was an ardenspace by virtue of being a temporary, experimental, educational context positioned in relation to the formal institutional contexts of school and university, but not fully located within the constraints of either. It was complexivist because it facilitated the rich and unpredictable exchange of disparate ideas about Shakespeare pedagogy in the hope that such interactivity might produce – freely and uncoerced – innovative professional knowledge and teaching practices. In other words, the project was constructed explicitly to facilitate the phenomenon complexity theorists call ‘emergence’ (Morrison, 2002: 21–6; Tosey, 2007: 31–3). Ideologically speaking, this approach stands in direct counterpoint to SysEd’s managerialist principles of command and control. To put it bluntly, while SysEd wants to know in detail the predicted outcomes of a learning experience before it is experienced because managerialism has a trust deficit in respect to its professional workforce, our project wants to facilitate the emergence of unpredicted outcomes by honouring the professional workforce through the learning experience.

Lucy’s Story (2008–18): Emergence Exemplified What did all this look like for an individual participant? The case of Barker College mid-career English teacher Lucy Solomon is exemplary (Figure 4.2). At the beginning of the partnership, she took the opportunity provided by Shakespeare Reloaded to embark on a University of Sydney Master of Arts degree focussing on literature to boost her disciplinary knowledge. In 2008 and 2009 she completed the two Shakespeare postgraduate units – ‘Shakespeare and the Renaissance’ and ‘Shakespeare and Modernity’ – that the project team members taught on her school campus. These units were open to any enrolled postgraduate students and so included teachers from Barker College and other Sydney schools as well as other postgraduate students of the university who were not teachers. She also took the unit ‘Shakespeare and his Contemporaries’ on the university campus in 2011 and, having completed a number of modern literature units as well, received her Master of Arts in 2012. The ability to complete two of her units of study on the school campus (in the northern suburbs of Sydney) was crucial as it made attendance after a day of teaching at school much easier than it would have been if

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Figure 4.2  Lucy’s story exemplifies emergence and the unpredicted impact of participation in Better Strangers/Shakespeare Reloaded from 2008 to 2018

she had to travel an hour to the university campus in the centre of Sydney for class. Teachers completing units within the Master of Arts were able to claim the hours as part of their quota of teacher professional learning hours mandated by the regulatory authority in NSW. This component of the project thereby dovetailed with the university’s degree structure and the school’s (and other schools’) desire to help teachers fulfil mandatory professional learning requirements. Thus, the project as an ardenspace was not entirely unconnected to adjacent institutional structures and even facilitated some forms of compliance – we hope more positive than negative in mode – with SysEd’s stipulations. Moreover, while it was recognised that the teaching of university units of study off the university campus in the suburbs could help teachers in those suburbs to commence postgraduate study, it was also acknowledged that this could make it harder for other enrolled postgraduate students to attend classes if they did not live or work in those suburbs (but may actually live or work closer to the university campus or in more distant and/or poorer suburbs). Consequently, out of a concern for fairness to all the university’s postgraduate students (who live and work across all areas of Sydney) the project team decided to retire this component after its initial run in 2008–9.

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In 2011, when the project was commencing its new phase under the name ‘Better Strangers’, Lucy found herself inspired by conversations with our then doctoral student Linzy Brady to rethink the way Shakespeare was being introduced to students at Barker College. She writes: ‘I realised that Shakespeare shouldn’t be kept from our Year 7 cohort as it had been.’3 She set about designing an entirely new unit – called ‘Weird Words and Bloody Battles’ – to introduce the school’s Year 7 students to Shakespeare, not by study of one play, but rather via encounters with five great speeches from The Tempest, Macbeth, Hamlet, Henry V and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Her aim, ‘by focusing on small sections of several plays’ was to help ‘students to feel empowered when later studying those plays’.4 In 2012 Lucy went on a project Travel Fellowship to England to visit the Shakespeare-related houses in Stratford-upon-Avon administered by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and to speak on her ‘Weird Words and Bloody Battles’ unit at the ‘Unlearning Shakespeare’ symposium cohosted by project leader Liam Semler and Jane Coles at Oxford Brookes University. This intellectually and culturally vivid experience prompted Lucy to make significant adjustments to her Year 7 Shakespeare unit on her return. She enriched the contextual grounding of the unit by inclusion of material relating to early modern theatres, costumes, props and staging. She adds, in her ‘Reflection Statement’: I also wrote the assessment to replicate something of the tour we did around Stratford. Students were required to take their audience on a tour of Elizabethan London as they delivered fun facts. The unit has been well received by both students and teachers each year and is still being taught in 2018. I feel it has led to more Shakespeare fanatics in recent years having had interest piqued early and supported across the rest of their secondary years.

A key point to note about this comment is how Lucy processed her travel experience through her mature professional identity as a teacher to produce an assessment scheme that was engaging for students and functioned as a key part of a Shakespeare package that students and teachers found effective. The Travel Fellowship did not teach or even aim to teach highschool assessment practice, but did facilitate Lucy’s innovation in assessment by treating her as a mature professional who would enjoy and benefit from an enriching Shakespeare experience overseas. 3

4

In these paragraphs I quote from Lucy’s ‘Reflection Statement’ on the impact of the project which she wrote in 2018. Her words and name are used with her permission. The full statement is preserved in the Better Strangers Annual Report (2018). For more on introducing plays to young students, see Chapters 1 and 3.

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Lucy’s transformative contribution to her school’s Shakespeare curriculum did not stop there. Having introduced the teaching of Shakespeare in Year 7, she soon realised that the school’s longstanding Year 8 Shakespeare course would need reconsideration, and so, in 2013, in collaboration with the co-ordinator of Stage 4 [Years 7–8], on the back of the success of ‘Weird Words and Bloody Battles’, we decided to retire the tired study of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Year 8 and replace it with a new unit which looked at adaptations of Henry V. Having studied the ‘Unto the breach’ speech in Year 7, students had some grounding as we pulled out some of the other great speeches from the play in Year 8. These were studied closely before students were introduced to the idea of adaptation with specific attention given to Branagh’s film version and a televised version from the Globe. Inspired by the Master’s program I undertook with Sydney University, I was able to write a unit that took some of the ideas inherent to adaptations and offer them at a Year 8 level. In this unit, students present their assessment digitally – offering another adaptation, as they analyse the original speeches and different filmic versions of them.

This reflection shows how professional decisions ramify complexly through time and space, weaving individual insights and drives with past experiences and new collaborative endeavours to produce reimagined curricula. The achievements described here are not all due to the project, but rather to the expertise of Lucy and her colleague, an expertise that flourishes (at least in part) when it is immersed in a complex adaptive system that is rich in content and possibility. It should come as no surprise that Year 9 was next to feel the tide of change or that, in fact, the influence of this enriched Shakespeare curriculum would carry through to the students’ final year at school and help prepare them for university study. Lucy writes: Finally, in 2015, teaching Macbeth to Year 9, I decided to expose them to much of the context studied during another Master’s course on Macbeth. Students presented seminars on James I, the writing of the King James Version [of the Bible] and [his book] Daemonology and the influence of witches in the life of him and his wife. It made for a substantially richer exploration of Macbeth, and teaching some of those boys now [2018] in Year 12, they still reference the research they did that year. It was invaluable to show them that the plays aren’t simply single entities but rather responses to influences and values inherent to the era in which they were written. They learned important research skills and the way in which academic scholarship functions.

When one compares this account of the transformation of her teaching of Shakespeare to Year 9 with her accounts of her Year 7 and Year 8 curriculum revisions it is clear that Lucy has an expert sense of the style of

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content, type of activities and form of assessment that are particularly suitable to each cohort’s stage of learning. Moreover, Lucy is always thinking about how each year’s learning builds on the gains of the preceding year and propels the students forward to the next level. Lucy’s ‘Reflection Statement’ was written in 2018 and describes the evolution of her teaching of Shakespeare during the project’s first decade. She concludes: ‘Quite simply, our collaboration with the Better Strangers team has done much to reinvigorate the way we teach Shakespeare across the school, both intellectually and practically, and has affected my own practice significantly’. While it is generous of her to foreground the positive impact of the school’s collaboration on the project, the preceding has shown, we hope, that the expertise and professional maturity of Lucy as an English teacher enabled her to maximise the opportunities afforded by the project. What Better Strangers/Shakespeare Reloaded did was introduce Shakespeare-focussed elements of energising disequilibrium into an established educational system and this facilitated the emergence of diverse possibilities for fresh ideas and multifaceted collaborations between Lucy, her school colleagues and project team members. One would not expect every teacher to respond in the same way as Lucy because the project was structured to facilitate varied forms of engagement according to personal preference. Her trajectory depicted in Figure 4.2 is merely one person’s path through the project. One could follow other Barker teachers’ forms of involvement and produce a unique chart of emergence for each one: for example, the young teacher Michael Marokakis went on a Travel Fellowship in 2016 and completed a PhD on Shakespeare adaptation in young adult fiction with the project, before moving to another school to take up the role of Head of English and at that point securing a book contract with Routledge for his doctoral thesis. The important point in respect of Lucy is that she participated in a number of project components that enriched her knowledge and experience of Shakespeare and education and she translated these into heightened professional action at her school resulting in a renewed Shakespeare programme for Years 7 to 9. Beneath this lay the project’s belief in Lucy as a well-trained, mature English teacher who was perfectly capable of maximising her experience of the project, rather than a managerialist belief that she needed specifically tailored remedial training in aspects of her practice so as to comply with SysEd’s image of appropriate professional learning. Over the project’s first decade, teachers participating in project events have repeatedly stated that their experience has been enriching and affirming in direct contrast to deadening and inauthentic professional training foisted on them by SysEd.

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Lucy’s key role in refreshing the school’s Shakespeare curriculum was entirely unpredicted by the project and exemplary of the sort of emergence that one might hope a complexivist approach to collaborative education research could facilitate. By setting up Shakespeare Reloaded as an ardenspace comprising varied learning communities interacting as a complex system the teaching of Shakespeare in this high school was indeed reloaded and the new Shakespeare programme could be considered an emergent phenomenon.

Activities and Events: Realising the Edge of Chaos Having described the project’s initial structure and principles, and having shared Lucy’s story as a Shakespeare teacher and project participant over a decade, we turn now to a brief account of some specific educational inventions of the project (Table 4.1). The reason for doing so is to provide a clearer sense of project operations and how the team imagines educational practice at the edge of chaos. A glance at the educational theory essays on the project website will confirm the team’s underlying commitment to thinking about open-ended and experiential approaches to teaching and learning. For example, the essays on weakness theory, complexity theory, ecocritical pedagogy, place-based pedagogy and school–university partnerships invite educators to think about literature education in collaborative and authentic ways outside the traditional constraints of SysEd. The three educational conferences the project has hosted or co-hosted – ‘Drawing out Shakespeare’ (2010), ‘Unlearning Shakespeare’ (2012) and ‘Shakespeare FuturEd’ (2019) – have sought to include teachers, academics, librarians, students and theatre practitioners in intellectual and creative ardenspaces characterised by mutual respect, innovation and sharing. The project team thinks of each educational activity as an ardenspace in which participants can find new and enriching ways to understand and engage with Shakespeare’s works. In most cases these activities incorporate collaborative exploration of ideas while also facilitating expression of individual insights and interests. The activities use various strategies to eschew SysEd’s deadening fetishization of standardisation, such as: facilitating the discussion of literary content and educational concepts simultaneously (Shakespeare Imaginarium; Teaching and Learning Caskets); requiring the exploration of ideas through diverse artistic modes such as drama and drawing (Kings’ Games; Shakespeare Redrawn); deploying gamified structures that present resources and prompts in random or unexpected ways (Shakeserendipity; Shakespeed); enabling the generation of unique,

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Semler (2013: 66–78)

The Bard Blitz (2009)

Semler (2019)

Shakespeare Redrawn (2020)

Semler, Hansen, and Abbott Bennett (2021)

Teaching and Manuel, Hansen, Learning and Semler (2022) Caskets (2016)

Shakespeed (2016)

Shakeserendipity Semler (2022) (2015)

The Shakespeare Manuel, Hansen, Imaginarium and Semler (2022) (2013)

Flaherty (2009)

Publication addressing activity

Kings’ Games (2008)

Activity and its launch date

A COVID-19 pandemic activity that was run via the project’s Twitter and Facebook accounts throughout 2020. Every week a quote from a Shakespeare play was posted on social media along with a drawing in response to it by a child. Followers were encouraged to make their own drawings each week and share them on social media.

A drama-based approach to learning about Richard III where students enact tableaux representing characters and their relationships. A four-stage, guided module to help teach students how to close read a passage of Shakespearean (or other historical) text and generate a unique argument about it to present as a speech or essay. Four workshops facilitating discussion of plays paired with educational concepts: Hamlet and student potential; Richard III and teaching evil; The Tempest and empathic intelligence; and Julius Caesar and rhetoric and reality. A digital flipcard game that presents players with an array of unexpected resources (video art, essays, images) in relation to a particular play to prompt open-ended discussion in workshops. A digital flipcard game that presents players with an array of unexpected, short video resources (each under 5-minutes’ duration) to prompt fresh and contemporary discussion of the plays. A series of workshops facilitating open-ended discussion of key educational topics. Each workshop is focussed on one scholarly article and one brief literary text (such as a poem or extract from Shakespeare) to prompt discussion.

Description of activity

Focal texts of activity

Scholarly articles on topics such as: Slow Education; Metalearning; Collaborative Learning; Gamification; Socially Just Pedagogy; and more. Quotations from twenty-one Shakespeare plays.

Macbeth, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest.

Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Richard III.

Hamlet as exemplar, but suitable for any historical literature. Hamlet, Richard III, The Tempest, Julius Caesar.

Richard III.

Table 4.1  Some activities created by the Better Strangers/Shakespeare Reloaded project

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evidence-based arguments about texts without need of a set essay question (Bard Blitz); and always endorsing imaginative and idiosyncratic lines of thought about Shakespeare’s texts and pedagogy (all activities). All the activities have been used in schools and most have also been used in university classes. The project has maintained its productivity over the years by building into each year’s programme a professional learning workshop known as the Imaginarium. This is effectively a shell structure governed by these five ‘Principles of Imaginaria’: (1) to stimulate fresh thinking about Shakespeare and education via collaborative means; (2) to be aware of professional constraints, but not limited by them; (3) to include educators from differing institutions wherever possible; (4) to have a theme and some structure, but actively seek the emergence of novel ideas through the collaborative process; and (5) to value imagination and creativity highly without forgetting the complicating role of structures and constraints. The project team members know that there will be an Imaginarium each year, which will usually comprise two to four 2-hour workshops over a number of weeks based on a collaboratively agreed theme. Participants will normally include teachers from various Sydney schools as well as Barker College and wherever possible the Imaginarium will be subsequently translated to online format for the Shakespeare Reloaded website. The Shakespeare Imaginarium, Shakeserendipity and the Teaching and Learning Caskets Imaginarium were all created via the annual Imaginarium workshop structure. Better Strangers engages in other activities too, but the regularity and popularity of the Imaginarium make it a mainstay of the project and one of its most fertile, creative engines. Better Strangers is currently enjoying its fifth phase (2020–3). The partnership at the core of the project remains that of the University of Sydney and Barker College. Such a restricted partnership – rather than, say, a collaborative network of schools – could be seen as a limitation, yet all projects differ from one another and the particular character of our project descends naturally from its imaginative origins. A key benefit is that professional trust and shared purpose have developed over time and not been undermined by too many collaborators pulling in too many directions. This basic stability has enabled us to experiment together and reach outwards (via face-to-face events and online resourcing) to share our discoveries and invite wider participation wherever we can. The large Shakespeare FuturEd Conference (2019) was run as a free, catered event incorporating contributions from scholars, teachers, practitioners, librarians and students from Australasia and around the world, and video

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content from it has been made available on the website. The Shakespeare Redrawn activity was run via our Facebook and Twitter accounts through 2020 as a way of contributing something positive to households in lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019 we packed our bags and headed to Townsville in Far North Queensland to run an ‘Imaginarium Roadshow’ event for school teachers in that region, and we planned to replicate this model in 2021 in Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory, but this became a Zoom-based event due to Australian state border closures and lockdowns. The ‘Roadshows’ are free, inclusive events for teachers, run in collaboration with regional English Teachers’ Associations, which facilitate the award of professional learning ‘hours’ to participants who have yearly quotas to fill. Due to fortuitous timing between Sydney lockdowns we were able to run the regular Imaginarium in 2021 in person at Barker College (focussed on teaching analytical and creative writing at high school). In 2020, 2021 and 2022 the project has also been participating as one research ‘Case Study’ among many within the University of Sydney’s mandatory ‘Interdisciplinary Impact’ course for third-year students. In this course, students from varied disciplines within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences work in multidisciplinary groups to address complex problems in response to a selected ‘Case Study’: in ours, they address ‘why and how might one teach Shakespeare in the twenty-first century?’

Conclusion: Creating Unpredicted Futures The Better Strangers/Shakespeare Reloaded project is committed to exploring Shakespeare pedagogy collaboratively and experimentally. It does so via a long-term, trusted partnership between academics and school teachers, which acknowledges the reality of institutional constraints on education while also seeking refreshing ways to energise English and Literary Studies. Complexity theory has proven a worthy conceptual ally in our attempt to honour and nurture teachers and students who often find themselves constrained or disheartened by SysEd. Shakespeare’s Orlando may have used the term ‘better strangers’ cynically, but we use it positively to signal the ongoing importance of bringing the strange or disparate together to facilitate the production of the unexpected. Systems will always be with us and large institutions seem inevitable in the educational sector. Both are vulnerable to the limitations and distortions caused by path dependency, instrumentalism and managerialism. Free and vital futures in Shakespeare education depend on our ability to imagine otherwise and collaborations in ardenspace grant us this opportunity.

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References Ball, Stephen J., 2003. ‘The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity’, Journal of Education Policy 18.2, 215–28. Biesta, Gert J.J., 2017. ‘Education, Measurement and the Professions: Reclaiming a Space for Democratic Professionality in Education’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 49.4, 315–30. Flaherty, Kate, 2009. ‘Richard III, Kings’ Games: Murder, Muddy, Marry or Make Friends’, mETAphor 1, 43–6. Flaherty, Kate, Penny Gay, and Liam E. Semler (eds.), 2013. Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Centre: Australasian Perspectives (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan). Hardy, Ian, 2020. School Reform in an Era of Standardisation: Authentic Accountabilities (London and New York: Routledge). Lingard, Bob, 2010. ‘Policy Borrowing, Policy Learning: Testing Times in Australian Schools’, Critical Studies in Education 51.2, 129–47. Lingard, Bob, Greg Thompson, and Sam Sellar (eds.), 2016. National Testing in Schools: An Australian Assessment (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge). Manuel, Jacqueline, Don Carter, and Janet Dutton, 2018. ‘“As much as I love being in the classroom …”: Understanding Secondary English Teachers’ Workload’, English in Australia 53.3, 5–22. Manuel, Jacqueline, Claire Hansen, and Liam E. Semler, 2022. ‘An Activist Democratic Model of Teacher Professional Learning: The Teaching and Learning Caskets Imaginarium’, in Andrew Goodwyn, Jacqueline Manuel, Rachel Roberts, Lisa Scherff, Wayne Sawyer, Cal Durrant and Don Zancanella (eds.), International Perspectives on English Teacher Development: From Initial Teacher Education to Highly Accomplished Professional (London: Routledge) 200–214. McGrath-Champ, Susan, Rachel Wilson, Megan Stacey, and Scott Fitzgerald, 2018. Understanding Work in Schools. Report to the NSW Teachers Federation (Sydney and Perth: University of Sydney and Curtin University). Retrieved 31 October 2018. https://news.nswtf.org.au/application/files/7315/3110/0204/ Understanding-Work-In-Schools.pdf. Morrison, Keith, 2002. School Leadership and Complexity Theory (London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer). Morrison, Keith, 2008. ‘Educational Philosophy and the Challenge of Complexity Theory’, in Mark Mason (ed.), Complexity Theory and the Philosophy of Education (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell), 16–31. Sachs, Judyth, 2016. ‘Teacher Professionalism: Why are we still Talking about it?’, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice 22.4, 413–25. Semler, Liam E., 2013. Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning versus The System (London and New York). Semler, Liam E., 2019. ‘Shakespeeding into Macbeth and The Tempest: Teaching with the Shakespeare Reloaded Website’, in Sidney Homan (ed.), How and Why We Teach Shakespeare: College Teachers and Directors Share How They Explore the Playwright’s Works with Their Students (New York: Routledge), 119–27.

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Semler, Liam E., 2022. ‘Shakespeare Reloaded’s Shakeserendipity Game: Pedagogy at the Edge of Chaos’, in Diana E. Henderson and Kyle Sebastian Vitale (eds.), Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy: Case Studies and Strategies (New York and London: Bloomsbury), 198–210. Semler, Liam E., Claire Hansen, and Kristen Abbott Bennett, 2021. ‘Shakespeare Redrawn: Reflections on Shakespeare Reloaded’s COVID-19 Lockdown Activity’, mETAphor 2, 15–21. Shakespeare, William, 2006. As You Like It, edited by Juliet Dusinberre (London and New York: Bloomsbury). Solomon, Lucy, 2018. ‘Reflection Statement’, in Better Strangers Annual Report (Sydney: unpublished), 16–17. Stroud, Gabbie, 2018. Teacher: One Woman’s Struggle to Keep the Heart in Teaching (Sydney: Allen and Unwin). Tosey, Paul, 2006. ‘Interfering with the Interference: An Emergent Perspective on Creativity in Higher Education’, in Norman Jackson, Martin Oliver, Malcolm Shaw, and James Wisdom (eds.), Developing Creativity in Higher Education: An Imaginative Curriculum (London and New York: Routledge), 29–42. Ward, Steven C., 2012. Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education (New York: Routledge).

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Part II

Reimagining Shakespeare with/in Universities

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Introduction Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen and Jacqueline Manuel

The pedagogical partnerships explored in this section reach within, across and beyond the bounds of the university institution. As Eloise Symonds notes of English institutions, partnership models ‘are becoming increasingly popular within universities’ (Symonds, 2020: 2). Driving these partnerships between universities, theatre companies and prisons are complex micro-level interconnections and relationships that are diverse and dynamic, integrating technologies and operating across multiple scales. In reimagining Shakespeare education, these projects demonstrate the vibrant role that universities and researchers play in our communities, and how supporting these connections – within universities and beyond – ­provides rich outcomes for students, scholars and our communities.

Contexts, Audiences, Relationships The collaborations articulated here are realised in vastly different ways, and each in its own way challenges and productively responds to boundaries – physical, geographical, institutional or socioeconomic – to enable pedagogical innovation in tertiary Shakespeare education. In Chapter 5, The Other Place collaboration between the University of Birmingham and the Royal Shakespeare Company is understood as an opportunity for participants to work within a liminal space and ‘free themselves from institutional expectations’ (p. 94). While this project aims to ‘blur boundaries between artists and scholars’ (p. 97), the collaboration between Shakespeare’s Globe and King’s College London (KCL) (Chapter 6) recognises that ‘institutional structures are vital’ (p. 111). Structures and the blurring of system edges are required for the Emory University-Shakespeare Central prison project (Chapter 8), which functions through respecting systemic limits while building connections across entrenched institutional borders. The projects explored in this section are profoundly impacted by ­geography. The Other Place collaboration arises from the proximity of 87

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academic and artistic space in Stratford-upon-Avon (Chapter 5), and the Globe-KCL MA is a ‘particular conjunction between a Shakespearecentred theatre and a university located just along the Thames from each other’ (Chapter 6, pp. 110–11). Farah Karim-Cooper discusses how the ‘immersive quality’ of the Globe has ‘affected our own scholarly practice and therefore influences and shapes the way the MA is taught’ (p. 111). By contrast, the Warwick–Monash co-teaching initiative (Chapter 7) is founded on geographical distance between Australia and England, operating in a hybrid zone enabled by teleconferencing technology, focusing on the ‘“local” and informed by the “global”’ (p. 115). The collaboration in Chapter 8 also relies on a blended-learning approach as it seeks to bridge ‘many geographic, socioeconomic, and other divides’ (p. 127).

Aims, Processes, Structures In each project we see two institutional partners collaborating to deliver fresh learning experiences for varied cohorts via highly distinctive programmes. The Other Place collaboration facilitates learning across multiple levels from undergraduate educational experiences to postgraduate research and staff engagement. In contrast, the projects described in Chapters 6, 7 and 8 focus on discrete course delivery: the MA Shakespeare Studies, the ‘Local and Global Shakespeares’ unit, and the concurrent Shakespeare courses at Emory University and a prison in Washington State. The aims of these projects vary significantly and yet they are underpinned by a principle that collaborative reaching outwards – projecting beyond safe and familiar spaces – will produce more inclusive and enriching experiences for all participants.

Insights, Challenges, Takeaways Collaboration, by its nature, requires border crossing. These projects demonstrate that there is no one response to this challenging facet of pedagogical collaboration. Some projects respond by reflecting on the nature of the border’s construction. For others, these delimitations give clarity and potency to the project. Technology is the vehicle by which some traverse the boundaries separating partners and participants. For others, the borders are in flux, and thus require ongoing careful negotiation. Sheila T. Cavanagh and Steve Rowland point to the conflict between a collaboration that aims to cross boundaries with artists who seek to break rules, and a prison system that reifies boundaries and rules. This constitutes one

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of the fundamental challenges of such collaborations: ‘prison (and higher education, we would suggest) are largely conceived from perspectives that inhibit the kind of learning prison programmes and prison/university partnerships promote’ (p. 136). Prison projects such as this move ‘beyond the walls that separate us’ (Pompa, quoted. in Gray et al., 2019: 9). By projecting across these boundaries, prison education projects hold ‘transformative’ potential for institutions and individuals (Gray et al., 2019: 17).1 Whether co-located, distanced by thousands of miles or separated by walls, the spatial context of collaboration provokes insights by challenging preconceptions and offering learning-rich experiences about cultural and socioeconomic difference alongside a reimagining of Shakespeare. The geographical separation of the Monash Warwick Alliance students (Chapter 7) and the sociocultural distance between tertiary and prison students (Chapter 8) prompts reflection on the meaning and potency of places in our learning processes and calls for us to consciously ‘embrace place’ and interrogate ‘the links between environment, culture and education’ (Gruenewald, 2003: 11). The use of communication technology – such as teleconferencing, videoconferencing and letter-writing – is crucial to the functioning of these tertiary collaborations. Fiona Gregory, Gabriel García Ochoa and Paul Prescott remind us that digital spaces often generate a ‘passive encounter’ (p. 125), and so creating an ‘affective experience’ of Shakespeare is a particular challenge in such contexts. This section also raises questions about how we might best reflect on university collaborations, with two project teams (Chapters 5 and 6) utilising a conversational mode of discussion. This speaks to the multivocality of the collaborative endeavour and suggests potential for alternative or non-traditional methods when documenting pedagogical collaborations. While the reimagining of Shakespeare education with/in universities is the focus of this section, it is the case that academics and tertiary institutions play leading roles in many of the collaborative projects in this book. The projects in these four chapters prompt reflection on the complexity and emergent unpredictability of the collaborative process. Collaborations seem to spring from and be sustained by the personal. Interpersonal connections between academics, teachers, practitioners, artists and students foster the environment in which collaborations emerge, evolve and flourish. As Gordon McMullan observes, ‘you need people with the energy to do the initiating and subsequent organisational work’ (p. 111). The projects 1

See Chapter 19 for another Shakespeare prison project.

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thrive on imagination and perseverance, passion and ingenuity, and these qualities grant participants the ability to escape normal routines and cross institutional boundaries. Projecting Shakespeare is very much about border crossing and generating a ‘third space’ in which collaborating partners can experience a reimagining of Shakespeare unique to that space.

References Gray, Natalie, Jennifer Ward, and Jenny Fogarty, 2019. ‘Transformative Learning Through University and Prison Partnerships: Reflections from “Learning Together” Pedagogical Practice’, Journal of Prison Education and Reentry 6.1, 7–24. Gruenewald, David A., 2003. ‘The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place’, Educational Researcher 32.4, 3–12. Symonds, Eloise, 2020. ‘Negotiating Partnership Models in the Humanities: The Possibility of Collaboration within Undergraduate English Courses’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022220944827.

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chapter 5

‘Radical Mischief’

The Other Place Collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company and the University of Birmingham Mary Davies

In May 2015, the RSC and the University of Birmingham (UoB) launched a five-year collaboration with the ambition of redefining the relationship between academic work and artistic practice. Professor Ewan Fernie, who worked out the initial vision for the collaboration in conjunction with the interviewees featured in this chapter, suggests: The collaboration was intended from the first to blur the boundaries between theatre and scholarship, criticism and creativity, and teaching and research. Our idea was that students, actors, directors and academics could join together in a collective experiment which would fuse different styles of thought and performance in quest of new and refreshing ways of doing both.1

The UoB and the RSC have previously maintained a relationship through the Shakespeare Institute, the satellite site of the University dedicated to Shakespeare and early modern drama based in Stratford-upon-Avon. The collaboration is the first formal agreement between the two organisations and is dedicated to supporting the long-term development of the spirit, influence and authority of The Other Place (TOP) as a centre for creative and academic exchange. TOP is the studio theatre of the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon, situated 200 yards along the road from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST) and Swan Theatre. In the 1960s, the former tin shed was used by Michel Saint-Denis to train actors, before becoming the base of Theatregoround, a break-away group of actors in the Company who sought to take work to new audiences around the country. Following a successful short season of new work there in 1973, former Artistic Director Trevor Nunn named this fledgling theatre The Other Place and appointed Buzz Goodbody, the first 1

Ewan Fernie, conversation with author prior to interview, November 2019.

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female director employed by the RSC, as its first Artistic Director. TOP officially opened in April 1974 and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the venue was noteworthy for its stripped-back conditions (no central heating!) and the intimacy it fostered between the actors and spectators. The building closed in 1989 and was rebuilt and reopened in 1991, from which time the studio theatre continued to present a mixed repertoire of classical and new work until its closure in 2005. The new TOP venue, which officially reopened in 2016, consists of a flexible 200 seat auditorium, rehearsal rooms, a café and is home to the costume store of the RSC, which is open to the general public. Significantly, the new TOP has been described as the ‘creative engine’ of the RSC (Hill, 2014: 6). TOP is a hub for learning, research and development at the RSC and exclusively new work is staged in its Studio Theatre. Following a similar impetus, the collaboration between the RSC and the Shakespeare Institute does not focus on the works of Shakespeare, but rather on how academics and artists can be inspired by those works to create a new and radical body of work. The mission for new work at TOP is summarised by the phrase ‘Radical Mischief’, coined by Erica Whyman, Deputy Artistic Director of the RSC and Artistic Director of TOP (Whyman, 2013: 3). ‘Radical Mischief’ celebrates the legacies of Shakespeare and Goodbody’s achievements in the original TOP, by provoking artists, scholars and students to be bold, daring and playful in their experiments. From the outset, the collaboration contributed new ideas and thinking into the programming of plays for the main houses of the RSC and biannually produced new work festivals at TOP. From the perspective of the University, the collaboration comprises a series of aims and objectives that engage with undergraduate and postgraduate students, and staff. Undergraduate students are offered opportunities to engage with the RSC through theatre trips and workshops with artists. Postgraduate students at the Shakespeare Institute studying on the MA Shakespeare and Education and MA Shakespeare and Creativity programmes receive tuition by theatre makers at the RSC, and the Creativity students showcase their work annually in the Studio Theatre. At the staff level, annual Research and Development (R&D) projects are collaboratively arranged between academics at the University and the RSC to explore cutting-edge ideas and fuse creative practice with critical thinking at TOP. The collaboration is mutually beneficial and enables experiments between students, academics and artists, which attempt to breakdown traditional binaries and develop innovative ways of working.

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This chapter takes the form of an interview with RSC and UoB personnel. It discusses the processes and structures of the collaboration, while also engaging with the challenges and lessons learned over the course of the past five years. Professor Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute, and Dr Abigail Rokison-Woodall, senior lecturer in Shakespeare and Theatre, join me in conversation with Whyman, and Jacqui O’Hanlon, RSC Director of Education. Mary: What is unique about the UoB/TOP collaboration? Michael: Both parties are trying to do a third task. It is a university institution trying to think with a theatre, and a theatre trying to think with a university. Both institutions are trying to do something new together. Abigail: I agree with Michael. It is about the collaboration being fully integrated into the courses that we run, the research that we conduct, and the way we think as a whole, rather than being something additional. Jacqui: I agree. One of the things that stands out for me is about the length of time that we have committed to working together. It means you are able to be braver, bolder and more adventurous because of the trust you have built between you. Erica: For me, it is about the parity of respect between the disciplines, and when that is real it does create a third space that doesn’t otherwise exist; a space where you can think rigorously and playfully at the same time, and that feels exciting. You are not stuck in one approach or one set of outcomes, and you are freed from some of those comfort zones.

An interesting paradox is unfurled above; the collaboration enables ‘a third space’ to exist that was not previously present, and yet it is not perceived as something ‘additional’. Both parties acknowledge the need for this space in order to create something new together, and these reflections relate to Liam Semler’s concept of ‘ardenspace’: ‘a space of pedagogical exploration beyond the formal systems that promotes complex responsive interactivity in anticipation of emergence’ (Semler, 2013: 49). The potential of this ‘third space’ to influence how both organisations operate is crucial, and the embeddedness of the collaboration in the delivery of certain MA programmes demonstrates new possibilities for researching and teaching. Mary: The TOP collaboration endorses a spirit of ‘Radical Mischief’, supported by both the RSC and the UoB. How does ‘Radical Mischief’ serve the collaboration and what obstacles stand in the way of being radically mischievous in both the theatre and the academy? Jacqui: For me, ‘Radical Mischief’ is about a systemic change. It is asking us to think deeply and anew about how we work as a theatre company, who we are for, and the voices that are in the space working together – that is what I have always found artists do, they will find the grit in the

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oyster. That is what academics can also do, and when they are both in the same space – and with students – there is the potential for something extraordinary and dangerous to emerge. Theatre can be both those things and for me that is what the partnership is provoking in us. The questions that ‘Radical Mischief’ asks of us are so big, that the challenge is about being able to move in a significant enough way in response. Abigail: It can be quite difficult to be radically mischievous in the academy. For example, it wouldn’t be very easy to introduce a new course and say that you were uncertain whether it would work, but that everyone would have enormous fun and we would experiment with new ways of teaching. That’s one of the things that the collaboration has really opened up for me; thinking about the way in which the RSC works in terms of Research & Development; in terms of the idea that one can spend a week or two experimenting, and conclude by saying that interesting, unexpected discoveries were made and while there is nothing to perform it has informed our thinking. That for me feels important and I think there should be more space in the academy for this than there currently is. Erica: I agree with the two descriptions about wanting to create space artistically and in terms of a rigorous, scholarly relationship to that, where we can be playful, but not to no end. There is absolutely that research enquiry meeting a playful artistic practice, but I think there is something else for me which Jacqui touched upon in terms of roots; a different meaning of radical I suppose. Of having the opportunity by getting away from all the immediate pressures of needing to put on a show or writing a paper, for example. To create a space that isn’t that, in which you can discern what, in a way, the foundational issues or questions are. How do we tackle the fact that both the academy, and the theatre, are largely white institutions or sectors in this country? You could repeat that of course in terms of class, disability, how gender operates in relation to power, but beyond identities, thinking about how we enable a conversation in a world where accessibility is so important. Really fundamental questions can get away from us in both disciplines because our specialisms get in the way, rather than using those specialisms to tackle those questions. Michael: I very much endorse all these points. It is difficult to timetable ‘Radical Mischief’. We are trying to produce a space in which to remember what the arts and the academy were all about in the first place, to get away from the job and to return to the work. To contemplate the nature of universities and the humanities, whose job is actually to critique things, rather than to produce utilitarian results that you can demonstrate are going to happen in advance. We are both together looking at how we represent the world and whose world it is we claim to be representing, which I think is an innately mischievous thing to do, no matter how solemnly we may do it.

Participants agree that ‘Radical Mischief’ invites artists and scholars to free themselves from institutional expectations (i.e. publishing research,

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producing and rehearsing productions) to explore fundamental questions in relation to representation and accessibility. The answers reflect the difference in responsibilities and pressures of working in either institution, as Rokison-Woodall and Dobson infer that the room for risk and experimentation, which is central to being radically mischievous, feels particularly challenging in an academic environment. This is summarised in RokisonWoodall’s reflection on R&D at the RSC, an important strand of work at the new TOP that allows artists and scholars space and time to explore their research and practice without additional pressures of having to justify and present their findings. ‘Radical Mischief’ thus inspires a reflective and challenging questioning of institutions that came to the fore during the 2018 conference discussed here. Mary: A significant achievement of this five-year partnership was the 2018 Radical Mischief Conference, co-convened by Professor Ewan Fernie and Erica Whyman.2 What worked about the conference, and what new directions of practice and thinking did the event embody? What were the weaknesses of the conference, if any? Michael: Its strengths and weaknesses were very much of a piece with one another. The brilliant thing about it was that people did not know what to expect. There wasn’t really a topic, and it wasn’t that people were there to give information for other people to write down, it was as much about its own form and the different ways of being in a room with other people and trying to think. Obviously, some of those experiments worked for some people better than others. Being at a conference that felt like being in a rehearsal room – that’s a tremendous relief. Jacqui: It felt like there was a more democratic set of voices that were being profiled and privileged, which was refreshing. I was most struck by the conversations happening in the small breakout sessions where I found the pairings of expert voices provocative. I still have in me the things that I heard and was part of discussing in that conference and they have really influenced the thinking that we have done in this institution this year. What was challenging about it is probably more prosaic really. I think we hadn’t planned well enough for what it was. The actual event itself we’d successfully executed and planned for, but I think we hadn’t planned for that amount of deep questioning of the institutions. I think there’s still a question for us in terms of how we get that out to a wider audience. 2

The conference took place on 20–1 July 2018 at TOP. The event included keynote speakers, breakout sessions that were jointly curated by academics and artists, and an open space format where anyone attending the conference could propose their own topic on which to lead a discussion. Speakers included Professor Jonathan Dollimore, Professor Dympna Callaghan, playwright and actor Charlie Josephine, playwright Juliet Gilkes Romero, Artistic Director Emma Rice, and Professor Sir Roger Scruton.

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Erica: That’s right. We perhaps couldn’t have known what sort of publication channels would work. It is worth saying that some of the artists were treated with a level of intellectual respect that is not culturally normal. Also, some of those divisions dissolved for practitioners who often lead work in a university setting but are treated as the rogue practitioner as opposed to the thinker. The learning outcome of that is probably not, ‘we had this amazing thought and we need to act on it.’ It is more that the next time they are working and considering how to make a contribution, they will have a little more intellectual confidence and that feels important. I felt the same about some of the younger scholars who were very vocal about not having access to platforms like that, and how powerful it was to simply shift the hierarchies of who gets to speak in a room. It is worth mentioning open space format because I was nervous about it, but I now have happy memories of particularly lively rooms and feeling like there was a whole other way of talking to one another. Abigail: I agree. The fact that it felt like a democratic space was important. As someone who has been an actor and has then written something and been told that it’s not being published in paperback because actors would not understand it; it is deeply frustrating. I don’t think I have ever been to a conference where the two sides – theatre and the academy – felt so integrated. I have been to conferences before where there have been academics, actors and teachers but they have all been in different sessions. The idea that people could get together in the same space and have conversations rather than share their pre-prepared expertise felt crucial.   I saw a tangible effect on our PhD students. When Erica talks about the open space and how that felt, I was just struck by the fact that the first three or four people who stood up in that big room filled with people to propose topics on which they wanted to lead a discussion were young female PhD students. They would not usually be given that forum and it had a real effect on them and continues to, I think.

The Radical Mischief Conference attempted to playfully disrupt the academic conference format by increasing participation and placing artists on an equal intellectual status as academics. Instead of inviting speakers to present ground-breaking research, keynote speeches provided provocations on radical thought that sought to inspire inter-disciplinary debate in smaller breakout rooms and open space discussions. The ‘deep questioning’ in the conference included asking what a full acknowledgement of white privilege could look like, and how artists and scholars could move beyond ‘a poverty of conversation’ about race for example (Royal Shakespeare Company website, 2018).3 O’Hanlon acknowledges the challenge of such 3

These questions (paraphrased here) were provided by writer and director Nadia Latif for the curated conversation on race at the Radical Mischief Conference.

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an event in terms of its afterlife; putting procedures in place to continue these conversations and to evoke action in response to the issues raised during the conference. Mary: How has the work and thinking of the collaboration extended beyond both institutions into the wider community? How might this be achieved if this aim has not yet been realised? Jacqui: We need to think about what we originally set out to do; what we are looking to change is discourse. We are looking to blur boundaries between artists and scholars, and we are looking to explore what practice as research means. Now in addition, we have had the concept of staff-led projects and that is specifically intended to have an external audience with a particular impact on that audience. When we think about the next five years, we are thinking differently about research because of the trust that we have built and the rigour of conversation that we can have, and the depth of understanding we’ve developed. We believe we can do something that is more significant externally, undertaking much larger scale kinds of research, but we have grown towards that. Abigail: I can talk about what we are now calling the ‘Signing Shakespeare’ project.4 That could not have happened without the collaboration, and when we talk about staff-led research projects, it was my project, but it was an organic thing in terms of how it emerged. I was thinking about access to Shakespeare for D/deaf children, and I was talking to Angela Wootten [Teaching Fellow in Education (Deafness and Hearing Impairment), University of Birmingham] because she happened to be my son’s teacher of the D/deaf.5 Angela was talking to Jacqui and had been for years as they have written a book together about drama and D/deaf children (See O’Hanlon and Wootten, 2007). Then the RSC was thinking very much about access to Shakespeare, not just for D/deaf children, but for D/deaf audiences and D/deaf practitioners. The whole thing came together because of shared interests; and because of the profile of our organisations and the connections they have, we have been able to take this project to the wider community and hopefully, in the future, to an increasingly wider community. 4

5

The ‘Signing Shakespeare’ project emerged out of a staff-led research project in 2018, led by Dr Abigail Rokison-Woodall. Five days were spent in R&D at TOP in August 2018, where RokisonWoodall, along with others from the UoB and the RSC Education Department, and associated artists, investigated new methods and practical exercises for teaching Shakespeare to D/deaf children. These exercises were then trialled at two schools for D/deaf children with a view to putting together workshop materials and signed resources for teaching the plays. The term ‘D/deaf’ is used as an imprecise means of representing the full spectrum of deaf people. Those who use the term ‘Deaf’ regard deafness as part of their identity and culture and are often users of British Sign Language (BSL). The term ‘deaf’ (with a small d) is used predominantly for those who are hard of hearing but with the use of hearing aids and/or lip-reading use spoken English as their first language. Rokison-Woodall’s son was diagnosed with auditory-neuropathy, a form of deafness, at birth.

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Erica: It does have quite a complicated structure, because there is a way of thinking about it in the sense that the RSC conducted Research & Development with Paula Garfield [Artistic Director of Deafinitely Theatre, the first deaf launched and deaf led professional theatre company in the UK] because we wanted to support her as a director of Shakespeare. We needed Abigail in that room, and by doing that, two things happened. Greg [Gregory Doran, Artistic Director of the RSC] was inspired by that work, and there is an argument that he would not have had the confidence to cast Charly Arrowsmith without that workshop [Arrowsmith is a Deaf actor who played Cassandra in the 2018 RSC production of Troilus and Cressida, directed by Doran]. Charly then came back for another season [RSC 2019 summer season, playing Audrey in As You Like It, directed by Kimberley Sykes, and Curtis in Taming of the Shrew, directed by Justin Audibert] and she is an Associate Artist. Abigail: Now Charly has fed back into the ‘Signing Shakespeare’ project and has become the director for the films that we’ve been making, and she’s brought with her a number of other brilliant D/deaf artists who have really enriched those materials.6 By having someone directing those films who is D/deaf themself, the conversations have been quite different in terms of people being able to talk about their own experiences of Shakespeare at school and what they would have needed. Michael: Yes. I would add that the way in which an experiment like this within two confined, finite institutions gradually spreads out into the world is through the work of people who have been through it – through the ‘x’ which resident artists, actors, playwrights or students proceed to do. I think we should be implanting microchips in anyone who has been near Shakespeare and Creativity so that we can see them on a map and listen to what they are saying and doing. That would be a good exercise.

The interconnectedness of the collaboration is highlighted within Rokison-Woodall and Whyman’s responses, as ‘Signing Shakespeare’ is an example of an individual’s research question (how to make Shakespeare more accessible for D/deaf children) that aligned with wider concerns at the RSC in terms of increasing accessibility for D/deaf audiences and practitioners. ‘Signing Shakespeare’ created tangible results, creating workshop materials and films to trial at schools for D/deaf children, which were very 6

The ‘Signing Shakespeare’ team have worked with professional D/deaf actors (Sophie Stone, for instance), to create short films of key scenes from Macbeth directed by Arrowsmith. These films display the actors performing scenes such as Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy in Act 1, scene 5 in BSL/ Sign-Supported English, which incorporates elements of BSL to support spoken English, using the grammar and syntax of the English language. The scenes were also filmed with actors using a more performative, iconic sign based on Visual Vernacular, which the team have dubbed ‘Visual Shakespeare’. Visual Vernacular is an art form owned by the D/deaf community that combines sign language with mime for solo storytelling on stage.

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well received by schoolteachers and pupils. While the ‘Signing Shakespeare’ project is an example of wider impact, O’Hanlon and Dobson acknowledge the challenges of measuring impact with regards to other aspects of the collaboration. With the exception of the staff-led research projects, O’Hanlon suggests that time was needed to get to know one another before any impact can be delivered externally, and Dobson also infers that such impact is gradual and that it may be too early to discern how much impact alumni have achieved as a result of the collaboration. Mary: Part of the intention behind the collaboration was to soften borders between teaching and research. How has the collaboration fused teaching and research collectively? Erica: What springs to my mind is the different ways that we have approached the MA courses in embedding artistic practice. We have done lots of different versions where artistic practice meets pedagogy. Abigail: Yes, this is something that Ewan Fernie talks about quite a bit in terms of actually seeing some of the teaching and the input of the RSC into the MA teaching as active research in its own right. Not research in terms of turning out a paper on it, but if I think about the research week last year where Iqbal Khan worked with MA students for a week, that was neither specifically teaching nor specifically research, and yet it had both of those things running through it constantly.7 Erica: Kimberley Sykes’ version of that research week three years ago resonates because she worked in preparation for her production of Dido, Queen of Carthage and the level of research during that week contributed towards her own production. Also, very vividly, there was a sense of investigation between the plays, which you could have done through more conventional teaching methods, but there was something really embodied, and something about identity as a theme in that room. By embodying it in practice, a couple of people brought a very particular identity or lived experience to those roles. That then (as it always does) opened up the way everybody was thinking about those texts. Abigail: I agree, and in a way, we are always fusing our research into our teaching. Sometimes we do it in very transparent ways: the next course is essentially the last book. The other way around, of feeling that the research emerges out of the teaching is something that we see less often and is absolutely a part of what Erica is talking about with Kimberley. Jacqui: It has taken us quite a long time (understandably) to make different choices about the input that we bring in alongside you as the teachers on 7

As part of the collaboration between the UoB and the RSC, postgraduate students at the Shakespeare Institute are offered the opportunity to take part in a unique MA Research Week in TOP. Students work with an RSC practitioner and explore a provocation over the course of a few days and the week culminates in a sharing that is attended by staff and students at the UoB, and staff at the RSC. The ideas generated from the research week then feed into the individual thesis projects of MA students.

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the courses. When we first started, I think it was much more the course tutor has to deliver, because that is what universities are really concerned about. They have got to deliver what they said to the student, and that is a very understandable anxiety, whereas I think what happened around years three and four and going into year five now, is that the conversations feel more fluid now. Abigail: I totally agree, it is not separated. The pedagogy module is quite a good example.8 When I first arrived, the module had three days spent at the RSC and three days spent at the Institute, and that’s not the case anymore. The whole six days are completely integrated so that it’s jointly taught currently between myself, Tracy Irish [RSC Education practitioner] and a number of practitioners and academics. Michael: The relationship between teaching and research in universities is pretty unstable anyway. One of the refreshing things I think around the Institute now is that the word ‘research’, which we’re so used to thinking of in terms of publications in learned journals, is being used in the way in which actors and playwrights use it. It’s a way of living your day, noticing things and taking them in, that might illuminate everything else you are doing. The blurring between writing, teaching and studying is a mark of the Shakespeare and Creativity MA, and the more that blurring spreads outwards into the other programmes of the Institute the better. If we can contaminate the rest of the world while we are at it then so much the better.

One of the central concerns of the collaboration is ‘blurring boundaries’, a phrase that has been used in different forms throughout this chapter. The collaboration between the UoB and the RSC seeks to dismantle any binaries between teaching, research and theatre practice. For example, an MA student on the Shakespeare and Creativity programme described their course as ‘an ideal fusion of rigorous theoretical exploration and dynamic practical creativity’.9 New ways of conducting research have been discovered that have been invaluable to staff, students and artists through events such as the MA research week and the staff-led research projects. In the context of the collaboration, research does not simply equate to writing and publishing results, but to work in a space with others to explore a question in practical and critical ways, where the end result may not be predictable or easily quantifiable. Conducting research in this collaborative way can foster a multiplicity of perspectives and lived experiences, 8

9

The pedagogy module is a core module on the MA Shakespeare and Education programme, where students are jointly taught with the RSC Education Department for six days during the Easter break. The module consists of a study of materials, methodology and theory used to teach Shakespeare and includes practical elements of problem solving. This quote was selected from a Module Evaluation Questionnaire for the Shakespeare Ensemble module, 2016–17.

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making for a rich learning experience. The spirit of ‘Radical Mischief’ encourages artists and scholars to be brave, rigorous and playful in their investigations, yet the challenges that ‘Radical Mischief’ posits may be too great for either institution to fully implement. Hence, two significant challenges facing the collaboration are how to implement change beyond the walls of the rehearsal/teaching space, and how to track change through former students of the MA programmes. The collaboration ultimately asks for a redefinition of terms such as ‘research’ and ‘impact’ by challenging the University and the RSC into new ways of thinking, researching and teaching.

References Hill, Pippa, 2014. ‘Research and Development: The Creative Engine’, in Royal Shakespeare Company, Radical Mischief, 3, 6. O’Hanlon, Jacqui, and Angela Wootten, 2007. Using Drama to Teach Personal, Emotional and Social Skills (London: Paul Chapman). Royal Shakespeare Company, 2018, ‘Radical Mischief’. www.rsc.org.uk/education/ higher-education/radical-mischief. Semler, Liam E., 2013. Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning versus the System (London: Bloomsbury). Whyman, Erica, 2013. ‘Welcome to the First Edition of our Newspaper’, in Royal Shakespeare Company, Radical Mischief, 1, 2–3.

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chapter 6

The Shakespeare’s Globe/King’s College London MA Shakespeare Studies The First Twenty Years of Collaboration Farah Karim-Cooper, Gordon McMullan, Lucy Munro and Will Tosh

Introduction King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe have offered a ­collaborative Shakespeare Studies Master’s degree programme since 2001: it was the first Master of Arts degree in Shakespeare Studies to be taught jointly by a university and a theatre. It has run for twenty years to date, and it continues to thrive. Gordon McMullan wrote about the first decade of the degree in a collection of essays on the teaching of English in higher education (McMullan, 2016). It seemed logical, then, both because of the ground that essay covered and because the collaboration emerged from dialogue between individuals at the two partner organisations, to present this account in the form of an edited conversation between four of the academics who teach on the degree – Farah Karim-Cooper and Will Tosh of the Globe and Gordon McMullan and Lucy Munro of King’s – in which the participants reflect on the two decades of the degree’s existence. We hope this approach gives a sense of the challenges and of the ongoing intellectual and pedagogical exchange required to develop a degree of this kind as well as a sense of the unique nature of Shakespeare’s Globe as a theatre that was also from the outset an educational organisation. The conversation was recorded on 17 December 2019, transcribed by Joy Cooper (to whom we are very grateful), and subsequently edited for this collection by the four participants.

Origins of the Collaboration Lucy: When the King’s/Globe MA first came into being, I had very recently finished my PhD at King’s, and I always wondered where the idea for the MA came from and what the rationale was for its creation. 102

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Gordon: It emerged from conversations I had with Patrick Spottiswoode (founding director of Globe Education). When I arrived in London in 1995 to take up a lectureship in the English department at King’s, I found my way to the site that would become the Globe, which included the embryonic Globe Education, and I began to attend events there. Somewhere down the line Patrick and I were talking, and it turned out that the idea for a collaborative MA between our two institutions had been in both of our minds for a while. The Globe at that point was teaching university students by way of visiting programmes for American undergraduates – short courses, summer schools and so forth – but the teaching was bought in, there was as yet no in-house academic, and Patrick and I were having a drink and one of us said ‘what about sharing an MA?’ (we differ over who said it first!). I said I felt we could do something amazing, something that no one else was doing, and he said ‘yes, but the Globe can’t afford to employ an academic full-time’. (It is important to remember that a collaborative degree that is not financially viable for both partners is a non-starter.) And I said, ‘well, let’s think about the potential income. If the Globe were to receive half the fees of even a modestly sized set of students, and a third of those students, say, were paying overseas fees, then that surely would make a difference’. And his answer was that that would be about half of what he’d need but he was willing to take the risk. So he took the risk, and it worked as we hoped and has continued to work ever since. Lucy: Wasn’t there already an MA programme in early modern literature at King’s? Gordon: Yes, there was: one that drew modest numbers consistently enough, but the new degree had the potential to be something quite different – an MA that would be attractive as a collaboration between a university department with a long history in the field of Shakespeare studies and an extraordinary theatre that had grown in the way Sam Wanamaker planned from the outset – as a combined theatre and education and research centre – and that was already having an effect on the study of early modern drama. Lucy: I remember that the Globe, even at that early point, was engaging keenly with early-career academics – PhD students and postdocs were giving talks, and it felt very open to graduate students. Farah: Absolutely. Andrew Gurr had set up a research department with postdoctoral research fellows – I remember as a PhD student thinking how much I’d like to work there – but when Andy retired and the funding for the postdocs reached its conclusion, the research department closed, partly for the logical enough reason that it had been created to undertake the research that would lead to the building of the reconstructed theatre, which now existed.1 When my post was advertised in 2004 [when the 1

Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare scholar, theatre historian and professor emeritus at the University of Reading, was deeply involved, as chief academic advisor, in the creation of the reconstructed Globe.

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first Globe Education lecturer, Gabriel Egan, moved to a university post], it was clearly described as a lecturer role with a focus on the shared MA but with no specific research element. So there’s no doubt that Globe Education was substantially enhanced by the creation of the MA, not only in and of itself but also because it then fed directly into the resurrection of the research department, not least because when we first started undertaking research activities we were able to recruit interns from the MA cohort. The MA was there at the outset, fuelling a programme of research that would fully develop later. Gordon: The degree was conceived purely as a pedagogical enterprise, but it’s fair to say it emerged both from the work the Globe was already doing at that time and also from certain kinds of research taking place in the English department at King’s. Lucy’s PhD was a clear instance of this work – addressing the early modern repertory and the mechanics of theatre production – and it seemed obvious for King’s to be working with the Globe on developing this critical line. The collaboration has grown in an organic way since. Will: How was teaching on the Globe/King’s MA received by students in the early years? After all, at that time the kind of work you’re talking about had yet to filter down fully to undergraduate teaching, and the first MA students must have been taught in quite different ways. Gordon: The MA at its point of origin was aimed principally at students who had done English Literature as a BA and who had studied Shakespeare and perhaps one or two other early modern playwrights primarily as texts to be close read and put into a certain sort of historical context. We encouraged our students to think about the plays not only as objects for close textual analysis but as scripts written to be performed by certain companies in certain spaces and what this might mean for critical practice. In other words, there was an explicitly revisionist pedagogical agenda from the outset. Not that the degree was only aimed at students with English BAs – we have always welcomed theatrically minded students and others (History BAs, for instance) alongside those with a literary focus – but the original primary target was people who were like I’d been at that age, keen on Shakespeare as literature but blissfully unaware of the history and practicalities of theatre. Those first students were so excited about the Globe project, and a key task early on was to respond to their excitement while also ensuring they understood that the degree was not about worship – which remains an important part of what we do. What was fascinating right from the start was that both Farah’s predecessor Gabriel Egan and then Farah herself, and now Will too, have been determined that uncritical enthusiasm for what the Globe is or might be should be made critical in a positive way. So the first students were a bit taken aback to find they were being told early on that there were problems with the belief with which some of them had arrived that Globe experience was automatically historically ‘authentic’. But once they got over the initial shock, they

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rapidly came to a position from which they could do the kinds of critical work you do as a successful Master’s student, and what mattered was that it wasn’t the King’s academics critiquing the Globe and the Globe academics defending a certain idea of the project but both sets of scholars asking intellectual questions the students hadn’t previously encountered. Will: It’s a curious irony that the degree we share is premised substantially on a certain critical independence from one of the partner organisations. But given the theatre’s profile, and given the profile of the writer in whose name the theatre exists, there isn’t any choice. Because, as you say, the students were coming to worship, and we needed to engage with this bardic atmosphere and help the students develop a critical understanding of the cultural history of the Globe and of the historical discourses that made the Globe possible, including a recognition of the unavoidable postmodernity of this ‘early modern’ building.

The Collaboration Evolves Gordon: Over time, inevitably, the student body has changed, and the longevity of the Globe has helped: it’s an established theatre now in a way that simply wasn’t the case when we began. And times change in other ways too. There was a moment five or six years ago when there was a distinct and unexpected overall upturn in applications: we went from accepting a fairly steady fifteen or so students per year to an equally steady twenty-five or thirty, which marked a new phase in the life of the degree. Will: Which was the moment we increased the Globe’s teaching contribution from one module [one semester-length course] to two, meaning that the input from the two organisations now approximates a fifty-fifty ratio – structurally, if not exactly in terms of personnel or administration. Farah: Which coincided with the opening of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse [the Globe’s indoor theatre]. That was when Will was appointed, meaning that there were now two Globe academics, and for the first time it was possible for us to handle two modules plus all the other obligations of our roles at the Globe (teaching visiting undergraduates, organising conferences and events, working with Globe theatre, doing our research). Lucy: And I started contributing some of the teaching to the Globe modules, meaning that there was collaboration at a local pedagogical level as well as at an institutional level. It really matters that at times we teach alongside each other as well as separately, that we share pedagogy in a very practical collaborative way, that the students see us in direct dialogue. Gordon: This was part two of the history of the MA. The original model consisted of a core King’s module (‘Working with Early Modern Literary Texts’), a core Globe module (‘Early Modern Playhouse Practice’), two optional modules, both taught at King’s (e.g. Sonia Massai’s ‘Global/ Local Shakespeares’, say, or my ‘Theatre, Gender and Culture in Jacobean

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London’), and then over the summer (for part-time students, the second summer) they write the dissertation, with supervision from both organisations. This model changed to one in which there is the core King’s module and two core Globe modules, one in each semester, with just the one optional module at King’s in semester two and then the dissertation over the summer. Lucy: In other words, growing the MA helped produce the extra funding that ensured there could be two members of academic staff at the Globe, which in turn meant a broadening of the intellectual input on both sides of the partnership, enabled the delivery of two modules and increased our ability to draw out some of the key issues, such as the interpretative ramifications of the differences between performances in the indoor and outdoor theatres. Gordon: At the same time, the English department had increased in scale because King’s’ status and location had enabled it to capitalise on the introduction of student fees in the United Kingdom, in particular the substantive rise in fees that took place in 2012. This is a development about which we have major reservations in respect both of the overall marketisation of UK higher education and of the impact of the expansion of universities such as King’s on those lower down the perceived hierarchy. But it has meant that there are now eight permanent early modernists in the department, increasing the range of options and perspectives for the MA students. Lucy: It’s worth noting too that we recruit students collaboratively. Colleagues from both King’s and the Globe look at the applications and assess them together, and we interview in institutional pairs. Plus, it’s not that Globe colleagues run their modules as hermetically sealed units and simply hand over the marks [grades]: we collaborate on marking and agreeing final grades, and Farah and Will contribute dissertation supervision as well as teaching the two modules. In other words, the Globe is as fully embedded in the programme as is King’s. And I think one of the most exciting things about the MA is that when you’re working with students on their dissertation projects you can so often see that they’re mixing and matching elements from the Globe modules and the King’s modules, with many fusing close attention to works from the period with thinking about material and theatrical contexts in intellectually probing and persuasive ways. Will: There’s something powerful about the fact that both the core modules that students study in the first semester are designed to move them on – constructively, gently, supportively – from their undergraduate presuppositions, especially about Shakespeare and the text. We’ve addressed one of the initial aims of the MA – to engender positive critique of the idea of an ‘authentic’ Globe – but it’s clear that we’re also engendering a critical attitude towards criticism itself, and what I most love about working with students at dissertation level is seeing that they’re no longer doing a certain

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kind of straightforward undergraduate literary-critical reading of texts but are bringing more intellectually sceptical traditions into play. Farah: And, as we’ve noted, the student cohort has evolved over time. For one thing, people who are taking an MA now straight after their BA years are likely to be twenty-one, meaning that the Globe has been here since they were born. They simply haven’t experienced a time when the Globe did not exist, and that means their outlook is different from that of the first cohorts who knew the theatre was new and extraordinary and radical, whereas now to our students it seems established, even traditional. Gordon: And students often come to us now with BA experience that is less solely close-reading focused than it was at the beginning precisely because of the developments in the field for which we have ourselves been partially responsible, particularly the value to be gained for literary study of Shakespeare and his contemporaries from developing awareness of the business of playing in Shakespeare’s day – the audiences, the companies, the theatres, the practicalities and the emotions of theatre going. Farah: We do encourage the students to remember they’re taking an English department degree. They’re studying firmly in the context of a theatre, but the critical methodology of the degree derives from the field of English literary-critical study, not drama or performance studies. We don’t supervise practical dissertations, for example, for the simple reason that we’re not trained drama-department people and that’s not our area of disciplinary strength or pedagogical experience. At the same time, we shape the modules so that the students encounter theatre practitioners who can talk to them about playing the Globe space from both an intellectual and a practical perspective and can offer them workshops that Will and I are simply not trained to run. We believe the students gain a valuable level of critical distance from each side of the literary-critical/practical-theatre divide. If I were to leave the Globe I would say ‘please replace me with someone who is an English literature scholar, not a theatre department person’, because I think it’s crucial in the Globe context that Will and I have been trained as textual/archival scholars, which isn’t what people expect from a theatre education department.

Employability and Impact Gordon: That the Globe is above all a theatre matters a great deal, of course, not least because of the immersive environment so characteristic of the Globe, which makes a huge difference to those of our students who spend nearly every evening at the Globe absorbing the activities, the ethos, the atmosphere. They feel at home in the Globe – not just in the playhouses themselves but also in the entire set-up of the Globe: performative, educational, administrative, social.

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Farah: They do. And one of the obvious early effects of the MA was that a proportion of the students stayed on and populated the Globe’s education department, and then they began after a time to move on to other London cultural organisations. Employers might see ‘MA in Shakespeare Studies’ and think ‘too esoteric’, but then they see it’s a collaboration with the Globe, and all of a sudden the cultural sector opens up as an employment option. And the MA students discovered that they could use their degree in an applied way by working initially at the Globe itself and then by going on to work at the National Theatre or the Barbican or wherever. In other words, the MA has created career options that a lot of people who study Shakespeare at that level might not expect. Gordon: What’s become clear is that employers in cultural organisations, who get hundreds of applications for every early-career post they advertise, can see that the students who have taken our MA are accustomed to being part of an arts organisation. They know what to expect, what the ethos is: they’re not arriving at interviews with unformed views about what it’s like to work in the cultural sector. When I began the conversations that would lead to London’s Shakespeare400 season in 2016, I became very aware of the network of former King’s/Globe MA students working within London’s cultural organisations, which was hugely encouraging.2 Lucy: In other words, the MA has made a tangible difference to London’s cultural sector. Gordon: No question. Our collaboration pre-dates the era of ‘impact’ that has become such a controlling element in the research environment of British universities, and in many ways what we do is quite oblique to official definitions of impact, yet it’s absurd that this should be the case because our collaboration is so clearly the real thing.3 Lucy: And that’s in part because the institutional framework conceptualises impact in ways that exclude teaching. I think, as people who work and teach in universities, we would always say that the most important impact that we have is on people we teach, but that’s something explicitly excluded from the impact agenda. Gordon: Yet we know that the degree has been really substantive in terms of expanding our students’ career options, which is not something we foresaw when we started. The model of impact that says you do research A and it linearly affects non-university context B is so unresponsive an instrument in comparison to the dialogic collaboration we’ve experienced over the last twenty years. 2 3

Shakespeare400 was the consortium of London cultural partners that King’s coordinated for the 2016 Quatercentenary. See https://shakespeare400.kcl.ac.uk/ ‘Impact’ is the term for the requirement by government, and thus by public funding bodies, that academics demonstrate that their research engages with the world beyond the university and ideally has a measurable effect in the economic sphere. See https://re.ukri.org/research/ref-impact/ and, for a larger sense of the Research Excellence Framework process and what it measures, www.ref.ac.uk/

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Value of the Collaboration for the Research Field Will: Shall we talk briefly about what the MA and the collaboration between King’s and the Globe has meant to us as researchers and scholars? Lucy: Farah and I are pretty much exact contemporaries in terms of the timing of our PhDs and the publishing of our first books and making our way through the career. I was very lucky that the links between King’s and the Globe were starting to develop when I was a PhD student but also that the Globe was somewhere I felt I could engage with as an early-career academic. Some of my first teaching experience was at the Globe on a programme for visiting American students. And years later, doing a public lecture at the Globe, it struck me that it had for a long time been my second home, academically speaking. There’s a kind of intellectual capaciousness to the Globe project that’s expressed through the programmes that Patrick and Farah have been so instrumental in developing, particularly events such as the ‘Shakespeare and Race’ festival that Farah organised in 2018 and all the conferences that have enabled the field to look at itself and think of itself in particular ways. This is obviously not directly connected to the degree, but the MA students tend to be the core audience, and part of what makes the experience of studying the MA so distinctive is that they have close interaction with two research cultures: at King’s and at the Globe, which are both distinct parts of London’s Shakespearean studies environment. Gordon: And for you a major part of the collaboration has been working on the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, which seems to have made a huge difference to your imagining of early modern theatre spaces and performances. Lucy: Yes, Farah invited me to join the Architecture Research Group tasked with designing the indoor playhouse. Farah: I was trying to change the make-up of the group at that time. I wanted to bring in diversity of opinion and to represent the new work that was being done on repertories and theatre spaces and boy companies. When I arrived at the Globe I was the only scholar there; there was nobody left from the old research department. It was me and an education department of lovely people, but their main focus was on pre-university education, so the collaboration with King’s provided me with a scholarly community. And it also gave me the visiting research fellowship that came with the appointment, an ongoing university affiliation that helped explain my role to people who didn’t really understand. I don’t get that bafflement so much anymore, but at that time it enabled me to feel like I was part of a scholarly community. It’s interesting hearing Lucy talk about what the Globe gave her – a kind of collaborative perspective, which is what King’s gave me from the other side. Gordon: I simply can’t now imagine my career in Shakespeare and early modern drama studies without the relationship with the Globe because it’s been so ongoingly formative, as it were. My Oxford doctoral work

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was purely textual and historical: I wasn’t paying attention to the fact that these plays were written for particular actors in specific spaces. That simply wasn’t part of my thinking; plus, I was working on a playwright that nobody cared about, namely John Fletcher – well, nobody except Patrick Spottiswoode! It was amazing to go to ‘Read Not Dead’ readings at the Globe and hear capable actors make performances with almost no rehearsal time out of plays that I’d studied and had a suspicion would be fun but had until then had no practical supporting evidence.4 To have access to these opportunities has changed how I imagine the work I do. Collaboration with the Globe has given me a much stronger understanding of early modern theatre as a fundamentally collaborative endeavour. Will: Farah has already mentioned that neither of our educational backgrounds was directly in theatre history or theatre scholarship: mine certainly wasn’t, although it was embedded in late-sixteenth-century culture and life. I had an earlier, short-lived identity as an actor, and I remember seeing the advert for the job and thinking how exciting it sounded – that it would be an opportunity to put together my practical experience of contemporary theatre making with the knowledge I’d subsequently acquired about the early modern period. As Gordon says, the idea of collaboration is at the heart of the Globe enterprise, and it matters that it is collaboration at disciplinary level as much as collaboration between individuals and institutions. It’s a question of enabling apparently divergent lines of expertise to come together productively. Lucy: My current research is propelled by the experience of being immersed in the documentary evidence for the indoor playhouses and thinking about how you reconstruct an indoor playhouse, combined with a pedagogical imperative: how do you work with this kind of material with groups of smart MA students? And the upshot is that the book about Shakespeare’s company I’ve been writing over the last couple of years would not exist in the form it does without these shaping experiences (Munro, 2020).

Conclusion: Unique or Reproducible? Will: Which prompts a final question: is this MA unique, or might it be reproduced elsewhere? Gordon: This is a key question. Is the MA something that can only happen in this particular conjunction between a Shakespeare-centred theatre and a

4

‘Read Not Dead’ is a project created by Patrick Spottiswoode to host a series of informal professional staged readings of every extant early modern play, which has run since 1995 and continues to thrive.

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university located just along the Thames from each other, or might it be a model for collaborative educational practice elsewhere? Farah: I don’t want to think it’s a model as such, not least because we’ve been so influenced by the immersive quality of the building that has so affected our own scholarly practice and therefore influences and shapes the way the MA is taught and is unique to what we have here. But the idea of combining different disciplines and creating a collaboration between live theatre and scholarly archival literary practice is absolutely something that can be replicated elsewhere, yes, and we would really encourage and support such developments. Lucy: The institutional structures are vital. One of the many things that makes the Globe unusual as a theatre is the depth of interest it has shown over twenty years in post-secondary education and its interest not only in undergraduates but also in postgraduate students and in establishing the broader research identity we’ve been speaking about. Will: There is something unusual, unique perhaps, about the Globe being a theatre with this level of institutional educational support. Other collaborative MAs have tended to be shared with museums and libraries, which is a qualitatively different phenomenon. We’re an educational charity and a research centre, yes, but the main identity of the Globe is as a theatre. Gordon: Certain conditions do need to be in place if a project of this kind is to be sustained. You need people with the energy to do the initiating and subsequent organisational work – because you mustn’t underestimate the hard work and commitment needed to keep such a programme going – and you need enough contributors on both sides to ensure that the teaching and supervision can be covered. Moreover, you need consistency of personnel on both sides, which can be harder to achieve in the cultural sector than at a university. Cultural organisations so often have to respond to short-term obligations for funding, and this can lead to frictions and to the inability to sustain long-term projects. Lucy: It has made a huge difference that Globe Education has maintained its focus on the full range of students, from primary school to PhD. If Patrick had left at any stage and an education director had come in whose main focus was on pre-university education, it might have posed challenges for the collaboration. And the fact that Farah has been in post since 2004 has enabled her to make key interventions: the enhancement of the Globe’s contribution to the MA, the supervision of PhD students, the recreation of Globe Research, the extensive conference programme. Having longterm conversation matters, and it matters that the two organisations, the university and the cultural partner, are already in genuine dialogue before initiatives such as an MA programme emerge, so that the project arises organically from a genuine ongoing sharing of ideas. Gordon: And of course, any such project needs to work both financially and professionally for both partners. A sustained level of applications to the MA over the years has provided a solid basis for planning, but who knows

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F. Karim-Cooper, G. Mc Mullan, L. Munro and W. Tosh how it will go now that, for instance, the ‘Shakespeare requirement’ that has for so long been an intrinsic element of undergraduate English programmes in the USA seems to be fading away. Will US undergraduates, an important element in our annual cohort, begin to lose that deep attachment to Shakespeare? We can’t know these things, but it’s a valuable reminder that the dimensions of the playing field change constantly, and you have to be aware of developments as they happen. So, yes, the model is one that I believe can work in other locations, but genuine local responsiveness is key, and certain conditions, certain relationships, need to be firmly in place in advance if programmes are to be created and sustained. We’ll happily share experience with anyone thinking of creating a collaborative programme along these lines. As we hope has been clear, the rewards, both for students and for academics, are considerable, and you never cease to be amazed by the things that unfold that you couldn’t have foreseen at the outset.

References Hewings, Ann, Lynda Prescott, and Philip Seargeant (eds.), 2016. Futures for English Studies: Teaching Language, Literature and Creative Writing in Higher Education (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan). McMullan, Gordon, 2016. ‘On Collaborating with Shakespeare’s Globe: Reflections on the Future of Postgraduate English’, in Ann Hewings, Lynda Prescott, and Philip Seargeant (eds.), Futures for English Studies (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan), 197–214. Munro, Lucy, 2020. Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King’s Men (London: The Arden Shakespeare).

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chapter 7

The Warwick–Monash Co-teaching Initiative Shakespeare and Portal Pedagogy

Fiona Gregory, Gabriel García Ochoa and Paul Prescott

This chapter describes an innovative collaborative teaching model developed by colleagues Paul Prescott (Warwick), Fiona Gregory (Monash) and Gabriel García Ochoa (Monash) using what is known as ‘the international portal space’, a state-of-the-art teleconferencing system developed by the University of Warwick, United Kingdom and Monash University, Australia. This technology is fundamentally different to platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, the use of which became widespread during the COVID-19 global pandemic of 2020. Unlike Zoom, portal pedagogy is predicated on in-person learning that it combines with digital technology to allow students from different institutions to work together in real time (in our case, early morning in the United Kingdom and evening in Australia) and in real spaces on a shared syllabus. In the unit ‘Local and Global Shakespeares’, offered in 2016 and 2017, students on opposite sides of the globe were able to engage with Shakespeare, building their own and a shared knowledge of Shakespearean performance in local and global frameworks. Working alongside students from a different cultural context also forced students to reconsider their understanding of the ‘natural’ and ‘given’ in relation to Shakespeare, and thus, in relation to their understanding of culture more broadly. This chapter examines the application of portal pedagogy and other strategies that we employed to show how this unit sought to reimagine the possibilities of internationally collaborative Shakespearean teaching and learning.

Origin, Nature and Aims Partnerships and collaborations between universities are a common feature of the twenty-first-century higher education landscape. Many of these span vast distances – both geographically and culturally – and a few are technically antipodean, linking institutions on the other side of the world from each other. In 2012, Monash University and the University of 113

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Warwick formed the Monash Warwick Alliance, a formal collaboration that has led to 700 staff and student exchanges, over 500 collaborative and co-authored research papers, and – most relevantly for this collection – a range of experiments in globe-spanning pedagogy. In this section, we set out the pedagogical foundations and practical operations of one such experiment, which brought two Shakespeare classrooms on opposite sides of the world together as one learning space. ‘Local and Global Shakespeares’ was designed to provide an intensive learning experience for two groups of staff and students separated by over 10,000 miles (for the Warwick students), almost 17,000 kms (for the Monash students), the difference in terminology highlighting the multiple levels of cross-cultural encounter this module fostered. The module presents students with the opportunity to examine Shakespearean texts and productions in both ‘local’ and ‘global’ contexts, to share particular knowledges, and to deepen their understanding of local, regional, national and transnational approaches to the texts. Students are invited to interrogate the extent to which Shakespeare – the ‘global playwright’ in the words of the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival – can be indigenised, used as a platform for local community identity and as a tool to explore contemporary issues of politics, race, class, gender and culture. The module is open to students from across both universities. While the majority of students tend to come from English Literature and/or Theatre backgrounds, many have been drawn from other subjects and disciplines (e.g. Physics, History, Sociology, Global Studies, International Relations, Commerce). So far, the module has run for two iterations in 2016 and 2017. The module needs to meet the demands of each cohort’s academic timetable. In Australia, classes commence in the last three weeks of the academic year, extending into the revision period and the first week of exams. In the United Kingdom this coincides with the first five weeks of their academic year. Thus, there is a strong sense of disjunction from the outset, with one cohort at the very end of the academic year and one at the very beginning. This sense of difference is further felt in the seasonal changes – as classes progress, Monash students don flip-flops and t-shirts and come in eating icy-poles; while their Warwick counterparts wear heavy boots and coats and huddle over their coffee. The Warwick students particularly need the coffee, as their class starts at 8 a.m., which corresponds with 6 p.m. Melbourne time. Even as the portal invites awareness of ‘sameness’, its inhabitants are repeatedly reminded of distance, discordance, and ultimately, difference. When the Melbourne students arrive at

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the classroom, the Warwick students are experiencing a ‘time’ – Tuesday morning – that for them has been and gone. The creation of this module depended on three related ambitions or assumptions about pedagogy and collaboration: 1. that students’ ‘zones of proximal development’ (Vygotsky, 1978) will be stretched through contact with peers on the other side of the world, and that seeing Shakespeare through each other’s eyes will create both an appreciation for and critical distance from the authority and prestige of otherwise privileged local productions. 2. that students will quickly move beyond inherited or ‘commonsense’ platitudes about Shakespeare’s universalism – his vaunted and transcendent ability somehow to speak for all peoples and for all times – towards a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which people, in a variety of historical and cultural moments, have used Shakespeare to make their own meanings for their own local purposes. Shakespeare’s ‘universalism’ is to be actively interrogated not passively accepted, the starting point not the conclusion. 3. that students are not merely consumers but are also producers of Shakespeare. If established companies fail to create versions of King Lear or Twelfth Night that pulse with relevance or energy or ideas, it is the responsibility of the next generation to make the play speak urgently to contemporary concerns. Through this unit, students are encouraged to build responses to Shakespeare that are grounded in the ‘local’ and informed by the ‘global’.

Portal Pedagogy: An Outline In this section, we address the module’s deployment of ‘portal pedagogy’, the medium through which we took on the challenge of developing a learning environment capable of bridging, in a sense, time and space, the digital world and the real world. This technology was installed in 2012/13 as part of the alliance formed between the two universities (Monk et al., 2015: 67). The portal is a digital and physical space that can ‘transcend the distance between Melbourne and Warwick in order to allow students at both universities to collaborate as a single cohort, and to strengthen the Monash-Warwick learning community’ (Monk et al., 2015: 68). It consists of two classrooms (one at each campus), equipped with microphones built into the environment, HD screens at opposite ends of each room, and two ceiling cameras that can zoom in or out, pan or turn from one side of

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the room to the other. Students and teachers see their counterparts on the other side of the world projected onto the screens in the room. They can hear each other and interact as though they were sharing the same space. Even small details have been considered in order to make this experience as ‘seamless’ as possible, such as the pattern on the carpet, a wide circle that is mirrored in size and colour in both classrooms. Classes in Australia are taught in the evening (6–8 p.m. or 7–9 p.m.), which corresponds with morning in the United Kingdom (8–10 a.m. or 9–11 a.m.). One of the goals of the portal is to allow students to feel that they are in the same room, at the same time, challenging their preconceptions of something as apparently mundane and ‘normal’ as time and space. The portal offers a number of benefits compared to the types of remote learning (via e.g. Zoom and Microsoft Teams) that have become common during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most obviously, portal pedagogy is based on in-person learning and gathering groups of people in two or more physical spaces. Rather than being remotely situated and interacting solely through the medium of a screen (as with Zoom), students and teachers are in each other’s physical presence; the portal then provides a bridge between these communities. The Zoom experience is fundamentally ‘flat’ – a screen full of boxes, many of them effectively blank. Portal pedagogy is, by comparison, rounded, embodied and dynamic. It is automatically more engaging, requiring everyone to leave their houses and to gather in a dedicated learning space together. During the pandemic, we have become accustomed to talk of ‘blended’ or ‘hybrid learning’, generally meaning that some lessons will be online and some in-person. The portal offers a radically different spin on these buzzwords: it is a blend or hybrid of face-to-face and digital learning at the same time. Such a blending offers excellent opportunities for cross-institutional and cross-cultural teaching collaborations that are financially and environmentally sustainable. As García Ochoa, McDonald and Monk argue, at present, higher education (HE) institutions face the challenge of internationalisation, and of offering their students the possibility of becoming part of a global professional community (2016: 546). HE institutions tend to address this challenge by providing opportunities for travel in the form of student exchanges or short courses abroad (Kim, 2010). International, transcultural experiences of this nature can of course be tremendously positive, but they come with their own set of challenges, predominantly financial implications for universities of both staff and student short-term and long-term mobility, and the additional costs that students become obliged

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to carry if they wish to participate in what are increasingly constructed as essential parts of the HE experience (Monk et al., 2015: 65). Thus, students who cannot afford to travel for a variety of reasons are not able to engage in this nowadays crucial aspect of HE with ‘global’, ‘international’ and ‘transcultural’ connotations. In late 2020, with strict travel restrictions around the globe due to the COVID-19 pandemic student mobility had practically stopped. In this crisis we turned to Zoom, Skype and other technologies for online teaching. In light of this, elements of the portal model offered an alternative and a possible solution to these challenges through what is now more widely referred to as ‘portal pedagogy’ (Monk et al., 2015: 62). According to Monk et al., portal pedagogy, connects geographically distant students through technology and curriculum to create a student-centred community of inquiry neither bound by disciplines nor countries. Bringing together cross-disciplinary interaction, student-driven learning, and technological solutions to pedagogical and logistical challenges, Portal Pedagogy offers a hybrid model that seeks to go beyond the limitations of online delivery and student exchange programmes in order to offer a flexible, meaningful, and globalised learning experience. (Monk et al., 2015: 62)

Thus, portal pedagogy is able to bring together a group of students from different places and cultures, going beyond the traditional boundaries of the classroom and the university at large in what can be referred to as a ‘trans-space’ (Monk et al., 2015: 66). In the case of ‘Local and Global Shakespeares’, the particular approach and characteristics of portal pedagogy allowed the unit to explore ideas of intercultural competence, and the global and local as concepts, using the ‘global phenomenon’ of Shakespeare as a common thread through the unit. As noted above, the students who participated in the unit in both institutions came from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (Chemistry, Science, Theatre Studies, Linguistics, Politics, etc.). This made the course, and the very ‘trans-space’ of the portal, truly transdisciplinary in nature, as differences in opinion led to robust, productive discussions across different areas of study. The unit made use of both reflection and discussion in its assessment tasks to prompt students to engage with these ideas. One aspect of the unit that was particularly significant was that not only were the students engaging with the ideas of intercultural competence and the global at a theoretical level, but during each session, through the portal, they were experiencing those very ideas in a clear example of active learning, putting these ideas into practice by virtue of experiencing this new ‘trans-space’.

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Syllabus, Exercises, Assessment Through the portal space, students from each campus learned together through shared lectures, seminar discussions and practical activities. Here, we examine some key components of the syllabus and consider issues of assessment more generally. Fieldtrip/fieldwork We position a theatre visit roughly halfway through the module. In the first two years, Warwick students saw King Lear and Coriolanus at the RSC and Monash students saw a university production of Twelfth Night and various performances at the Pop-up Globe (which was resident in Melbourne’s Botanical Gardens in October 2017).1 We had always envisaged that the Melbourne students would also get to see the RSC productions via live cinema relays (indeed, Prescott bought tickets for the performance of King Lear that was beamed live to cinemas across the world on this assumption) but for whatever reason the productions have not found a distributor in the city. In both cases, the encounter with live performance is framed somewhat differently than it might normally be. While students are still encouraged to think about all the interpretive components of live performance (design, direction, individual actors, cruxes) their main responsibility is to report on the experience of the event to their antipodean peers. This involves not only an account of the production’s interpretive choices, but also – and crucially – the wider cultural-anthropological contexts of the encounter: what are the conventions of theatre going in Stratford-upon-Avon and Melbourne? How do audiences behave? How does the small-town or urban context affect the theatre-going experience? How does theatre architecture frame and inflect audience response? Does the cultural, historical and literary heritage of a place like Stratford-upon-Avon affect how one experiences a performance of Shakespeare? There is thus a challenge to students to become anthropologists of the local, to document all aspects of the experience that could not be gleaned from distance (e.g. in online trailers), including some of the ‘invisible givens’ of the events, such as programmes, food, foyer spaces and merchandising. The cultural self-consciousness of this encounter with live performance is further enhanced by prior exposure to a series of paratexts and productions that multiply and complicate the meanings of the set texts. In the case 1

On the Pop-up Globe, see Chapter 11.

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of King Lear, we were spoilt for choice. Choosing from the first half of the 2010s alone, we were able to consider: (1) The UK-based company Dash Arts’ current work-in-progress, an intercultural project that draws together a group of actors, each working in their own language, from a dozen countries across the globe; (2) An indigenous, First Nations 2013 production in Canada, set in the seventeenth century among an Algonquin tribe; (3) The eviscerating vision of the play found in the Belarus Free Theatre’s production (2012), a version that powerfully explored the themes of tyranny, land and homelessness, performed by a cast that is itself, for political reasons, homeless; (4) The Shadow King (2013), an adaptation by Melbourne-based company Malthouse Theatre that depicts the destructive effects of mining royalties on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families (the cast and crew of this production thanked their ‘Elders for guiding and advising on the correct public displaying of their culture and identity’); (5) Philippa Kelly’s The King and I, a fascinating memoir which, as Kelly writes, charts the ways that: ‘Australia and King Lear have become entwined in my reflections as a kind of furniture for the mind’, but is also the author’s take ‘on a tale of national identity, of a country’s wit, crises, and, at times, shame’ (2011: 1).2 While the last two examples had the most immediate purchase on one of the module’s central concerns with Shakespeare and Australia, all five examples complicated the ways in which both sets of students viewed both the play and, in this case, the work of the RSC. Creative Exercises The module is anchored in an understanding of the texts as engines of performance and is vitally concerned with how the plays have been, are and could be performed. We moved between examining specific performance works – including historical examples such as Granville Barker’s Twelfth Night and Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and innovative recent work such as Tim Supple’s Twelfth Night, the Habima National Theatre’s Merchant of Venice and Melbourne Malthouse’s The Shadow King – to considering broad themes of authenticity, appropriation and agency; of indigeneity, heritage and environment. Throughout, we 2

Dash Arts’ Lear: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/activities/projects-old/globalshakespeare/ links/kinglearworkshops/summary/. For a full and appreciative account of the Algonquin Lear, see: https://englishumf.wordpress.com/2012/06/. For an informed and sympathetic review of the Belarus Free Theatre’s Lear, see: https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/extra/ shakespeares-shadow-the-belarus-free-theatres-king-lear-at-the-globe-theatre/

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brought discussion back to the guiding questions of the unit: What does it mean to be global in this new age of immediate connectivity and unfettered access to information? How does this understanding of the global impact on Shakespeare? How does Shakespeare perform globally? We began the unit by testing familiarity and challenging hierarchies. At first, this was simply an exercise in word association; in small groups, we asked the students to offer ‘unfiltered’ responses to terms such as ‘Stratford-upon-Avon’, ‘Bell Shakespeare’, ‘Royal Shakespeare Company’ and ‘Monash Shakespeare Company’. Even a basic exercise like this proved very revealing. The notion that Bell Shakespeare existed on a lower plane of value, as an example of Shakespearean performance, than the RSC, and that the work of a university Shakespeare group would be on a lower plane again, proved much more entrenched and difficult to shift in the Australian cohorts than in the UK cohort, the latter being more open to challenging the authority of institutions such as the RSC, highlighting for students preconceived notions of a cultural centre versus periphery. Following the ‘trans-space’ notion of portal pedagogy (Monk et al. 2015: 66), the students were encouraged to perform a more dynamic engagement with the space (physical, conceptual, technological) than simply sitting and talking to one another. For example, we got them up and moving through the use of ‘mood diagonal’ tasks: in this exercise, we place two contradictory statements about Shakespeare in opposing corners of the room. In one corner, adapting Ben Jonson, is the statement ‘Shakespeare was not for an age but for all time’; in the opposite corner, adapting George Bernard Shaw, ‘Shakespeare is for an afternoon, not for all time.’ Each student then physically adopts a position on an imaginary line within the spectrum of opinion and is asked why they have taken that position. As they listen to their peers’ arguments, students are invited to shift their positions if they feel their mind is being changed. We also used other practical methods – performing in unison; call and response activities through the portal – to generate an embodied and collaborative energy in and across both spaces. Once they were comfortable with the space and interacting with their peers on the other side of the world, we formed groups with members from each cohort and asked them to create short performances in response to one of the set texts. One of the most memorable of the resulting works staged one of the lovers’ scenes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a performer on either side of the portal, furiously texting each other on their mobile phones. They turned off the microphone so we could only hear the performer on our side – but we could see what was happening in Warwick/Monash, and when we saw that performer press send on her mobile and then heard the loud ping

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on the phone at our end, it produced an audible frisson in the audience – we had seen that message transmitted from a UK morning to a Melbourne evening and then, even more satisfyingly, watched as the Monash performer took up that offer and batted it back over the other side. Alongside the fun, the unit staged a series of affective encounters – of moments of familiarity, of shared recognition and of unfamiliarity, an awareness of difference. A nice example of this was the gasps of the Warwick students at discovering that over half the Monash cohort had visited Stratford, which they considered a rather mundane little town down the road, while none of the UK students had been to Melbourne. Or when the Warwick students were asked if they knew what ‘Bell Shakespeare’ was and we (in Australia) were met with complete silence – a silence that amazed the Monash group and provoked them to see anew something they considered familiar and natural. These encounters fostered a deeper kind of intercultural competence. It gave students the opportunity to become aware of their cultural assumptions and shift their understanding from a binary, centre–periphery relationship between antipodean cultures, to a nuanced, much more complex spectrum of cultural relativity. As one Warwick student said in their evaluation of the module: ‘Having the seminars with the Monash students was incredible. I feel like both groups were coming from different places so it was really useful to share ideas. It’s one thing for a lecturer [in the UK] to say “in Australia, Shakespeare is seen like this” and completely another to have an Australian student say “this is what Shakespeare is”’ (Warwick student feedback). Assessment The assessment for the module is consistent across the two campuses and places an emphasis on creativity and self-reflection as well as newly acquired subject knowledge. It is as follows: • 30 per cent student-devised creative project (e.g. 5–10 minute sitespecific adaptation, filmed); • 50 per cent reflective essay (reflecting on module work, developing themes touched on in class plus identifying and evaluating a specific individual contribution to a student-devised creative project) (2500 words); and • 20 per cent one in-class/-term assignment (e.g. presentation, podcast). Having developed an informed critique of the work of ‘local’ Shakespeare companies and been introduced to a range of other productions (historic

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and contemporary), students then devise their own creative responses to the set texts, working within their respective cohorts. These responses might take the form of a short film or the pitch for a conceptual production or a sample scene from an adaptation. They are required to address some of the module’s core preoccupations: How might Shakespeare’s play-texts be made to speak differently for ‘local’ audiences, whether the location is Melbourne or the English midlands, in the 2010s? How might the texts be interpreted differently in order more fully to represent current concerns or regional/civic identity? In the first two years of the module, we have had a wide range of projects. Two of the best (viewable on the module webpage) reimagine the opening scene of Lear, one as a contest between different British theatre directors for Shakespeare’s approval, one as a suburban family (al fresco) Christmas dinner (this was both a witty pastiche of the long-running Melbourne-based soap opera Neighbours and a smart satire on British stereotypes of Australian-ness). One of the more intriguing creative projects from 2017 was a cycle of folk songs inspired by Coriolanus and designed to be inserted into a notional full production of the play. In the final session before Christmas, the student concerned taught everyone – on both sides of the portal – one of the folk songs, a satirical take on the quasi-incestuous feelings Volumnia has for her son (these were scurrilously linked to some of the then US President’s off-colour comments about his own daughter). The student also taught us a simple set of Morris-like line-dancing steps to perform as we sang the song. In a tremendous finale to the module, both groups aligned – apparently in one straight line – and performed the satirical ditty. We were reminded of Thomas Beecham’s wise instruction to ‘Try everything once except Morris dancing and incest’ – somehow, in this session, we’d safely sampled both. It was entirely fitting that the module ended with the performance of a new work inspired by English folk music but completed only in this moment of trans-antipodean alignment.

Challenges During the first two years that the unit was taught, the facilitators identified two main challenges to teaching Shakespeare collaboratively through the portal: (1) the technical considerations of the portal itself and (2) working intensively with two different student cohorts for a short period of time.

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Technical Considerations of the Portal Portal pedagogy is a magnificent educational tool. It allows us to connect different student cohorts across time and space, enabling new types of teaching, learning and collaborating in a classroom environment that would otherwise be impossible. Unfortunately, an unsurpassable limitation of this new style of teaching is its absolute dependence on technology. When the portal works, the teaching and learning experiences are phenomenal; however, unforeseen technical issues can be jarring at best, or bring the international, collaborative element of the class (which makes it so unique), to an abrupt end. We were privileged on both sides of the portal to have technical staff on call who could assist us with any technical difficulties. If a microphone stopped working or one of our screens froze, we were able to have the issue fixed within minutes, if not seconds. This poses a number of considerations for other institutions wishing to adopt portal pedagogy, such as technical staff allocation, availability and training. Warwick and Monash colleagues who have used the portal before in previous modules (including one of the authors) have not had the same fortune, and were forced to either improvise the continuation of a class when communications were down, or always have a Plan B, in anticipation of technical problems. Additionally, there were limitations to what technology could easily achieve in 2016 and 2017 (when we first ran the module). Even state­of-the-art teleconferencing technology such as the one used for the portal can at best conjure the illusion of a shared space, but not replicate it. Consequently, simple classroom activities posed unforeseen challenges. Small-group discussions proved difficult given that both rooms are wired with sensitive ambient microphones, which transformed even the most deliberately hushed conversations into a disruptive cacophony that could be heard by everyone (the solution was simple: turn off the microphones during such discussions). Similarly, work in small groups across the portal often proved to be too complicated. Even though we had envisioned the possibility that during class time students could collaborate in small groups formed by members of both Warwick and Monash, the logistics involved in getting each other’s details to communicate across parallel platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp or even traditional email, were too complex. At the present time of writing (2021), such problems could of course be easily addressed with the

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use of Zoom or Microsoft Teams break-out rooms, chat platforms and screen-share functionality. We have a number of strategies that could help us address these issues in future iterations of the module, both related to preliminary work with the students before the beginning of the teaching period. The first would be to pair the students across both cohorts as digital pen pals, who could be in touch with each other for a week or two before class, thus resolving the logistical problems mentioned above. The second would involve an introductory session with all students. The session would provide a detailed explanation of the technical limitations and possibilities of the portal, and the importance of working within those parameters in order to ensure a smooth class experience. Teaching Intensively The module was taught over a period of five weeks, which included eight portal sessions that took place on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with one specifically dedicated to the end-of-semester performances; one week of rehearsals, during which students worked on their final performance projects; and one or two performance visits, depending on what was available at the time. Working within such a short time frame poses certain challenges: there were times, for example, when the RSC would be staging a play in Stratford-upon-Avon that the Warwick cohort could attend, but there would be no equivalent in Melbourne for the Monash students to go to, or vice versa. Had the module taken place over an entire semester, or even a few more weeks, it may have been easier to find performances that the students could attend. Our ambitious reading list also proved problematic. We tried to compress a semester’s reading into three weeks of teaching. Even though the module spans five weeks, Week Four is dedicated to rehearsals for the students’ final performance project, which takes place on Week Five. Thus, activities and discussions based on the semester’s readings take place during Weeks One to Three. Fortunately, most students on both sides of the portal were assiduous and dedicated, and came to each class having read most of the prescribed texts for the session. However, even when students read their texts, given the volume of the material involved, these readings sometimes turned out to be somewhat superficial. It appears that there was not enough pre-class time for students to properly digest the complexity of an article or an essay, which resulted in a different type of dynamic for class discussions.

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Conclusion In discussions with students in the lead-up to teaching, their motivations for taking the unit centred on wanting a greater engagement with Shakespearean texts and performance and, more cynically, a desire to knock over the equivalent of a semester-length unit in five weeks. Few, if any, of the students had prior experience with the portal format or how a unit being co-taught with a university on the other side of the world would work in practice. The unit did consolidate and extend students’ understanding of Shakespeare, especially in terms of this author’s global reach, however the aspects of the unit that students found most valuable were those that were less expected, including how much fun they found the classes and how meaningful the encounter with students from another culture proved to be. In formal feedback on the module, student evaluations emphasised the element of play that occurred in class – they repeatedly referred to the unit as fun: The module was the best thing I could have taken this year. It was fun, thoughtful and definitely impacted the way I now view Shakespeare. Linking with my degree in regard to globalization and interconnectedness, it was a new perspective and way to deepen my understanding and knowledge. This module, above all else, was just fun, something that can be really underrated. (Warwick student feedback)

What the students found ‘fun’ were the group activities; the specific element that made these exercises ‘fun’ was embodying Shakespeare’s words through the portal – responding to bodies and voices that were – simultaneously – in a shared space and time, and in a completely different space and time: picking up cues, mirroring movements, creating performance. While it is becoming more common for universities to invest in the kind of technology that forms the basis of the Warwick–Monash portal space, such spaces generally foster a revealing and engaging but largely passive encounter based on observation and dialogue. In our unit, the portal became a gateway to a deeper, more affective experience through a shared, embodied encounter with Shakespearean performance. The sense of shared experimentation that came with ‘playing through the portal’, of testing what the technology could support and inhibit, united the students and enhanced their sense of connection in ways we had not anticipated. They also brought contemporary concerns and areas of interest that shifted our approach to the texts. In its first iteration in October 2016, the aftermath of the Brexit referendum (about which the

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Australian students avidly quizzed their UK counterparts) and the looming US presidential election brought issues of land rights, nationalism, refugee experience and censorship to the fore of our readings of Twelfth Night and King Lear. It is surprising in retrospect that the issue of climate change did not emerge in conversations; in 2021, the topic would be unavoidable – Australian students especially have a lived experience of the climate emergency that would be highly beneficial for British students to hear. Ultimately, by remaining flexible to the possibilities of the technology and allowing the curriculum to shift in response to contemporary concerns and what each cohort wanted to learn about the other, ‘Local and Global Shakespeares’ fostered a collaborative ethos and a uniquely affective and playful form of intercultural competence.

References García Ochoa, Gabriel García, Sarah McDonald, and Nicholas Monk, 2016. ‘Embedding Cultural Literacy in Higher Education’, Intercultural Education 27:6, 546–59. Kelly, Philippa, 2011. The King and I (London: Continuum International Publishing). Kim, Terri, 2010. ‘Transnational Academic Mobility, Knowledge and Identity Capital’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 31.5, 577–91. Monk, Nicholas, Sarah McDonald, Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou, and Mia Lindgren, 2015. ‘Portal Pedagogy: From Interdisciplinarity and Internationalization to Transdisciplinarity and Transnationalization’, London Review of Education 13.3, 62–78. Vygotsky, Lev, 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Warwick student feedback, 2016. University of Warwick module evaluation, ‘Local & Global Shakespeares IL021’.

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chapter 8

Shakespeare In and Out of Prison

A Collaboration between the World Shakespeare Project and Shakespeare Central Sheila T. Cavanagh and Steve Rowland

The World Shakespeare Project (WSP), directed by Sheila T. Cavanagh at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and Shakespeare Central (SC), created and led by Steve Rowland in Seattle, Washington, collaborate together regularly. The WSP uses site visits and videoconferencing to link diverse students, teachers and arts practitioners in Shakespearean-based conversations and performance exercises across many geographic, socioeconomic, and other divides. SC seeks to facilitate Shakespearean pedagogy using Shakespeare media delivered to classrooms via the internet, or in person in settings like prisons, to further its tenets that ‘Shakespeare is for everyone’ and that ‘Shakespeare changes lives.’ The two projects join forces often, particularly through their shared commitment to Shakespeare in prison education and to global Shakespeare. Since 2013, they have coordinated schedules and assignments in order to enable written Shakespearean exchanges between undergraduates at Emory and incarcerated students in Washington State.1 Many of the inmates are serving sentences of life without parole, so they have been able to interact with multiple classes at Emory. Relatively few of the Emory students have any personal experience with the prison industrial complex, but they learn about Shakespeare in Prison initiatives through multiple avenues, including viewing Shakespeare Behind Bars or SBB (a documentary about Curt Tofteland’s programme in Kentucky), Mickey B (Tom Magill’s Northern Irish Prison Macbeth) and scenes from Steve Rowland’s documentary Time Out of Joint: Prison Reflections on Shakespeare (filmed in 2013 at Woodbourne Correctional Facility in New York). A number of relevant visitors also come to the Emory class in person or through videoconferencing, including: Rowland; Tofteland and Sammie Byron from SBB; Magill from Belfast; Sarah Higinbotham and Bill Taft 1

For more on prison Shakespeare, see Chapter 19.

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from Common Good Atlanta; and Scott Jackson from the Shakespeare in Prison Network and Shakespeare at Notre Dame. We are not currently able to include the incarcerated Shakespeareans in videoconferencing sessions, but the students in each location write and respond to each other’s essays and Cavanagh visits the prison class in person as often as possible. Each group of students reports that significant engagement and learning result from these ongoing exchanges of essays. Everyone involved uses first names only in their writing, with specific subsets of students at each institution being partnered together so that there is an opportunity for continuing dialogues. Since there are innumerable privacy and intellectual property issues involving both student populations, this chapter will also identify writers solely by their first names, with pseudonyms assigned for any participants needing additional camouflage. Students with distinctive names, for instance, will have their identities shielded. Prison officials also require protocols to protect their participants, and to ensure that communications sent outside the prison are safe for all parties, so we are not including the name of the correctional facility here. Determining which practices correspond with the requirements of such a distinctive student environment remains one of the most important, but delicate tasks associated with this collaboration. Prison rules, for example, are often not easy to intuit and unusual requests may trigger suspicion. In this environment, for instance, Rowland is sometimes allowed to show videos of Shakespeare plays, but occasionally is told that only audio is allowed, even if the audio is from the same production. Recently, restrictions on R-rated films were imposed, although the prisoners regularly watch R-rated films on TV. While the logic behind such restrictions may not be readily apparent, we are grateful for any cooperation and access, and therefore our ongoing work necessitates adherence to whatever constraints prison officials choose to institute. Addressing this issue, Tofteland suggests that corrections officers often believe that ‘because inmates are in prison for breaking laws, there should be even more rules to learn and obey inside’ (Tofteland, 2011: 218). While he notes that artists often ‘are driven to break the rules’, he offers counsel that concurs with WSP/SC standard practices: Never forget that, as an artist running an outside program, you are a guest in the correctional institution. You and your program must support the institution and live within its world. Do not interpret the correctional institution’s rules and regulations as you see them through your eyes, but rather ask the appropriate correctional staff person to be the interpreter. (­Tofteland, 2011: 218)

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Tofteland’s admonitions here ring true for us. We always adhere to institutional requests whether or not we agree with them. We understand that the impetus for many rules is to ensure the safety of the prisoners, the corrections officers and the visiting teachers. Our goal is to expand educational opportunities for both groups of students, not to buck a system outside our purview. We see our work integrated with, and supportive of, prison life and of the needs of our university students. Emory is supportive of this collaboration and there have been no concerns raised there, since student names are redacted in correspondence. One of the more challenging aspects of course planning, however, centres around institutional expectations for these two groups of students. The recent documentary College Behind Bars highlights a Bard College prison education programme that offers incarcerated students the opportunity to receive degrees. Several people in the film emphasise that the prisoners are held to the same academic standards as those in place at the Bard campus. The WSP/SC partnership operates differently, however. Rowland’s class is named ‘Shakespeare and Me’, while the Emory course is ‘Shakespeare in Text and Performance’. The class at Emory attracts well-prepared students who are accustomed to fulfilling typical academic requirements. Some of the prison students have extensive educational backgrounds; others do not. Rowland initially devised ‘Shakespeare and Me’ to convey the idea to these incarcerated students that Shakespeare can be accessible to all people and to encourage them to use drama as a means to interrogate their own lives in conversation with the characters and issues in the plays. It is also important to meet the challenge of working with students at different levels. While the prison offers some credit-bearing courses, Rowland prefers this one to be ‘non-credit’. There are no prerequisites. Everyone is welcome. In an interesting twist, Cavanagh and Rowland have observed that the less academically prepared prisoners often understand the plays deeply and that both parties learn powerfully through the exchanges. Shakespeare’s England was a different place to our contemporary society. Violence and close fighting with swords and daggers were commonplace. We have observed that many prisoners, even those without prior Shakespeare reading, are well equipped to understand the plays because of their familiarity with the kind of violence often found in the drama. They bring insights missed by those with no experience of the psychic pain of living in violent communities, like ghettos and prisons. Accordingly, many rich conversations ensue when these men discuss intersections between their own experiences and the plays. In addition, when the prison students see parallels between their lives and the pressures on Shakespeare’s characters, their comprehension of the plays soars.

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Emory students, however, typically have had little practice integrating personal narratives into their academic endeavours. They frequently retreat into a mode of writing that reveals little of themselves as they predominantly wish to sound intelligent (and receive good grades). These shared essays help them explore new kinds of combined analytical and personally reflective writing, as this excerpt on 1 Henry IV from Eve illustrates: When I was told that my father was involved in an affair, it pained me so much that I wished I were born to a different dad. The King has the same sentiment when he laments, ‘Yea, there thou mak’st me sad, and mak’st me sin / In envy that my Lord Northumberland / Should be the father to so blest a son’ (Shakespeare, 1996: 1.1.77–9). My dad wasn’t the same person to me anymore, and it was as if I was living with a stranger. King Henry similarly declares, ‘And art almost an alien to the hearts / Of all the court and princes of my blood’ (Shakespeare, 1996: 3.2.34–5).

Patricia similarly finds parallels between her experience and Prince Hal’s: Both Hal and I share the burden of wanting to please our fathers while forging our own paths into the future. Conversation between parent and child is constructed through pre-established roles, often barring real and honest discussion of difficult subjects. Had Henry IV spoken to his son frankly, he might have understood Hal’s preparations for the future, saving them both much grief. Had my father listened to my reservations about my future, he might have understood my reservations about modern medicine and my place in it.

In contrast to these students who are beginning to expand the range of their formal essays, their incarcerated partners occasionally hesitate about the comparative artificiality of academic writing. On one hand they want to learn formal writing techniques, but they also want to gain more insight into the personality and thinking of the undergraduates than this kind of writing often provides. Furthermore, the prisoners need reassurance that their own writing style is appropriate in a higher educational environment. Each group, therefore, needs to be encouraged to experiment with new ways of engaging with this literary material and with each other. Rowland and Cavanagh believe strongly that the deepest learning occurs when both ‘heart’ and ‘mind’ are engaged, but a significant divide often occurs between these two distinctive approaches. Our goal is to support all of these students as they learn to integrate their own life experiences with their textual analysis. While we are often successful, we still wish to create stronger methods for combining cognitive and affective models of learning. Once again, our practices align with principles Tofteland brings to SBB:

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Our belief is that if you educate the human mind without educating the human heart, you have educated only half the human being. Educating the heart opens the soul for transformation and allows the human being to step away from the shadow of negative behavior into the light of positive behavior. (Tofteland, 2011: 216–17)

The WSP/SC collaboration endeavours to bring all of our students’ hearts and minds into their interactions with each other and with Shakespeare’s texts. Our efforts to engage undergraduate and incarcerated students together resemble some other initiatives and differ significantly from others, ­particularly since our pedagogy is based textually rather than performatively, unlike many of our Shakespeare in Prison counterparts. In addition, many germane prison initiatives do not incorporate Shakespeare. A US initiative called ‘InsideOut’, for example, does not include Shakespeare, but its Mission Statement corresponds with the philosophies underpinning our collaboration: Education in which we are able to encounter each other, especially across profound social barriers, is transformative and allows problems to be approached in new and different ways. Inside-Out’s mission is to create opportunities for people inside and outside of prison to have transformative learning experiences that emphasize collaboration and dialogue and that invite them to take leadership in addressing crime, justice, and other issues of social concern. (Inside-Out)

Many valuable prison programmes focus on topics and goals far distinct from Shakespearean drama and achieve great success. Still, the WSP/SC collaboration remains deeply rooted in Shakespeare because it lends itself so readily to both academic and personal engagement. Within this particular environment, pedagogical differences appear to matter less than one might expect. Australian Shakespeare in Prison practitioner and academic Rob Pensalfini suggests, for instance, that even though programmes bringing Shakespeare to incarcerated populations vary widely in methodologies, they end up with similar results: It appears, therefore, that Prison Shakespeare projects, regardless of their articulated justification, and to a large extent regardless of the exact nature of the process, produce similar outcomes. The one thing that all of these projects seem to encourage is reflection – whether that be direct personal reflection or reflection through the experience of a character. Unlike formally assessed rehabilitative courses, that reflection is not externally assessed for reward, but finds its rewards in better performance, a deeper appreciation of the text, and/or understanding of people, possibly including oneself. (Pensalfini, 2016: 173)

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One of the biggest challenges to teaching incarcerated students is to find a way to address trauma, which is a central theme in the lives of most prisoners. Stories of childhoods often include abusive parents, broken families, awful education, rough neighbourhoods and gang violence, drug abuse, peer pressure and lack of self-esteem, often exacerbated by the trauma of crimes committed. As prisoners come to accept the reality of what they have done, they realise how many lives may have been shattered. This emerging consciousness is agonising to deal with, and often creates depression in the prisoners. And there is even more trauma in the daily life of prison: violence, threats, abusive guards, solitary confinement, gang activity, racial hatred and more. We believe that an approach to Shakespeare that allows prisoners to see themselves in the stories and characters can be powerful and cathartic. This may seem to be at odds with more traditional academic teaching of Shakespeare, which often asks students to be purposely impersonal, but our results suggest that allowing prisoners to look at their own lives has multiple benefits. First of all, it allows them to see Shakespeare as ‘possible’. Many of our incoming prison students have deep fears that Shakespeare is too advanced for them. But after getting acquainted with stories of betrayal, lying, power manipulation, manipulation in romance, issues of honour, manhood and more, prisoners see that ‘I can get this!’ Then, as the plays are read, the understanding becomes bidirectional. The prisoners can see their own lives reflected in the deeds of Macbeth, Hamlet, Leontes or Lear and they develop a better understanding of their life paths and mistakes – seeing ways out of their traumatic cycles. Simultaneously, they appreciate their own intelligence and begin to increase their self-esteem. As the teaching and learning advance, prison students are able to write papers that serve both purposes, and are often deeply insightful – and moving. The Emory students experience similar gains, aligning with Michael Baker’s, Jerry Andriessen’s and Sanna Järvetä’s descriptions of such ‘collective activity’: the task they are trying to achieve and what is to be learned (the cognitive dimension), how they relate to each other (the socio-relational dimension) and what they feel about that (the affective dimension). (2013: 2)

This particular WSP/SC collaboration began after Rowland partnered with Dominic Dromgoole, then Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, during the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival, which presented thirtyseven of Shakespeare’s plays in thirty-seven languages. Rowland saw thirtysix of the productions and interviewed the directors and one key actor of

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each play. Consequently, with Dromgoole’s support, he was able to access the filmed versions of these performances even before they were made publicly available, and received clearance to show them to his incarcerated students. Wishing to reflect the ethnic mix of many US prison populations, Rowland decided to include three distinctive Globe to Globe productions in his prison classes: The Renegade Theatre’s Yoruban language Winter’s Tale from Nigeria; the Q Brothers’ hip-hop language Othello: The Remix; and the National Theatre of Mexico’s Spanish language 1 Henry IV. Both the incarcerated and the Emory students watched each production and exchanged essays containing their responses to them. They also crafted further reactions to those writings, including the Emory students’ analysis of Mickey B, which the incarcerated Shakespeareans sadly were unable to see. As the excerpts presented below demonstrate, the prison students model ways to balance personal responses to the plays with textual analysis after reading the plays carefully and insightfully. The Emory students report appreciation for the responses they receive and eagerly await further correspondence. Steve S., for example, a thoughtful and engaged student who is serving a sentence of ‘life without’ (life without the possibility of parole) and has corresponded with numerous Emory cohorts, wrote several letters to Emory students who had read 1 Henry IV and watched Hugo Arrevillaga Serrano’s Globe to Globe production. In each carefully constructed missive, Steve mentions ‘that I have read your essay several times’ before offering his analysis. In one, he offers feedback to Anne: You begin your essay with an unequivocal statement: ‘throughout my life I have been incredibly fortunate. I’ve been blessed with a comfortable upbringing and many people who love and care about me’.2

Steve acknowledges Anne’s words here, but encourages her to push her analysis further: I find, as I read your essay, that you spend considerably more time in conveying the dynamic you experienced within your own life, the sometimes bitter dualistic nature of trying to become who you want to be and pleasing those that mean the most to you, than you do on conveying that delineated in Henry IV.

Throughout his writing, Steve consistently quotes Anne’s work and offers citations from Shakespeare’s play. His self-consciousness about writing to highly educated students who write in a more academic style causes him 2

All student quotes come from essays exchanged between Emory University undergraduates and inmates of the Washington State Department of Corrections.

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to frequently hesitate about offering his perspectives. ‘I apologize again for my unsolicited opinion’, he writes, but repeatedly asks challenging questions and demonstrates that he takes this exchange extremely seriously. In writing to Linda, for example, he quotes extensively from her essay and from 1 Henry IV before bringing his perspective into the discussion: In Act II, Scene II Prince Henry begins to display some of his waning displeasure with his father in his acting out of an audience between he and his father and Falstaff (though his interaction also displays his growing concern regarding Falstaff’s character) and a growing understanding of his father’s concerns. He also addresses his relationship with his own father, recognizing ‘at my current age there are barbs that still sting, even now’, but that ‘25 years removed from the most brutal and unacceptable day of my life, my father still claims me’.

Steve, like many of the incarcerated Shakespeareans, has been in prison longer than the Emory students have been alive, something that the undergraduates frequently find humbling. David, also serving ‘life without’, is a devoted Shakespearean and arrives at class always with at least two books. One is his cherished copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare which is dog-eared, flagged and copiously annotated. He takes an equally thoughtful, but less-personal, approach in his writings to the Emory students. While addressing John about Macbeth, for example, he remarks: I like your take on the witches’ prophecy as well. While I don’t fully agree I think you cite the language well, and use it to support your ideas. I believe the witches prompt him, and that he falls easy prey to their suggestions. While at the same time, we the audience are aware of Macbeth’s own debate within himself: ‘If good, why do I yield to that suggestion, Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair, And make my seated heart knock at my ribs’ (A:1, S:3, L:147). This shows, I think strong evidence towards corruption, and ambition, not rage. But you even have an answer for this.

John also received feedback from one of the younger incarcerated Shakespeareans, who similarly focused on the Emory student’s discussion of rage, this time relating it to the prison context: The nature of rage and outrage are subjects that are familiar to us who populate prison. For even the most docile among us are still forced to adapt or be devoured. The lens with which you look at Macbeth and Mickey B is a unique one. More so when you take into account that it was a harsh time and harsh men were the ones who survived. Often stepping over the fallen to reach for their dreams. But what makes your decision a good one in my opinion is that you choose to tie it in with honor. Rage by its very nature is not a good

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thing, even should you put words to quantify it. Such as Righteous Rage or even Justifiable Rage, no matter how one puts it, it is still rage.

In another essay, an inmate named Jerry shares his own experiences, including his remorse, over meeting ‘my own Falstaff: an obese self-­ satisfied waste of space’: Falstaff (in 1.2.136–8) is attempting to convince Prince Hal that armed robbery is not only an indicator of manhood but a sign of true worthiness to the throne, all toward his own lazy ends. I have been on the receiving end of such sales pitches (criminal solicitations) and there is a tangible sense of festering disgust at knowing that the pitchman thinks so little of you that he would attempt to convince you to throw your future away for what is only a short-term gain … This is what Falstaff is doing.

These kinds of exchange, which make evident how closely emotions and actions in prison, on the street, and elsewhere mirror those under discussion in the drama, allow the participants to share their inner response to the plays more clearly than conventional academic writing tends to facilitate. They also demonstrate the insight, brilliance and care that the prison students bring to their thinking and writing. Their ability to feel comfortable writing to others and being able to address important issues honestly illustrates why prison/undergraduate collaborations can be so beneficial for everyone involved. Undergraduate students are often surprised to find deep intelligence and clear writing coming from prisoners, a population that contemporary media often portrays as one of ignorant and unfeeling people. The undergraduates are also surprised to learn that prisoners, having lived complex lives created with brilliant camouflage of truth and frequent violence, are able to relate to Shakespeare’s characters in profound ways. Living for many years in a harsh, ruled environment, in which their humanity is purposefully denied, having an exchange with a student colleague and being allowed a seat at the table of college learning is a true joy. In these exchanges the prisoners relish being ‘seen’ as human beings, and considered as people with ideas and insights about life and literature that are worth sharing. Shakespeare becomes a powerful tool in this educational process because the plays so beautifully investigate and articulate the messy and explosive aspects of human conflict. Michael Balfour makes a related observation in the introduction to Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice, where he notes the incompatibility between many prison structures and the kind of self-reflective work we espouse:

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S.T. Cavanagh and S. Rowland In the context of prison, this humanizing process will never be a fundamental priority. It exists in contradiction to the administrative task of the institution. Prison is in the business of containment, observation, punishment, categorization, restriction separation, and on occasion rehabilitation. And even the rehabilitation is generally framed within the paradigm of the useful (re-socialisation into a life full of purpose). So prison theatre, theatre in prison, is a term in eternal contradiction with itself. A living, breathing, noisy, chaotic, confusing, and compelling paradox. (Balfour, 2004: 2–3)

While our written exchanges are not noisy, the WSP/SC project accords with Balfour’s premise: prison (and higher education, we would suggest) are largely conceived from perspectives that inhibit the kind of learning prison programmes and prison/university partnerships promote. Notably, Niels Herold, in his book focused on Shakespeare behind bars, argues that Shakespearean drama is particularly suited for such endeavours that interweave education with personal growth: America is faced with a crisis of mass incarceration that exacerbates rather than solves our social problems ... The emergence of Prison Creative Arts Practitioners and Programs have changed the way we think about inmate rehabilitation and institutional reform ... The core thesis of this book is that transforming inmates through Shakespeare performance depends not only on the therapizing effects of a theatrical process, but upon a post-­ Reformational English theology embedded in the play-texts themselves. (Herold, 2014: 1)

Herold makes a detailed case for his belief that the plays themselves contain material that is particularly well-suited for transformational work. While not everyone involved in these programmes knows early modern theology well enough to assess Herold’s premise, Pensalfini also explores the question of ‘What’s So Special About Shakespeare?’, and concludes: The particular benefits that can arise from Prison Shakespeare, as opposed to other prison theatre programmes, stem principally from two sources. First, though perhaps more controversially, Shakespeare’s text provides certain opportunities for engagement and self-exploration that may not be found as readily in other works, or in devised works. Second, and not to be underestimated, the prestige and/or notoriety of Shakespeare seems to lend an added weight to the outcomes of the project, as well as an increased interest from media and the public. (Pensalfini, 2016: 225)

Both Pensalfini’s and Herold’s descriptions about the efficacy of Shakespeare in Prison endeavours correlate with the benefits we find among all of our students.

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The WSP/SC partnership works well because Rowland and Cavanagh share many pedagogical goals and neither places any proprietary demands upon the students or the curriculum. The common aims revolve around a way to engage all students in the works of Shakespeare by allowing them to learn more about themselves as they study the plays. We both believe that students understand the plays better and look forward to reading more Shakespeare when they can draw direct parallels from their own lives to the complex predicaments and hard decisions faced by Shakespeare’s people. We are both passionate about Shakespeare, education, prison reform and the ways collaborative undertakings bring together widely divergent groups. The problems we encounter tend to arise from the divergent structural demands between the two environments. Emory students expect a syllabus that maps out specific dates for assignments. Rowland is committed to serving all interested students, regardless of their educational background. Therefore, he cannot accurately access the needs and abilities of his students until the semester is already underway. Some of the prisoners are well able to read entire Shakespeare plays, while others need enough guidance that the schedules of the two groups can not readily coincide. Cavanagh can expect a level of prior preparation from her undergraduates that the inmates may or may not share. Weather and other unanticipated happenstances can throw things off considerably. Even if hurricanes or ice storms preclude in-person meetings, Atlanta students still have the opportunity to participate in class electronically. Prison classes, in contrast, can be irretrievably cancelled by weather or institutional lockdowns. We have also learned to be careful about the ways we introduce the students to each other. The one time that we failed to orchestrate this properly and did not create a supportive context, the inmates found the Emory students’ analytical writing impossibly daunting and made them embarrassed about sharing any written work, fearing they would be deemed unintelligent and not up to the task. Other glitches occasionally occur when students have friends or families who work in the criminal justice system or who have been direct or indirect victims or perpetrators of violent crime. So far, we have been able to address such issues thoughtfully and respectfully when they have emerged, but we need to remain cognisant that people’s past lives and experiences invariably enter our classrooms and colour our students’ abilities to function well within this collaboration. The WSP/SC partnership takes many forms, but this Shakespeare in Prison project continues to teach us about ways to integrate personal experiences with academic undertakings. Several Emory students have become involved in prison education programmes after they completed this class

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and increasing numbers of students enrol because they have already developed a passion for social justice within higher education. Some of the structural challenges we face are threatening to become insurmountable, but we are committed to continuing this collaboration to the best of our collective abilities. In the words Andy wrote to one Emory student: ‘We don’t know who we are as people until we are connected to someone else, we only know that being with them makes us better human beings.’ The connections formed through this partnership remain strong and valuable. Shared explorations of Shakespeare appear to increase learning for everyone involved.

References Baker, Michael, Jerry Andriessen, and Sanna Järvelä, 2013. Affective Learning Together: Social and Emotional Dimensions of Collaborative Learning (London: Routledge). Balfour, Michael (ed.), 2004. Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice (Portland, OR: Intellect Books). Herold, Niels, 2014. Prison Shakespeare and the Purpose of Performance: Repentance Rituals and the Early Modern (London: Palgrave Pivot). Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. www.insideoutcenter.org. Magill, Tom (dir.), 2007. Mickey B (Belfast: ESC Films). Novick, Lynn (dir.), 2019. College Behind Bars (PBS). Oguntoken, Wole, 2012. The Winter’s Tale. Renegade Theatre Company, Nigeria. Pensalfini, Rob, 2016. Prison Shakespeare: For These Deep Shames and Great Indignities (London: Palgrave). Q Brothers (perf. and dir.), 2012. Othello Remix. Rogerson, Hank (dir.), 2005. Shakespeare Behind Bars (Philomath Films). Roland, Steven (dir.), in progress. Time Out of Joint. Serrano, Hugo Arrevilaga, 2012. 1 Henry IV (National Theatre of Mexico). Shakespeare, William, 1996. The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans (New York: Houghton Mifflin). Tofteland, Curt, 2011. ‘Keeper of the Keys’, in Jonathan Shailor (ed.), Performing New Lives: Prison Theatre (London: Jessica Kingsley), 213–30.

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Part III

Public Reimaginings

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Introduction Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen and Jacqueline Manuel

The chapters in this section explore Shakespearean cultural endeavours in which publics, communities and local groups from around the world participate in multifaceted learning experiences. From the first Shakespeare play performed entirely in an Australian Aboriginal language to international theatrical collaborations in Brazil, to New Zealand’s transformative Pop-up Globe and an urban regeneration project in northern England, these projects introduce Shakespeare to new audiences and locate Shakespeare education in proximity to sociocultural challenges. Increasingly, universities are seeking to ‘engage with communities ­outside of the classroom’ (Todd, 2016), and theatrical groups have always worked this way. These projects are thoroughly committed to community and this is what makes them transformative for local audiences and regions. Elspeth Graham (Chapter 12) notes that ‘[w]hile appeals to community by dominant social groups and officials may constitute bad faith, a small town’s self-identification as a community may function rather differently’ (p. 195). These chapters show how broad and complex the idea of Shakespeare education is when it arises from cultural projects that highly value communities. Chapter 9 explores how ‘rendering Shakespearean works in the Noongar language, from a Noongar perspective, is a political statement’ (p. 148): it serves ‘as a rebuke to the deficit discourses built up around Aboriginal languages that have both facilitated their endangerment and hampered their revival’ (p. 149). The cultural capital of Shakespeare is set to work against centuries of oppression and trauma. Bridget Escolme makes a similar point in her comment on Fórum Shakespeare (Chapter 10): ‘If we work interculturally with theatre texts, it is possible to discover not so much something universal and apolitical about the “human condition” but something more culturally productive about how the structures, c­ onventions and rhetorical force of performance allows different stories to be told’ (p. 170). Through two reconstructed theatre projects, the authors of Chapters 11 141

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and 12 provide ‘transformative’ (Chapter 11, p. 182) experiences educationally and economically for their unique demographics: young people across New Zealand and Australia and a diverse regional English community, respectively. Thus, as Paul Heritage concludes in Chapter 10, ‘we see not only significant learning across languages and cultures but the consequences of performance that lie beyond the meaning of the play’ (p. 167).

Contexts, Audiences, Relationships These projects imagine Shakespeare, collaboration and education intersecting in public sites and spaces. As a consequence, their work extends in complex and far-reaching ways to encompass diverse formal and informal relationships. Chapter 9 demonstrates two theatre companies in partnership, Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company and Bell Shakespeare, working alongside local community elders and engaging with public audiences and school students; Chapter 10 explores a more widespread, changing set of relationships between visiting international academics and artists and Brazilian theatre companies, students, prisoners, publics and celebrities; Chapter 11’s Pop-up Globe centres on the dynamics between academic research and industry, and how this enables the informal, ephemeral relationships between performers, theatrical spaces and audiences; and Chapter 12 features a long-term, town partnership with stakeholders including residents, researchers, industry and council. Yirra Yaakin’s Hecate integrates theatre, education and activism. It is a public, theatrical and educational reimagining of Shakespeare through Noongar language, as well as a chance for Australians to contemplate and address historical, intergenerational trauma impacting Indigenous language and culture. Fórum Shakespeare also prioritises – albeit quite differently – cross-cultural and cross-language relationships. It interrogates implicit cultural assumptions (for example, through casting young Brazilian juvenile offenders as Romeo opposite a telenovela star as Juliet) and generates unexpected connections across demographics and cultural boundaries. The project explicitly engages with participants from different backgrounds and with different language abilities; diversity of relationships is key. For some projects their audiences are as lively online as in the theatre. Fórum Shakespeare’s 1999 Romeo and Juliet production received widespread media attention for its radical casting of Romeo and Juliet and it claims a ‘social media reach of 200,000+’ (p. 173). Pop-up Globe points to ‘over 16,000 Instagram posts’ as evidence of ‘the younger demographic that Pop-up Globe has mobilised’ (p. 181). This data expands our definition

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of the ‘publics’ of these public reimaginings of Shakespeare. Conversely, Shakespeare North (Chapter 12) complicates the role of media, with news coverage acting as both an opportunity for promotion and a threat to ‘scholarly integrity’ (p. 193).

Aims, Processes, Structures The projects in Chapters 9 and 10 utilise Shakespeare’s works to challenge histories and cultural assumptions, to cross language barriers and promote understanding of ‘difference’. For Yirra Yaakin and Fórum Shakespeare, supporting the speaking of Indigenous languages, considering the role of participants’ languages and backgrounds, and responding to colonial histories are all incorporated in project aims. Catherine Silverstone’s work in Brazil has parallels with Yirra Yaakin’s project, as it ‘opened up possibilities for discussing Shakespeare in relation to Brazilian histories of colonisation, indigeneity, language and cultural dispossession and recovery projects’ (p. 171). Shakespeare North (Chapter 12) and the Pop-up Globe (Chapter 11) are architectural endeavours involving multiple collaborators and reaching from a ‘heritage-based, economic regeneration initiative’ (p. 190) through to a relocatable, pop-up playhouse. Both projects feature an innovative theatre space with genuine early modern resonances, yet designed to plunge modern audiences and participants into a contemporary context of performance and learning. Pop-up Globe aims not for perfect historical ‘authenticity,’ but the ‘integrity’ of high-quality, popular Shakespeare performance. Similarly, in reflecting on the design of the Shakespeare North Playhouse, Graham writes: ‘Absolute locational authenticity has yielded, in this regard, to our contemporary interest in the recreation of diversely interesting and attractive early theatre spaces’ (p. 189). Shakespeare North aims to build a genuine, dialogic relationship with its community, industry, government and academic stakeholders. The project’s educational aims extend beyond bringing ‘Shakespeare into the family lives of Knowsley people’ (p. 196): it builds community cohesion, celebrates local knowledge and language, and empowers community members to follow their own ‘paths of discovery and creation’ (p. 197).

Insights, Challenges, Takeaways Theatre making in all its forms – including architectural construction – is inherently collaborative and communicative. These projects show how

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genuinely integrated it may be in community work dedicated to sharing, teaching and learning. Language difference is a key aspect of these projects. Chapters 9 and 10 explore English and Noongar, and Portuguese and te reo Māori, respectively. Chapter 12 details a public symposium examining Shakespeare in the context of the ‘linguistic realms’ of Knowsley and discovering how ‘[t]he history and identity of the place as both melting pot and embodiment of continuing socio-cultural difference is summarised in its language characteristics’ (p. 198). In Chapter 11, thinking more metaphorically, the immersive live-theatre experience of Pop-up Globe’s ‘empathy drum’ is a unifying ‘language’ granting a shared experience to young and old, actors and audiences, academics and theatre makers. For all these projects, commitment to local communities is fundamental to success at the local level, which produces globally transferrable insights. The potential of language to express and support cultural identity, to claim public space and to offer transformative experiences for audiences, is felt in each of these collaborations. Language is, in fact, always complexly multiple in such public projects: Shakespeare’s language, human languages, the languages of theatre, business, emotion and education. Theatre is also key – as one might hope with Shakespeare projects. It grants transformative experiences that can interweave histories and the present, address historical traumas, engage people of all ages and provide economic and cultural support to local communities.

References Brady, Linzy, 2009. ‘“Shakespeare Reloaded”: Teacher Professional Development within a Collaborative Learning Community’, Teacher Development 13.4, 335–48. Todd, Dorothy, 2016. ‘“Oh this learning, what a thing it is!”: Service Learning Shakespeare and Community Partnerships’. This Rough Magic, December. www.thisroughmagic.org/todd%20article.html.

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chapter 9

Hecate

Adaptation, Education and Cultural Activism Clint Bracknell with Kylie Bracknell

Introduction This chapter will discuss collaborative processes, leading and learning associated with Hecate, which premiered at Perth Festival 2020 as a ­ co-production between Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company and Bell Shakespeare. Hecate is the first Shakespearean work, in this case Macbeth, to be performed entirely in one Aboriginal language from Australia, specifically the Noongar language from Western Australia’s southwest. Every performance elicited a standing ovation (Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations [ORIC], 2020). Hecate was adapted and directed by Kylie Bracknell and co-translated with editorial guidance from senior language teacher Roma Yibiyung Winmar. I, the primary author of this chapter, was involved as a co-translator, composer and sound designer. As part of the continuing legacy of settler colonialism in Australia, most of its hundreds of Aboriginal languages are severely endangered or ‘sleeping’, not currently spoken by the people they belong to (National Indigenous Languages Report, 2020). The annual global language reference publication Ethnologue lists the Noongar language (also spelled Nyungar) and its regional dialectic variants as dormant or extinct (Eberhard et al., 2020), which makes Hecate all the more remarkable. Over 30,000 people identify as Noongar, making it one of Australia’s largest Aboriginal cultural groups (South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council, 2016). However, in the 2016 Australian census just 475 Noongar people reported that they use the Noongar language at home (Austlang n.d.). Given that Noongar placenames and words to describe fauna and flora have been co-opted into common Western Australian English vernacular, considerably more of the population regularly use smatterings of Noongar language vocabulary in their everyday speech. Still, the Noongar language is rarely heard strung together in full sentences. Building on millennia of Noongar performance traditions (Bracknell, 2017), and more 145

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recent performance history (Haebich, 2018), Hecate is the first full work of Western-style theatre presented entirely in the Noongar language. More than a significant artistic achievement, presenting Shakespeare in Noongar has provided a very rare opportunity for Noongar people and the general public to actively engage with the Noongar language in a variety of ways. The development of Hecate provided a unique space to work with and perform in the Noongar language but this opportunity arose because engaging with the English literary tradition – and particularly Shakespeare – attracted the necessary government and philanthropic support, media attention and audience interest to support this safe yet brave space. This was always apparent to Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company’s artistic director Kyle J. Morrison who invited Bell Shakespeare to collaborate as a partner. Bell Shakespeare’s association with Hecate began in 2017 with Bell’s artistic director, Peter Evans, who saw this as an exciting opportunity to support a unique retelling of Macbeth, in line with the belief held by both Bell Shakespeare and Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company that Shakespeare should not be ‘stuck in the past’ but is the ‘lens through which we can explore and question the present and imagine the future’ (Bell Shakespeare, n.d.). This collaboration was effective due to the manner in which Bell Shakespeare supported Yirra Yaakin in realising its vision for Macbeth, rather than asserting control as Australia’s national theatre company specialising in Shakespeare. One of the greatest challenges in revitalising Aboriginal languages in Australia is a lack of resources – a question not simply of financial or archival resources, but of human creative and intellectual resources too. The UNESCO Expert Group on Endangered Languages identifies nine factors contributing to language vitality (Brenzinger et al., 2003). These are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

intergenerational language transmission, absolute numbers of speakers, proportion of speakers within the total population, loss of existing language domains, response to new domains and media, materials for language education and literacy, governmental and institutional language attitudes and policies, community members’ attitudes towards their own language, and amount and quality of documentation.

This framework enables the categorisation of languages in terms of their endangerment status and assists in developing language maintenance strategies. As an arts intervention in the context of language endangerment,

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the development and staging of Hecate directly addresses all nine factors. Hecate nourished a new group of Noongar language speakers, activated a new domain for language use (Western theatre), and produced educational resources, while challenging deficit attitudes toward Aboriginal languages. The creation of Hecate connects with an array of collaborative endeavours particularly associated with revitalising an endangered language. The initial vision of the project quickly met the realities of language endangerment, setting into motion a decade-long timeframe necessary to adapt and translate the work, engage with senior Noongar speakers and Australia’s national theatre company Bell Shakespeare, and develop a Noongar acting ensemble. In the context of building a confident troupe of speakers for this project, teaching and learning Noongar language were approached as collaborative enterprises, necessarily distanced from didactic, classroom-style pedagogy. Language development sessions with the cast emphasised orality over literacy. This approach was carried over to school workshops undertaken after Hecate’s first season. Reverence – for Shakespeare in the arts community and Noongar language in the Noongar community – raised the stakes for Hecate. The processes developed in response to this pressure may serve as a guide for future endeavours intersecting with issues of translation, cultural endangerment and decolonial imperatives (Jazeel, 2017).

Shakespeare Waangkiny (Shakespeare Speaking)? Domestic and international interest in Aboriginal languages among nonAboriginal people has increased in recent decades, especially given the United Nations’ International Year of Indigenous Languages (2019) and International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–32) (UNESCO, 2020). While new opportunities continue to arise for Aboriginal people to engage in the explanation and promotion of their cultural heritage (Henderson and Nash, 2002: 1), Aboriginal people may hold a wide range of attitudes towards the revitalisation and public exposure of their languages (Bell, 2013). Due to trauma linked to forced assimilation with the settler-colonial community,1 some older Aboriginal people may ‘voice 1

The attempted cultural assimilation of Aboriginal people in colonial Australia was facilitated by various Australian state government policies, including the Aborigines Act (1905), Native Administration Act (1936) and the Native (Citizenship Rights) Act (1944) in Western Australia. It generally involved the institutionalisation of Aboriginal children. Additionally, citizenship rights were not available to Aboriginal people deemed ‘uncivilised’ by government authorities, for example, those people who continued to speak Aboriginal languages in public (Haebich, 2000).

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their opinion that traditional language and culture should remain in the past’, while others may not be willing to participate in language projects ‘due to shyness or the belief that they do not have enough language knowledge’ (Bell, 2013: 402). Working with Bundjalung and Gidabal people of south-east Australia, music researcher Margaret Gummow explains that: [T]oday, many Aboriginal people are possessive of their culture and rarely perform songs on request. The songs and language that are still remembered are precious possessions from the past that owners hang on to. This is understandable when we consider the history of European contact. (1992: 48)

It is also understandable that many Aboriginal people are reluctant to have themselves, their languages and their cultures put ‘on display’ for the entertainment of newly interested non-Aboriginal audiences, especially when many of these opportunities place Aboriginal people in the position of having to defend their identities while also attempting to disprove the many stereotypical or inaccurate representations of Aboriginal culture in media, films and literature, and upon which non-Aboriginal audiences have constructed erroneous discourses around issues related to Aboriginality (see Langton, 1993). Hecate (Figure 9.1) premiered a decade after Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company’s artistic director Kyle J. Morrison first hatched the idea of performing Shakespearean works in the endangered Noongar language, beginning with Sonnets in Noongar (2012). In 1833, colonist Robert Meni Lyon wrote in reference to Noongar people that ‘the whole of each tribe are bards’ (1833: 52). However, colonisation since 1829 and ensuing assimilation policies in southern Western Australia have adversely impacted the transmission of Noongar language, stories and songs. Today few people are familiar enough with the Noongar language to appreciate the nuances of its poetic forms. Paradoxically, due to Shakespeare’s ubiquity in formal education and global popular culture, many Noongar people are familiar with at least a few lines of Shakespeare. Yibiyung says, ‘Everyone knew the name Shakespeare but he was from another century, another world. Then he came into our world long after he was gone, and helped promote our language [laughs]’ (Personal communication, 28 October 2020). Rather than a simple act of kowtowing to European cultural aesthetics, rendering Shakespearean works in the Noongar language, from a Noongar perspective, is a political statement. As someone with at least three decades of experience teaching the Noongar language in schools, Yibiyung is adamant that ‘our languages aren’t valued. They never have been … Kids going into missions and having to learn

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Figure 9.1  Production still from Hecate performed at Perth Festival 2020, ‘The Murder of McDuff’s family’. Photograph by Dana Weeks

English because their own mother tongue wasn’t acceptable’ (Personal communication, 28 October 2020). Speaking back to the most highly revered of English playwrights in an Aboriginal language may serve as a rebuke to the deficit discourses built up around Aboriginal languages that have both facilitated their endangerment and hampered their revival (Bell, 2013; Pascoe, 2018).

Koondam Koorong-koorliny (Weaving the Dream) Kyle J. Morrison was inspired by connections he found between Shakespearean themes and Noongar experiences. Over a decade, he drove this project from an initial ideas stage to the eventual premiere of Hecate, based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Translating Macbeth into Noongar is the culmination of a long, collaborative process between Morrison – the visionary, and one of the authors of this chapter, Kylie Bracknell (nee Farmer) – the adaptor, co-translator, and director. As the artistic director of Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company, the only Aboriginal theatre company in Western Australia, Morrison’s original concept was to develop a Noongar Othello. He wanted to bring Shakespeare to a wider audience and recognise

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what he understood as a synergetic relationship between Shakespearean themes and Noongar culture. To Morrison, this relationship is apparent across all of Shakespeare’s plays (A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes place between spirit and conscious realms, As You Like It explores reconnection to Country2) as well as in the richness and expressiveness of Shakespearean English and the Noongar language. Hecate’s associate director, James Evans, says ‘the extraordinary thing about Shakespeare is that his stories are timeless, universal, not just for one culture but for the entire world’ (Yirra Yaakin, 2020). In 2010, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre initially suggested a collaboration with Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company to translate King Lear into Noongar. Morrison’s initial exploration of this possibility quickly established that developing a full-length play in an endangered language would require a long timeframe and particular expertise. The Globe returned with the idea of translating Shakespeare’s sonnets. Morrison approached a number of individuals and organisations associated with the Noongar language with the idea of translating Shakespeare, but the success of the Sonnets in Noongar project was in large part due to collaboration with Kylie Bracknell, who understood not only what was required for word-to-word translation into Noongar language, but the adaptation of the Shakespearean subtext into a Noongar production. Over her twenty-year career in the performing arts, Bracknell had previously performed as an actor in two Shakespearean productions. More importantly, since her teens she had dedicated herself to learning the Noongar language from senior speakers and subsequently presented Waabiny Time (Trimboli and Farmer, 2009, 2012), Australia’s first national children’s television programme in an Aboriginal language (Noongar). Morrison and Bracknell’s collaboration lead to the Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company developing and presenting Sonnets in Noongar, a selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets in Noongar as part of The Globe Theatre’s Cultural Olympiad in London in 2012, setting the stage for a larger project to translate Macbeth. Morrison’s initial vision and Bracknell’s adaptation – spurred into bold and brave territory by award-winning writer and dramaturg, Kate Mulvany – demanded that Hecate be not a direct translation, but something entirely new, imbued with a distinctly Noongar sensibility. Hecate brings together Shakespearean and Noongar ideas about femininity, 2

In an Aboriginal context, the term, ‘Country’, written with a capital letter, signifies land as ‘nourishing terrain’, alive, multidimensional and intertwined with local Aboriginal people and culture (Rose, 1996: 1).

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Country, consciousness and spirituality in its exploration of the way the land is affected and changed by human decisions, and where boodjar (Country) is the reigning monarch. Morrison describes this as allowing for conversations between consciousness, people and non-corporeal entities, and imbuing every character with the nobility of having their place in the world. He considers Macbeth as providing a framework for the possibility of creatively telling a story in Noongar language that is physically far enough removed from Country to avoid cultural sensitivities and issues of reverence and ownership, but close enough philosophically to be understood by the Noongar audience for whom it was made. Morrison’s aspirational vision for the piece quickly met the reality of working with an endangered Aboriginal language. Current Yirra Yaakin chairperson Ellery Blackman states: We completely supported Kyle J. Morrison and his vision for Shakespeare in Noongar. We also trusted his ability to mature that vision and transition its ownership to Kylie Bracknell – and Kylie’s ability and leadership to take that vision and create an amazing production. (ORIC, 2020)

Translation was never going to be straightforward, and significant community development work needed to be undertaken not only in forming a Noongar ensemble who could perform in the Noongar language but ensuring that senior Noongar language speakers were respected and supportive of the project. Blackman describes how ‘what was essential to us was a clear and defined channel for engaging with elders and seeking their input, approval, and acceptance at every stage’ (ORIC, 2020). Over the decade-long process building to Hecate’s premiere, Morrison became such an adept Noongar language speaker that his contribution to the Hecate ensemble as actor in a variety of dialogue-heavy roles was integral to the success of the project, not just his initial vision as Yirra Yaakin’s artistic director.

Dabakarn Waangk (Careful Talk) Over the decade leading up to Hecate (2020), over fifteen Noongar performers participated in multiple, usually week-long workshops facilitated by Kylie Bracknell. This functioned not necessarily to develop the work, but to develop an ensemble comprising Noongar language speakers. Each workshop stirred emotions, offering a trusted healing sanctuary that steadily combated the residual effects of language loss while supporting new reclamation journeys for this tailored ensemble. None of the

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performers had spoken fluent Noongar language from an early age, and only some had heard it. Kylie Bracknell explains: The Noongar language has not been taught strongly enough in our Noongar community for it to flow down to the younger generations to use in everyday conversation. Sadly, past government policies actively suppressed the Noongar language. As many community members attest, our elders were flogged for using it. (2016)

Aside from addressing the obvious logistical and artistic challenges of the project, the workshops leading to Hecate assisted performers and invited senior language speakers to ‘heal from the intergenerational trauma associated with Aboriginal language loss’ (Bracknell, 2016). There is inherent danger in attempting to learn and perform in one’s endangered Aboriginal language. Acknowledging the surety of discomfort, Bracknell’s workshops fostered ‘brave spaces’ where those involved could sit with discomfort, while also looking after each other’s wellbeing (Studham, 2020). Creating a dynamic brave space allowed the workshops to adapt in response to the articulated needs of the group, whether that meant providing time for acknowledgement or deciding to revisit a particular item on a later day. The task of learning enough Noongar language to articulate something as complex as Shakespeare was daunting for all involved. Notwithstanding the fundamental differences between Shakespearean English and the Noongar language, Hecate’s cast and creative team were also struck by the stark phonetic differences between Australian English and the Noongar language. These include the prominent nasalised vowel ‘æ’ (as in ‘ash’) which is not found in the Noongar language but is common to the varieties of English that most Noongar people speak as their first language today, and the emphasis placed by Noongar speakers only on the first syllable of each word – a feature not found in varieties of English. Such differences in accent and syllable-stress had an undue influence on how the cast pronounced Noongar, which was written using English orthography (i.e. the Latin alphabet). To compensate for such marked language differences, the repeated performance of songs as an oral pedagogy in language learning contexts can promote and reinforce correct pronunciation and emphasis (Techmeier, 1969). Years before the script for Hecate was finalised, I developed a handful of songs for the production based on Shakespearean text that Kylie Bracknell sourced from Macbeth and other plays. As early as 2017, although casting was far from being determined, everybody participating in the workshops

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would learn and repeat the songs. Morrison and other cast members consider the songs pivotal to their growth as speakers and maintained Noongar singing practices months after Hecate was staged. This outcome adds evidence to the theory that the mnemonic qualities of song can help to invigorate and sustain language acquisition (Miyashita and Shoe, 2009). It also demonstrates how song can effectively inform the stresses, tone and rhythm of an endangered Aboriginal language (Edwards and Hobson, 2013). More importantly, the communal singing rehearsals bonded the group of performers through unified action. In the moment of keeping a song going, everyone was in it together. Eventually, an oral and embodied approach to learning the Noongar language was complemented by text-free approaches to familiarise the cast with the narrative arc of Macbeth. Kylie Bracknell encouraged Bell Shakespeare’s Peter Evans and James Evans to direct the cast through a 15-minute retelling of the play, complete with entrances and exits, feigned violence and vocal expressions – just not dialogue from the play. Seeing and feeling the story, rather than pouring over the work’s dense text, gave the cast and creative team a more fluid and playful view of Macbeth. It also allowed Bracknell to take a birds-eye view of the whole story, which assisted in the adaptation process. As perhaps the most challenging activity in Hecate’s development, Kylie Bracknell instigated a ‘Noongar only’ hour for each workshop day, in which participants could only interact using the Noongar language – no English. It was important to her that the actors involved understood the words in the script as Noongar speakers themselves as, after all, they would need to be aware of their cue lines. In a small way, this approach aligns with the relative success of language immersion programmes in New Zealand, Canada and Hawaii (May, 2013). Bracknell describes how ‘[a]t the very beginning of this project, these tough exercises would bring a fair bit of silence to the room for sixty minutes or more. Now, it’s hard to get sixty seconds of quiet time amongst them, and that brings joy to my heart’ (Bracknell, 2016). Often, it would be these ‘Noongar only’ hours that would trigger discomfort among performers and require time and space for thought, group discussion and response. It was risky work, but as Yibiyung suggests, ‘If you’re reclaiming your language, aren’t you going to grab it with both hands?’ (Personal communication, 28 October 2020). Bracknell also chose the ‘Noongar only’ hour as the time around which to invite senior Noongar language speakers to visit the nascent ensemble. Although she invited a range of senior people from the Noongar community to visit the workshops leading to Hecate, few accepted the challenge of

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speaking only in Noongar for a full hour. Rather than necessarily add to the pressure of this activity, the senior language speakers who participated would often offer phrases or words for the performers to try out prior to the hour commencing. After the ‘Noongar only’ hour, they would join the group in reflecting on the difficulty of avoiding English after having it imposed on our lives for so long. Much like the effect of group singing, having to rely on each other in the context of the ‘Noongar only’ hour strengthened the ensemble and the bonds between the ensemble and the senior language speakers. Yibiyung was the senior language speaker who participated in the most ‘Noongar only’ hours with the ensemble. Of the first Aboriginal community preview night and the subsequent opening night, she remembers just looking at the faces of others [senior Noongar people] who were there and they’d recognise a word and they would just [she smiles]. They were crying, they were so overwhelmed, they were happy. (Personal communication, 28 October 2020)

Anticipating the need for audiences to connect and reflect, Kylie Bracknell arranged for Noongar woman Mitchella Hutchins to host ‘kambarnap’, an outdoor meeting area with a fire before and after each ­performance of Hecate. More than a collaboration between creatives and cast, Hecate was a collaboration with the Noongar, and even the broader community. Through the framework of Shakespeare, Hecate was able to lead non-Aboriginal audience members into a ‘different cultural realm’ (Marshall, 2020), some describing the production as ‘a miracle’ and ‘original, transporting and necessary theatre’ (ORIC, 2020).

Djoowak Waangkiny (Next-generation Speaking) Shortly after Hecate’s premiere season, Perth Festival organised for a subset of the Hecate cast and creative team (myself, Kylie Bracknell, Roma Yibiyung Winmar, Kyle J. Morrison, Rubeun Yorkshire, Della Morrison and Cezera Critti-Schnaars) to share the Hecate songs in sessions with three Perth high schools. Of the three participating cohorts, one was mainly Aboriginal students, one was a mixed group with mainly non-Aboriginal students, and one was a mixed all-female group. Taking the Hecate songs to high schools allowed us to trial the oral pedagogy that had worked well with the cast in the development workshops. These sessions were purely oral, focusing on call-and-response singing, s­ mall-group practice and collaboration with facilitators to develop short performance pieces.

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Based on Perth Festival’s feedback data, these sessions resulted in increased knowledge of Noongar language and Noongar songs, and belief in the value of singing as an effective mode of language learning: Knowledge of Noongar language Before the workshop 50% of students said they knew nothing about Noongar. After the workshop, 88% of students said they knew a few words (48%) or phrases (40%) in Noongar. Knowledge of Noongar songs Before the workshop, the majority of students (94%) had either never heard any Noongar songs, or were only familiar with Noongar songs from Hecate. After the workshop 48% of students said they can sing some songs in Noongar. Belief that singing helps learn another language Before the workshop 24% of students thought that singing would help them learn some sentences in another language. After the workshop, 55% of students believed that singing would help them learn some sentences in another language. Anticipated and experienced feelings After the workshop, at least twice as many students reported wanting to learn more songs, more Noongar language, and feeling excited about learning Noongar songs. Three times as many students reported feeling confident about learning Noongar songs, while the small number of students who initially felt ‘silly’ or ‘stupid’ learning Noongar songs dropped from 4 to 1. (Perth Festival Feedback, 2020)

The relative success of these school incursions was contingent on a number of factors. The songs themselves are musically and linguistically challenging enough as to not be too easy for high-school-aged students. Having at least three facilitators and a senior language speaker present at each session provided a strong grounding for the activities to take place and increased the potential for effective small group work. Although the co-educational groups worked with both male and female facilitators, Aboriginal gender protocol considerations led to us deciding that the allfemale student group only worked with female facilitators. Importantly, because these Noongar songs are based on translations of Shakespearean text, like Hecate, they carry the cultural cache to encourage a broad range of people to engage. Furthermore, as the sessions were highly participatory, they allowed for something like an ‘instantaneous response, prior to interpretation’ (Bracknell, 2020: 221). The students had little time to second-guess their participation before being swept along in a visceral and distinctly Noongar experience.

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Conclusion As a settler-colonial nation with a noted cultural cringe (Philips, 2006), Australia places high cultural value on Shakespeare. Yibiyung describes a ‘cultural activist’ as someone who ‘activates the minds of other people’. In Hecate, Shakespeare’s venerated status has been subversively used as a chink in the settler-colonial armour, through which Aboriginal cultural activism and deeper ‘felt’ intercultural understanding has been achieved as a result of various collaborative processes, most importantly in developing a Noongar language-speaking ensemble of Noongar actors. The increased ability to draw funding and publicity explains why the first full theatrical work in the Noongar language in modern times is an adaptation of Shakespeare and not a wholly original Noongar story. At the same time, from the perspective of the creative team Hecate as a piece of theatre was but a happy by-product of the broader agenda, to revive a community of Noongar speakers. Yibiyung says that ‘using Shakespeare as a vehicle to showcase our Noongar language adds something else. It is wonderful to start off and then reach the peak and be looking back knowing that everything was done properly’ (Personal communication, 28 October 2020). From Kyle J. Morrison’s initial idea to translate Shakespeare and his collaboration with Kylie Bracknell resulting in a significantly extended timeframe for development, to the respectful and supportive mode of collaboration with Bell Shakespeare, to supporting an extended group of Noongar performers in expanding their language in a brave space under the watch of senior language speakers, this project has strived to do things properly. That brave space extended out to audiences via the kambarnap meeting space and schools through the song sessions. Hecate was likely the last show many people in Western Australia saw before the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic. For many of the team involved and audience we have kept in touch with, it has inspired an increased focus on our place in the world and distinctly local connections.

References Austlang. n.d. W41: NOONGAR/NYOONGAR. Canberra: AIATSIS Collection. https://collection.aiatsis.gov.au/austlang/language/w41. Bell, Jeanie, 2013. ‘Language Attitudes and Language Revival/Survival’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 34.4, 399–410. Bell Shakespeare, n.d. ‘Our Story’. www.bellshakespeare.com.au/our-story Bracknell, Clint, 2017. ‘Conceptualizing Noongar Song’, Yearbook for Traditional Music 49, 92–212.

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Bracknell, Clint, 2020. ‘Rebuilding as Research: Noongar Song, Language and Ways of Knowing’, Journal of Australian Studies 44.2, 210–23. Bracknell, Kylie, 2016. ‘Sonnets in Noongar – The Task’, Runway Journal 31. http://runway.org.au/sonnets-in-noongar-the-task. Brenzinger, Matthias, Akira Yamamoto, Noriko Aikawa, Dmitri Koundiouba, Anahit Minasyan, Arienne Dwyer, Colette Grinevald, Michael Krauss, Osahito Miyaoka, Osamu Sakiyama, Rieks Smeets, and Ofelia Zepeda, 2003. ‘Language Vitality and Endangerment’. UNESCO Expert Meeting on Safeguarding Endangered Languages, Paris, France, 10–12 March. www.unesco .org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CLT/pdf/Language_vitality_and_ endangerment_EN.pdf. Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communication and the Arts, 2020. National Indigenous Languages Report, Australian Government. www.arts.gov.au/documents/national-indigenouslanguages-report-document Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.), 2020. Ethnologue: Languages of the World (23rd edn. Dallas: SIL International). Edwards, Jodi and John Hobson, 2013. ‘“Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” is not an Aboriginal Song’. 3rd International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC) 2013: Sharing Worlds of Knowledge, Hawaii Imin International Conference Center, University of Hawaii, 28 February–3 March. Gummow, Margaret, 1992. ‘Aboriginal Songs from the Bundjalung and Gidabal Areas of South-Eastern Australia’, PhD thesis. The University of Sydney. https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/7249. Haebich, Anna, 2000. Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000 (North Freemantle, WA: Fremantle Press). Haebich, Anna, 2018. Dancing in Shadows: Histories of Nyungar Performance (Perth: UWA Publishing). Henderson, John and David Nash (eds.), 2002. Language in Native Title (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press). Jazeel, Tariq, 2017. ‘Mainstreaming Geography’s Decolonial Imperative’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42.3, 334–7. Langton, Marcia, 1993. ‘Well I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television …’: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things (Sydney: Australian Film Commission). Lyon, Robert Menli, 1833. ‘A Glance at the Manners and Language of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Western Australia with a Short Vocabulary’, Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal, 30 March, 52. Marshall, Jonathan W., 2020. ‘Review: Hecate’, Limelight Magazine, 11 February. www.limelightmagazine.com.au/reviews/hecate-yirra-yaakin-theatre-companyperth-festival/. May, Stephen, 2013. ‘Indigenous Immersion Education: International Developments’, Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education 1.1, 34–69.

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Miyashita, Mizuki and Shirley Crow Shoe, 2009. ‘Blackfoot Lullabies and Language Revitalization’, in Jon Reyhner and Louise Lockhard (eds.), Indigenous Language Revitalization: Encouragement, Guidelines, Lessons Learned (Flagstaff: Northern Arizona University), 183−90. Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations [ORIC], 2020. Standing up tall for Noongar. www.oric.gov.au/publications/spotlight/standing-tall-noongar. Pascoe, Bruce, 2018. ‘Australia: Temper and Bias’, Meanjin Quarterly, Spring edition. https://meanjin.com.au/essays/11312/. Perth Festival Feedback. Data provided to participants, 20 September 2020. Phillips, Adam A., 2006. On the Cultural Cringe (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing). Rose, Deborah Bird, 1996. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness (Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission). South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council [SWALSC], 2016. ‘Settlement Agreement’. www.noongar.org.au/about-settlement-agreement. Studham, Susan. 2021. ‘Supporting Brave Spaces for Theatre-Makers Post#MeToo: A Chicago-Based Study on Rehearsing and Performing Intimacy in Theatre’, in Judith Rudakoff (ed.), Performing #MeToo: How Not to Look Away (Bristol, UK: Intellect). Techmeier, Mary, 1969. ‘Music in the Teaching of French’, The Modern Language Journal 53.2, 96. Trimboli, Cath and Kylie Farmer, 2009. Waabiny Time: Series 1, National Indigenous Television (NITV), Neutral Bay, NSW: EnhanceTV. Trimboli, Cath and Kylie Farmer, 2012. Waabiny Time: Series 2, NITV, Neutral Bay, NSW: EnhanceTV. UNESCO, 2020. Upcoming Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032) to Focus on Indigenous Language Users’ Human Rights, UNESCO. https://en.unesco.org/ news/upcoming-decade-indigenous-languages-2022-2032-focus-indigenouslanguage-users-human-rights. Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company, 2020. Hecate Trailer. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=F5HhBTSZFGU.

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chapter 10

‘I’ll Teach you Differences’

Learning across Languages and Cultures with Fórum Shakespeare (Brazil) Catherine Silverstone, Bridget Escolme and Paul Heritage

In Memoriam: Catherine Silverstone Born Hamilton, New Zealand: 17 December 1974. Died London, United Kingdom: 4 October 2020.

Joy. Photographs of Catherine leading workshops on Twelfth Night at Fórum Shakespeare catch just a flash of the joy she found and inspired in the encounter of teaching. Catherine brought a physical, personal commitment to workshops, lectures and to the sharing of discoveries in the classroom. When we invited Catherine to participate in the São Paulo Fórum in 2014, we knew that as an esteemed scholar of contemporary queer and decolonial approaches to Shakespeare she would provoke original encounters with the Shakespearean text for the Brazilian participants. Catherine’s disarming gentility and her strong advocacy of Māori culture motivated actors, directors and students to find and to speak their own Shakespeare. In the photographs she stands with authority, sits in equality, plays with vitality and – rather like Viola herself – invites us to ask, ‘What country, friends, is this?’, when we find ourselves on Shakespearean shores. Friendship was at the heart of Catherine’s teaching as has been evident in the outpouring from her students and colleagues since her untimely and deeply shocking death. Catherine leaned across languages and cultures to insist that Shakespeare must be a bridge and not a border. Catherine did not have a chance to bring her brilliant critical lucidity to the final revisions of this chapter, which we wrote together in 2019, but her partner Julia Cort kindly agreed to do what they always did for each other and proofread for Catherine one final time. We dedicate this chapter to Catherine and Julia. 159

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Since 1995, People’s Palace Projects (PPP) – a research centre in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London – has produced Fórum Shakespeare, an (almost) biannual project that consists of a varying combination of workshops, performances, seminars and public debates. Led by PPP director Paul Heritage, the Fórum has taken place in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, São Paulo, Brasília, Campinas and Belo Horizonte in schools, libraries, church halls, universities, conflict zones, prisons, juvenile detention centres, the Brazilian Academy of Letters and sometimes even in theatres. Fórum Shakespeare is a creative pedagogic endeavour that since its inception has been undertaken in collaboration with theatre companies, in particular Nós do Morro/Us from the Hillside, which is based in the favela of Vidigal in Rio de Janeiro. For each edition, the Fórum invites ‘teachers’ of Shakespeare (directors, actors, voice and movement specialists, musicians and academics) to come to Brazil and learn with Brazilian actors and non-actors as they make Shakespeare together. Over the past two decades, the Fórum has been joined by guest artists and academics from India, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Africa, Holland, the United States, Singapore, Ireland as well as from a range of British cultural and higher education institutions. Along the way, Nós do Morro built a rich and productive relationship with the RSC, inspired for over a decade by regular visits by Cicely Berry, its former Voice Director. The RSC has

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also made it possible to bring young associate directors, members of their Education Department, fight directors and composers to work on the Fórum. We have also seen two-way traffic between British and Brazilian stages: Nós do Morro was invited to perform Two Gentlemen of Verona in Stratford-upon-Avon as part of the RSC’s 2006 Complete Works season, and two years later at the Barbican Centre in London. More recently, RSC Associate Artist Greg Hicks directed a production of Macbeth in São Paulo as part of the 2016 edition of the Fórum. The Fórum brings young actors from Brazilian peripheries together with theatre makers (and audiences) from a range of cultures in order to ask questions about multicultural, multilingual and potentially mutually beneficial ways of engaging with Shakespeare. Fórum Shakespeare insists on the plurality of Shakespeare, which as the theatre director Peter Sellars reminds us has its pleasures and its pains. Sellars’ vision of collective creation is very much the Fórum’s starting point: Theatre is not a solo activity. It’s actually the understanding that we will never be able to understand any of these issues until we search for a collective understanding. Individual expertise or point of view is no longer adequate in this world, if it ever was. Knowledge has to be an understanding, has to be conceived much more as Plato would, as an ongoing dialogue. (Delgado and Heritage, 1996: 226)

Through Fórum Shakespeare, the collective learning has been dependent at all times on who is in the room, where we are meeting and what languages we bring to speak together. This chapter explores three examples of collective learning through Fórum Shakespeare: Paul Heritage’s work on Romeo and Juliet with a group of juvenile prisoners in Rio de Janeiro in 1999; Bridget Escolme’s workshops for young people in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Brasília in 2011, 2013 and 2014; and Catherine Silverstone’s lecture and workshop for general audiences in São Paulo in 2016.

Romeo and Juliet in Rio de Janeiro, 1999 (Observations by Paul Heritage) In September 1999, Fórum Shakespeare took place in the Educational Institute Padre Severino, a secure unit for young people ‘in conflict with the law’ on the Ilha do Governador in Rio de Janeiro. In Brazil, the age for criminal responsibility is eighteen, meaning that the young people who were held there were not technically imprisoned. However, the words ‘school’ or ‘educational institution’ were of little relevance to the methodologies, philosophies or activities of this unit or any others that form

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part of DEGASE (Department for Socio-educational Action), which is under the jurisdiction of the Secretariat of Education in the State of Rio de Janeiro. The Fórum consisted of two weeks of workshops with fifteen young men run by Guti Fraga (Nós do Morro’s Director) and myself. The workshops led to a staged reading of Romeo and Juliet for the other inmates/pupils and invited guests. Some of the roles were to be played by a group of professional actors, most of them well-known because of their regular participation in the ‘telenovelas’ (soap operas) of the TV Globo network. As the work progressed, it quickly became apparent that most of the boys wanted to play Romeo so the role was played by different juvenile actors for each scene in which Romeo appears. Given the restrictions on entry to the secure unit, Fraga and I rehearsed with the professional actors at a theatre in Ipanema, working with a band of young drummers from another favela-based arts company, Grupo Cultural AfroReggae. The professional actors, drummers and young men from the Juvenile Justice System only met for a brief time in the morning before a single afternoon performance for over 200 fellow ‘inmates’ plus guests, journalists and photographers. The mix was potent. Each of the components in the performance – TV Globo stars, Shakespeare, juvenile offenders – had their own cultural value that operates in contradictory ways within Brazilian society. Globo stars do not usually mix with juvenile offenders nor do juvenile offenders mix with Shakespeare. Juvenile offenders are not normally associated with literacy, so the idea of them staging a reading seemed an even greater disturbance of the realities with which society becomes comfortable in condemning young people to imprisonment in this system. The young men did have problems with the language, but so did the professional actors. That’s the point. We are all distanced in some way from this language. It is beyond us. If it were not, then it would not serve to express the unspeakable. The language offered opportunities for these young people to challenge expectations (from themselves and others) about how they might think and speak. The performance took place in a cavernous hall that did not help the words cross the boundary between the stage and audience. Distant from the concrete stage were rows of chairs on which sat dignitaries, guards, teachers and journalists. Sitting in front of them on the floor were the young men and women from three penal institutions. On stage were the actors seated on individual chairs: a juvenile Romeo between each professional actor who together would tell the story of the star-crossed lovers. Each Romeo wore a white T-shirt bearing the character’s name, and new shorts hurriedly supplied by the Institute at the last minute to ensure

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respectability. The young drummers from the favela of Vigário Geral showed little reaction to the environment, standing behind the cast in their AfroReggae t-shirts. Their drums seem to hold a promise that they will avoid the trajectory that takes too many young people like them from peripheral communities to the prisons of Brazil. Leticia Sabatella, a major star of Brazilian telenovelas, played Juliet to each of the young Romeos. After only one run-through of each scene with the succession of actors, Leticia had little idea of what to expect when they took the stage together. Her Romeos varied from the almost illiterate to the fluent and passionate, an inconsistency that serves the text well. Each actor presented different challenges for her and the other professional actors who were on stage with them. Meanwhile the challenges for the Romeos and their colleagues in the audience were likewise considerable. In her workshops with actors, Cicely Berry often quoted The Spanish Tragedy’s warning that ‘Where words prevail not, violence prevails’ (Kyd, 2009: 2.1.108). In working on Romeo and Juliet, these young men were encountering a way of expressing ideas and emotions that was entirely alien to them. Fraga and I wanted to see what happened in the act of speaking this language (in translation). Workshops started from the premise that the young men would have no trouble understanding what these characters were doing or feeling or thinking. The only obstacle might be how they expressed themselves. The group was literate enough to read the text, although some of them could only read each word individually and showed little ability to make connections between the words as they spoke. Others quickly found a fluency that would be admirable in any group of adolescents from Britain or Brazil. Much of the work with the text took the form of physical exercises with their tongues, mouths, faces and, eventually, their bodies. Connections were made with the forms of the words: their shapes, their sounds, their resonances. From the physical work came an understanding of how these words were structured in phrases and lines, how they filled space and arrived at other bodies. The young men discovered that words are neither neutral nor inactive and they began to do things with language: not to describe their world, but to be active with and within this language. In rehearsals the words seemed to expand as the young actors were able to express certain feelings. For example, Romeo’s fierce reaction to his banishment in Act 3, scene 3: ‘They are free men, but I am banished:/And sayest thou yet that exile is not death?’ (Shakespeare, 2012: 3.3.42–3). A group exercise working on the speech revealed the violence of Romeo’s thoughts in the battering of the verse before they began to engage with the meanings of the words. Banido (banished) was not a word that the group

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knew, but the participants found how the verse expressed their own feelings of separation and desperation, revealing the text in specific ways for everyone in the room. Such revelations were on every page, almost every line, and even in the play’s title. The way that Romeo and Juliet are repeatedly linked – in title, prologue and narrative – makes them seem equally balanced in the play. Having twelve juvenile offenders play Romeo against a young and ‘valued’ television actor disturbed any easy sense of equity. Juliet is a much-prized member of her family and her cultural value is enormous, as we see when her father settles her on Paris. Romeo meanwhile may come from a good family, but how others react to him, the company he keeps, his actions in the early scenes show him to be already outside family and social control. The difference between these Rio Romeos and their Juliet was exploited by the media in the widespread coverage that the performance received. The impact of the event was evident in the newspaper coverage on the following day and in subsequent pictures that appeared in tabloid magazines. The front page of O Globo on 31 August 1999 emphasised the social and political contexts within which this theatre project was made. The lead story was prison overcrowding in São Paulo with a typically dehumanised and animalistic picture of caged men but on this occasion, it was set above a photograph of one of the young actors from Instituto Padre Severino kissing a famous actress while holding a copy of Romeo and Juliet in his hand. This image tells an unexpected story of an impossible encounter that would be beyond the reach of most Brazilians. Just to show these young men reading is in itself a cultural transformation, but it is in the pictures of the kisses that the performance’s transgressive effect was most forcefully evoked. In the performance, as Sabatella approached her first kiss with the actor playing Romeo, it became the subject of intense institutional, cultural and personal surveillance. Press photographers rose and there was a battery of clicks and flashes accompanied by catcalls and cheers from the young audience, but I failed to notice what was actually happening on stage. Sabatella adroitly side-stepped subsequent lines that would have led to further kissing. As she returned to her seat at the back of the stage with the other performers she showed no visible reaction, but while waiting for her next scene, she was carefully looking through the text. Calculating which Romeos were next in line to kiss her (they were conveniently seated in order of their entrances), she quietly got up and went to talk to each of her Romeos while other scenes were taking place. During the first kiss, the actor playing Romeo had used his tongue. Outwardly calm on stage, her reaction was simultaneously one of being assaulted but at the same

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time wanting to regain control. She whispered to each of the Romeos that were to follow: ‘you can kiss me for as long as you like, on the lips if you want, but you cannot put your tongue in my mouth. Because that would not be theatre.’ Resilient, creative and compassionate, the actor reasserted her control to the extent that even in the final scene, when drugged on the tomb and seemingly in no position to affect how Romeo might kiss her, she still achieved what she wanted. The final Romeo kissed her on the lips but crossed no further boundary. My own failure as director to anticipate and prevent the initial assault was overcome by Sabatella who renegotiated Brazil’s social, cultural and political frontiers through the performance. In different ways, each of the juvenile actors put themselves on the line, albeit differently to the professional actors. To be serious about what they had learnt would have exposed the young men to potential ridicule, so the biggest shock for everyone involved in the production was when one of the Romeos began to speak the text without the book. He had learnt his lines. He had committed himself to the work and the audience of his peers stopped the play to applaud. It would have been far easier for any of those young actors to have disrupted and disturbed what was happening on stage. To show their ‘investment’ was the greatest risk. As boy after boy took on the risk of reading, the young men in the audience with whom they shared cells, corridors and the exercise yard, watched something they too might be capable of achieving. By letting the performance reveal their pleasure in what they had learned and co-created, we see not only significant learning across languages and cultures but the consequences of performance that lie beyond the meaning of the play.

Embodied Analysis: From Translation to Intercultural Experience (Observations from Bridget Escolme – Workshop Leader: Fórum Shakespeare 2011, 2013 and 2014) I first started teaching Shakespeare in 1987, when I was training to be a secondary school teacher in the British comprehensive school system. This early training and my two posts in British secondary schools revealed to me that to teach Shakespeare to young people is to engage in an essentially intercultural endeavour, even in UK schools, where young people were continually being told that this writer was part of their cultural heritage. Some of the resources I had at my disposal for teaching Shakespeare at that time had been published by the Inner London Education Authority, soon afterwards abolished by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. I remember a question posed to the readers in what, if memory serves me

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right, was a Macbeth resource book for teenagers. ‘Why did Shakespeare write the way he did?’ The answer was immediately offered: ‘He wrote the way he did to sound better and to say more’. Soon after this refreshingly simple opening came a rap poetry version of the bloody Sergeant’s speech from Macbeth. As a white teacher from a privileged educational background, the modern version was almost as ‘other’ to me as the 400-year-old one was to some of the thirteen-year-old students I was teaching. But working with the two versions together productively foregrounded the cultural tropes and the rhetorical, affective mechanisms in the writing of each. Enacting both versions was a sophisticated act of embodied translation and analysis for the young people involved. When I taught Shakespeare to young people, I found that they took most readily to the work when we acknowledged that some of the words, lines, ways of telling stories and cultural assumptions we encountered in these plays were alien to us. We would find what made sense to us when we acknowledged what might not. Working with a ‘translation’ into a modern, popular poetic form as in the example above was an acknowledgement that we must work to make sense of Shakespeare, and that translation produces new meaning as well as accessing old. When I came to Fórum Shakespeare, years later and after having undertaken a number of research projects in Shakespeare performance as a PhD student then an academic, I was wary of making assumptions about Shakespeare’s universality in a Brazilian context. As part of the Fórum in 2011 I worked with young acting students hosted by Nós do Morro and also with university students in Rio de Janeiro. In subsequent years I led workshops with acting students in Salvador in 2013 and in Brasília in 2014. I worked with Hamlet and with Measure for Measure in Brazilian translations, sometimes with students who spoke little English but also with a group whose English was so sophisticated that they were fascinated by my literal cut-and-pasted parallel translation of Hamlet and were able to critique the Brazilian version we were using, explaining what they felt were its inadequacies to me as they poured over the original. In terms of Brazilian class and culture I worked with both the privileged and the marginalised. I did perceive cultural differences between some of the groups, as I have mentioned in a chapter on laughter in Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage.1 Working on the relationship between 1

For example, in 2011, between the relatively privileged undergraduates from the University of Rio de Janeiro and students from the Universidade da Quebradas drawn mainly from the city’s favelas (Escolme, 2013: 55–6).

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performer and audience in Shakespeare with Rio university students, I encountered similar concerns around generic decorum to those that sometimes emerge in British groups: what if turning and commenting to the audience in a Shakespeare production undermined the play’s seriousness? The group I worked with in the favela of Vidigal were unconcerned about this possibility and seemed to understand immediately and intuitively that a play about a murdered king (Hamlet) or a victim of sexual harassment (Measure) could be funny one moment, deadly serious the next (Escolme, 2013: 55). What I found here was not so much universality of thematic content or emotional language but a dramaturgical sophistication on the part of the favela group, where they understood how a text might produce meaning by violently – and intentionally – shifting tone, rather than developing smoothly and decorously across a narrative arc. I worked primarily with two theatrical concepts across my three visits to Fórum Shakespeare, and I chose them partly to complement the close work with text that was being undertaken by Cecily Berry and the RSC directors with the same groups. One was the convention of direct address: Shakespeare’s plays were written for visible audiences – day lit or candle lit – and I work with actors on the assumption that the relationship between actor and audience is as significant as that between characters. The other was the idea of gestural vocabularies, experimenting with what happens if we replace realist acting styles with a limited set of gestures that symbolise, say, moral archetypes rather than psychological character. This work privileged theatrical and cultural conditions of performance over text. It was thus very different from the focus on ‘translation’ with which I started this section and my career in teaching Shakespeare. But it brings me back to the idea of ‘sounding better and saying more’ with which I started, because the work enabled another kind of embodied analysis, as I hope these concluding passages make clear. I learned from these students firstly because of their extraordinary, embodied commitment to all the work we undertook. I hope it is not an act of cultural cliché making or exoticisation to say that I observed them bringing a culture of dance and carnival to each staged moment. They worked with not only a consistent physical energy but a consciousness of their own presence as performers. This is something that realist acting has sought to erase but which is highly appropriate to these theatrically self-conscious plays. I learned (or had made conscious for me what I think I had at some level intuited) that a figure like Isabella from Measure for Measure can represent a gestural archetype of Chastity (we created a series of gestures to represent Chastity, to which the actors playing Isabella were

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limited), as well as an actor showing off how good she is at acting Chastity, and a psychological subject – a young woman who comes under threat by a sexual predator and who reacts in psychologically plausible ways to this threat. The young actors I worked with created images and gestures to represent moral archetypes, performed them with great energy and precision, and were then able to play with them, use them, weaponize them, to create politically and emotionally charged storytelling. We may, I think, have a problem in mainstream British theatrical culture, in that many rehearsal processes are based on the underlying assumption that Shakespeare is realist drama. But Shakespeare can be rhetorical communication, and generic transgression, and actorly showing-off, without losing emotional impact or seriousness. The students I worked with on Fórum Shakespeare, in their embodied acts of translation and analysis, taught me more about the bricolage of moral, religious, psychological and cultural effects that make up these plays than many of the universalising strategies of the British education system and stage. If we work inter-­culturally with theatre texts, it is possible to discover not so much something universal and apolitical about the ‘human condition’ but something more culturally productive about how the structures, conventions and rhetorical force of performance allows different stories to be told.

Observations from Catherine Silverstone (Lecturer and Workshop Leader: Fórum Shakespeare 2016) Fórum Shakespeare 2016 was focussed on three productions of Shakespeare  – The Tempest, Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice – performed in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte respectively. It also included events at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB) in São Paolo, including a one-day conference with lectures and discussions on the theme of rupturas e suturas (ruptures and sutures), bookended by workshops, to which I contributed. PPP advised in the planning stage that both my talk and workshop would be subject to simultaneous interpretation in Portuguese, and that I would be working with a Portuguese translation of Shakespeare in my workshop. These formats and the conference theme help to highlight issues about language, location and cross-cultural communication in relation to Shakespeare. These issues emerged both in relation to the subject of my talk, which was focussed on Shakespeare in translation in te reo Māori, the indigenous language of Aotearoa New Zealand, and working with participants via an interpreter and a text in translation. In addressing the conference theme, I returned in my lecture to research I had carried out on translations of Shakespeare into te reo Māori.

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I investigated how these projects can be understood in relation to effects of British colonisation on Māori, the indigenous inhabitants of Aotearoa New Zealand and efforts to address those effects through creative projects alongside other Māori community and government-led initiatives, especially since the 1970s (see Silverstone, 2011). I explored this topic through an analysis of Don C. Selwyn’s film, The Maori Merchant of Venice (2001), the first feature-length film to be shot in te reo Māori. Selwyn’s film is a testament to the success of various regeneration efforts in relation to language and culture but, amidst this celebratory mode, it also remembers historical traumas. For example, the film contains a striking scene set in an artist’s studio where the camera pans across a series of paintings depicting violent land confiscation at the settlement of Parihaka in the 1880s. In one image, the word ‘Holocaust’ is repeated on the painting’s vertical and horizontal axes. The film’s use of this word references the post-1945 Western performance history of the play, which has been dominated by associations with the murder of six million Jews. The abrupt intrusion of an English word also literally signifies a linguistic holocaust. Relatedly, the word also alluded to contemporary debates in Aotearoa New Zealand as to the ‘appropriateness’ of using the term with respect to the devastating effects of colonisation on Māori and indigenous peoples more widely (Silverstone, 2011: 73–4). Delivering my talk in Brazil invited me to review my analysis of this aspect of the film and to reflect on how location reorients understandings of the play and its performance histories where Aotearoa New Zealand and the Holocaust in Europe are not necessarily the primary frames of reference. This opened up possibilities for discussing Shakespeare in relation to Brazilian histories of colonisation, indigeneity, language and cultural dispossession and recovery projects, areas which are also central to aspects of PPP’s work in Brazil including and beyond Fórum Shakespeare. The process of working with an interpreter for the talk also enabled me to keep some linguistic ruptures in my text. This was achieved by requesting that words in te reo Māori were not translated into either English or Portuguese by interpreter Marco Antônio Gonçalves. Here my talk contributed, albeit in a small way, to one of Selwyn’s aims ‘to introduce the Maori language through Shakespeare to the world’ (quoted in Middlebrook, 2000) by helping to raise awareness of te reo Māori through a consideration of Shakespeare. Fórum Shakespeare provides opportunities for many such small gestures, each offering a way to shift, even if subtly, meanings and languages that come to be accrued to texts in particular contexts and providing opportunities to rethink them by reorienting the location. My workshop – ‘Flirting with Shakespeare’ – took a different tack in terms of content, as we focussed on narratives of desire in Twelfth Night,

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though issues of translation continued to be central. Through a series of exercises and attention to monologues, duologues and scenes, we experimented over a 3-hour period with strategies for performing desire. The workshop was attended by sixteen literature and drama students or actors in their twenties, the majority of whom were women. The primary challenges in designing and delivering the workshop with simultaneous interpretation and a text in translation were to do with the amount and pace of material and finding effective modes of delivery. These are similar challenges to my regular workshop design in English but the estrangement effect of working with an interpreter created space to reflect on aspects of my practice, especially the role that spoken language plays. In the resulting workshop, we worked on building our collective understanding of the text’s narratives of desire. This was done primarily through practical exercises focussed on bodily posture and spatial relations between characters that were, initially, not reliant on performing the text. Text was introduced in highly selective sections that I had mapped to an English edition, allowing me to support the work of individual groups. The delivery of the material did, though, highlight the need to adjust the amount of the material much more than I had anticipated. The pace of working was slowed significantly by my lack of Portuguese, even as it was enhanced by the help of some participants who spoke English, especially in terms of peer-to-peer support. These issues were reflected in two of the free text comments in the evaluations, which noted that ‘Translation was great and necessary but took away precious time’ and that ‘It would be interesting to do a more extensive workshop to provide more immersion in the languages’, though the workshop was well-received despite these challenges (Workshop Evaluation, 2016: anonymous participant). This ‘small gesture’ of the one-off workshop – a microscopic element of the long-running Fórum Shakespeare project – highlights some challenges of working across languages and making sense of a Shakespeare play, even as the pleasures of our collaborative working on that day, of trying out ideas together and our efforts to understand one another, are not so easily captured.

Conclusion Towards the end of Act 1 of King Lear, Kent ventures to tell his king that he will teach him ‘differences’ (Shakespeare, 1997: 1.4.88). For over two decades Fórum Shakespeare has been constituted as a pedagogic performance in which teaching becomes a mutually iterated act that is always contingent on multiple differences. Across more than 100 workshops and

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public events run by fifty-plus artists and academics from four continents for over 30,000 people with a social media reach of 200,000+, Fórum Shakespeare has constructed meaning through exchange. Like Lear’s heath, Prospero’s island or Rosalind’s Arden, Brazil has been imagined as a place where ideas, practices, knowledges, habits and conventions can be undone. It has insisted that learning (and teaching) must vary in site, scale and ambition in order to sustain the Shakespeare we seek to imagine for the lives we live today. As the writers of this chapter took time in 2019 to reflect on moments from Fórum Shakespeare across the past twenty years, our motivation has been the urgency of what we still need to learn across languages and cultures as worlds curve away from what differences can teach us.

References Delgado, Maria M. and Paul Heritage, 1996. In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Escolme, Bridget, 2013. Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’s Slaves (London: Bloomsbury). Kyd, Thomas, 2009. The Spanish Tragedy, edited by Andrew Gurr (London: A&C Black). Middlebrook, Libby, 2000. ‘Language Test for Shakespeare Play’, New Zealand Herald, 24 November, www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid= 161717. Selwyn, Don C. (dir.), 2001. Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Weniti/The Maori Merchant of Venice (He Taonga Films). Shakespeare, William, 1997. King Lear, third series, edited by Reginald A. Foakes (London: Arden Shakespeare). Shakespeare, William, 2012. Romeo and Juliet, third series, edited by René Weis (London: Arden Shakespeare). Silverstone, Catherine, 2011. ‘The Legacy of Colonisation: Don C. Selwyn’s The  Maori Merchant of Venice and Aotearoa New Zealand’, in Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance (New York: Routledge), 55–78. Workshop Evaluation, 2016. Fórum Shakespeare, People’s Palace Projects (trans.), April.

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chapter 11

The Pop-up Globe

Designing and Learning to Play an ‘Empathy Drum’ Miles Gregory and Tim Fitzpatrick

Pop-up Globe’s Director of Music, Paul McLaney, has worked with the company right from the start in 2016. He describes the theatre as an ‘empathy drum’: a structure that resonates with and amplifies the interpersonal connections between the participants in the theatrical event. The authors of this chapter, Pop-up Globe’s founder and artistic director Miles Gregory, and Tim Fitzpatrick, the lead academic involved in this collaboration, reflect on how the building itself – and what resonates inside it – came about; what kind of living theatre has been made by the Pop-up Globe theatre company; and what has been learned in the process. At the time of writing, the Pop-up Globe (Figure 11.1) has delivered seven critically acclaimed and successful seasons (Auckland 2016, 2017, 2017/18, 2018/19; Melbourne 2017/18; Sydney 2018; Perth 2019), a national tour of New Zealand (2019), and a winter season in Auckland (2019). It completed its farewell Auckland season in 2019/20. It has performed nineteen original productions to over 700,000 people in Australasia and won fifteen awards in the process, creating a whole new audience for Shakespeare in repertory.

Building the Building Pop-up Globe is the world’s first full-scale working reconstruction of the original second Globe playhouse, closely based on research carried out at the University of Sydney by Tim Fitzpatrick and Russell Emerson – research that focuses on the building that Wenceslaus Hollar sketched in the 1630s (Fitzpatrick, 1996, 2004, 2011b; Fitzpatrick and Emerson, 1999), and which claims to deduce from the sketch the structure of the second Globe, and to intuit key features of the interior of the playhouse – features not evidenced in Hollar’s sketch of the exterior. The researchers argue that the structural geometry implied in the sketch means the footprint of the second Globe – and hence also the first Globe, with which it shared its foundations – was significantly smaller than previously believed. 174

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Figure 11.1  Much Ado About Nothing, Pop-up Globe Auckland, 2017 (Photo: Peter Meecham)

The theorised 86 ft footprint maps perfectly onto the archaeological remains of the first and second Globes, something which the larger, 100 ft wide London Globe – completed well before the publication of the archaeologists’ final report on the 1989 archaeological dig – fails to do (Bowsher and Miller, 2009: 127–8; Fitzpatrick, 2004). The collaboration between Pop-up Globe International Ltd, and Fitzpatrick and Emerson is codified in an Intellectual Property agreement that specifies mutual commitments and obligations. At the heart of this agreement is a simple mathematical or geometrical formula that drove the researchers’ computer-modelled designs – designs that the Pop-up Globe translates into scaffolding, timber and corrugated iron cladding to reflect the smaller footprint and the underlying ad quadratum geometry. This formula determines the crucial relationship between the stage and the yard and galleries: the Pop-up Globe is 86 ft wide, twice the width of its 43 ft stage. Since its galleries are of a similar depth to those in London (just over 12 ft 6 in deep) its major point of difference from London is a much smaller yard: it is 61 ft across compared to London’s 75 ft – the groundlings occupy an area only two-thirds the size of the yard in London. This increases the vertical angle the actors need to cover so as to reach the top gallery, but more importantly it brings the galleries much closer to the

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stage and concentrates the groundlings. As a result, Pop-up Globe’s actor– audience relationship feels more intense and intimate than the London Globe’s, and the seasons so far have confirmed the researchers’ expectation that this building would be more performance-friendly than the London reconstruction. The historical playhouses on which Pop-up Globe is based were built by actors for actors, so one would expect them to work well as interactional spaces – and the fact that after the disastrous 1613 fire the King’s Men chose to rebuild the Globe as it was, with the second Globe matching precisely the footprint of the first, is indicative. It was of course cheaper to re-use the existing charred footings, but one might suspect there was something about those dimensions that they wanted to preserve (so as to keep playing a familiar empathy drum, perhaps?). The other obvious difference between the London and the Pop-up Globes is that the latter uses contemporary materials and building techniques: it is built largely of scaffolding, with roughly 80 per cent of its components being stock standard modules. It therefore creates a very different effect on its audience, providing no ‘time-warp’ experience by deploying seventeenth-century timber framing and plaster infills. It is – just as was its historical ancestor – an unashamedly contemporary building, although the decorative scenae frons design is inspired by English architectural fashion of the early seventeenth century. Unlike other permanent reconstructions the Pop-up Globe can be – and has been – dismantled, stored, re-assembled and modified to reflect a developing understanding of how to make the building work better as a contemporary performance space with an integral historical pedigree.

Playing the Building Miles Gregory aimed to build a playhouse that would reproduce and re-interrogate historical Elizabethan and Jacobean actor–audience relationships, but this was not at the service of historical research: rather it was to provide a crucible for and generator of exciting productions that would speak to a contemporary audience. While his impetus was to replicate in modern materials the theoretical object arrived at by the research project, his overriding rationale was to deliver unamplified, open-air, Shakespearean performance in natural lighting, in a building that should be conducive to such attempts because it replicates the dimensions of the original Globes. Both Fitzpatrick and Gregory argue strongly that ‘integrity’ rather than ‘authenticity’ is at the heart of how their individual

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projects developed, and that Pop-up Globe meshes with and realises the pure historical research through what might be termed ‘selective authenticity’ – because the focus is not on the building, but on what can happen inside it. Selective authenticity involves taking aspects of historical performance that might resonate with a modern audience, so as to expand their view of theatrical interaction through the experience of alternative performance styles. This is manifested in decisions to use universal electric lighting, for example, but not to use any vocal or musical amplification. There are clearly practical necessities in the real-world business of performing theatre that Gregory feels cannot be ignored.1 Dr Phillip Parsons, a key participant in the 1960s reconstruction of the Fortune playhouse at the University of Western Australia, commented insightfully on the synergies between playing space and performance style: ‘A particular drama does not spring from a particular kind of stage but from a particular relationship between actor and audience’ (Rawnsley and White, 2018: 62). Parsons’ comment is consonant with McLaney’s characterisation of the Pop-up Globe as an ‘empathy drum’, a building that you can work with – not have to work against – to create ‘a particular drama’ for and with your audience. And it is consonant with Gregory’s aim to prioritise what goes on in the building rather than the building as such. Gregory’s priorities led to a repertory system involving two resident acting companies for each season, with each company typically staging two productions. Continuity of directors (most prominently and successfully Gregory himself and David Lawrence, Pop-up Globe’s Associate Artistic Director, together with Ben Naylor, Tom Mallaburn and Miriama McDowell as regular directors for the company) and actors (the core ensemble worked together across multiple seasons and shows, in some cases racking up over 450 performances on the stage) has enabled the accumulation of expertise in playing this ‘empathy drum’. Its seven seasons have strongly confirmed that the geometry of the building is indeed enormously conducive to an immediacy of rapport – between the actors/characters, between the actors/ characters and the audience, and between audience members themselves.

Playing the Building to Create an Audience The state of ‘authenticity’, even if it were possible or desirable to obtain, could never be a simple touchstone of success: even if the reconstruction reproduces a theatrical space that generated great theatre performance 400 1

For more on early modern theatrical reconstruction and the notion of ‘authenticity’, see Chapter 12.

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years ago, it follows neither that such historical authenticity will automatically confer magic and authority on productions done there, nor that audiences will inevitably and immediately develop competence in and responsiveness to this ‘particular drama’. So while the researchers might be gratified that the ‘particular drama’ developed by Pop-up Globe seems to be encouraged and nurtured by the interactive spatial dimensions they theorised, the outcomes of this collaboration are not simply the result of a two-dimensional synergy of building and production philosophy. There is a third ‘longitudinal’ dimension, since this synergy rides on more subtle and complex currents of theatrical sensibility, culture and competence necessarily accumulated over time. Intense actor–audience relationships might be forged in the crucible of the performance space, in the moment of performance – but real success involves a longer-term project: the capacity to engage with and create a growing and returning audience receptive to and competent in reading the ‘particular drama’ the building encourages from one production to the next. Pop-up Globe’s greatest achievement lies in its creation of a large and receptive audience pool, as individual moments of performance immediacy are processed and transformed over time into audience competence and receptiveness. The repertory system encourages the audience to see multiple productions within a short time span – an opportunity enthusiastically seized by many younger audience members, some to an extraordinary extent.

Creating a Transformative Educational Experience It is not surprising, given Gregory’s programmatic aims and insights, that the first significant outcome of performances at the Pop-up Globe lies in the ways the actors ‘play’ the audience, maximising the interactive possibilities of the venue. He articulates his own response to attending performances at the London Globe: In time I realised, as so many have before me, that it’s the energy of the building that has the potential to bring Shakespeare to life. It’s the shared space, the triple-galleried cockpit, the restless crowd, the direct address. (Gregory, 2015)

Perhaps more surprising is the capacity of an audience member, Chris L. (not a professional theatre critic or academic researcher) to articulate the interaction between building, actors and audience in the creation or triggering of physical and emotional involvement, in a five-star TripAdvisor review entitled ‘The theatre embraces you’:

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This is truly a night; an event not to be missed. The actors draw on the audience, creating a theatre that embraces you. The Pop-up Globe is built out of scaffolding and iron but as you walk in you are surrounded by people and you feel a great presence. (Chris L, 2017)

This incorporates three aspects of interaction: the actors ‘drawing on’ the audience to create an ‘embracing’ performance; the strong sense of being ‘surrounded by’ other audience members; and the presence created by the scaffolding and iron that constitute the architectural space – an interactional space that both encloses you and exposes you to the other audience members. Experience of multiple productions at the London and Pop-up Globes confirms how different and unique the audience experience is at Pop-up Globe. The notably smaller size of its yard condenses and concentrates the audience’s rapport with the stage, intensifying the intimacy of the interaction. The stages of the two playhouses are roughly the same size but are very different in how they relate to the buildings as a whole: the Pop-up Globe stage is proportionally larger in relation to the smaller polygon, and actually seems larger – because you are inevitably closer to it. This allows the actors to dominate the building in a way that London does not: the yard is manageable, the galleries much closer. For the audience it is indeed a ‘theatre that embraces you’ (architecturally), enabling the creation of ‘theatre that embraces you’ (performatively). The second outcome from Pop-up Globe’s seasons so far is demographic: who precisely constitutes the audience pole of the performance interaction. Pop-up Globe has created an entirely new audience for repertory Shakespeare in countries that have no significant history of this mode of performance, and this new audience has turned out to be predominantly youthful. Gregory was always partially motivated by the extraordinary educational opportunities that building a Pop-up Globe would bring to educational communities that had not enjoyed access to a replica Elizabethan playhouse, hoping that Pop-up Globe ‘might just be the most powerful experiential education tool ever invented in the fields of Shakespeare, English studies, and drama’ (2015). Some 35,000 students from all over New Zealand attended performances at Pop-up Globe Auckland 2016; since then over 100,000 students from around Australasia have experienced a Pop-up Globe performance, and in early 2019 Pop-up Globe appointed a Head of Youth Learning, Rita Stone, who has since developed a flourishing youth theatre programme as well as lifelong learning opportunities, talks, workshops and classes.

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Young audience members seem particularly affected by the deliberately direct connection between actor and audience achieved through ‘direct address’: performers make eye-contact with audience members and speak directly to them. Gregory attributes his career-long interest in direct address to ways of working he discovered while studying his Master of Fine Arts in Staging Shakespeare at the University of Exeter. This technique turns scenes inside out by permitting the scene to be shared entirely with the audience, casting them as part of the action. A large part of Gregory’s early career involved directing and performing in open-air Shakespeare in the United Kingdom, so he was able to further develop this technique with his company as a means of overcoming some of the acoustic challenges of open-air performance: engaging the audience directly in the play also ensured the best possible projection from the actors. In a workshop at the start of rehearsals, Pop-up Globe actors are trained in the company’s house style, known as ‘playful Shakespeare’, which involves extreme use of direct address. Playful Shakespeare encourages actors to ‘cast’ the audience in any given scene, and to find opportunities to interact with them for comic or dramatic effect. It is a technique that sidesteps any notion of naturalistic performance modes in favour of telling the story of the play collaboratively with the audience. Younger audiences seem to find this style exhilarating and inclusive, and particularly enjoy the sensation that by interacting with the actors they can potentially influence the course of the action – even if this sensation is ultimately misleading. Drawing inspiration from Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre practice, Pop-up Globe uses large quantities of fake blood, urine and other liquids. In the company’s debut season, concerns around health and safety led to the decision for all blood-bags used in Romeo and Juliet (director Ben Naylor) to be directed upstage away from the audience. The first preview of the production took place in front of an invited audience of lawyers and their families from sponsoring law firm Anthony Harper. The yard was practically empty, with most audience members preferring to sit rather than stand in front of the stage. The exception was an eleven-year-old boy, Charlie Hoole, who was standing directly in front of the stage, as close as he could get. During the large fight scene in Act 3, scene 1, at the death of Tybalt, a blood-bag burst in the ‘wrong’ direction, covering the boy in blood. At the interval a few minutes later, concerned Front of House staff approached the boy with cleaning cloths and a free T-shirt to apologise. They were stunned to find that he was absolutely delighted. As his father subsequently wrote in an email to the company:

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We absolutely loved the [play] [...] especially Charlie who, after being splattered in Tybalt’s blood, ran over to me to announce, ‘This is the best play ever!!’ (Gareth Hoole, personal communication, in an email from Lythan Chapman, Head of Marketing at Anthony Harper, to Miles Gregory, 4 September 2019)

Charlie Hoole’s experience led the company to reverse its policy around blood and other liquids. Directing most blood-bags and other liquids offstage into the yard means that not only does the audience revel in the direct and visceral connection to the stage action, but the slip hazard from the liquids on stage is greatly reduced. This playful – and often physical – connection between actor and audience, aligned with an irreverent yet ‘loving’ relationship with the original texts, has a powerful impact on the audience, as reviewer James Wenley observes: They present Shakespeare at his most populist. The cast take any and every excuse to interact with the audience. Standing in my prime groundling spot at the edge of the stage, I’ve had water tipped on me, been splashed by fake blood, had a croissant smooshed in my face by a French soldier, been the inevitable target of a bald joke, and clutched King Henry V’s hand. Purists would have an aneurism: they add one-liners, Bring it On cheerleading routines, and quote from those other great poets, One Direction.(Wenley, 2017)

Faced with immersion in a theatrical experience unlike any other they have encountered, young audiences behave differently – and their behaviour is embraced by the theatre-makers. The number of smartphones taking photos and videos during the performance is striking, but Gregory’s business partner and Pop-up Globe’s chief executive officer Tobias Grant is unconcerned: provided there is no sign of commercial-length videos being shot, he doesn’t mind – ‘As long as they post’. It is clear from the threads on social media, thousands of reviews on Facebook, Google and TripAdvisor, and over 16,000 Instagram posts tagged #popupglobe that they do indeed post en masse, and that this is a consequence of the younger demographic that Pop-up Globe has mobilised. Is there evidence of the realisation of Pop-up Globe’s programmatic aim to create a potentially transformative theatrical experience for young people by maximising the performance potential of this spatially involving theatre design? Figures 11.2 and 11.3 show two images from performances of the electrifying production of Henry V (2017, director Miles Gregory, designer Bob Capocci). The first image shows the close interaction engendered by Pop-up Globe’s production parameters that include using the yard (Figure 11.2). The second (Figure 11.3) shows a very human Henry, having taken off his crown before Agincourt, sitting downstage on one of three sets of steps

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Figure 11.2  Henry V (Chris Huntly-Turner) embraces an audience member in the yard while Westmoreland (Joel Herbert) looks on from the stage, Pop-up Globe Auckland, 2017 (Photo: Peter Meecham)

that link the stage to the yard. Standing right beside him is a group of four audience members: three young teenage boys and (presumably) the mother of at least one of them. These are boys of an age that is notoriously awkward and self-conscious in public situations (particularly unfamiliar ones such as a fully lit theatre), but that is not in evidence here – they are completely swept up in the performance, and only the adult betrays some slightly self-defensive body language. The boys’ body language would suggest significant empathetic engagement with a fictional character who is less than a metre away in shared light; and this engagement might suggest it is indeed possible for certain conditions of performance to trigger ‘a transformative experience’. A similar comment would seem justified in regard to the image of three young fans watching Much Ado About Nothing (Figure 11.4). The opportunity to engage with Shakespeare’s work performed by the Pop-up Globe theatre company has been transformative for many young people, who have found the company’s performance style so accessible and enjoyable that it has significantly changed their connection with Shakespeare – and in some cases, their own view of themselves. In all cities where Pop-up Globe has performed, many young people have returned to the theatre to see the performances not just once or twice, but in some

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Figure 11.3  Henry V (Chris Huntly-Turner) and young audience members, Pop-up Globe Melbourne, 2017 (by the author with permission provided by Tim Fitzpatrick)

cases reportedly up to eighty times. This extraordinary (and perhaps even unique) pattern of repeat attendance by young people has been facilitated by Pop-up Globe’s ticket prices – a reflection of Gregory’s view that theatre should be affordable for everyone. Standing tickets in the yard – a third of the theatre’s capacity – are just NZD/AUD $10, allowing those who become entranced by the productions and atmosphere of the theatre to attend multiple times. Mikaela Millwood was just thirteen when she encountered Pop-up Globe in its debut 2016 season, brought by her mother to a guided tour of the playhouse: I was fascinated, and I clearly remember doing a cartwheel on stage. That season I only managed to see three shows, but I loved them! In Season 2, I couldn’t wait for the doors to open! I brought my friends along from school too, and they had heaps of fun. It was engaging and so much better than going to the movies, even for people who weren’t really into theatre. It was a safe place that we could go and hang out together, and laugh and enjoy ourselves. […] That season, I saw 80 shows in total. […] Pop-up Globe, over the past three years, has completely changed my life. (Personal c­ ommunication via email to Miles Gregory, 17 December 2019)

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Figure 11.4  Three young fans, wearing elements of costume at Pop-up Globe Auckland, 2017 (Photo: Peter Meecham)

One young Australian audience member, Emily Reginalds, wrote in her Tumblr after attending Henry V at Pop-up Globe Melbourne, 2017: When Henry motioned to me during ‘Once more unto the breach’, I’m not ashamed to admit that I burst into tears. And when he rallied the troops, he called upon us as well. It was like a primal instinct, an inexplicable urge, to shout and stomp our feet and join the rousing cries of Henry and his soldiers in arms. I don’t give two craps about England, or Saint George, but last night I sure as hell did. Conquer France, you say? Sweet, let me just get my coat. It was such a special night that I will never forget. The performance and our part in it, as groundlings, was so vital and full of life. I want to go back, again and again and again. My heart and soul are full. They’re overflowing. (Reginalds, 2017)

These extraordinary individual accounts seem typical of broader patterns, as suggested by reviewer James Wenley’s reflections on the 2017 Auckland season: The Pop-up [Globe] blows away anxieties about ‘not getting Shakespeare’ and reinvigorates the plays as broadly accessible entertainment (as they were in their own time). One of my former high-school teachers, who had brought her students to a matinee of Henry V, told me that the prospect of the Pop-up Globe had made her students excited about theatre, and many were begging to attend. […] They were delighted to be so close to the actors, to be acknowledged, and they played back. The Pop-up Globe can change

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perceptions about what theatre and Shakespeare can be like. Attending a performance at the Pop-up Globe can be life-changing. (Wenley, 2017)

Tensions and Synergies: What Has Been Learned or Confirmed The synergies between the collaborators are obvious in the preceding discussion. However, these are two distinct but intertwined projects – to rediscover the dimensions and spatial dynamics of a historic theatre, and to make living productions that fully exploit the second Globe’s unique performance conditions – and they do not and cannot fully overlap. This final section explores areas of non-overlap that might in the future lead to further synergies and joint discoveries. Academic research enables and occasionally rewards the researcher’s obsessive tunnel vision. Fitzpatrick and Emerson had elaborated a notional reconstruction of the original Second Globe, so Gregory’s proposal to build it as a full-scale replica and produce Shakespeare in it might have sparked hopes this would lead to a thorough testing of the detailed architectural, structural and performance theories and hypotheses they had developed over a decade. Fortunately, Fitzpatrick had observed other reconstruction initiatives failing to provide academics with useful and coherent data; he had published on the reasons for this conundrum, sounding warnings about the impracticality of having professional theatre companies do academic testing (2015). So when contacted by Gregory with the exciting proposal to build Pop-up Globe, he did not have inflated expectations about how such a project might advance the research. In fact, far from being disillusioned, he found that Pop-up Globe delivered important outcomes such as those discussed earlier. However, its productions have not explored issues he has raised about historical staging practices and in particular entrance and exit patterns. Fitzpatrick believes that the Elizabethan playhouse had only two entrance-points (two lateral stage doors) through which the vast bulk of entrances and exits occurred, and argues performances could be done smoothly without the third upstage-centre entrance (usually termed the ‘discovery space’) theorised by major theatre historians (2011a: 247–88). This minority view has recently been given impetus by prominent Canadian scholar Leslie Thomson. In an appendix to her book on discoveries she assesses the historical evidence for the discovery space (Thomson, 2018: 213–41), pointing out that in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period there was no term for this supposed stage feature (Thomson, 2018: 214), and that theatre historians’ evocation of this resource is based on suppositions – and

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on an uncritical acceptance of earlier scholars’ suppositions – rather than historical evidence. Fitzpatrick ties this physical constraint to a broader theory of how the two entrance points might have been used systematically to create a clear sense of place in the plays, based on the relationships between the place portrayed by the stage-space in any scene and the opposed offstage places implied in the dialogue as being behind the two lateral doors (2011a: 175–96). Clearly then there is an extensive agenda of spatial theories that could be tested in the Pop-up Globe space, but who would want to restrict Pop-up Globe productions to just two entrance-points? In its various iterations the building has had three (or even four) entrances, but upstage entrance points are only half the story: Pop-up Globe productions also use, to spectacular effect, entrances to the stage via steps up from the yard. Before Pop-up Globe materialised Fitzpatrick had already argued that the place for investigation of historical performance is not in full-scale professional productions but in exploratory workshop sessions (2015: 174–5). He and colleagues have in fact been able to conduct workshop sessions on the Pop-up Globe stage, but such initiatives are necessarily limited: in a tight repertory season featuring both evening and matinee performances the theatre is in virtually continuous use for performances, understudy rehearsals and maintenance. During the 2018 Sydney season a two-hour slot on Wednesday afternoons was all that Pop-up Globe could reasonably make available to grateful academics. Scholars need alternative venues, such as the New Fortune at the University of Western Australia (Rawnsley and White, 2018; Fitzpatrick, 2018), to test their theories. Findings from such workshops might then feed into subsequent productions, but the link between academic research and professional practice is necessarily long term and indirect.

Conclusion At the heart of Pop-up Globe’s appeal to audiences is a dynamic combination of factors: the unique architectural and spatial features of the theatre; affordable ticket prices for groundlings; direct address; contemporary references and ad libs; the extensive use of spectacular fight scenes; colourful bespoke period costumes mixed with anachronistic modern elements; dances, songs and special effects including flying, blood and pyrotechnics. Add to this a strict attention to the run time of shows (all performances aim to run at 2 hours and 15 minutes excluding an interval) and a determination to embrace the humour of Shakespeare’s work, and the extraordinary audience reactions cited earlier become understandable. That this complex

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theatrical experience seems also to engender in at least some young audience members a deeper and broader appreciation of Shakespeare’s works and of the themes he pursues is a great source of satisfaction both to the theatre makers and to the academics whose work triggered the Pop-up Globe’s remarkably successful and unique enterprise. The ‘empathy drum’ beats on.

References Bowsher, Julian and Pat Miller, 2009. The Rose and the Globe: Playhouses of Tudor Bankside, Southwark: Excavations 1988–91 (London: Museum of London). Fitzpatrick, Tim, 1996. ‘The Fortune Contract and Hollar’s Original Drawing of Southwark: Indications of a Smaller First Globe’, Shakespeare Bulletin 14.4, 5–10. Fitzpatrick, Tim, 2004. ‘Reconstructing Shakespeare’s Second Globe Using CAD Design Tools’, Early Modern Literature Studies Special Issue 13, 4.1–35. http:// extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/si-13/fitzpatrick/index.htm. Fitzpatrick, Tim, 2011a. Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate). Fitzpatrick, Tim, 2011b. ‘From Archaeological Remains to Onion Dome: At the Upper Limits of Speculation’, Shakespeare 7.4, 432–51. Fitzpatrick, Tim, 2015. ‘“The Two Doors’ Traffic of our Stage”: Developing and Testing “Spatial” Readings’, Cahiers Élisabéthains 88.1, 169–80. Fitzpatrick, Tim, 2018. ‘Exploiting Expensive Hardware: Software Models for Globe Research’, in Ciara Rawnsley and Robert White (eds.), The New Fortune Theatre: That Vast Open Space (Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Publishing), 209–25. Fitzpatrick, Tim and Russell Emerson, 1999. ‘Reconstructing the Spatial Dynamics of “Lost” Theatre Spaces; Shakespeare’s Second, First and Third Globe Theatres’, People and Physical Environment Research, 42–57. Gregory, Miles, 2015. ‘Why I want to Build a Pop-up Globe Theatre’, WhatsOnStage, 9 May. www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/news/guestblog-miles-gregory-pop-up-globe-theatre_37771.html. L, Chris, 2017. ‘The theatre embraces you’, TripAdvisor, 10 March. www .­tripadvisor.co.nz/ShowUserReviews-g255106-d10053679-r465996987-Pop_ up_Globe-Auckland_Central_North_Island.html Rawnsley, Ciara and Robert White (eds.), 2018. The New Fortune Theatre: That Vast Open Space (Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Publishing). Reginalds, Emily. Tumblr, 2017. Last accessed 10 November 2020. https://reginalds .tumblr.com/post/165529635183/last-night-a-ten-year-long-dream-of-mine-came. Thomson, Leslie, 2018. Discoveries on the Early Modern Stage: Contexts and Conventions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Wenley, James, 2017. ‘Scene by James: The Battle for Shakespeare, or, is the Pop-up Globe as you like it?’ Theatre Scenes, 30 April. www.theatrescenes.co.nz/ scene-by-james-the-battle-for-shakespeare-or-is-the-pop-up-globe-as-you-like-it/.

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chapter 12

The Place of Shakespeare North

Histories, Dynamics and Educational Aims Elspeth Graham

Shakespeare North is an urban regeneration project inspired by the Shakespearean theatrical heritage of its location in the small town of Prescot, England. It was initiated in 2004 and opened in 2022. At its heart is the creation of a replica sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theatre: London’s Cockpit-in-Court. In the manner of Matryoshka dolls, this ­recreated theatre is enfolded in a modern building (itself surrounded by a performance garden) that will house extensive community and educational activities – the focus of this chapter.1

The Place of Shakespeare North: Layers of History Prescot is located in the modern Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley, a constituent part of Liverpool City Region (although formerly part of Lancashire). It was a growing knowledge of the little-recognised – and perhaps surprising – level of Knowsley’s Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic interests that first inspired the development of Shakespeare North. Retrieval of historical evidence of theatrical activity in Knowsley revealed two centrally intertwined stories. There is, firstly, that of the Lancashirebased Earls of Derby: courtiers, local magnates and significant theatrical patrons, one of whose residences, Knowsley Hall, bordered the town of Prescot (and which remains the Merseyside home and estate of the current Earl and Countess of Derby). It was Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, later Fifth Earl of Derby, who was patron of Strange’s Men, the precursor to Shakespeare’s Globe company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men 1

Elspeth Graham was one of the initiators of the Prescot Playhouse Project (subsequently the Shakespeare North project) in 2004. She was a Founder Trustee of the Shakespeare North Trust, formed as a vehicle for the project, from its inception in 2006 to March 2021 and participated in the work of the project throughout this time. This chapter reflects the ethos of her work during the period of her involvement. It does not necessarily reflect the values of the current Shakespeare North Trust or the Shakespeare North Playhouse.

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(MacLean and Manley, 2014: 1–2; Graham, 2020). And Strange’s Men have been further identified as a company that, along with Leicester’s Men  and other significant troupes, performed in the Lancashire residences of the Earls of Derby in the 1590s (Farington, 1853: 32, 44, 51, 56–7; Graham and Tyler, 2011: 128; MacLean and Manley, 2014: 25–6, 33–5). Then, secondly, there is the less-known history of the ‘theatrum’, ‘lusorium’ or ‘play howse’ (as Prescot’s Manor Court Rolls from 1603 to 1617 variously identify it) in Prescot itself: the earliest, known, Elizabethan, purpose-built playhouse outside London (see Bailey, 1952; George, 2003; George 1991; Graham and Tyler, 2011). Research into the – initially surprising – existence of an early theatre in this poor and apparently remote town has recently revealed an alternative view of Prescot as a market town for the wider region that also held a thriving annual fair attracting around 500 visitors a day. A revised picture has emerged of Prescot as a more connected and entrepreneurial place than it once seemed, a place alert to visitors’ entertainment needs. Just as this historical background to Shakespeare North is produced from an interpretative inter-relation of apparently disparate stories, so the modern project, initiated in response to knowledge of this history, involves dialogue, co-creation and attention not only to the entangled needs of different stakeholders but, just as importantly, to what is between them. The project itself is a partnership enterprise: between Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council and the Shakespeare North Trust, a separate charity (whose trustees include academics and businesspeople) established as the project vehicle, with the participation of Liverpool John Moores University as a founding academic partner. Its central aim is to commemorate Knowsley’s early modern theatrical heritage by building – on the site of Prescot’s Elizabethan cockpit – the Shakespeare North Playhouse. Rather than a re-creation of the original Prescot Playhouse, details of which are unknown but which, since it was easily converted into a dwelling house in 1609, is unlikely to have been more than a modest rectangular building, the modern Playhouse incorporates a replica of Inigo Jones’/ John Webb’s seventeenth-century, indoor Court theatre, representing both the historically fluid nature of the original space and the needs of the present. Absolute locational authenticity has yielded, in this regard, to our contemporary interest in the recreation of diversely interesting and attractive early theatre spaces.2 In the same manner as Shakespeare’s Globe, the 2

For more on early modern theatrical reconstruction and the importance of ‘authenticity’ and ‘integrity’, see Chapter 11.

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Sam Wanamaker theatre and other replica Shakespearean theatres across the world, Prescot’s reconstructed Cockpit-in-Court will contribute to, in Andrew Gurr’s words, ‘an educational experiment, an experiment in staging Shakespeare’ working as ‘a laboratory for actors to rediscover the art of acting’, and for audiences to discover the art of watching and listening to performances, in a Jacobean/Caroline space, offering possibilities of theatrical dialogue between the historic and the modern (Gurr, 1989: 25). But perhaps in distinction from other replica theatres whose initial aims were more purely theatrical, Shakespeare North has, from its inception, had a broader remit: to serve as a stimulus to regional re-creation in a broad sense, re-presenting Knowsley and Merseyside not as deprived areas but as special places with a rich heritage and modern cultural vibrancy. The Shakespeare North Playhouse, as a local landmark, a visitor attraction and an economic and educational stimulus, aims to have national and international appeal and recognition, but to be resolutely grounded in its locale. Since it began in 2004, the project has, in fact, always been conceived as a heritage-based, economic regeneration initiative, directly drawing on ‘the cultural authority, the financial leverage and the world-wide currency of Shakespeare’s name’, as Ronnie Mulryne and Margaret Shewring once put it in relation to Shakespeare’s Globe (1997: 15). It is this regenerative aim that has enabled the capture of over £35 million of public development funding (from national government, regional government and Knowsley Council itself) since Knowsley has been consistently identified in the UK government’s multiple deprivation indices as the second most deprived local authority area in England (English Indices of Deprivation 2019). The people of Knowsley, as national statistics reveal, have low life-expectancy, high levels of (often trans-generational) unemployment, and poor life chances. Some sub-areas of Knowsley suffer the United Kingdom’s very worst levels of income deprivation with half Knowsley’s children growing up in poverty. And Knowsley, according to government statistics, has the lowest level of educational attainment in England. Just as the picture of early modern Prescot as poor and remote has been complicated by recent social-historical research, so awareness of Knowsley’s recent history produces a more nuanced picture of it than purely statistical information, presenting it solely as a deprived place, might suggest. It is a place riven by the contrary forces that have shaped it at the same time as, paradoxically, it embraces its hybridity. As the work of Prescot’s Heritage Hub (linked to Shakespeare North) reveals from its collation of oral-­historical accounts, its people often have a strong, proud sense of tradition – yet the Borough is, in fact, a relatively recent formation.

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It was created by the 1972 Local Government Act (effective from April 1974), which reconceived a number of townships, identified since the Middle Ages as south-Lancashire, as Liverpool satellite towns, gathering them together into a discrete administrative and economic entity: the new Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley in Merseyside (Local Government Act 1972: chapter 70). At the same time, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, people from ‘slum clearance’ areas of the city of Liverpool (often home to Irish diaspora communities) were moved to new housing estates in different Knowsley townships, producing, however unintentionally, new pockets of consolidated deprivation (Rogers, 2010). Formed as a long, thin banana-shaped strip, where expanses of farmland and the rural estate of the Earl of Derby stretch between the townships, Knowsley curves round the eastern outskirts of Liverpool. It is inhabited by those whose families have remained locally rooted throughout centuries and whose names (Ditchfield, Bold, Molyneux, Houghton, Hey) appear as part of Prescot’s Elizabethan story, recurring throughout centuries of records, alongside more recent settlers in Knowsley whose earlier family histories are those of repeated dislocation and deracination. It might be characterised as an arbitrarily constructed, geographically uncentred, indeterminate place, neither properly urban nor properly rural, further re-identified since 2014 through fresh local government legislation as an outlying component of a ‘City Region’, linked to, but not part of, the city of Liverpool itself. In its recent past, it has sometimes been described by inhabitants as a ‘rubbish place’, a ‘forgotten place’, a place in decline. Yet, at the same time, its townships are rooted in, self-aware about and proud of the longue durée of their histories. Knowsley’s hybrid identity, its levels of deprivation and its geographical composition, along with the past decade’s central-government cuts in funding to the area, provide multiple challenges to local and regional government; yet these very difficulties have also produced local government initiatives (such as endorsement and significant funding of Shakespeare North itself) that are exceptionally imaginative, bold and courageous. The corresponding responsibility of the Shakespeare North project in this context is immense. Both its integrity and its possibility of success depend on it representing the local in a way that is true to its history and to the identities and needs of Knowsley’s people, while articulating this complex local story with the national and international. Likewise, it must produce a dynamic inter-relation between disparate stakeholder communities – including those of the local, the established Shakespearean theatre world and the academic world. At every level of the project, then, interrelation, entanglement, the in-between, and the dialogic are integral to the

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project’s vision and aims and must be, I believe, to its developmental and operational practices.

The Project Development: Dialogism, Relationship and Entanglement If recognition and creative negotiation of heterogeneity are central to Shakespeare North, the question of how to embody and enact dynamic interaction between people, institutional bodies and groups can, of course, be fraught. At an abstract level, there is a long history of thought that, rather than focussing on discrete aspects of any environment, culture or system, considers instead the importance of the relationships between its constituent elements. These are sometimes seen as involving dialogues or conversations between the components’ different voices, emphasising the multi-vocal nature of the whole (Bakhtin, 1984 [1963]: 6–9). Such a general emphasis on what is between elements, rather than on the elements themselves, is summed up by the anthropologist Tim Ingold in his stress on idea that ‘the tangle is the texture of the world’ (2000: 199–201). At a practical level, it is commitment to working methods that embody the dialogic, the inter-, the multiple, the genuinely co-creative that has produced many of Shakespeare North’s excitements as the project has developed. Yet it is, inevitably, the very differences that lie behind such an exhortation to the dialogic or polyphonic that have, at times, made processes fraught with difficulty. Some of the greatest joys of working on the Shakespeare North project over many years have come out of encounters between those with radically different professional expertise. I, as an academic literary scholar, would never have expected an afternoon spent in the offices of Mersey Travel to discuss the problematic location of Prescot’s bus terminus and taxi rank immediately in front of the Shakespeare North Playhouse site, to be interesting, let alone joyful. But witnessing ways in which Mersey Travel managers deployed their intimate, detailed, broad knowledge of every individual bus and train route across the City Region in order to solve Shakespeare North’s planning problem was pure delight. Localism here was enacted through a deep, creative knowledge of systems of traverse across a region. From this, I gained, in an experiential flash, a new recognition of the complexity of our familiar world and how its functioning depends on a web of diverse knowledges, expertise and forms of creativity. And, if this was one of the most unexpectedly enhancing moments of the long years of project development, there have been numerous

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similarly creative intellectual moments produced by the vast range of interdisciplinary or inter-professional encounters that participation in such a project involves: with architects, town planners, building and sound engineers, acousticians, landscape designers, visual artists, museum curators, archaeologists, project managers, actors, theatre directors, stage managers and many more. Yet there are, equally, encounters that become clashes or conflicts or misunderstandings. The relationship between the academic and the popular, for example, despite the value recently placed on public engagement and research impact by academic funding bodies and in academic research assessment exercises, is notoriously difficult to negotiate. The Elizabethan and Jacobean history underpinning Shakespeare North exemplifies this directly, since the story that stimulated the project, although well evidenced, is not a simple one. Prescot neither has the straightforward Shakespearean birthplace claims of Stratford-upon-Avon; nor the archaeological and long-established documentary authentication of Shakespeare’s Globe; nor even the more complex, but unequivocal, historical basis of the Gdański Teatr Szekspirowski (Limon, 1985). The composite history behind Shakespeare North is hard to represent in the public domain. Media coverage such as an early headline, ‘Shakespeare Lived and Worked in Prescot’ (when he almost certainly did not), is threatening to academics’ scholarly integrity and reputational safeguarding. But to others working in the quite different contexts of local government or the private sector where the success of the project depends on promoting it to local people and potential donors in ‘business communities’, such a reaction can seem self-indulgent and over sensitive. Research scrupulousness, integral to an academic mentalité, may seem irrelevant. Such mismatches of core professional values may bring fundamental tensions into the open. Are the needs of non-academic fundraisers or project managers ultimately more important to the project’s viability than matters of intellectual probity? Who has ultimate ownership of the project? Whose vision directs it? What matters most about the project? Should the academic underpinnings of the project and its initial conceptualisation be deemed ‘just an idea’? Can the Playhouse’s governance be effective if its trustees have little knowledge of Shakespeare, theatre, history or education? Such disjunctures between cultural and professional values have emerged during Shakespeare North’s development at a number of levels, from the trivial to the critically project threatening. Inherent in a historic theatre reconstruction project are the tensions between the appeal to authenticity and the need to comply with modern building standards, budgetary

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limits and project deadlines. Alignment of the pragmatic, the scholarly and the design-led has, inevitably, been a recurrently important issue. Professional disorientation, on a less crucial, but intensely experienced level, may be produced by more quotidian differences. What is a professional document: one that is rigorously researched and well written, or one that is nicely illustrated and colloquially expressed? How might one navigate different institutional hierarchies and the processes of decision making in different bodies – organisational differences that can lead to delays and profound misunderstandings? Perhaps most importantly, differences in accountability and responsibility shape ways in which project partners interact. University teachers are normally accountable to employing universities and perhaps, beyond that, to government agencies. They may perceive themselves as having a responsibility towards students, towards colleagues – and perhaps to their academic discipline. But in a community-based partnership project where do prime responsibilities lie: to project partners?; to the local community?; to funders?; to the national and local electorates who have chosen the political manifestoes and remits of government funding bodies? For local government partners, the stakes are perhaps rather higher than for academic partners. If the Shakespeare North project ultimately fails, the consequences for both individuals and even for the local authority overall could be calamitous. And for members of the Shakespeare North Trust, a partnership body subject to the legal requirements for charities, individual trustees can suffer both financial and reputational consequences for failure. The overall issue raised by such conflicts, is of how to mitigate the potentially negative effects of misunderstanding or conflict while retaining a commitment to multiplicity and dialogism. It is, perhaps, education in its very widest sense that offers a navigational route between the values, practices and desires of different partners and between different stakeholder communities. Joint training days for project partners could provide a possibility of recognising and discussing differences. And there are various models for acknowledging difference in relation to Shakespeare North’s future operation. Both in the programming of the theatre and in Shakespeare North’s educational programme, the interests of project partners and the needs of diverse stakeholders might be met, perhaps, by aggregating different educational offers (for schools and undergraduate and postgraduate university students and continuing professional development for teachers) or forms of theatre (Shakespearean performance and stand-up and pantomime). Or, more innovatively, education and theatre might be integrated. In the community-education projects that have been

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devised and delivered as precursors to the full operation of the Shakespeare North Playhouse from 2022 onwards, there has also been an attempt to fully enact dialogism by highlighting difference itself, so as to capture the distinctive history and make-up of both the project and its location.

Shakespeare North’s Community Education Projects The notion of ‘community’ is invoked by almost all cultural, political, economic, administrative and funding bodies, and is ubiquitous in popular social commentary. But, during the same period that it has gained a purchase on public discourse, the idea of community has, ever more regularly, been critiqued in academic sociology where it is seen as lazily invoking a fake sense of togetherness (see, for example, Bauman, 2012 [2000] 101). Yet invocations of community might not always be counterfeit. Perhaps the concept can have an affective (rather than conceptual) force that is not always inauthentic. While appeals to community by dominant social groups and officials may constitute bad faith, a small town’s self-identification as a community may function rather differently. When Shakespeare North Playhouse first went through a planning permission process in 2016, comments from members of the public were invited as part of the legal procedure. Among the hundreds of overwhelmingly positive responses were several expressing gratitude that ‘someone should have thought we mattered enough to do this here’. That use of ‘we’, and that reference to locale, precisely evoke a locally owned sense of community – albeit a community whose identity has been infused with a sense of its own irrelevance, its own insignificance. While the social make-up of Knowsley clearly includes diverse socio-economic and cultural groups, such an overarching appeal to its own sense of local community by inhabitants has, perhaps, a particular validity that cannot – and should not – be understood cynically. So it is with such an understanding of what community means to Knowsley people that several of Shakespeare North’s educational projects, set-up in advance of the theatre’s opening in 2022, have come about. The work of the community theatre company, Imaginarium (formerly MATE), a formal associate of Shakespeare North, has been vitally important to developing enthusiasm for the larger project. Its annual open-air productions of Shakespeare plays have converted many people from the initial belief that ‘Shakespeare’s not for us. It’s too posh’ to having an appetite for Shakespearean drama. These professional-quality productions where all characters are played by local people and where all characters from monarchs and nobles to mechanicals, servants and clowns speak with a regional

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accent, can profoundly change performance dynamics: the ­relationship between play-text, players and audience is radically t­ransformed. Such performances have levelling effects that offer new interpretations of Shakespearean drama to an already acculturated audience, and a discovery of the fun and accessibility of Shakespeare to others. Imaginarium’s productions sell out; every summer, hundreds of local people of all ages, and from a diverse range of socio-economic backgrounds, watch and interact with productions full of song, dance and intellectual vitality, children sitting on rugs, adults on camping chairs, all sheltered by an ancient oak tree in a natural woodland amphitheatre. The intimacy of relationship between community members as actors and community members as audience for Imaginarium productions brings Shakespeare into the family lives of Knowsley people; they come to own the Borough’s theatrical heritage. And this has, in turn, helped stimulate both greater parent involvement with pupils’ engagement in English, drama, art and music in schools, and, maybe more unexpectedly, Shakespeare North’s economic regeneration aims. Two years before the Shakespeare North Playhouse opened, new bars and restaurants replaced betting shops, pawn shops and manicure bars in Prescot’s town centre: the Bard, Harrington’s (named after the Elizabethan playhouse’s builder), the Lord Strange and a dozen others. Townspeople have taken hold of the Shakespeare North stories – both that of Prescot’s early modern past and that of the present project development – and have possessed them through entrepreneurial initiatives and through collectivism. Not only have the new Prescot business owners spontaneously formed their own local business network, supporting, promoting and interacting with each other, but they have also contributed to Shakespeare North’s Community Curators. This group, led by members of Knowsley Council, themselves in dialogue with professional researchers, have begun to interpret archival materials in new ways, especially with an eye to creating exhibitions for the Shakespeare North exhibition area: manuscript passages referring to the Prescot playhouse will become illuminated wall displays; an Elizabethan embroidery group has produced a template for activities; and a public re-enactment of Prescot’s Elizabethan Court Leet, with descendants of some of its original Elizabethan actants playing the parts of their ancestors, is planned. If this group is seen as embodying a form of adult or community education, its dynamics are not those of classic models, such as those associated with Paulo Freire in Latin America or Tom Lovett, closer to home, in Liverpool (Freire and Shor, 1987; Lovett, 1988). Although community education is here conceived as a means of empowerment of politically subordinate or

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economically disadvantaged groups, emphasising pedagogic dialogism, their concerns often remain with what should be taught to community members. Knowsley’s Community Curators function differently. Initial information may be given by professionals, but the paths of discovery and creation then followed are determined by the group, allowing for new locally visioned interpretations. Shakespeare North Community Symposia evoke community in a different way. These events originated in response to a differently targeted symposium: ‘Shakespeare, The Earls of Derby & the North West: an international symposium with leading scholars of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre culture’, held at Knowsley Hall and hosted by the Earl and Countess of Derby in 2016. This occasion itself served as an educational experiment in bringing together diverse groups – cultural influencers, academics and members of the public – in a celebration of local links to Shakespeare in his anniversary year. In spite of being recognised as successful in connecting national and international scholars with an audience made up of academics, socially prominent influencers from north-west England and local people, it also provoked quietly remonstrative emails to its organisers. These pointed out how Knowsley people were starved of cultural stimulus but could not afford the expensive tickets for this event. Would it not be possible, they asked, to organise something similar but much cheaper in Prescot itself? In response, the Shakespeare North Communities Group began to set up ‘Community Symposia’ where use of the word ‘community’ aims to capture both that originating, gently oppositional appeal for affordable but high-quality cultural stimulus, as well as the sense of interactive creativity that Shakespeare North aims to embody more generally in all its educational activities. In his account of experimentation with performances in Shakespearean Original Pronunciation at Shakespeare’s Globe, Pronouncing Shakespeare, David Crystal remarked that: One of the most interesting outcomes has been to draw attention to the process of dramatic interactivity, demonstrating the creative role of the playgoer. My most vivid memories of productions are those where that mysterious border between actor and spectator is crossed. And it is language that usually provides the bridge. (2019: 5)

And it is language that was the theme of the Community Symposium, held in November 2019, ‘Shakespeare North, Sound and Voice’. In this, the event’s concept consciously referenced the linguistic culture of Knowsley itself. Knowsley people frequently explain to outsiders that local people,

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with a Lancashire history but a present as part of Merseyside/Liverpool City Region, speak in accents that can each be identified as specific to a small township area (Prescot, Whiston, Rainhill and so on), forming a patchwork of discrete linguistic realms, often only two or three miles apart, while the overall regional dialect is generally recognised as a hybrid of the distinctive Liverpudlian (or ‘Scouse’) and Lancastrian. The history and identity of the place as both melting pot and embodiment of continuing socio-cultural difference is summarised in its language characteristics. Since voice is, evidently, integral to theatre, the Communities Symposium aimed to test how Shakespeare North’s aim to bring together diverse social groups might be focussed by such a central theatrical component: the dialogic as language itself. The programme for the day began with experts (Jane Boston from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and Kathy Dacre from Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance) on voice in theatre, rooting the event in the theatrical and Shakespearean while responsively engaging the audience by clapping rhythms and voicing sounds (Boston, 2018). Liverpool-born, language historian Tony Crowley followed, outlining his research on Merseyside language, again in interaction with his audience over Liverpudlian words, phrases and a ‘Scouse’ version of the witches’ speech from the opening of Macbeth. Shared laughter and shared knowledge produced an affinity between speaker and audience, emotional warmth, and a recalibration of the value of Liverpool language and accents, usually deemed the second least attractive in the United Kingdom (Crowley, 2012). An Oxford postgraduate Renaissance lutenist, Sara Liber Salloum, introduced the importance of music in a brief talk and through the beauty of her musical accompaniment to lunch. Then, at the thematic centre of the day, as a localising lynchpin, Carole Arnold, the headteacher of Prescot’s Evelyn Primary School, described the school’s pioneering work with children and their parents on articulacy: her ‘Prescot Loves to Talk’ project. From elaboration of the importance of early acquisition of oral fluency and confidence to lifelong educational achievement, longterm prospects of employment, physical and mental health, to a description of parents’ engagement with the project, then to children’s visits to local shopkeepers to ask for their participation, the rhetoric of this talk, in its use of incremental repetitions and variations, enacted its theme. It elicited both laughter and (as feedback showed) a feeling of inspiration and local pride. The day culminated in a performative account of theories of Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation by David Crystal and Ben Crystal. This talk enthralled its audience. It combined the informative,

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the humorous and full audience responsivity in its combination of the actorly, the intellectual – and the performed appeal of a family dynamic as comments, jokes and asides ping-ponged between David and Ben Crystal, Hilary Crystal (sitting between the audience and performers) and Edie, Ben Crystal’s therapy dog (also a Shakespearean actor in her own right). It enacted a sense of intimacy and inclusiveness that was recognised by both speakers/performers and audience members. By the end of the day there was palpable excitement, the vibrancy of a genuine ‘buzz’ in the homely church hall in which the event was held. Speakers commented on how the day thematically built a recognition of the crucial importance of language confidence to cultural identity and to each individual’s possession of a validated place in the world. The day generated a sense of sharing knowledge and work (audience members both interacted with speakers and helped with clearing up). From an organisational perspective, it brought together some project partners through outward-facing activity; differences of value, of professional expertise and experience, were annulled through a day that actualised, in a small way, the potential of the Shakespeare North project overall. Above all, speakers, organisers and audience members from the local community spoke of the way that the day had yielded emotional warmth.

Conclusion: Community, Dialogue, Difference and Shakespeare North Although the word ‘symposium’ might suggest a conventional academic event, this community symposium subtly transformed that concept. Focussing on matters of diversity and empowerment through language, the day enacted the project’s aim of bringing together, on an equal footing, the excellence of nationally recognised speakers and performers with Knowsley people, their local concerns and attributes. More significantly, perhaps, it was in the relationships between speakers, audience and organisers that the day also, spontaneously, achieved something greater than the simplicity of its format and setting might imply. It brought about an affective cohesion that might distinguish a genuine sense of community-­ generated identity from those notions of community decried by Bauman and other social theorists. Affective warmth, knowledgeability and excitement fused into something small but remarkable. If this was an educational event, it became clear, the transmission of knowledge and inspiration was not one way, nor confined to a dry understanding of knowledge acquisition. A mutuality and a sense of the fully dialogic – between different participants with different roles and diverse backgrounds, but also between

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thought, identities, feeling – were enacted. It is this spirit that Shakespeare North, in spite of all its informing differences, embodies in its particular place, its buildings and programmes.

References Bailey, F.A., 1952. ‘The Elizabethan Playhouse in Prescot, Lancashire’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 103, 69–81. Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 1984 [1963]. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. C. Emerson (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Bauman, Zygmunt, 2012 [2000]. Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press). Boston, Jane, 2018. Voice. Readings in Theatre Practice (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Crowley, Tony, 2012. Scouse: A Social and Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). Crystal, David, 2019. Pronouncing Shakespeare. The Globe Experiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Farington, William and F.R. Raines (eds.), 1853. The Derby Household Books (Manchester: The Chetham Society). Freire, Paulo and Ira Shor, 1987. A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education (London: Macmillan). George, David (ed.), 1991. Records of Early English Drama. Lancashire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). George, David, 2003. ‘The Playhouse at Prescot and the 1592–94 Plague’, in Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson (eds.), Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 227–42. Graham, Elspeth (ed.), 2020. ‘Shakespeare North and the Earls of Derby’, Shakespeare Bulletin 38.3 (Special issue). Graham, Elspeth and Rosemary Tyler, 2011. ‘“So unbridled & badde an handfull of England”: the Social and Cultural Ecology of the Elizabethan Playhouse in Prescot’, in Mike Benbough-Jackson and Sam Davies (eds.), Merseyside: Culture and Place (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press), 109–40. Gurr, Andrew and John Orrell, 1989. Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). HM Government, Local Government Act 1972. Chapter 70, effective from 1 April 1974. www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1972/70 Ingold, Tim, 2000. The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London and New York: Routledge). Limon, Jerzy, 1985. Gentlemen of a Company: English Players in Central and Eastern Europe 1590–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lovett, Tom (ed.), 1988. Radical Approaches to Adult Education (London: Hutchinson).

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MacLean, Sally-Beth and Lawrence Manley, 2014. Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, 2019. The English Indices of Deprivation 2019 (HM Government: London). https://assets .publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file/835115/IoD2019_Statistical_Release.pdf. Mulryne, J.R. and Margaret Shrewring (eds.), 1997. Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press). Rogers, Ken, 2010. The Lost Tribe of Everton (London: Trinity Mirror Media).

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Part IV

Digital Reimaginings

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Introduction Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen and Jacqueline Manuel

Digital Shakespeares are pervasive. As Jim Casey observes, there is ‘a multitude of new media and platforms for reimagined Shakespeares’ ­ (2019: 112). The diversity of approaches to teaching Shakespeare ‘has become even more widespread with the quickening rate of digital proliferation in everyday life and pedagogy’ (Bell and Borsuk, 2020: 1). The chapters here underscore the extent to which digital technologies have opened up frontiers for Shakespeare education, scholarship and performance. Chapter 13 considers digital archives and online resources such as the Shakespeare Electronic Archive, MIT Global Shakespeares, HamletWorks, Shakespeare Brasil and the Folger-JSTOR’s Understanding Shakespeare. The project described in Chapter 14 centres on textual and performative variants of plays and productions using digital tools including Perusall .com and MIT Global Shakespeares. In Chapter 15, Janelle Jenstad illuminates the future of digitised early modern drama via an account of Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO) and Chapter 16 turns to Play the Knave, a digital game using a motion capture interface with animated avatars. As Peter S. Donaldson writes, ‘the future of digital Shakespeare might be well served by recalling the ambition of the pioneering pre-Web projects’ (Chapter 13, p. 210). We see this forward-­planning in LEMDO’s ability ‘to connect with projects that have not yet been imagined or built’ (Chapter 15, p. 243). In exploring the past and present innovations of digital Shakespeare projects, the chapters in this section enable us to ‘project’ forward to imagine digital futures.

Contexts, Audiences, Relationships While these collaborative endeavours project into the digital realm, their embeddedness in virtual and real-life contexts varies ­considerably. Donaldson considers the possibilities of linked archives and online resources; how users can make connections across ‘all available media 205

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classes’ (p. 210). By contrast, while Play the Knave thrives on a ‘glitchy’ ­connection (p. 254) between real-life and digital interaction, at its heart the game is driven by embodied learning. As Jenstad makes clear, her project – like others featured here – serves ‘multiple audiences’ (p. 245), including teachers, scholars and students. In contrast to most printed editions of Shakespeare which ‘address one audience’, LEMDO aims to host ‘polyvocal editions’ that function for different audiences simultaneously. It allows those audiences to selfidentify as students, teachers or scholars, creating an opportunity for conscious self-reflection on the means and modes by which we engage with Shakespeare’s texts. A foundational collaborative structure underpins the relationships enabled by these projects. Global collaboration prompted the creation and linking of archives in Chapter 13. The construction of LEMDO relies on students as ‘stakeholders and co-creators’ (p. 247). At the classroom-level, Alexa Alice Joubin’s text-based and video-based pedagogies are designed for collaborative learning, not ‘isolated activity’ (p. 228). Chapter 16 features scholar–student collaboration in the ideation of Play the Knave through to its deployment as an education programme in schools.

Aims, Processes, Structures The specific interactions of resources, pedagogies, people and sites (digital and physical) build these projects into something greater than the sum of their parts. This is a feature of complex adaptive systems, which are produced by the rich interactions of multiple components and actors (see Introduction). In embracing a non-linear structure and enabling an openness in the classroom that fosters the unexpected, Joubin’s work is complexivist: it is ‘rhizomatic’, replacing ‘the linear, arborescent, grand narrative with the “rhizome” which has no centre and grows in all directions’ (p. 227). Her enquiry-based learning ‘discovers deep connections among seemingly distinct interpretations’ (p. 226). Donaldson similarly connects ‘distinct’ resources to advance his vision of a ‘living variorum’, which provides access to the text through ‘commentary and performance’, ‘tools for student-created pathways’ via linked collections, and the ability for students to author their own ‘cross-media reactions, interpretations, and essays’ (p. 210). The explicit aims of the LEMDO project (p. 239) also speak to a rhizomatic move away from hierarchies and linearity in the desire to ‘cut across

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the corpus of early English drama’ and ‘contextualise Shakespeare afresh’ (p. 239) to create ‘a networked hub’ for early modern drama studies (p. 242). The structure of Gina Bloom and Amanda Shores’ project (Chapter 16) offers a different model of collaboration: they argue that, surprisingly, ‘close connection is not sufficient or even necessary for collaboration’, and the turbulent, unstable nature of ‘glitchy connections provoke and fuel collaboration’ (p. 253–4), demonstrating another facet of complex systems.

Insights, Challenges, Takeaways In any digital imagining of Shakespeare, access, durability and skill are essential – and sometimes a challenge. The resources described in Chapter 13 are not all open access, with linked materials sometimes requiring users to navigate paywalls or institutional access. While free, Play the Knave is not instantly available to teachers. Videos on platforms like YouTube and Vimeo can be ‘ephemeral’ (Chapter 14, p. 233). Although projects like LEMDO are resolutely open access, Jenstad recognises the challenge of ensuring the ‘longevity’ and ‘preservation’ of digital materials (p. 239). These projects rely on teachers and students navigating web platforms and software programmes, and curating and creating their own materials. Jenstad points to the beneficial skills students develop in working with LEMDO, giving them ‘useful knowledge in many professional environments’ (p. 248). Teachers are often not all well equipped for implementing digital tools and resources in the classroom and blended learning requires a deft balance between digital resources and ‘the liveness that has been central to recent movements in Shakespeare pedagogy’ (Carson and Kirwan, 2014: 59). Bloom and Shores highlight the additional ‘challenge’ of ‘timing’ and the difficulties presented by the hierarchical structure of our educational systems (p. 258). The absolute necessity of interconnectedness – of digital tools, of students and resources, of online and embodied learning, of ideas and interpretations, and of teachers and pupils – is a key insight in the reimagining of digital Shakespeare education. The projectors in this section reveal the potential for the digital to empower students and educators as makers, collaborators and researchers in the classroom. Students are ‘empowered to claim ownership of Shakespeare’ (Chapter 14, p. 236) and become ‘stakeholders and co-creators’ (Chapter 15, p. 247). Digital Shakespeare is about much more than getting students in front of a computer or iPad, on a webpage or playing a game. The digital reimaginings described here consider their virtual platforms as intertwined with diverse modes of learning: ‘global Shakespeares’,

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after all, ‘thrive in hybrid cultural and digital spaces’ (Chapter 14, p. 235); and digital Shakespeares embrace ‘multiple learning modes – kinaesthetic, visual, auditory’ and understand the ‘glitchiness’ of virtual and real-life collaborations (Chapter 16, p. 259). If these reimaginings help us picture the future of digital Shakespeare education, it is by no means a future in which we must follow Prospero and drown our books: rather, these projects seek to cross boundaries and build bridges between virtual and real life, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean texts, archives, systems and habits of thought. There is a movement towards the rhizomatic, a resistance to or working around existing hierarchies, and a prioritisation of adaptable, learner-centred and enquiry-driven pedagogy that positions students as active, skilled co-learners.

References Bell, Henry and Amy Borsuk, 2020. ‘Teaching Shakespeare: Digital Processes’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 25.1, 1–7. Carson, Christie and Peter Kirwan, 2014. ‘Introduction: Defining Current Digital Scholarship and Practice: Shakespeare Pedagogy and the Digital Age’, in Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan (eds.), Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 58–62. Casey, Jim, 2019. ‘Digital Shakespeare Is Neither Good Nor Bad, But Teaching Makes It So’, Humanities 8.2, 1–19.

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chapter 13

Reimagining Shakespeare, Linking Archives and the ‘Living Variorum’ Peter S. Donaldson

In 1992, experimental novelist Robert Coover declared ‘The End of Books’ in a front-page essay in the New York Times Book Review and announced the advent of a new age of literary hypertext, basing his claim on recent experiments in multilinear fiction and poetry on floppy discs and CD-ROM. Only seven years later, as the World Wide Web was replacing these media, he announced, in ‘Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age’, the end of the period he had so recently defined, declared Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, a recasting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as the crowning achievement of the Golden Age and expressed deep scepticism about the Web as an environment for hypertext fiction (Coover, 1992, 2000). Though Shakespeare archives and collections are not works of imaginative fiction, the advent of the Web also marked a shift in early experiments in the digital realm in Shakespeare study and education. A number of these projects, delivered on standalone workstations and portable media such as CD-ROM and interactive laserdisc, were inspired by, or convergent with, the early hypertext/hypermedia visions of authored pathways through multimedia information spaces like those explored by Jackson and other ‘Golden Age’ authors. These include, among others, Shakespeare Electronic Archive, Shakespeare on the Chinese Stage 1979–1989 (Li and Gillies, n.d.), Shakespeare in India: ‘King Lear’ (Trivedi, 2004), and the Voyager Macbeth (Braunmuller and Rodes, 1994). A number of these early Shakespeare projects were recast for the Web, but often lost key features such as the copious links between short passages of the text and the corresponding images and video sequences that supported the ‘reading across media’ experience. For example, the videos contained in Shakespeare in India have been republished on MIT Global Shakespeares, but the coordination of text, video and commentary, and the ability to jump from a specific moment in one production to the corresponding moment in one of the other productions, have not carried over to the Web version. 209

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While many extensive online Shakespeare archives and collections have now been created, the future of digital Shakespeare might be well served by recalling the ambition of the pioneering pre-Web projects, and by: (1) expanding and linking existing archives in such a way that a student, researcher or anyone else interested in Shakespeare can access materials relevant to a line of text across all available media classes; and (2) focusing educational initiatives on the expanded possibilities – including support for student creation of multimedia essays, discussions and pathways – that ‘reading and writing across media’ in linked archives can provide. In earlier work I called such cross-media collections the ‘expanded book’ model, and Larry Friedlander used the term ‘living variorum’: the term ‘variorum’ (an abbreviated form of the Latin term for critical editions that include textual variants and commentary on specific passages ‘by various editors’) has been in use since the mid-1800s. Friedlander proposed an extension of the term to include access to recorded moments of performance (Friedlander, 1991: 124). In his vision of the future, Shakespeare education includes not only access from moments in the text to commentary and performance, but also tools for student-created pathways through such linked collections and for student authoring of cross-media reactions, interpretations, and essays of their own. In this chapter I will discuss some of the steps already taken for advancing the vision of the ‘living variorum’ drawing on the histories of the Shakespeare Electronic Archive and MIT Global Shakespeares: Video and Performance Archive as well as partner projects such as HamletWorks and Shakespeare Brasil. I also include the recent Folger-JSTOR collaboration, Understanding Shakespeare, which is now part of the broader ‘JSTOR Understanding Series’. This tool has widened the horizon for a potential ‘living variorum’ by creating a resource in which a huge collection of quotations from the plays are line-linked to a scrolling electronic version of the corresponding Folger Shakespeare Library edition. I will introduce several of these collections and offer examples of the kinds of paths users might take through a not-yet-created archive in which the productions presented by Global Shakespeares and other collections would be linked to texts of the play (ideally line by line), to videos in other collections, works of art and illustration, commentary, and digital images of early editions in a cross-media, multi-project resource not only for researchers but also for student use in cross-media essays and presentations of their own.

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Shakespeare Electronic Archive The Shakespeare Electronic Archive was launched on workstations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the University of Pennsylvania and the Shakespeare Institute in 1996 and made available on the Web in 1999. This project is still online and provides comprehensive links between transcriptions of early texts and digital images of the passage being read as well as full images of each page. A digital facsimile of one complete Folger copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare is included as well as full page images from other copies to illustrate all known print variants, selected from the Folger copies by Peter M. W. Blayney. The archive also includes all individual copies of Hamlet Q1 and Q2, curated by Michael Warren, an art and illustration collection of 1000+ images, covering the period from the late-seventeenth century to 1900 curated by Alan Young, and video sequences from several Hamlet films (Forbes-Robertson, 1913; Ragnar Lyth, 1982; Burton-Gielgud, 1964). All materials are linked to short passages (three or four lines) of text of which they are versions or which they illustrate or enact. This way of organising collections emphasises very rapid access to materials relevant to a given place in the text, not merely as a convenience but in pursuit of new ways of reading across media as distinguished from searching more slowly through separate collections for bits of information or for individual image files. In thinking of Shakespeare resources in this way we were influenced by several trends in the field in the late 1980s and early 1990s, specifically the notion – always known, but never before fully grasped or adequately taught – that the Shakespeare text is inherently variant and that variation matters, not only as evidence to establish a best text, but as variation. Our collaborator Michael Warren had played a central role in this shift, arguing for a two-text King Lear as early as 1976, and in 1990 published The Complete King Lear, an attempt to display variation among editions by providing unbound fascicles of facsimiles of Quarto and Folio Lear as well as a large bound book whose ‘cut facsimiles’ (passages of text selected and cut from a facsimile page and aligned with their equivalents in another text) allowed him to display corresponding passages on facing pages, with additional columns for variations within each edition. When Warren finished this work, he believed he had reached the limit of what could be done on paper. He joined our team and arranged for the photographing of the Hamlet quartos, and also compared every character in the transparencies we commissioned to the originals at the relevant libraries.

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HamletWorks HamletWorks is a large collection of many kinds of Hamlet related materials, among them a massive and growing collection of excerpts from historical commentary on the play, keyed to individual lines along with several options for displaying text, including Bernice Kliman’s innovative Enfolded Hamlet, which presents both Q2 and F1 in a single text, with variants marked by colour-coded brackets. HamletWorks had its origin in the MLA’s still in progress New Variorum (NV) for the play. In the ambitious extensions of the variorum form Kliman, the Hamlet NV’s first lead editor and her colleagues, imagined the transition from print to digital, including an archive of discussions among the editors, so that future researchers would have access to the workflow and reasoning of the team. Perhaps the feature most relevant to the project of renewing the quest for an archive that crosses media and document classes through partnerships across project and institutional boundaries is HamletWorks’ immense collection of extracts from the commentary history for each line in the play. For some lines, the editors have now published more than 100 commentary extracts spanning four centuries. Since there are so many entries for those lines, the design for a new multi-­project archive might include curating a smaller number to serve as an initial ­sample: one could click on ‘Angels and ministers of grace …’ and see the date, author, and first several lines of five or six commentary notes, and a further click might bring all 100 into view in a list. Commentaries would, of course, be linked to video and illustrations, as well as to the corresponding moments in text and facsimiles.

Understanding Shakespeare The Shakespeare component of the ‘JSTOR Understanding Series’ is a joint effort of JSTOR Labs and the Folger Shakespeare Library. In this project, lines in the Folger editions of all Shakespeare plays for which there are quotations in the text of articles in the JSTOR journal collections are linked to the specific passages in the journal that quote those lines. The website provides open access to excerpts from the articles in which a line from a play is mentioned as well as full-page images of the page. Access to the full text of the article images of the page on which the relevant reference occurs is limited to those with JSTOR permissions. For readers without those credentials, the limitations are minor in comparison with the expansion of access to commentary within scholarly articles, and

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even those who cannot read the full article get to see the reference in the context of a full page. Understanding Shakespeare is easy to use and delivers impressively on the promise of its front-page tag-line in the initial launch version of the project: ‘Pick a play. Click a line. Instantly see articles on JSTOR that reference the line’. The wealth of material available for most plays is extraordinary, and for a number of lines even overwhelming: for example, there are over 500 references in the JSTOR corpus to the line ‘To be or not to be.’ What are these results like and what do they add to a scholarly enquiry or to a student’s understanding of the text? First, for material that might be possible to find in available online bibliographies, the time between reading the line and reading the relevant passage in an article is almost instantaneous, and the ability to read a number of such passages from different articles amplifies that advantage. In addition, Understanding Shakespeare turns up a great deal of material until now virtually impossible to find: in creating the links for Henry V, for example, the project first identified more than 40,000 articles of possible relevance, and then used more sophisticated search protocols to narrow that number down to several thousand. What this project has done goes beyond the claims to comprehensiveness of the print variorum – commentary linked to lines can, as HamletWorks has demonstrated, be far more copious in an online hypertext than in print. Quotations from Shakespeare in scholarly articles in the domain of print are so copious and, in the pre-digital age so hard to find, that we have so far given little thought to them as a class of resources that could be included in a collection indexed to specific lines. Understanding Shakespeare is a major advance toward the ‘living variorum’.

Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive Global Shakespeares began in 2006 when I received an invitation from private donors to propose an expansion of the work of the Shakespeare Electronic Archive in any direction I thought best. My first priority was a global collection of performance videos. I contacted Alexa Alice Joubin,1 who had suggested such an expansion of the archive into Asian Shakespeare several years earlier, was a collector of videos herself, and had by this point become a key figure in the creation of Stanford’s Shakespeare in Asia site. Alexa agreed to collaborate and my proposal to the donors was for a 1

See Chapter 14 in this volume.

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collection of Asian videos as a first phase in the creation of a global video collection, Shakespeare Performance in Asia, launched in 2009 as a collaboration with Li Lan Yong (Singapore) and Kaori Kobayashi and Michiko Suematsu (Japan). Our collaborators in Singapore and Japan went on to expand their work in the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A-S-I-A) while Alexa and I recruited editors in Brazil, Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere, and launched the Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive in 2010. The collection now includes over 100 complete videos from across the world. Our work as co-founders of this first global Shakespeare video archive, and that of our editors and collaborators, has made a significant contribution to current scholarship on global Shakespeare, and has also contributed to the launching of partner projects in Taiwan and Brazil. In new projects we would want to link these resources to a base text, to the ‘Commentary Notes’ in HamletWorks, and to an updated version of Shakespeare Electronic Archive. In a linked archive, one could begin at a point in several electronic texts – transcriptions of F1 or Q2, a modern electronic text, or the conflated Enfolded Hamlet and move from there to the corresponding place in facsimiles of the two early editions, or to images illustrative of the passage and to the right place in, for example, one of thirty Hamlets from more than a dozen countries. I will now provide examples of two pathways through such a combined archive that would result from linking these collections at the level of the line or short passage. Pathway 1: ‘Now might I do it’ In this imagined session the reader would encounter the associated metadata for each of these steps, moving through three collections (HamletWorks, Shakespeare Electronic Archive and the Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive) to rapidly compare materials relevant to the crux line, ‘Now might I do it …’ (TLN 2350),2 for which Q2 and F1 differ slightly but substantively enough to support readings as divergent as those of Samuel Johnson and S. T. Coleridge, with illustrations and artwork that span a comparably wide spectrum from an action never really begun to a scene of suddenly interrupted murderous intent. The Enfolded Hamlet within HamletWorks reveals the textual difference (TLN 2349–53): 2

TLN stands for Through Line Number and is a precise way of identifying exact lines in the play text because the numbers count straight through the play including stage directions.

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Enter Hamlet. HAMLET Now might I do {it. But} now {’a} is {a-praying.}

And now I’ll do’t [Draws his sword.] — and so {’a} goes to heaven, And so am I revenged. That would be scanned: A villain kills my father, and for that

The Commentary Notes on TLN 2350 in HamletWorks preserve numerous critical reactions including Coleridge’s: 1818–19  mclr2 mclr2: contra john1 2350-73  Coleridge (ms. notes 1819 in Ayscough, ed. 1807; rpt. Coleridge, 1998, 12.4:855): “Dr. Johnson’s mistaking of the marks of reluctance & procrastination for impetuous, horror-striking fiendishness! Of such importance is it to understand the Germ of a character. But the interval taken up by Hamlet’s Speech is truly aweful! And then—‘My words fly up’—O what a lesson concerning the essential difference between Wishing & Willing: and the folly of all motive-mongering, while the individual Self remains.”

The eleven artworks linked to TLN 2350 in the Shakespeare Electronic Archive include, for example, an anonymous engraving of Henry Irving as Hamlet alone with sword and taper (Figure 13.1) and F. Wentworth’s engraving of H.C. Selous’ image of Hamlet drawing his sword behind the kneeling Claudius (Figure 13.2). The international videos in this case diverge even more widely. From the still of the Ryutopia Company’s 2007 production directed by Yoshihiro Kurita (Figure 13.3), it is clear that the Hamlet of this version is completely passive. Roles are almost reversed, with Claudius behind Hamlet, who is played as if he were a departed spirit in a Noh play who has returned to the scenes of his life to experience it once more with the detachment of the dead. But when Claudius finishes his anguished attempt at repentance, he finally wakes from his trance or meditation with a start at the line ‘Now might I do it.’ This compresses the issue of when and how action might be taken into the final few seconds of the scene. In contrast, Zé Celso’s version (Figure 13.4) gives us a Claudius who has torn off his clothing in a fit of drunken remorse; Hamlet pursues him pitilessly across the width of the full playing space, only to stop, perhaps partly in disgust, at the last fraction of a second, averting a collision. These differences in the afterlife of the line in commentary, art and theatrical production do not always map neatly to which of the variant

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Figure 13.1  Anonymous, ‘Mr Irving as Hamlet’. Folger Shakespeare Library, Source Call Number (STC): Art Flat a26, no. 82, image 002110. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library

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Figure 13.2  H. C. Selous, ‘Now might I do it pat, now he is praying’, engraved by F. Wentworth. Charles and Mary Chowden Clarke, The Plays of William Shakespeare (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, [1868]), Vol. 3, 421. STC: PR2755.C6 C1a Sh.Col, image 002734. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library

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Figure 13.3  Hamlet, directed by Yoshihiro Kurita (Japan) (2007). Image courtesy of the Ryutopia Niigata City Performing Arts Center. MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive

readings of the line are used in the script or in modern editions the artists may have consulted, with the more reluctant (Coleridgean) versions drawing on ‘Now might I do it but …’ and the more violent (Johnsonian) version drawing on ‘Now might I do it pat …’. Rather, it might be argued, they suggest a spectrum of possibilities for the play that Shakespeare himself may have been exploring in the transit from one of these to the other. Pathway 2: ‘Sir, in this audience’ This line (TLN 3692), in which Hamlet addresses Laertes in Act 5 before the fencing match, is one in which the three early texts vary. Cross-media study of the line and its afterlife might be helpful in thinking about the question, raised by Lukas Erne and others, of the extent to which Shakespeare as a writer composed for readers as well as theatrical audiences, sometimes creating one version of a play for print and another for the stage (Erne, 2013). In Erne’s view, some of the play texts, such as F1

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Figure 13.4  Walney Costa in the film Ham-let, directed by Tadeu Jungle, from the play Ham-let directed by José Celso Martinez Corrêa (known as Zé Celso) (1993). Courtesy of Teatro Oficina Uzina Uzona. MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive

Henry V that have seemed most theatrical (and/or metatheatrical) may in fact have been the more literary ones – using their references to and evocations of performance to encourage what Harry Berger Jr. called ‘imaginary audition’ (Berger, 1989). A seventeenth-century reader’s gloss on Henry V preserved in the Meisei Folio (see Meisei University Shakespeare Database) offers an interesting perspective on Erne’s thesis because the annotator (by definition, a reader) thinks first of the theatrical audience, and not, or not evidently, of himself and other readers when he glosses the play’s incitements to activate the imagination. Above the text of the First Folio page of Henry V, he writes: ‘The auditours Imagination must supplie the strangenesse of Incredible representations of the stage’. His next comment on the matter, at TLN 1007–66, also appears to support the ‘readerly text’ theory, for he writes, ‘Imagination must conceive the suddane changes and actions of the stage.’ To return to Hamlet. After encountering the variant readings of the early texts, the imagined reader of our virtual variorum might next access a curated sample of the HamletWorks Commentary Notes for the line.

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The commentary for this line (‘Sir, in this audience’) is sparse, but several comments raise the question of who the ‘audience’ is: the King and Queen, or the assembled nobles: 3692 in this Audience] Andrews (ed. 1989): ‘in the presence of all these noble witnesses’. 3692 Audience] Kittredge (ed. 1939): ‘this royal audience. Cf. [3680]’.

Surprisingly, none of the commentators on TLN 3692 in the HamletWorks collection suggest that the spectators in the theatre are addressed, or are intended to be imagined, yet the line evokes an audience, and thus prepares for Hamlet’s later direct address to an audience, as he is dying: ‘You that look pale and tremble at this chance,/That are but mutes or audience to this act’ (TLN 3818–19), which is more often taken as an address directed, at least in part, to the spectators. Checking HamletWorks for this line (‘That are but mutes or audience’) yields examples of commentators, including Samuel Johnson, who claim that the ‘audience’ referred to is the theatrical audience. It is true, as many of the commentators point out, that ‘mutes’ (mutae personae in the dramatis personae of Latin play texts as R. Travers notes below) is an appropriate form of address for the nonspeaking onstage audience. But Hamlet can also be referring not only to the onstage audience, but also to the spectators in the house: 3819 mutes] Johnson (ed. 1765): ‘That are either mere auditors of this catastrophe, or at most only mute performers, that fill the stage without any part in the action’. 3819 mutes] Travers (ed. 1929): ‘the “mutae personae” of Latin lists of characters in plays (cp. p.125 n. 6 [1999n])’. 3819 audience] Travers (ed. 1929): ‘audience keeps up, and “act” (cp. III, Ix, 73) does not contradict, the comparison with a theatrical performance. A less robust, or more sophisticated, art would rather have avoided it (cp. e.g. pp. 57 n. 7, 79 n. 4)’. 3819 mutes] Edwards (ed. 1985): ‘Characters in a play with no speaking parts. Hamlet’s remarkable view of himself as he dies, as being at the centre of a theatre-performance, is discussed by Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, 1962, at the end of Ch. 6’. 3819 mutes] Andrews (ed. 1993): ‘unspeaking actors. Within the playworld, Hamlet is speaking metaphorically; but in the theatre imitating that play-world, the actor playing Hamlet is speaking literally to his mute fellow actors who are pretending to be “Audience to this Act”’.

The reader, researcher or student might now turn to video sequences of this precise moment in the play from among those in Global Shakespeares and other collections. In the discussion following I have also included several of the well-known film adaptations as examples, because, though their

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use in a public access, linked archive is at present more problematic, they help to round out the vision of the ‘living variorum’ and provide a filmhistorical context for the performances we have collected, and their interpretation of ‘Sir, in this audience’ is especially rich. In his 1946 Hamlet film Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet begins the line speaking only to Laertes and then glances briefly, in close-up, behind him. A reverse long shot shows Osric and an unnamed courtly couple at the rear of the hall. Hamlet does not break his focus on Laertes for long, yet the acknowledgement of another ‘presence’ and a (slightly) wider audience than one seems important to the sequence, and it is not the royal presence that is emphasised, for the king and queen, though present in the hall are not visible either in the shot of Hamlet or of the rear of the hall. In fact, they are in front of Hamlet, but not within the frame. In the wider shots in the scene that follows we see a space that is like a stage, with characters arranged in deliberate, rather traditional looking stage tableaux. But it is also a space in which the movement of characters and camera make the view of the scene fluid and shifting as the hall becomes a fencing floor, a scene of death and then a space of remembrance and mourning. Towards the end of the scene (‘You that look pale … that are but mutes or audience to this act’) the hall very pointedly becomes an imagined theatre, its audience including the courtiers who sit before Hamlet, who is now honoured as the new king. When Hamlet’s gaze moves from screen right to left over the assembled on-screen audience, and fixes, for the length of the line, on the camera itself in direct address, the ‘audience’ implied may be taken to be that of the cinema, though the ‘stage within the frame’ trope makes it also an acknowledgement of the theatre. In Sergei Kozintsev’s 1964 film (USSR), Hamlet and Laertes are nearly alone in a large hall, with a few courtiers at a great distance from them. Kozintsev often pointedly evokes and varies from the Olivier film, as several scholars have noted. Here, as in Olivier, Hamlet is in intimate conversation with Laertes, but glances very briefly toward others who are in the hall but are not in his range of vision or visible in the frame at the moment of the glance. Here, in keeping with the film’s presentation of a Hamlet who is almost always under surveillance, the glances suggest a kind of check on the privacy of the conversation rather than, as in Olivier, a respectful acknowledgement of the presence of others. During the second of these glances, and at the point in the Folio text at which Hamlet has the half-line ‘Sir, in this audience’, Hamlet says ‘Let everyone know, I did not wish you evil’/‘Pust’ znayut vse, ya ne zhelal vam zla’ [omitted in the subtitles; translation to English by Margaret Litvin]. Kozintsev also omits the line that opens the sequence: ‘This presence knows and you must needs have heard’, which in both Q2 and F indicates Hamlet is addressing a

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wider audience than Laertes alone. The combination of this omission and the alteration of ‘in this audience’ to ‘let everyone know’ make this a private moment: Hamlet’s message to Laertes will only be revealed to others at a later time. This revision resonates with the ways in which the play, in its very last moments, reframes the action of Hamlet’s story as something only partly expressed to anyone except Horatio. Laertes, of course, will not survive to ‘let everyone know’, and Hamlet’s apology will have no wider audience within the world of the film, though of course a message is conveyed, as if emerging from the world Kozintsev has crafted to evoke Stalinist censorship and constraint, to the film audience, not only to viewers in the Soviet Union, but, since this film has had an exceptionally wide audience, throughout the world. José Celso Martinez Corrêa’s provocative 5-hour production (Brazil, 2007) of Hamlet makes maximal use of TLN 3692: Hamlet speaks not only to all of the actors in the scene but the audience for the performance as well. This is particularly emphatic because the production was staged in a warehouse, the playing space is narrow and the seating (many tiers of steel ‘balconies’) is vertical. This Hamlet looks up over his head to the high tiers of the building – there is no mistaking that the primary ‘audience’ is the audience to the actual theatrical performance, rather than the king and queen or the other players as Hamlet’s request for pardon (directed to Laertes in the text) here becomes a plea to the audience to forgive Hamlet’s sins. In the Ryutopia Company’s 2007 performance (Japan), Hamlet exists in a space that is different from and only intermittently engages with the actions taking place behind him. When the script calls for him to act, as for example when he stabs Polonius, the actions are performed by performers simulating mechanical karakuri dolls. Now, as the play draws to its ending, the other characters join him, move slowly forward as the duel begins, and stand facing the audience for the duration of the final scene. As the duel progresses, the verbal exchanges of the characters alternate with a repeat performance of the narrative of the Fall of Troy and the death of Priam, delivered from the bridge. This startling innovation moves the narrative into a palimpsest of historical periods, and connects the tragedy of Hamlet and the fall of the royal house of Denmark to the founding epic narratives of loss of empire in the West (Donaldson, 2013; Yong, 2009). In reviewing the video sequences that interpret (or omit) the F1-only reference to ‘audience’ in the apology to Laertes, we can identify a spectrum from onstage audiences to playhouse audiences, and further, to ‘audiences’ of still wider scope and longer duration, extending beyond the time and place of a particular production, and suggesting Shakespeare’s

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own engagement with the long view, with the persistence of his work and his words in what Wai Chee Dimock (2007) calls the ‘deep time’ of literary and dramatic experience, and with a worldwide audience that would encounter his works in many forms not yet invented in Shakespeare’s own time. One of these forms is the ‘living variorum’ imagined by Larry Friedlander, Bernice Kliman and others in the early 1990s and partly realised in the Shakespeare Electronic Archive, Global Shakespeares, HamletWorks, Understanding Shakespeare, Internet Shakespeare Editions and other projects. Among this array of projects there are key materials for achieving further steps toward the ‘living variorum’. But the vision itself is a widely shared one, and other projects might also serve as focal points for progress. What is most important for the immediate future is that the early goals – multimedia resources that cross time and cultures – be linked in a large and easy-to-use digital expansion of the possibilities that animated the invention of the print variorum form, and that progress be made toward a more truly global version of such a resource.

References Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A-S-I-A). http://a-s-i-a-web.org/en/ home.php Berger, Harry, Jr., 1989. Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). Braunmuller, A. R. and David S. Rodes, 1994. Macbeth (CD-ROM: The Voyager Company). Coover, Robert, 1992. ‘The End of Books’, New York Times Book Review, 21 June, 1, 74–5. Coover, Robert, 2000. ‘Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age’, Feed Magazine. http://nickm.com/vox/golden_age.html. Dimock, Wai Chee, 2007. Through Other Continents: American Literature across ‘Deep Time’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Donaldson, Peter S., 2013. ‘Hamlet, the Heike and the Fall of Troy’, Shakespeare: Journal of the British Shakespeare Association 9.3, 191–203. Erne, Lukas, 2013. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Friedlander, Larry, 1991. ‘Electrifying Shakespeare: Modern Day Technology in a Renaissance Museum’, Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums (Toronto: Ontario: Archives and Museum Informatics), 118–25. www.archimuse.com/ publishing/hypermedia/hypermedia.Ch14.pdf HamletWorks. Edited by Bernice W. Kliman, Nicholas Clary, Hardin Assand, and Eric Rasmussen. http://triggs.djvu.org/global-language.com/ENFOLDED/ index.php

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Honigmann, E.A.J., 1990. ‘Do-It-Yourself Lear’, New York Review of Books, 25 Oct, 58–60. Li, Ruru and John Gillies, (n.d.). Performing Shakespeare in China 1980–1990 (CD-ROM). Meisei University Shakespeare Database. http://shakes.meisei-u.ac.jp/ MIT Global Shakespeares: Video and Performance Archive. https://globalshakespeares .mit.edu/ Shakespeare Brasil. www.youtube.com/user/shakespearedigital/videos Shakespeare Electronic Archive, 1996–. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. http://shea.mit.edu/shakespeare/htdocs/main/index.htm Trivedi, Poonam, 2004. King Lear in India (CD-ROM). Understanding Shakespeare. JSTOR Labs and Folger Shakespeare Library. www .jstor.org/understand/shakespeare Warren, Michael J. (ed.), 1990. The Complete King Lear, 1608–1623 (Berkeley: University of California Press). Yong, Li Lan, 2009. ‘After Translation’, Shakespeare Survey 62, 283–295.

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chapter 14

Collaborative Rhizomatic Learning and Global Shakespeares Alexa Alice Joubin

‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together’. All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare, 4.3.74–5)

Film, theatre and television are inherently communal and collaborative art forms (Miell and Littleton, 2004: 1). Therefore, cooperative learning effectively reproduces the communal character of the subject for close reading, while problematising the uneven terrain of collaboration in the performing arts. The ‘interdependent and collective nature of collaboration’ (Newell and Bain, 2018: 62) encourages participants’ agency, sense of responsibility for their roles, and shared accountability. By creating knowledge collaboratively, students and educators lay claim to the ethics and ownership of that knowledge, an act that is particularly urgent and meaningful in the age of COVID-19 when students, more than ever, longed to be connected to others during quarantine. Collaborative learning involves the creation and circulation of freeform responses that foster a better understanding of dramatic texts. In this form of non-linear thinking, the texts become parts of a non-hierarchical network of ideas rather than a singular point of origin for dramaturgical meanings. This chapter demonstrates how collaborative learning helps students and researchers untangle the web of ‘mingled yarn’ of Shakespearean performances in digital culture. The philosophical principles and pedagogical strategies originated from my practices in the classroom as well as my partnership with a number of collaborative digital humanities projects. One unique feature of my approach to teaching is its exploration of textual and performative variants in the plays and their performances through digital tools. While this chapter discusses pedagogies for the fouryear university classroom, many of the collaborative learning strategies are applicable to other levels of education. Drawing on strategic presentism (Dimock, 2018) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of the rhizomatic, nomadic nature of postmodern 225

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knowledge (1987: 53), my pedagogy emphasises enquiry-based learning that – supported by digital tools – discovers deep connections among seemingly distinct interpretations, though it has faced some challenges due to students’ uneven preparation and their diverse reading and viewing habits. Despite the internal diversity among its participants, the collaborative enterprise has created productive synergies among its collaborators and encouraged ‘radical listening’: a strategy to listen for the roots, rather than the plot, of stories. The proactive communication strategy of radical listening creates ‘an egality between teller and listener that gives voice to the tale’ (Charon, 2006: 66, 77). In the context of teaching drama, students progressed from looking for the what in ‘plot’ to the why in characters’ motivation and behaviours. My pedagogy treats Shakespeare’s plays as fundamentally performative narratives that sustain both past and contemporary conventions. The methodology of strategic presentism, a term coined by Lynn Fendler (2008: 677), acknowledges the present position of the interpreters of the humanities and empowers them to make a difference by methodically using our contemporary issues to motivate historical studies. By thinking critically ‘about the past in the present’ (Coombs and Coriale, 2016: 88) – such as the #BlackLivesMatter movement – students analyse performances and dramatic texts with an eye toward changing the present. The collaboration has also revealed Shakespeare to be a cluster of texts for critical analysis rather than simply a ‘white’ canon with culturally predetermined meanings. A key lesson that we have learned is that, while not every thread we pursued thrived, the educational benefits lie not in exhausting all possible interpretations but rather in sustaining multiple pathways to knowledge. The two parts of this chapter – text-based and video-based pedagogies – examine each of the collaborations’ goals, significance, challenges, pedagogical impact and lessons for future innovations.

Rhizomatic Learning Non-linear, networked learning strategies mine rhizomatic, horizontal, synchronic connections among textual and performative variants of Shakespeare. These strategies draw attention to the growing body of productions, films and digital videos with variegated meanings. Deleuze and Guattari use the botanical metaphor of ‘rhizome’ to describe epistemological multiplicities, as opposed to an ‘arborescent’ model of knowledge, which is hierarchic like a tree (2004: 7, 16, 25). As Douglas Lanier writes, ‘to think rhizomatically about the Shakespearean text is to foreground its

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fundamentally adaptational nature’ (2014: 29). My rhizomatic pedagogy replaces the linear, arborescent, grand narrative with the ‘rhizome’ which has no centre and grows in all directions. Rhizomatic learning is pedagogically inclusive of multiple patterns of critical thinking and discrete but connected writing habits. It promotes diversity not just by accommodating differing learning needs but also by valuing divergent paths to knowledge that are rooted in cultural differences. The organising principle of the internet is a contemporary example of rhizomatic structure. There is no beginning and end, and there is no one single, fixed path through the contents with a singular meaning. Putting learning in a rhizomatic context and utilising digital tools encourages ‘introspection about [our own] position in … cultural and sociopolitical contexts that can challenge authoritative … meaning-making processes’ (Bell and Borsuk, 2020: 6). Students learn through collaboratively charted paths rather than curated exhibitions provided by the instructor. As a result, they would be able to use Shakespeare as a training ground to understand other complex texts in the future. My pedagogical model connects what may otherwise seem to be isolated instances of artistic expression. In contrast to goal-oriented pedagogies, collaborative learning allows participants to take into account the ambiguities and evolving circumstances that affect interpretations of the texts. A singular, modern edition of Shakespeare’s plays is no longer the only object of study. Instead, it is one of multiple nodes that are available for search and re-assembly. Teaching Shakespeare through translated versions and performative possibilities draws attention to dramatic ambiguities and choices that directors must make (Schupak, 2018: 165). In dramaturgical terms, it helps students discover ‘how the same speech can be used to perform … radically divergent speech acts’ (Rocklin, 2005, xviii). Students no longer encounter Shakespeare as a curated, editorialised, pre-processed narrative but as a network of interpretive possibilities. Instead of taking a secondary role by responding to assignment prompts, students examine the evidence as a group, annotate the text and video clips, and ask and share questions that will, at a later stage, converge into thesis statements. For instance, the political meanings and affective labour behind Hamlet’s lines ‘A little more than kin, a little less than kind’ (Shakespeare,  2005: 1.2.68) during Claudius’ announcement of his marriage to Gertrude depend upon performative contexts. If played as an aside in response to Claudius’ greeting him as a ‘son’, Hamlet’s comments could deepen a division within the court. If addressed to Claudius, these lines could publicly challenge Claudius’ authority by disrupting the king’s orchestrated

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familial harmony. The king has to decide whether to respond in kind or ignore the insult, as his courtiers are watching. If addressed to his mother, Gertrude, Hamlet could be opposing her re-marriage after his father dies, gesturing towards a moral high road. If addressed to the spectators, the prince could be insinuating that his uncle’s marriage with his mother has overstepped the boundary of brotherly kinship.

Text-based Collaboration Using open-access tools, such as Perusall.com, that incentivise and support collective and collaborative annotation of texts, I create a social space where students learn from each other. Perusall opens up any webpage or PDF text for annotation. Perusall and similar computer-mediated scholarly communication platforms have been shown to enhance the quality of collaboration and promote effective learning interactions between students (Miller et al., 2018; Cadiz, Gupta, and Grudin, 2000). Annotations are gathered under thematic clusters as distinct ‘conversations’, as Perusall calls them, for analysis. For each assigned text, the class would read, annotate and comment on a shared document, engaging in close reading and a critical framework of literary interpretation. The interactive nature makes reading a more engaging, communal experience, because readers become members of a community. The annotation tool, paired with a dynamic digital play text, provides pedagogical advantages over reading a print text as an isolated activity. A typical, codex-book modern print edition would fixate ambiguous textual variants by making editorial choices and by glossing particular words in the text. We worked with the modernised version of the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) King Lear. The ISE’s dynamic digital text shows textual variants when readers hover the mouse over a word. While textual variations and ambiguities can seem irrelevant to students, they are central to our understanding of a play. For example, in the ­division-of-the-kingdom scene (1.1), Regan tells Lear that she ‘profess[es] [herself] an enemy to all other joys/Which the most precious square of sense professes’. The floating pop-up window glosses the second instance of ‘profess’ as ‘to affirm or to claim, insincerely’. It also reveals that the Quarto uses the stronger verb ‘possess’. As students mulled over the variants, they saw that while the difference may be subtle, the choice of word alters Regan’s tone. In the same scene, Cordelia says in her aside that ‘then poor Cordelia/ And yet not so, since I am sure my love’s/More ponderous [‘richer’ in the Quarto] than my tongue’. In student annotations and discussion in this

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thread, they concluded that the adjective ‘richer’ would align Cordelia, in terms of the speech act (utterances that perform an action and intent), with the language of transaction initiated by Lear, Goneril and Regan. The adjective ponderous would add a sense of severity to Cordelia’s thought process. Kent’s advice to Lear in the scene also shifts in tone from diplomatic in the Folio to dire in the Quarto: ‘reverse thy state’ versus ‘reverse thy doom’. Taking on the role of editors, students provided rationales for their choice and shared their overall interpretations of the narrative. Writing and circulating rationales for editorial and interpretive choices led to increased awareness of one’s own decision-making process, known as ‘meta-cognition’ (Varghese, 2019) in students’ learning process. With collaborative close reading, students claim the language, in recognition of the speech act, rather than just the character in the sense of whether a character is ‘relatable’. King Lear has also opened up new avenues for linking contemporary cultural life and early modern conceptions of aging. In one course, students connected, on Perusall and during class, what they perceived to be Lear’s most eccentric moments (the division-of-the-kingdom scene and the first scene at Goneril’s castle) to the generational gap crystallised by the catchphrase ‘OK boomer’, which went viral after being used as a pejorative retort in 2019 by Chlöe Swarbrick, a member of the New Zealand Parliament in response to heckling from another member. The fictional situations have room for both intellectual and emotional responses to the play. The peer-to-peer collaboration excavates layered meanings of key words in a play text that tend to be glossed over by students if they read the text by themselves. As a cognitive and affective learning strategy, reading in solidarity is more effective than reading in solitude (Neil, 2020). In a similar vein, students were asked to combine textual annotations with a cluster of relevant images they selected from the Folger Library’s LUNA, an open-access digital image collection. In Othello’s final speech (5.2) before his suicide, he alludes, in the 1623 First Folio, to the ‘base Iudean’, a person of Jewish faith or Judas Iscariot in the Bible, and, in the 1622 First Quarto, to a ‘base Indian’, Indians of the New World, who ‘threw a pearle away/Richer then all his Tribe’. With dynamic ‘toggle view’, a reader of the digital edition could see simultaneously all the variants in a crux that is now open for comparative analysis. The Biblical allusion would signal Othello’s failed conversion to Christianity, Iago’s betrayal, as well as Othello’s lost soul. The reference to the New World would support interpretations of Othello’s internalised status as a ‘savage’. Historical engravings and paintings of Othello in the final scene reflect varying assumptions about the word choice and the weight of the freighted words.

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In other instances, textual variants take the form of speech assignment rather than word choice. For example, the ‘Abhorrèd slave’ speech directed toward Caliban in The Tempest (1.2) is assigned to Miranda in the First Folio and most modern editions, but to Prospero in Lewis Theobald’s, John Dryden’s and other pre-twentieth-century editions. In turn, in modern performances these lines are sometimes reassigned depending on how the director wishes to characterise Miranda and Prospero. It makes Miranda less innocent and more complicit in colonial crimes against the natives if she joins Prospero in calling Caliban a slave. There is another side of the coin. It can be empowering for Miranda to speak thus. Melissa E. Sanchez observes that, when the lines are spoken by Miranda, she is intruding ‘into the political debate’ between two men, Prospero and Caliban, and establishing herself ‘as an independent agent’ (2009: 65). Studies have shown that the reasons for reassignments of these particular lines are rarely stylistic but instead ideological (Clayton, 2016: 436). Global adaptations activate dormant aspects of Shakespeare’s plays. A play such as Henry V and its global afterlife provide rich material to be mined in, for example, a post-Brexit world. The enquiry-driven collaboration turns speakers of other languages into an asset, particularly international students who are not native speakers of English. All too often they are seen as a liability, but their linguistic and cultural repertoire should be tapped to build a sustainable intellectual community. Take The Tempest for example. What exactly do Prospero and Miranda teach Caliban? The word ‘language’ is ambiguous in Act 1, scene 2 (Caliban: ‘You taught me language …’). It is often taken to mean his master’s language (a symbol of oppression). But it can also mean rhetoric and political speech writing, a new tool for him to change the world order. One way to excavate the different layers of meanings within the play and in performances is to compare different stage and film versions from different parts of the world, as will be discussed in the next section. Students translated a passage into a language of their choice and shared their rationale with the class. For the purpose of sharing, they translated back into English what they wrote in another language. Sharing their linguistic skills, students also looked up historical translations of the plays. Caliban’s word, ‘language’, is translated variously in different languages. For example, Christoph Martin Wieland translates the word in German as ‘redden’, or ‘speech’. In Japanese, it is rendered as ‘human language’, as opposed to languages of the animal or computer language. Act 1, scene 3 of Othello offers another instance that is ripe for multilingual interpretations, which is the focus of a digital project that I

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participated in as a collaborator. Directed by Tom Cheeseman, Version Variation Visualisation: Multilingual Crowd-Sourcing of Shakespeare’s Othello (https://sites.google.com/site/delightedbeautyws/) examines how two key lines are translated in different languages. Focusing on the last words spoken by the Duke of Venice to Brabantio in the court scene, the project has collated 200 translations in thirty languages of the following lines: If virtue no delighted beauty lack, Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.

(Shakespeare, 2005: 1.3.289–90)

Translations of these lines into different languages deal with the meanings of fair and black rather differently. Mikhail Lozinskij’s Russian translation says ‘Since honour is a source of light of virtue,/Then your son-in-law is light, and by no means black’. Christopher Martin Wieland and Ángel Luis Pujante used ‘white’ in German and Spanish (respectively) to translate fair, while Victor Hugo chose ‘shining’. The software has since been adopted by Vladmir Makarov, Nicolay Zakharov and Boris Gaidin at Moscow University of the Humanities to compare multiple Russian translations of Shakespeare (shakespearecorpus.ru/). The translators’ choices of word reflect how social markers – gender, class, immigration status – create and amplify one’s desires and needs. While not directing the discussion toward their individual experiences of racialised discourses, students, including those who are ‘blessed with surplus visibility of race’ (Karamcheti 1993: 13), were able to discuss racial prejudices – a typically more sensitive topic in class – through these eye-opening translations of an impersonal, fictional scene. All of these textual variants and translational differences draw attention to the instability of the play texts as well as their variegated terrains that are open for interpretation. Grounded in the notion of variants and translations as parallel texts, the pedagogy encourages students to (re-)claim the language rather than aiming for interpretations that are disingenuous, gratuitous, or merely ‘politically correct’.

Video-based Pedagogy Working in tandem with collaborative textual analysis is video-centric collaboration. By turning a large number of performance versions into common objects of study, my digital video project makes links between adaptations that were previously regarded as distinct. Digital videos help us make necessary links between different modes of performative and literary representation. Our current, active, communal user-centric culture, which

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prioritises user participation (Fazel and Geddes, 2017: 3), is supplanting the more passive and siloed reader-centric experience that dominated the previous centuries, which in turn replaced the oral culture of Shakespeare’s age. Performance-oriented understanding of Shakespeare can enhance the collaborative reading of textual variants in multilingual contexts. For a number of reasons, the digital video has a special place in collaborative pedagogy and the current phase of global Shakespeare studies (Öğütcü, 2020; Thurman, 2020). First, the rise of global Shakespeares is inseparable from the prevalence of digital video on commercial and open-access platforms, because these platforms provide inter-connected forms of communication for site-specific epistemologies – knowledge that is produced in and reflects cultural specificities of particular locations. Secondly, digital videos support instant access to any sequence in a performance, as well as the means to re-order and annotate sequences, and to bring them into meaningful conjunction with other videos, texts and image collections (Joubin, 2011: 43). As such, digital video lends itself to collaboration via affordable and sharable tools. In a pedagogical context, digital videos of Shakespeare performance – dynamically co-constituted through the repertoire of common knowledge, with users’ hands as scribes and editors – can destabilise and expand the repertoire. Thirdly, digital video has recently redefined many of the terms and parameters of the study of Shakespeare. While in the 1990s students typically encountered global Shakespeare for the first time through film or theatre, in our times the initial encounters occur predominantly on digital platforms in the form of video clips, memes or quotes. It has become more common for non-professional readers and audiences to encounter global Shakespeares in fragmented forms. The outbreak of the global pandemic of COVID-19 in early 2020 closed live theatre events and cinemas worldwide, but at-home audiences consumed a large number of digital videos when global travel and national borders were shut down. In pedagogical contexts, the malleability of digital video puts play texts and performances to work in an interactive environment. Online performance video archives can encourage user curation and interaction with other forms of cultural records. In practice, this redistributes the power of collecting, re-arranging and archiving cultural records away from a centralised authority to the hands of users. Despite the challenge of maintaining net neutrality and equal access, generally speaking, in a de-centralised model of networked culture, the users have more direct engagement with narratives and multi-modal representations of events.

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While there is much academic discussion of mediated representations of Shakespeare in the mediascape such as YouTube (see O’Neill, 2014) and while there is an increasing number of apps with supplementary video content, peer-reviewed open-access video-centric teaching platforms have remained marginal to pedagogical and critical inquiries. Videos on such platforms as YouTube and Vimeo are not vetted or consistent enough for teaching and research. They are also ephemeral, disappearing when the contributor retracts them or when the rights holder asks for them to be removed. Aiming to provide vetted, crowd-sourced performance videos that are open-access with permalinks, Peter. S. Donaldson and I co-founded the MIT Global Shakespeares (https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/), an openaccess digital performance video archive providing free online access to performances from many parts of the world as well as peer-reviewed essays and vetted metadata provided by scholars and educators in the field. Deeply collaborative in nature with nine regional editors and four affiliated projects, the MIT platform publishes vetted video, metadata and peer-reviewed analyses of performances. With a ‘decentralised editorial design’ (Henderson, 2018: 72), it is both a curated and crowd-sourced archive. Donaldson details the ‘variorum’ aspect of the project in Chapter 13 in this volume. Here I would like to focus on our new single-play learning modules and user interface that we launched in 2018 (https://shakespeareproject.mit.edu/). Our interface supports the creation of clips and streamlining of aggregated searches. It can suggest videos of potential interest based on the user’s history. By creating clips that are meaningful to them, students curate their public ‘self’ – their tastes, passions and signature arguments. They exchange notes on their affective relationship to a play or film. Among the self-contained online learning modules for students and for educators to gain competency and to deploy in class are Othello, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice and King Lear. They are accessible and free of charge. Users can request access. Designed for classroom use, the modules share a focus on global adaptations. The Global King Lear in Performance module (Figure 14.1), for example, features thirteen full films and numerous video clips that have been pre-arranged in clusters of pivotal scenes (such as the blinding of Gloucester). The feature of clustered, curated clips from a large number of performances is pedagogically useful. While it is only feasible to teach indepth by assigning one or two films of Lear in a given class, students can expand their horizon by close reading competing performative interpretations of a few pivotal scenes. There are also modules focusing on single productions, such as the solo Beijing opera performance entitled Lear Is Here

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Figure 14.1  Screenshot of the MIT Global Shakespeares webpage, restricted to students who are given access via courses

(https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/modules/). It offers detailed lesson plans, exercises and explication specifically around one adaptation. The full performance video has been divided up into video chapters to facilitate learning. All of the modules have permalinks and offer vetted, curated content on platforms that invite direct user engagement. As I discussed in the previous section on text-based pedagogy, teaching Lear entails teaching each culture’s and generation’s reaction to the challenging ethical burden within and beyond the play’s actions. Does Cordelia’s hanging enhance the tragic pathos surrounding her journey, or does it help to highlight the senseless male suffering? The biggest payoff of teaching Lear through video analysis is a rhizomatic, productive engagement with performative variants. Viewing a clip of Cordelia’s silent protest from Peter Brook’s existentialist 1971 film of King Lear and a clip of Lear’s reaction from Grigori Kozintsev’s Korol Lir (1971) enables an inherently comparative approach to scene analysis. Viewing performances in this ‘distracted’ fashion helps to resist the tyranny of the few canonised adaptations and their privileged interpretations. Consuming performances through arbitrary as well as curated pathways sheds new light on performances that do not tend to be discussed side-by-side. Juxtaposing the clips of the division-of-the-kingdom scene, for example, allows us to re-examine the critical tendency to explain Lear’s problems

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away as part of a perceived ethical burden. The scene in Brook’s film version is dominated by close-ups of Lear and other characters, framing Paul Scofield’s Lear as a solemn statue. In contrast to Laurence Olivier’s Lear in the made-for-television film (dir. Michael Elliott, 1983), who laughs off Cordelia’s initial response, Scofield’s Lear speaks methodically and remains stern throughout the scene, which ends with him calmly banishing Cordelia. Cordelia’s aside is cut, thereby diminishing the weight of a potentially revelatory moment as well as Cordelia’s self-discovery. Placed side-by-side with Akira Kurosawa’s Ran and other versions that contain elements of merriment, this scene in Brook’s film sets a much more sinister and nihilistic tone for the entire narrative. External, sartorial signs of regality are largely absent in Scofield’s Lear. In contrast to Elliott’s film, this scene in Brook’s film does not treat the division of the kingdom ceremonially. Some assignments ask students to curate their own video clip collections and articulate their rationale. Students use the tools on MIT’s platform to make short virtual clips, which they then integrate into their analysis and commentary. Similar to the aforementioned textual exercises, they state their reason for making particular clips and for their particular collection of clips. By making clips, tagging them with thematic or dramaturgical descriptors and sharing their annotations, students engage in a collaborative form of close reading the textual and performative variants. At the same time, insights from their curatorial experience enable a bird’s-eye view of multiple performances, leading to a productive form of distant reading (Moretti, 2013). Thus organised, digital videos – those that have been vetted and lodged in MIT Global Shakespeares – are common objects for close study in a media-rich environment, enabling multi-centred conversations about Shakespeare that are not always routed through traditional British-US centres of Shakespeare production. As stable, accessible, citable video texts, performance videos are now available for citation in scholarship.

Conclusion Combining text- and video-based pedagogies, my collaborative educational projects reflect the fact that global Shakespeares thrive in hybrid cultural and digital spaces, moving through and beyond print editions and such traditional and emerging metropolitan centres as London and New York. Building a community with shared purposes, the projects create multiple non-hierarchical entry points for ideas to flow through disparate cultural spaces and through genres of stage and screen. They encourage

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students’ ethical responsibility to each other as they grow from a recipient of knowledge transfer to co-creators of knowledge. At the core of my projects is the co-existence of multiple, sometimes conflicting, versions of the same narrative in multiple pathways to knowledge. Students are able to pause an encounter with a play to gather more visual and textual information collaboratively. They resume the encounter when they are ready, placing the contrasting versions side-by-side or meshing them in a narrative that they now own. By foregrounding the linkage between early modern English drama and contemporary ideologies in global contexts, we address ‘the ways the past is at work in the exigencies of the present [including] the long arc of ongoing processes of dispossession under capitalism’ (Coombs and Coriale, 2016: 87–8). In this framework, the past is not an object of obfuscated, irrelevant knowledge that is sealed off from our present moment of globalisation, but rather one of many complex texts to enable us to re-think the present. Since strategic presentism decentres the power structures that have historically excluded ‘many first-generation students, students of colour, and differently abled students’ (Spratt and Draxler, 2019: 4), more students – especially underprivileged ones – are empowered to claim ownership of Shakespeare.

References Bell, Henry and Amy Borsuk, 2020. ‘Teaching Shakespeare: Digital Processes’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 25.1, 1–7. Cadiz, J. J., A., Gupta, and J. Grudin, 2000. ‘Using Web Annotations for Asynchronous Collaboration Around Documents’, in Proceedings of CSCW’00: The 2000 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Philadelphia, PA: ACM), 309–18. Charon, Rita, 2006. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Clayton, Tom, 2016. ‘Two Textual Cruxes in The Tempest’, Notes and Queries 63.3 (August), 436–41. Coombs, David Sweeney and Danielle Coriale (2016), ‘V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism: Introduction’, Victorian Studies 59.1, 87–9. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 2004. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, 2 vols, Vol. 2: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum). Dimock, Wai Chee, 2018. ‘Historicism, Presentism, Futurism’, PMLA 133.2, 257–63.

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Fazel, Valerie M. and Louise Geddes, 2017. ‘Introduction’, in Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (eds.), The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 1–22. Fendler, Lynn, 2008. ‘The Upside of Presentism’, Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education 44.6, 677–90. Henderson, Diana, 2018. ‘This Distracted Globe, This Brave New World: Learning from the MIT Global Shakespeares’ Twenty-First Century’, Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change across Media, ed. Stephen O’Neill (London: Bloomsbury), 67–85. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, Canada. https:// internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/ Joubin, Alexa Alice, 2011. ‘Global Shakespeare 2.0 and the Task of the Performance Archive’, Shakespeare Survey 64, 38–51. Joubin, Alexa Alice, and Peter S. Donaldson, 2019. MIT Global Shakespeares: Video and Performance Archive. https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/ Karamcheti, Indira, 1993. ‘Caliban in the Classroom’, Radical Teacher 44, 13–17. Lanier, Douglas, 2014. ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value’, Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, ed. Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 21–40. Miell, Dorothy and Karen Littleton (eds.), 2004. Collaborative Creativity: Contemporary Perspectives (London: Free Association Books). Miller, Kelly, Brian Lukoff, Gary King, and Eric Mazur, 2018. ‘Use of a Social Annotation Platform for Pre-Class Reading Assignments in a Flipped Introductory Physics Class’, Frontiers in Education 3 (March), doi.org/10.3389/ feduc.2018.00008 Moretti, Franco, 2013. Distant Reading (London: Verso). Neil, Kelly M., 2020. ‘Using Affective Learning to Teach Shakespeare in the General Education Classroom’, University of Alabama Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies Symposium on The Future of Teaching Shakespeare, February 21–2. Newell, Catherine and Alan Bain, 2018. Team-Based Collaboration in Higher Education Learning and Teaching: A Review of the Literature (Singapore: Springer Nature). Öğütcü, Murat, 2020. ‘Teaching Shakespeare Digitally: The Turkish Experience’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 25.1, 92–102. O’Neill, Stephen. 2014. Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard (New York: Bloomsbury). Rocklin, Edward L., 2005. Performance Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English). Sanchez, Melissa E., 2008. ‘Seduction and Service in The Tempest’, Studies in Philology 105.1 (Winter), 50–82. Schupak, Esther B., 2018. ‘Shakespeare and Performance Pedagogy: Overcoming the Challenges’, Changing English 25.2, 163–79.

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Shakespeare, William. 2005. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Spratt, Danielle and Bridget Draxler, 2019. ‘Pride and Presentism: On the Necessity of the Public Humanities for Literary Historians’, Profession (Spring), https://profession.mla.org/pride-and-presentism-on-the-necessity-of-thepublic-humanities-for-literary-historians/ Thurman, Chris, 2020. ‘Shakespeare.za: Digital Shakespeares and Education in South Africa’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 25.1, 49–67. Varghese, Mary, 2019. ‘Meta-cognition: A Theoretical Overview’, International Journal of Advance Research in Education & Literature 5.8, 1–4.

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chapter 15

Linked Early Modern Drama Online

A New Editorial and Encoding Platform for Shakespeare and His Contemporaries Janelle Jenstad Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO; lemdo.uvic.ca) is a new TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) encoding, editing and anthology-building platform for the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It aims to reimagine Shakespeare education in multiple ways. LEMDO invites us to contextualise Shakespeare afresh, by allowing us to combine plays and cut across the corpus of early English drama in groupings not supported by print anthologies. LEMDO addresses multiple constituencies, including students at various levels. LEMDO is made with and for students; at every level of the project, students are contributors, team members and stakeholders. LEMDO is accessible; it is committed to open-access publication, long-term preservation and easy downloading for offline use, thus reducing barriers of wealth, geography and technology and ensuring accessibility of contributors’ work, a matter of additional importance when students and early career researchers are co-creators of the work. This chapter – the first scholarly piece about LEMDO as a project – begins with a brief overview of the origins of LEMDO and its three principal objectives. It then argues that the digital platform has three principal affordances: the tools to view Shakespeare ‘in combination’ (a phrase I prefer over ‘in context’); the ability to serve multiple user groups; and the capacity to support asynchronous collaboration and pedagogy. Finally, the chapter discusses the ways in which students are stakeholders in and co-creators of LEMDO as part of their education, not merely consumers of its outputs, and concludes by gesturing towards the technological responsibilities that come with supporting student work.

Overview of LEMDO LEMDO was conceived in 2014 as the new digital home for the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE; Best et al., 2018), Digital Renaissance Editions (DRE; Greatley-Hirsch, 2018) and Queen’s Men Editions (QME; Ostovich et al., 2018). As the then Assistant Coordinating Editor of the ISE, I 239

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gradually became aware that its suite of technologies would soon be at ‘end-of-life’. In 2015, a group of forty-five individual stakeholders and ten partner institutions – all invested in editing, teaching and performing early modern drama using digital texts and tools – put together a national Partnership Grant Letter of Intent; it was recommended for funding but our application fell below the cut-off point.1 We prepared a second application in 2017 (also ultimately unfunded) and finally a smaller but successful Partnership Development Grant application in 2019.2 The process of writing these applications for partnered work convened and solidified the partnership that now sustains LEMDO. The University of Victoria was gifted the assets and outstanding obligations of the ISE in 2019, shortly after the ISE server failed in December 2018. The gift agreement gave the LEMDO team a small pot of funding to remediate old work and to help editors transition to new ways of working. The server failure gave fresh urgency to building the new platform in that any new work was effectively on hold until the LEMDO platform was ready. The LEMDO project has three objectives. The first objective is to preserve some of the assets of the old ISE to ensure their continued development and availability. An online, anonymous survey answered by 190 respondents showed that respondents considered the old-spelling texts and the facsimiles of early publications (quartos and folios) to be the ISE’s chief assets, both for their scholarship and their teaching. Users valued the linking between facsimiles and texts, which made it easy to show students what early texts looked like. Even as more libraries digitise their collections – and as the valuable Shakespeare Census project (Hooks and Lesser, 2018) provides quick ways to get to the images – this linking of open-access text and facsimile is a uniquely valuable functionality that we would like to retain and improve for LEMDO. Analytics showed that the Shakespeare’s Life and Times (SLT; Best, 2010)3 was the most visited part 1 2

3

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) is Canada’s national funding agency. All three applications were made to the Partnership funding stream. The grant co-applicants are, in alphabetical order with a parenthetical note about their area of focus, Peter Cockett (QME), Laura Estill (Manuscript Drama), Alan Farmer (DEEP), Lisa Goddard (Linked Data), Brett Greatley-Hirsch (DRE/ISE), Andrew Griffin (QME), Martin Holmes (Lead Programmer), Diane Jakacki (TEI/LEAF-Writer), Janelle Jenstad (PI and Project Director), Mark Kaethler (Assistant Director), Zachary Lesser (DEEP), James Mardock (DRE/ISE), Kathryn McPherson (EMEE), Kathryn Moncrief (EMEE), Sarah Neville (DRE/ISE), Helen Ostovich (QME) and Cliff Werier (Interface). Shakespeare’s Life and Times was the kernel of the ISE. It was published on floppy disks in 1990, then on CD-ROMs in 1994, and finally on the internet in 1999. Last revised in 2010, it has been staticised along with the rest of the ISE and will be available for the foreseeable future at https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/index.html.

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of the site, likely because it was pitched precisely at senior high school students and freshman and sophomore university students. This kind of resource goes out of date quickly, however; the book-like SLT is therefore being thoroughly revised by co-editors Kathryn McPherson and Kathryn Moncrief into a new encyclopaedia-like resource called Early Modern English Encyclopedia (EMEE). It will be a standalone resource published on the LEMDO platform, rather than an embedded feature of the ISE; while Shakespeare features prominently, the new name reflects the broader scope of EMEE and its objective of serving users of all the LEMDO anthologies. We are also saving – by converting and remediating – some of the recent editions4 created on the old ISE platform before it failed in 2018, to be the nucleus of a New Internet Shakespeare Editions (NISE).5 All of the editions published in the DRE and QME projects are being converted and remediated, on the grounds that these projects offer editions of plays rarely or never before edited. Through a series of programmatic conversions (completed in early 2021) followed by intense remediation by the LEMDO team (ongoing), we are thus revitalising the DRE, QME and select ISE editions and resources. At the same time, we are bringing them in line both with disciplinary standards for encoding and with emerging standards for digital preservation. For long-term archival purposes, these editions will be ‘Endings-compliant’;6 in other words, they will be pure HTML and CSS, with no server-side dependencies, not even for search functions. This output format means that we can deposit these editions and resources safely in libraries and on servers and personal computers around the world, where they can be used even without an internet connection. The second objective is to create a platform where new editions and anthologies can be prepared to the highest editorial and archival standards. Meeting this objective required choosing a subset of the widely 4

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At the time of the server/software failure in 2018, seven editions had been published online and in a print edition from Broadview Press: As You Like It and Hamlet (David Bevington), 1 Henry IV (Rosemary Gaby), Henry V (James Mardock), The Winter’s Tale (Hardin Aasand), Twelfth Night (David Carnegie and Mark Houlahan), and Othello (Jessica Slights). Two further editions had been peer reviewed and published online: King John (Michael Best) and Cymbeline (Jennifer Forsythe). Other editions were partially published, in progress, only recently assigned, or unassigned. The Coordinating Editors of the NISE are Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Janelle Jenstad, James Mardock, and Sarah Neville. Collectively, we have responsibility for finishing the work of the old ISE and continuing the work of DRE. The Endings Project is a collaboration between three developers, three librarians, and three scholars at the University of Victoria. The project aims to provide ‘tools, principles, policies and recommendations for digital scholarship practitioners to create accessible, stable, long-lasting resources in the humanities’. See https://endings.uvic.ca/ for the Endings principles, code and projects, and https://endings.uvic.ca/ compliance.html in particular for a statement of what it means to be ‘Endings Compliant’.

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used TEI-XML markup language7; building an infrastructure where editors, anthology leads and student assistants can create and mark up the components of their editions; writing processes to build anthologies out of editions; writing new editorial guidelines for the 2020s; and preparing extensive encoding, editorial and processing documentation.8 This new LEMDO platform will enable the NISE to continue the work of preparing the world’s first open-access, open-code, peer-reviewed, critical editions of Shakespeare’s plays. A key part of LEMDO’s current work is therefore getting editors back to work on the new platform, encoding in a new markup language, and working to the new guidelines. The process of convening a new editorial board and canvassing active ISE editors is ongoing. LEMDO’s third objective is to create a networked hub for the study of early modern drama. To achieve this objective, LEMDO uses the same technologies for multiple projects, creates numerous links to other projects’ data and publishes LEMDO’s own datasets for others to use. Like its ISE predecessor, LEMDO hosts multiple editorial projects on a single platform. Those projects share space in a centralised repository, a markup language (LEMDO’s TEI-XML customisation) and processing that turns encoded files into web pages, with a few exceptions where different scholarly questions or texts require some customisation of the processing. Sharing a technical infrastructure means the files created on the LEMDO platform are easily interchangeable. For example, a play published in the NISE anthology will be able to be republished in a King’s Men anthology without re-encoding. By early 2021, LEMDO hosted one independent student edition (Howard, 2020), four anthology projects9 and EMEE,10 with the potential to host others. All of these projects – editions, anthologies, encyclopaedias – can link to published pages, editions or components from any other project. They all draw on centralised bibliographies, personographies, prosopographies and taxonomies, the chief of which will be a database called the Bibliography of 7

The TEI Guidelines are a multilingual set of standards that have been used to encode texts since 1990. They are widely used in a number of disciplines and have generated a robust community of users and many ancillary tools (TEI Consortium, 2021). 8 The LEMDO platform is hosted by the University of Victoria on the uvic.ca domain. UVic provides the URL, server space and long-term library archiving for LEMDO and the anthologies that it publishes. The University of Victoria is the publisher of the digital editions and the University of Victoria Libraries is the publisher of the print edition. Peer review can be handled by the LEMDO flagship project, Digital Renaissance Editions, or by an anthology’s own editorial board. 9 In addition to DRE, ISE and QME (the legacy projects), LEMDO also hosts the MoEML Mayoral Shows anthology (MoMS) and has committed to hosting anthologies of John Day’s and of Anthony Munday’s plays. 10 EMEE is a complete revision of SLT. About 10 per cent of the encyclopaedia’s 1000 entries will be prepared by students via pedagogical partnerships.

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Editions of Early English Drama (BEEED).11 LEMDO also uses the affordances of the semantic web and stable URIs to build connections to the Database of Early English Playbooks, the Map of Early Modern London, the English Short Title Catalogue and the World Shakespeare Bibliography. These projects have created permanent ids for playbooks, locations and people, early printed books and modern Shakespeare criticism. We embed those ids into our project files and generate hyperlinks to the relevant pages of those projects at processing time, thus directing LEMDO users to resources that supply other kinds of information.12 Finally, LEMDO is generating entities with unique project-level ids from its own taxonomies, ontologies and datasets of characters. We plan to deposit this data into a national linked data triplestore being created by the LINCS Project (Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship).13 LINCS will help us create ‘crosswalks’ between our project and centralised ontologies (such as Library of Congress entities). In this way, LEMDO will be able to connect with projects that have not yet been imagined or built.

LEMDO Affordances Shakespeare in Combination The information architecture of LEMDO and the associated technologies are designed to serve a wide range of research questions for many users. LEMDO is invested in answering those questions by looking not merely to Shakespeare as exemplary or representative of early modern drama but also to a cultural network that includes Shakespeare. LEMDO joins a small number of open-access digital editorial projects that aim to expand the canon. Like Richard Brome Online (RBO; Cave, 2010), LEMDO offers oldspelling texts and modern critical editions. Unlike RBO, which takes an author-centric approach and focuses on just one playwright (albeit one who 11

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BEEED is currently a vast spreadsheet of 10,000+ editions, collected by Brett Greatley-Hirsch at Leeds. Building BEEED into a database that serves all the LEMDO anthologies and editions is one of the objectives of our current SSHRC funding. This kind of linking, which adds tremendous value for student users simply by making them aware of other resources, is generally eschewed by website builders who want to keep users on their own sites. LEMDO is consciously trying to create a larger scholarly dataverse, even if it means losing valuable ‘clicks’. Estill notes that most digital Shakespeare projects ‘lack … outward facing links to situate themselves in the wider field of digital Shakespeare resources’ (2021: 10). The linked data triplestore is being built at the University of Victoria with funding from a Canadian Foundation for Innovation grant for LINCS, led by Susan Brown at the University of Guelph. See https://lincsproject.ca/.

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has needed the thorough-going critical attention that RBO offers), LEMDO is a platform designed to support multiple anthology projects. Unlike RBO editors, who worked directly with the platform builders at Sheffield, LEMDO editors work mainly with their anthology leads, who in turn call on the LEMDO team for technical support. We lose p ­ laybook-specific or author-specific particularity but gain extensibility and inter-operability, a necessary calculus for enabling plays to be combined by playwright, playing company, playhouse, year or even genre. LEMDO’s goals are like those of the Folger’s A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama (EMED; Brown et al., 2016), in that EMED also aims to expand the canon with its forty documentary editions (in original and regularised spelling), selected to ‘feature a variety of authors, genres, and dates of first performance and publication’.14 EMED offers metadata and XML files for 403 printed plays in total, with links to download the EEBO-TCP transcriptions from GitHub or the ‘morphadorned’ versions thereof prepared by Martin Mueller to create an ‘algorithmically amenable corpus’ (i.e. suitable for big data analysis) (Mueller, 2014). EMED does so without Shakespeare, however. If one wants to read a Shakespeare play, one has to toggle over to The Folger Shakespeare, where one can read the modern text of the Mowat and Werstine series.15 EMED and the digital Mowat/Werstine are wonderfully useful and well-conceived projects, but they serve different purposes and address different user groups. The challenge that LEMDO addresses, therefore, is to treat Shakespeare in the same way as other playwrights. In short, we wish to resolve the ‘Shakespeare/not Shakespeare divide in digital humanities projects’ identified by Laura Estill (2019: 1). As host to projects that aim to edit and publish other early modern plays, LEMDO ensures that Shakespeare will be richly contextualised within a much bigger anthology. All of the individual anthologies (DRE, NISE, QME and MoMS) share the functionalities of a LEMDO anthology, but each has its own unique identity (logos, colour schemes, customised menus), personnel (boards and contributors), and even some variation in editorial approach (performance-as-research approach, or different handling of multiple-text plays). Plays will also be published in an anthology of the whole, and can be reused (with the editor’s permission) for anthologies that gather plays together in ways that allow for different 14 15

‘Featured Plays’, A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama. https://emed.folger.edu/ featured-plays. The digital resource does not include the annotations that can be found in the Simon and Schuster print editions. See https://shakespeare.folger.edu/.

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approaches to early modern drama. For example, Henry V, forthcoming in the NISE anthology, might also appear in a King’s Men anthology, a 1599 anthology, or an anthology of history plays. As the number of LEMDO editions grows, such specialised anthologies will be increasingly easy to create, with the bulk of the anthology lead’s work lying in the collection and contextualisation. Multiple Audiences Most editions of Shakespeare – limited by physical space, publishers’ aims and the individual editor’s predilections – address one audience, tailor the editorial approach to that audience and meet a circumscribed set of goals. LEMDO is able to host polyvocal editions that serve scholars and students at the same time and achieve multiple outcomes. LEMDO editions can be rigorously scholarly in that their capacious digital space allows for digital surrogates, in-type facsimile transcriptions and semi-diplomatic transcriptions of all the early witnesses; a modernised reading text with full annotations and collations; and generous critical paratexts and contextual materials. Because this capaciousness – partly a function of LEMDO’s remit to remediate old ISE editions – lengthens the time it takes to complete an edition and unfairly burdens the editor who is unlikely to receive full professional credit for what can easily become multiple editions – a valid criticism of the old ISE most recently articulated by Sonia Massai (2021: 253) – the new ISE and other anthologies will need to decide on a set of minimum requirements for an edition and designate the other components as optional. As Laura Estill has recently pointed out, ‘we don’t expect a single [print] edition to serve all purposes: we should not lay this burden on digital editions either’ (Estill, 2021). LEMDO is, however, committed to multiple annotation tracks for the modern text; here LEMDO shows its commitment to multiple audiences. Editors are invited to supply the types of notes shown in Table 15.1. While glosses, commentary notes, textual notes and performance notes appear in other editions, it is unusual to have all of these types of annotations in one edition. Furthermore, the lexical notes are a new type of annotation track; such information may be included in commentary notes in other editions, but LEMDO explicitly encourages links to Lexicons of Early Modern English with the aim of helping students understand whether a word was considered to be a ‘hard word’ by its first hearers (Lancashire and Tersigni 2018: 27; Lancashire, 2021). The pedagogical notes are designed to capture the creative pedagogy that flourishes in our classrooms yet often goes unpublished. In a later stage of our

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J. Jenstad Table 15.1  LEMDO editorial notes

Note Type Gloss Commentary note Textual note Lexical note Performance note Pedagogical note

Purpose Offers a single-word or short-phrase definition of a word or phrase in the modern text. They are meant to facilitate basic comprehension for student readers and those unfamiliar with early modern English. Makes connections, apprises readers of key critical arguments and controversies, and provides historical context. Comments on early texts, textual challenges and editorial emendations. Discusses in depth (more than a gloss would) the origin, meaning or usage of a word or phrase, often with reference to the Oxford English Dictionary and/or Lexicons of Early Modern English. Discusses specific productions and/or Performance-as-Research exercises. Offers teaching tips and strategies, invites discussion and points to other resources.

development, LEMDO plans to implement several different interfaces. Users can self-identify as ‘students’, ‘teachers’ or ‘scholars’. Depending on their choice, different annotation tracks will be ‘on’ by default in the interface: glosses and commentary for students, pedagogical notes for teachers, textual notes (and collations) for scholars and so on. Any user group can view the other annotations by clicking a radio button, but LEMDO does not have to privilege one form of annotation over another or make assumptions about the median user. Asynchronous Collaboration and Pedagogy It is unlikely that any one editor will take advantage of all these annotation tracks. What makes this rich annotation possible is a contractual arrangement whereby the edition remains ‘open’. LEMDO’s contracts with project leads and individual editors stipulate that editions can be annotated by others. LEMDO aims to ‘unseal’ the scholarly edition and make it even more useful by inviting experienced teachers to contribute pedagogical annotations that sit alongside the edition. Using the affordances of stand-off markup, we can anchor teaching notes and materials to the text. In this way, we can create teaching editions without calling on the original editor(s) to revisit finished work. We can repurpose the scholarly text without altering or decontextualising it (as the Kittredge Shakespeare series does, for example). We can peer review and publish the rich teaching materials of our colleagues,

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thus capturing a form of scholarship not often recognised or published. The ability to have LEMDO editions serve both scholarly and pedagogical needs will become crucially important for the ­non-Shakespearean projects that are moving to LEMDO. The plays in QME’s and DRE’s respective remits may never enjoy more than one modern edition this century, and thus it is imperative for that one edition to address as many user groups as possible. That edition, by making the play teachable, is likely to be the impetus for generating the teaching materials that LEMDO would like to capture. The capacity to keep an edition open and to invite what I call ‘asynchronous collaborations’ is therefore a key strategy for expanding the number of teachable early modern plays. The anthologies can also create a separate menu for teaching, as QME has done by publishing Helen Ostovich’s prompts for student performances of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; the fact that she was not the editor of the play is precisely the point of this kind of pedagogical enrichment of existing editions.

Students as Stakeholders and Co-creators LEMDO involves students in the creation of the project and gives them opportunities to contribute their own scholarship to the LEMDO anthologies. Like MoEML, LEMDO is built by permanent staff and faculty working alongside a team of student researchers funded by federal and provincial grants, work-study funds and co-op programmes (Jenstad and Takeda, 2017). Students on the UVic team have contributed code, design, documentation, remediation strategies and research. They have beta-tested documentation, written policy, scoured the TEI Guidelines for solutions and wrestled with textual and encoding challenges alongside the team leaders. They often liaise directly with contributing editors, thus enjoying the mentorship of scholars far beyond their own institutional home. We also foresee that LEMDO will have a training role for student research assistants working at other institutions. An editor with funding may well hire a research assistant (RA) to help with an edition. LEMDO is able to incorporate the external RA into the local team’s virtual workspace and to offer some support and training to the RA. In addition, LEMDO’s documentation includes a ‘Quick Start for Encoders’ and an ‘Introduction to XML and TEI’ that are pitched at the remote RA working with an editor elsewhere. This strategy has two functions: on the one hand, it allows the student RA to become an expert on encoding and thereby take over some parts of the editorial labour; on the other hand, it nurtures the next generation of editors. Even if the RA does not become an editor, they will

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acquire a good understanding of XML and markup languages, broadly useful knowledge in many professional environments. In addition, LEMDO can host editions created by students themselves. A LEMDO edition does not have to be under contract to one of the anthologies, which gives graduate students in particular a chance to take full responsibility for an edition. Building on the successful MoEML model of pedagogical partnerships (Jenstad, McLean-Fiander, and McPherson, 2018), LEMDO will invite faculty members elsewhere to make the encoding and editorial tools available to their advisees. LEMDO’s extensive editorial and encoding guidelines make it possible for graduate students to create their own editions. The first-born LEMDO edition – by which I mean an edition not previously published partially or fully on the old ISE platform – is a student edition of Ralph Knevet’s Rhodon and Iris (Howard, 2020), prepared under my supervision as a pilot pedagogical partnership and destined eventually for review by DRE. These pedagogical partnerships are a key strategy of LEMDO’s larger project of producing digital critical editions of all early modern plays. Inviting students to help build and then contribute to a digital platform means that the platform has an additional responsibility to ensure longevity. To that end, all editions prepared using LEMDO tools will be Endings Compliant and ready for long-term digital preservation; the LEMDO platform itself is merely (despite its complexity) a means to an end. The ultimate deliverable of the LEMDO platform is a set of static webpages with no server-side dependencies. Editions and anthologies are output entirely in HTML and CSS, the founding languages of the web. They are lightweight and pre-concordanced using the Static Search Tool (Holmes and Takeda, 2021), which means that they are searchable and internally coherent even without an internet connection. The metadata that identifies students’ contributions to an edition is ‘baked’ right into each static webpage, along with the students’ bio-bibliographical notes. We can distribute multiple copies of digital editions, which gives the editions the best possible chance of surviving institutional change, personnel change and even the eventual failure of the LEMDO platform itself, for which there will be no further need once our editorial work is finished. The XML files may survive even longer, depending on the technologies of the future. To best serve students and teachers who use the editions – as opposed to the makers thereof – LEMDO editions are open access and licensed under a Creative Commons license for free use with attribution. In addition to the digital editions, we have prepared print editions that contain a subset

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of the edition components. Our commitment to single-source publishing ensures that the LaTeX-generated print editions are perfectly aligned with the digital edition. These editions contain the modern text, the annotations that will best serve the classroom user and a general introduction. They will have covers, full Cataloguing-in-Publishing metadata, ISBNs, and standard act, scene, and line numbers, but they will be fully open access like the digital editions, downloadable as PDFs through UVic’s ePublishing Service or available for purchase as print-on-demand physical volumes through campus bookstores. Not only is the physical book a good archival medium, but the availability of the book allows users to choose how they wish to interact with the edition.16 As a remediator of legacy projects (ISE, DRE, QME), LEMDO builds on the intellectual success and open-access linked nature of its predecessor (the ISE platform). As the builder of something new, LEMDO aims not merely to serve students free resources but also to involve students in the creation of those resources in various ways. We also aim to meet the demand for non-Shakespearean texts that is represented by other digital projects. Finally, and most importantly, for any of this work to survive for future students and to bear witness to student contributions, we need to avoid the ultimate technological failure of the ISE platform. Our strategy of open-access, static editions that travel with their own metadata but can be combined in new anthologies offers hope for a long preservation and wide dissemination.

References Best, Michael, 2010. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. https://internetshakespeare .uvic.ca/Library/SLT/index.html Best, Michael, Janelle Jenstad, and James Mardock (coord.), 2018. Internet Shakespeare Editions. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/ (archived site). Brown, Meaghan, Michael Poston, and Elizabeth Williamson (eds.), 2016. A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama, Folger Shakespeare Library. http://emed.folger.edu. Cave, Richard Allen (ed.), 2010. Richard Brome Online. www.dhi.ac.uk/brome/. Estill, Laura. 2019. ‘Digital Humanities’ Shakespeare Problem’, Humanities 8.1. DOI: 10.3390/h8010045. 16

It is also worth noting that a print edition serves the editor’s professional needs as well. Even though the digital edition goes through peer review, many tenure committees still wish to see a printed book. As tenure portfolios go digital, we expect that editors will wish to include the downloadable PDF of their print edition as well as links to their more capacious digital editions.

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Estill, Laura, 2021. ‘How Can We Evaluate Digital Editions of Early Modern English Drama’ (Renaissance Society of America), https://rsa.confex.com/ rsa/21virtual/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/10532 Unpublished ms. Greatley-Hirsch, Brett (coord.), 2018. Digital Renaissance Editions. https://­ digitalrenaissance.uvic.ca/ (archived site). Holmes, Martin and Joey Takeda, 2021. ‘Project Endings staticSearch Generator: Schema and Guidelines for Creating a staticSearch Engine for Your HTML5 Site’. https://endings.uvic.ca/staticSearch/docs/index.html. Hooks, Adam and Zachary Lesser, 2018. Shakespeare Census. https:// shakespearecensus.org/. Howard, Ashley, 2020 (ed). Rhodon and Iris. Student edition published on the LEMDO-dev server. Janelle Jenstad, Kim McLean-Fiander, and Kate McPherson, 2017. ‘The MoEML Pedagogical Partnership Program’, Digital Humanities Quarterly 11.3. www .digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/3/000302/000302.html. Jenstad, Janelle and Joseph Takeda, 2017. ‘Making the RA Matter: Pedagogy, Interface, and Practices’, in Jentery Sayers (ed.), Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 71–85. Lancashire, Ian (ed.), 2021. Lexicons of Early Modern English. University of Toronto Libraries. https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/. Lancashire, Ian and Elisa Tersigni, 2018. ‘Shakespeare’s Hard Words, and Our Hard Senses’, in Janelle Jenstad, Mark Kaethler, and Jennifer Roberts-Smith (eds.), Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (London: Routledge), 27–46. Massai, Sonia, 2021. ‘Shakespeare and Digital Editions’, in Lukas Erne (ed.), The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies (London: Bloomsbury), 244–61. ­ uration Mueller, Martin, 2014. ‘Shakespeare His Contemporaries: Collaborative C and Exploration of Early Modern Drama in a Digital Environment’. ­Digital Humanities Quarterly 8.3. www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/3/000183/ 000183.html. Ostovich, Helen, Peter Cockett, and Andrew Griffin (gen. eds.), 2018. Queen’s Men Editions. https://qme.uvic.ca/ (archived site). TEI Consortium, 2021. TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. P5 Version 4.2.2. Last updated 9 April 2021. www.tei-c.org/ Guidelines/P5/.

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chapter 16

Play the Knave Theatre Videogame in Schools From Glitchy Connections to Virtual Collaboration Gina Bloom and Amanda Shores

Users of Play the Knave, the digital Shakespeare game at the centre of our collaboration, perform dramatic scenes karaoke-style through a motion-capture interface (Figure 16.1–2). While reciting the dialogue that appears on screen, they animate their avatars by moving their bodies (think Xbox’s Dance Central, but for dramatic performance, particularly Shakespeare).1 Although the game, created by the ModLab at the University of California, Davis, was not initially developed to be an educational tool, its classroom applications have become overwhelmingly evident (Bloom, 2019a; Bloom et al., 2021; Bloom and Bates, 2021). Most high school students in the United States are required to read Shakespeare and find the plays difficult to understand and/or irrelevant to them (Blocksidge, 2003; Haddon, 2009; Thompson and Turchi, 2016; Cohen, 2018;). A motioncapture videogame, particularly one that engages a well-established method of teaching Shakespeare through theatrical performance (Banks, 2014; Edmiston et al., 1987; Edmiston and Mckibben, 2011; Gibson, 1998; Riggio, 1999; Rocklin, 2005; Winston, 2015), meets the needs of learners in secondary and even primary schools – what are called ‘K–12’ schools in the United States. However, bringing the game to K–12 learners initially proved challenging. Gina Bloom, the project director for Play the Knave, has had extensive experience teaching with the game in university contexts but the capabilities of K–12 students are very different from those of post-secondary students. Bloom was still trying to figure out 1

Development and research on Play the Knave (Bloom et al., 2020) have been supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, through the ModLab’s affiliation with the Games Institute at the University of Waterloo; and the University of California, Davis, through an Interdisciplinary Funding for the Humanities and Arts grant. The education programme has been supported by the UC Davis English department and by alumna Margaret Bowles. All research on human subjects discussed in this chapter has been approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB).

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Figure 16.1  Screenshot of Play the Knave showing menu options for Shakespeare’s tragedies

Figure 16.2  Students performing Hamlet scenes from Play the Knave, Epstein School, Atlanta, GA, 4 April 2017. Photograph by Gina Bloom

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how to frame the game for K–12 schools when she met Amanda Shores in late 2016. Shores, then a student in one of Bloom’s UC Davis classes, was minoring in Education and had worked as a tutor and K–12 teaching assistant. Realising we made a formidable team, we began working together to create the Play the Knave education programme. In what follows, we will describe our collaboration and discuss its impact on beneficiaries, including not only the K–12 students whom we initially intended to reach, but also participants in the programme who began as its beneficiaries and evolved into our collaborators. Among these were the several dozen university students who served as Play the Knave teaching ‘interns’: trainees who, in this case, received course credit for their work. The Play the Knave teaching internship enhanced these students’ educations and helped prepare them for careers post-graduation. At the same time, the work students produced as part of the internship, including teaching resources and research on the game’s classroom impact, helped build the education programme. A similar evolution in roles characterised the K–12 teachers who participated in the programme. We discovered that the game more positively impacted their students when we treated teachers less as beneficiaries than as active partners. Significantly, we found that in-person connection did not predict or correlate with the quality of these various collaborations. Many of our most successful collaborations have been virtual, involving teachers across the United States whom we have never met in person. We suggest that close connection is not sufficient or even necessary for collaboration, a useful finding for others engaging in educational partnerships, particularly in the wake of a pandemic that has strained in-person connectivity. Collaborations often begin with individuals from different spheres (whether social, professional or otherwise) connecting with each other in the same place and/or time to share ideas. Play the Knave was born out of precisely this kind of real life (RL) connectivity: faculty and doctoral students affiliated with UC Davis’s ModLab met weekly, discussing ideas for game design, and the concept for Play the Knave emerged out of these conversations. Meeting in person regularly to proffer and negotiate ideas certainly can be productive. Theorist of artistic collaboration R. Keith Sawyer, who applies Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s influential theory of ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) to jazz music and theatre improvisation, explains that ideal collaborative dynamics rely on participants achieving a ‘group flow’ in which (1) participants’ ‘skills match the challenge of the task’ at hand; (2) there is ‘constant and immediate feedback’; and (3) participants are ‘freed to concentrate fully’ on their collaborative tasks. Participants

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Figure 16.3  Screenshot of Play the Knave, showing menu options of some of the thirty avatars

connecting in the same space at the same time seems critical to achieving ‘group flow’ (Sawyer, 2007: 42–3). Although the group flow and connectedness Sawyer values is useful, we argue that it is not essential to educational collaborations. And this is cause for relief not only in light of pandemic restrictions but because even in the best of conditions, it is difficult for academia-based collaborations to achieve most of the characteristics Sawyer identifies as necessary for group flow. Instead of achieving a flow state, the Play the Knave education programme has settled for and now comes to embrace a state of fits and starts, of lags, or what in the digital world might be called ‘glitches’. A glitch is a perceived error, such as when the computer reacts to our keyboard input in an unexpected way, disrupting workflow. The glitch is not, in fact, a system malfunction but rather a moment of something like miscommunication – we ask the computer to carry out a particular task, but for any number of reasons, the command is not clear and the computer does something else. Glitchy connections may frustrate users and disrupt flow, but they need not hinder collaboration between participants. Indeed, we argue that glitchy connections provoke and fuel collaboration. Play the Knave itself models this seemingly counter-intuitive claim. Knave’s players expect that their avatars (Figure 16.3) will mimic their

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actions perfectly, but because of the hardware used to run the game (a low-cost motion capture camera) combined with the platform’s design (which allows users to control their avatars with their own bodies), the avatars often make movements players don’t expect or can’t control. These ‘glitches’ in the animation certainly disrupt the ‘flow state’ that is the goal for so many game designers, who pour great financial resources into ensuring that their videogame animations are seamless enough to support the player’s feeling of flow. However, as Bloom has discussed elsewhere, there are ethical costs to pursuing flow in motion-capture animation, and research on Play the Knave has shown that the disruption of flow even leads to better learning (Bloom, 2019b; Bloom et al., 2021). Players who cannot seamlessly connect with their avatars become more aware of their role in the interaction with the machine and thus can take responsibility for their input. Consequently, players cease treating the avatar as a mindless tool or conduit for their intentions and instead come to conceive the avatar as a collaborative partner with limitations and affordances that, once understood and addressed, prompt a richer interaction. We maintain that the glitches so endemic to human interactions with machines – and with Play the Knave’s digital interface in particular – provide a model for responding to the practical challenges involved in connecting with partners in collaborative educational projects. Our chapter’s suspicion of the concept of ‘connectedness’ is ironic given that Bloom brainstormed the structure of our collaboration while participating in a workshop called ‘Connecting Faculty, Schools, and Communities through Shakespeare’. Organised by Anne Cunningham and Laura Turchi for the Shakespeare Association of America conference in 2018, the workshop brought together academics wishing to ‘forge meaningful connections within our academic institutions and with teachers and arts organizations’. Cunningham and Turchi set out a series of assignments for participants to do in the months leading up to the conference, the completion of which would help each of us make the ‘connections’ we needed to further our projects. Encouraged by the workshop’s supportive structure, Bloom worked with Shores to deepen RL connections with our local community. One of these connections was the Davis Joint Unified School District Bridge Program, an after-school programme that addresses the academic and emotional needs of low-income and high-need students. Shores was a tutor at Bridge and arranged for a pilot project in which Play the Knave was incorporated as a daily enrichment activity for the students. A second connection was the Teacher Education programme at the UC Davis School of Education, through which we hoped to find K–12 teachers

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willing to try Play the Knave in their classrooms. In addition to soliciting from Teacher Education staff the names of programme alumni who might be interested, we presented the game to pre-service teachers enrolled in the credentialing programme. During the academic year that followed, we built on these connections to Bridge and the School of Education. The structure for this was a year-long internship in UC Davis’s English Department. The pedagogy internship had three overlapping goals. First, we aimed to contribute to the education of the interns. We sought out promising and ambitious undergraduates, particularly English majors, who were curious about a career in teaching or deeply invested in Shakespeare studies and/ or digital culture. The internship would provide these students an utterly unique educational experience in addition to preparing them for careers after graduation. A second aim was to impact Shakespeare education in our Northern California community. We hoped that by having a larger teaching team, we could reach out to many more K–12 schools. We were especially focused on under-resourced schools, which could not afford the hardware needed to run Play the Knave. And finally, we hoped the internship would contribute to the ongoing development of the game’s software. Knowing more about how K–12 learners responded to the platform would help Play the Knave’s development team adjust the software’s features, ensuring that the game, once released to the public, would be set up effectively for classroom adoption. In sum, the internship not only structured our collaboration with each other but also facilitated three additional overlapping educational collaborations: (1) among UC Davis undergraduate students and between them and Bloom; (2) between the UC Davis teaching interns and local K–12 teachers; and (3) between the teaching team for Play the Knave and the game’s development team. We activated our local connections through two phases of the internship. First, over the course of three months, interns offered lessons with Play the Knave almost daily at Bridge, which not only gave the interns hands-on teaching experience but also benefitted Bridge students. To take just one example, a sixth-grade student who suffered from extreme anxiety around reading greatly improved his literacy skills as a consequence of working with the game. The motion-capture interface – which incorporates bodily movement and exciting visual stimulation – encouraged him to engage with the texts on screen; these more positive experiences with reading shifted his attitude such that he read with less trepidation in other contexts. The Bridge visits continued during the second phase of the internship, when interns (including Shores) also took a quarter-long

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seminar for credit in the English department with Bloom. Unlike in a typical course, interns shifted between being beneficiaries of Bloom’s instruction and being collaborators with Bloom, Shores and the Knave software development team. In addition to reading scholarship in the fields of education, Shakespeare, media studies and digital humanities, interns worked in teams to apply this theory by designing lesson plans that they would teach in actual K–12 classrooms. The classroom visits, in turn, informed ongoing research into and development of the game’s design. The class fulfilled one of the practical challenges of collaborations situated in academia: carving out time for the project from the busy schedules of students and faculty. We assumed that by providing a dedicated space and time for the group to connect in RL, we would meet the multiple aims of the project. In certain ways, the class structure was ideal. Readings and discussions provided the critical intellectual foundation for the project; assignments with set deadlines forced us to make consistent progress; and the regular meeting time/place offered a convenient setting for interns to talk through the difficulties they encountered while working with local teachers and leading lessons with the game. That said, the university classroom has its limitations as a structural mechanism for collaborative work because it is surprisingly rigid and hierarchical. Even though interns took the class as ‘Pass/Fail’, needing only to complete the assignments in order to pass, many of them were nervous about their performance. Whenever Bloom commented on interns’ work, they couldn’t help but interpret this as ‘instructor feedback’, feeling that they were being (for better or for worse) judged. Although Bloom tried constantly to position herself as the leader of a collaboration and not as the authoritative master, the hierarchy was difficult to dissolve. Another form of rigidity that interfered with the collaborative dynamic stemmed from the narrow definition of ‘learning’ inherited from our time in a university. Because this was an official class for credit, Bloom – perhaps out of habit and a sense of student expectation more than any topdown requirement – felt the course needed to resemble other courses in the department: a syllabus set in advance with required readings and pre-determined assignments with fixed deadlines. And since the course was in an English department, those assignments needed to emphasise close-reading, research and writing skills. The expectations of an English class, however, often came into conflict with the requirements of a great collaborative project. For instance, one assignment – designed to enhance the interns’ education as well as to support the collaboration between our teaching team and the game’s development team – involved having each

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group of interns develop a research question relating to Play the Knave’s impact on learning and use their visit to a local school to gather data for answering this question. The syllabus was designed to scaffold this research, gently guiding the interns through each phase of their projects. However, collaborations do not proceed in a straight line and along a predictable course that can be laid out in advance on paper: they are much more like jazz jam sessions than like orchestral performances (Savage and Symonds, 2018: 61). As we put our syllabus into practice, we realised that some of the deadlines and even some of the assignments were unreasonable. Our collaboration as a team was strained by our efforts to impose on it an inorganic timetable and structure. What is more, the structure and aims of our research sometimes conflicted with our outreach to local teachers. Again, one challenge was timing. The university system and the K–12 system have vastly different daily timetables and academic schedules, and the lead-time teachers needed to plan lessons was much shorter than the lead-time we needed to organise classroom visits. More than once, a teacher would request to have the classroom visit within a week, and we would scramble to respond as interns juggled paper deadlines, exams and classes. Divergent temporalities rendered our connections with local teachers ‘glitchy’. These glitchy connections made the research assignment at the centre of the course especially challenging to execute, since the availability of K–12 school research sites could not be neatly coordinated with the course’s research assignment deadlines. This put pressure not only on the educational experience of the interns but also the teaching team’s collaboration with the game’s development team. Because it was difficult to connect with K–12 teachers in RL, our visits to classrooms and our research on those visits took on a structure that did not always yield the most robust data. The process for implementing Play the Knave in classrooms was essentially this: an intern would briefly correspond, usually via email, with the teacher to settle on a date and time for the visit and to find out which play was being taught: in the best circumstances, interns would ascertain what the teacher hoped students could learn from the activity. Then a group of interns would arrive at the arranged time and teach the lesson plan the group had designed. These conditions were not ideal for researching the game’s impact. Some teachers hadn’t seen the digital tool in advance, so they couldn’t inform interns fully about how the platform could best serve their particular students. Moreover, since interns were limited to one or two class visits, with little room to assess students before, during and after these visits, it was difficult for them to draw inferences from data collected.

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This is not to say that the visits were fruitless. It was clear to us and to the teachers who filled out our post-visit questionnaire that students who otherwise resisted Shakespeare were intrinsically motivated to participate in lessons involving the game. Because the game presents Shakespeare’s drama simultaneously through multiple learning modes – kinaesthetic, visual, auditory – it helps students with different learning styles connect with Shakespeare’s language (Azevedo et al., 2018). Moreover, as has been the case in research on Play the Knave in university classrooms, the game prompted high school students’ critical thinking around racial and gender identity in Shakespeare, deepening their understanding of the difference between actor and character in drama and putting pressure on their assumptions about traditional casting (Bloom et al., 2021). But we realised that our research would have been more productive if the teachers involved could have taken a more expansive role in the lessons we taught their students. A contrasting case of successful collaboration with one particular teacher confirms this point. Before the formal internship programme got underway, Bloom and Shores helped organise a lesson for one of the preservice teachers from UCD’s School of Education, Brendan Ward. Ward wanted his ninth-grade students to use Play the Knave to rehearse assigned scenes from Romeo and Juliet so as to prepare them for a summative assessment centred on performance. Ward reported back that the platform’s motion capture interface encouraged students who were typically very still when they performed to move around, and as they became more conscious of how they used their bodies to communicate, their comprehension of the text improved. Ward found that student performers’ ability to identify and make arguable claims about the text, as well as their ability to justify those claims with evidence, became more refined as a result of the activity (Shores, 2017; Ward, 2017). We believe that a major reason for the success of this lesson was the nature of Ward’s involvement in it. Unlike the classroom visits that took place during the internship, Ward was not simply a beneficiary of our programme, but our collaborator as well. Although we shared our expertise and sample lesson plans with Ward, ultimately he developed the lesson plan, took primary responsibility for teaching it and assessed the game’s impact on his students. In retrospect we realised that in our visits to local schools, we had been treating our host teachers not as collaborators, but as conduits: the teachers supplied the connection to the students we wanted to study. Our failure to truly collaborate with teachers was not an ideological or conceptual shortcoming as much as it was a practical fallout of the glitchy connections that are unavoidable when university students try to connect in RL with

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K–12 teachers. One way to remedy that problem would be to insist on repeated RL meetings with teachers who want to use the game to ensure they are empowered as collaborators. But this is an impractical solution that cannot be executed on a broad scale. Few K–12 teachers have the time to experiment with new software and hardware, let alone to meet repeatedly with our teaching team to develop the perfect lesson plan, as was the case with Ward. How, we were led to wonder, can we truly collaborate with teachers if our RL connections to them are bound to be glitchy? What might such collaboration look like? In the years since Shores graduated and our official collaboration ended, Bloom has experimented with new programme formats to address these questions. When Bloom ran the teaching internship for a second time in 2018–19, collaborating that year with a different undergraduate student, Rachel Cowen, the focus of the English department seminar for interns was developing pedagogical resources for Play the Knave. Interns worked collaboratively to create an online archive of lesson plans that could later be accessed virtually by teachers wanting to use the game in their classrooms but unable to connect with us or our interns in person. In this context, interns’ classroom visits provided opportunities to playtest the lessons and to educate interns about K–12 students’ learning needs. The team collectively created more than fifty lesson plans grounded in research from scholarship in Shakespeare Studies and Education: lessons are tagged to enable teachers to search by topic, play or grade level. The teaching resource archive is temporarily housed on a Google Drive folder, though our plan is to migrate the lesson plans to a public website with search capabilities. The internet, we have come to realise, is an ideal medium for the revised and still evolving education programme because, as Play the Knave itself demonstrates, in the virtual realm glitchy connections do not obviate, but rather can provoke, collaboration. Users of Play the Knave respond to the game’s glitchy interface by working harder to understand their avatars’ affordances and then adjusting their style of performance accordingly. The glitchy interface between human and technology spurs the need for human players to treat the avatar not as a cipher, but as a collaborator: not as a separate entity, but as a virtual playmate (Bloom, 2019b). In our education programme, we have found similarly that shifting the focus to virtual connections – however glitchy they may be – encourages richer collaboration. In its current instantiation, the programme works like this: teachers from anywhere in the country discover Play the Knave, often through internet browsing. Having looked over our website videos and resources

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and deciding they are interested in using the game, teachers email us to borrow a ‘Knave Kit’, which includes all the hardware they need to run the game, detailed instructions for set-up and access to our online archive of lesson plans. The teacher or school simply pays for shipping and agrees to share feedback about their and their students’ experience with the game. One advantage of the Knave Kit loan programme is that it makes the game available to teachers far beyond our local community, but of greater interest for this volume, it has improved the quality of our education programme’s various collaborations. Ironically, by attenuating our RL connection to teachers, we have improved our ability to collaborate in meaningful ways with them. Instead of having a lesson delivered in person by one of our interns – which sets up the teacher as a conduit rather than a partner – teachers use the Knave Kits more independently. They adapt our resources to fit the particular needs of their students and of their school curriculum, going on to teach these lessons themselves, as did Ward. Because the teachers know their students so well, they can make informed selections from and emendations of our lesson plans, and they can collect more precise data on student learning outcomes. Participating teachers report a range of different ways the game has facilitated learning. Some tell us that the game has been especially helpful for engaging their shy students, enabling them to benefit from reading Shakespeare aloud. One writes, ‘The more timid students had less anxiety about getting up and performing.’ And another says, ‘Because of the format, the students didn’t seem to suffer from any of the usual hesitation of reading difficult text aloud.’ Many teachers observe that performing via the motion-capture interface was not only fun for students, giving them ‘an early positive experience with Shakespeare’, but also helped them understand how actors’ movements could convey a particular interpretation of the characters and the scene as a whole. One teacher reports that students ‘amplified the choices they were making about characters to make them clear on the screen’. Another writes in a similar vein: ‘Students demonstrated in pairs that they could expressively physicalise the text to show different interpretations of the scene.’2 As these thoughtful comments from teachers demonstrate, the game’s impact on students can be studied without our needing to be present in the room when the game is used, thereby bolstering our teaching team’s collaboration with the game’s development team. In addition to gathering surveys from teachers and their students, the returned Knave Kits are full of useful data. As players are 2

Feedback from teachers at River City High School in California, Waldron Mercy Academy in Pennsylvania and City of Hialeah Educational Academy in Florida, respectively.

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informed before each game session, Knave automatically records game sessions, and the animated videos players create as they perform (featuring player voices and the movement of their avatars) are available not only for the teacher and students but also for our research team. The videos tell us quite a bit about student engagement with the game. Removing ourselves physically from schools has allowed another sphere of collaboration to flourish, among teachers themselves. In one case, when an enterprising teacher at Neptune High School in New Jersey wanted to borrow a Knave Kit from us but was concerned about the shipping cost, she found other teachers at her school who would be interested in using the game in their classes. Following the model of the cooperative (a well-known form of collaboration), each teacher contributed a small sum to pay the shipping fee. The teachers then worked together to timeshare the equipment and to develop lesson plans that would work for their very different classes. The teacher then gathered, collated and passed along feedback from her colleagues. This incident has inspired us to explore ways digital tools might facilitate collaboration between teachers who are not connected in RL. We hope to allow teachers who develop classroom resources for Play the Knave to upload these to our online archive, so that they are available to other educators who can use or adapt these lessons, going on to upload their own materials. The current Play the Knave education programme takes advantage of the vast and unpredictable connections of digital networks not to supplant biopower, but to build on it. Without question, there is something special about connecting in RL. The flow often experienced during live, in-person meetings can be magical, and the work enormously productive. But for academics wishing to have meaningful interactions with elementary and secondary schools, not to mention with their own university students, RL connections can be glitchy and sometimes impossible. As we hope to have shown, glitchy connections need not shut down educational collaborations of these sorts but can instead push us to adapt to collaborators whose lives may differ considerably from our own.

References Azevedo, Jordan, Gina Bloom, Kirsten Burrell, Rachel Cowen, Kristen Hartley, Natalie Hill, and Yoon Ah Ko, 2018. ‘Play the Knave in Schools: Research from 2018–19 Teaching Interns’. ModLab, University of California, Davis, 8 June. Banks, Fiona, 2014. Creative Shakespeare: The Globe Education Guide to Practical Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury).

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Blocksidge, Martin, 2003. Shakespeare in Education (New York, London: Continuum). Bloom, Gina, 2019a. ‘Play the Knave’, in Karen Schrier (ed.), Learning, Education, and Games, Vol III: 100 Games to Use in the Classroom and Beyond (Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press), 304–11. Bloom, Gina, 2019b. ‘Rough Magic: Performing Shakespeare with Gaming Technology’. Shakespeare Birthday Lecture: Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., 23 April. www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6egGB5EayA. Bloom, Gina, and Lauren Bates, 2021. ‘Play to Learn: Shakespeare as Decolonial Praxis in South African Schools’, Shakespeare in Southern Africa 34, 7–22. Bloom, Gina, Evan Buswell, Colin Milburn, Michael Neff, and Nicholas Toothman, 2020. Play the Knave (Davis, CA: ModLab) https://www .playtheknave.org/ Bloom, Gina, Sawyer Kemp, Nicholas Toothman, and Evan Buswell, 2016. ‘“A Whole Theatre of Others”: Amateur Acting and Immersive Spectatorship in the Digital Shakespeare Game Play the Knave’, Shakespeare Quarterly 67.4, 408–30. Bloom, Gina, Nicholas Toothman, and Evan Buswell, 2021. ‘Playful Pedagogy and Social Justice: Digital Embodiment in the Shakespeare Classroom’, Shakespeare Survey 74, 30–50. Cohen, Ralph Alan, 2018. ShakesFear and How to Cure It: The Complete Handbook for Teaching Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury). Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row). Edmiston, Brian, Pat Enciso, and Martha L. King, 1987. ‘Empowering Readers and Writers Through Drama: Narrative Theater’, Language Arts 64.2, 219–28. Edmiston, Brian, and Amy Mckibben, 2011. ‘Shakespeare, Rehearsal Approaches, and Dramatic Inquiry: Literacy Education for Life’, English in Education 45.1, 86–101. Gibson, Rex, 1998. Teaching Shakespeare: A Handbook for Teachers. Cambridge School Shakespeare Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Haddon, John, 2009. Teaching Reading Shakespeare (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge). Riggio, Milla Cozart, 1999. Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance (New York: Modern Languages Association). Rocklin, Edward L., 2005. Performance Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English). Savage, Karen, and Dominic Symonds, 2018. Economies of Collaboration in Performance: More than the Sum of the Parts (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan). Sawyer, Keith R., 2007. Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (New York: Basic Books). Shores, Amanda, 2017. ‘Play the Knave in the English Shakespeare Curriculum: A Review’. Play the Knave: For the Classroom (blog). 28 June 2017. www .­playtheknave.org/uploads/1/3/0/7/130747582/curriculum_review_of_play_ the_knave.pdf.

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Thompson, Ayanna, and Laura Turchi, 2016. Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach (Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury). Ward, Brendan, 2017. ‘Drama King: Is It Valuable Or Is It All Just Fun and Games’? University of California, Davis, 28 June. https://m.youtube.com/ watch?v=Hxs5H94Mq4k&feature=em-upload_owner. Winston, Joe, 2015. Transforming the Teaching of Shakespeare with the Royal Shakespeare Company (London: Bloomsbury).

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Part V

Reimagining Performance

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Introduction Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen and Jacqueline Manuel

Shakespeare performance and the forms of education arising from it are radically reimagined by the projects in this section. Social, cultural, linguistic and national boundaries are crossed, unique spaces from church (Chapter 21) to prison (Chapter 19) to castles and breweries (Chapter 20) are activated, and we are invited to reconsider what it means to perform inclusively. These projects generate social change and critical reflection on gender, disability, cultural difference, marginalisation and the structure and effect of corrections systems. They project through and beyond the objective of teaching and learning Shakespeare’s works: to offer theatrical experiences to ‘people who had no access to the arts’ so that ‘marginalised families don’t feel marginalised’ (Chapter 17, p. 279); to empower ‘girls and gender non-conforming youth through the performance of Shakespeare’s text’ (Chapter 18, p. 283); to provide rich experiences that build empathy (Chapter 19, p. 303); to ‘build cultural intelligence’ (Chapter 20, p. 317); and to support ‘cross-border’ collaboration (Chapter 21, p. 320).

Contexts, Audiences, Relationships Many of these projects, in their collaborative design, reinforce Christian M. Billing’s claim (on the topic of rehearsing Shakespeare) that, until we get into the rehearsal room and expose Shakespeare (or any other printed play-text) to the active and embodied processes of collaborative investigation, risk, play and the repeated creating of exploratory interpretations that constitute rehearsal practice, we have none of us ‘cracked the spine’ of any of Shakespeare’s plays. (2012: 384)

For Billing, ‘greater collaboration’ moves beyond the rehearsal room and across ‘various interested constituencies’, including textual, archival, theatre and performance scholars, theatre practitioners, actor training institutions, working actors and audiences (2012: 393). 267

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The performance-centred projects featured here each reimagine performance with diverse audiences, often in complex or unique contexts, and with an extensive range of collaborating partners. Flute Theatre (Chapter 17), Butterfly (Chapter 20) and Edward’s Boys (Chapter 21) are based in the United Kingdom, but each has managed precious resources and partnerships to project Shakespeare much further afield including across language boundaries. The audiences and participants – be they autistic children and their families, Omani teachers and students, or French students, parents, teachers and academics – significantly influence the form and evolution of the work being created. Kelly Hunter of Flute Theatre writes: ‘Families came, and schools came, and they said they’d never experienced things like that before’ (p. 276). She adds: ‘The question for me is do you feel alive? Are you able to experience your life even a little bit more?’ (p. 276). Edward’s Boys creates ‘a cross-border instance of collaboration on multiple levels: peer-to-peer, with young people from one country performing for young people in another country; between secondary school teachers and higher education faculty; between the worlds of research and education, and the world of theatre’ (p. 320). Butterfly’s work in Oman illuminates ‘the capacity of theatre to uncover deep human connections beneath more superficial cultural differences, and also the obstacles those still very real differences can create’ (p. 307). For the Australia-based Shakespeare Prison Project (SPP) (Chapter 19), audiences comprise inmates, prison staff, participants’ families, invited guests and members of the public. The project counters prison culture that lacks outlets where prisoners ‘can discuss complex issues’ and is ‘largely devoid of activities that might come under this umbrella of “personal growth/satisfaction”’ (p. 297). The Chicago-based Viola Project (Chapter 18) places Shakespeare performance in real-world contexts by engaging with non-Shakespearean and non-theatrical partners including social justice organisations. It prioritises relationships with lowincome schools and provides workshops on adolescent health, financial literacy and self-defence. The project has recognised its own changing social contexts, moving from its origins as an ‘all girls, no boys’ programme to one that addresses gender fluidity and inequity.

Aims, Processes, Structures For several of these projects, reimagining Shakespeare performance is a means to address injustice and boost inclusion. Performance-oriented projects are usually framed as non-educational in the conventional sense of ‘education’, and yet are permeated with collaborative learning. Their

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processes are deeply relational and focussed on joy and theatre making. For example, the SPP ‘is not a study group, the atmosphere is not that of a classroom. It is recreational, not educational’ (p. 302), and Flute Theatre is ‘nothing to do with changing a person, it’s to do with using Shakespeare to know ourselves’ (p. 275). These five projects have powerfully defined identities – working with autistic children and their families, supporting girls and gender ­non-conforming youth, working with prisoners, fostering Anglo-Omani collaboration, touring an all-boys company in France – and yet share an emphasis on rehearsal processes and theatrical play that enable participants to connect emotionally, practically and cognitively. The facilitation of emotional expression through an ‘ethos of play’ (Olive, 2015: 106) is notable across the projects: from experiencing ‘long-forgotten emotions’ (Chapter 19, p. 303) to sharing feelings (Chapter 17, p. 275) and managing ‘a complete range of feelings’ (Chapter 18, p. 285) because ‘Shakespeare is about feelings, so is for all’ (Chapter 20, p. 317). Their aims, structures and processes are uniquely bound to their identities and contexts and they present us with numerous instantiations of ardenspace.

Insights, Challenges, Takeaways These collaborative endeavours face pragmatic challenges relating to resourcing, funding and participant needs and availabilities. We see that collaboration with like-minded individuals and larger organisations, institutions and festivals can be crucial for a project’s creative expression and financial viability. Kelly Hunter and Robert Shaughnessy (Chapter 17) refer to challenges that arise when collaborating partners have different ways of thinking and seeing a project. Steve Dunne and Rob Pensalfini (Chapter 19) reveal how prison cultures and rules can obstruct their project work. We discover that ardenspaces are vulnerable to powerful systems and processes, but we also see how imaginative and experienced projectors pivot and adapt to keep their dream alive. Dunne created a new tradition for the project when he ‘became the first prisoner in the history of the SPP to play a woman’ (Chapter 19, p. 297), Tracy Irish and Aileen Gonsalves note the challenges of ‘cultural gender differences’ in their work with Omani students (Chapter 20, p. 307), and the performances of Edward’s Boys led to open, authentic discussions around sexuality. These considerations are engaged with seriously and imaginatively so that what begins as a challenge becomes through collaborative endeavour and reflection a powerful insight. We see that

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performance-based projects are particularly adept at surfacing, processing and resolving barriers and divisions of this sort. The projects in this section show that reimagining performance in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts depends on the informed and ‘open’ approach of collaborators in respecting, embracing and harnessing ‘difference’ (Chapter 20, p. 312). All of the projects rely on the authenticity, strength and diversity of the connections they found and foster. They exemplify teaching and learning through collaboration, but do so by centring theatre making that is adventurous, imaginative and humane. Reimagining Shakespeare in performance yields unexpected and antiestablishment insights into how and why engaging with Shakespeare can be liberating, enriching and rewarding (Chapter 17). These projects rely on ‘mutual trust and support’ (Chapter 21, p. 323) between collaborators and within the relationships on which the work is built, and from this a rippleeffect is generated, ‘an effect, subtle and gradual’, that brings disturbance and renewal to the cultures and contexts of the projects (Chapter 19, p. 298).

References Billing, Christian M., 2012. ‘Rehearsing Shakespeare: Embodiment, Collaboration, Risk and Play …’, Shakespeare Bulletin 30.4, 383–410. Olive, Sarah, 2015. Shakespeare Valued: Education Policy and Pedagogy 1989–2009 (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect).

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chapter 17

Flute Theatre, Shakespeare and Autism Kelly Hunter and Robert Shaughnessy

The following conversation took place in London in November 2019. Robert Shaughnessy1 interviewed the founder and Artistic Director of Flute Theatre, Kelly Hunter MBE about the work of the company with Shakespeare, young people with autism and their families. This work grew out of the games and workshops devised by Hunter from the 1990s onwards and subsequently formalised as the Hunter Heartbeat Method (HHM).2 In brief, the HHM works with the ‘pulse’ of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter to create a rhythmic, sensory and immersive performance, co-created by actors and autistic participants, focusing on key moments in the plays played and replayed as interactive games. The purpose of the work is primarily artistic rather than pedagogic, therapeutic or remedial: performances are not designed to alleviate or overcome autistic symptoms and behaviour (classically, challenges in communication, personal interaction and repetitive and stereotyped behaviours) but to create a space in which to play and to dream.3 Flute Theatre was established as a company in 2014 and has to date mounted three autism-centred Shakespeare productions: The Tempest (2014), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2017) and Pericles (2019). The interview took place prior to the onset of the COVID-19 ­pandemic in 2020 and subsequent lockdown, and so does not take account of the ways that the company’s work, until this point rooted in close live encounters, has since evolved online. Robert: Let’s begin by talking about the origins of the company – when and where and how it started.

1

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Robert Shaughnessy is Professor of Theatre and Director of Research at Guildford School of Acting, University of Surrey. He has a long-term stake in Flute’s work not only as a research collaborator and Board member, but also as the parent of an autistic young man, Gabriel, who, as a Creative Associate of the company, is a regular participant in the development of its work. For an account of the Hunter Heartbeat Method, see Hunter, 2015. See Shaughnessy, 2018, 2019.

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Kelly: Flute Theatre was born out of me wanting to create Shakespeare productions that would offer people who had no access to the arts the opportunity to really experience their life-changing power. I’d been working with people with autism for at least fifteen years but always in school settings. I made a production of The Tempest in 2014 which was really successful in terms of what I wanted it to be: we used the HHM games, but primarily we made the best Tempest we could make. That’s the difference: we’re doing things for people on the spectrum. We are cutting these plays back. The difference is that the audience is fifteen people on the spectrum and their families. Robert: Could we go right back, starting with the fundamentals in terms of where the first games came from and how they work? How did you progress from games and workshops to a whole play? Kelly: I was an actor at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). I was playing big parts on big stages at Stratford, London and New York4 and I was feeling increasingly that there seemed to be this fourth wall between me and the audience. I was not in a place where I could really access the power of Shakespeare, the power of the rhythm and the sound of the words that can change your life. After one very frustrating season at the RSC in 2001, I took myself off and worked in a special school and gave myself the brief to find out how to use Shakespeare for people who had no access to the arts. They said you can come, and you can play with anybody, but not with the people who are autistic. They are in a unit, behind that door. They literally pointed to a door. For me, that door represented something very interesting. I wanted to get behind it to see who on earth these people were that it was said wouldn’t be able to play. I’d never met anyone with autism as far as I knew, so with a little bit of persuasion they let me behind the door. Me and my little band of actors started playing with these kids and something landed: something became very, very present. Straightaway we sat in a circle. We made the rhythm of heartbeats because I knew there was something powerful about the iambic pentameter. As an actor, I knew that I could literally control the feelings and thoughts of an audience through the way that I used the iambic. I wanted to see if that could be translated. We’d sit and make the rhythm of a heartbeat and start saying ‘hello’ with these kids, making games of eye contact and spatial awareness. That came from my obsession with four key words in Shakespeare: eyes, mind, reason and love, that I took from Louis Zukofsky’s book, Bottom: On Shakespeare (1987 [1964]), I understood that there was this poetic through-line of Shakespeare’s plays of the loving eye and the seeing brain. I’d found people who struggled to access their seeing brain and their loving eye, and articulate it. 4

Kelly Hunter joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1991, when she played the lead in Pam Gems’ The Blue Angel and Mariana in Measure for Measure. She went on to play Isobel in Stephen Poliakoff’s Talk of the City in 1998, Constance in King John (2001), Hermione in The Winter’s Tale (2009) and Goneril in King Lear (2010).

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Quite quickly, there were two boys who were so-called non-verbal, and when we sat with the heartbeat circles they started saying ‘hello’. For both of them it was the first time that they had really spoken, certainly in school, and the teachers were very surprised. It was clear that we were onto something. I stayed there for three years. By trial and error, I created this first set of games using my exploration of the moment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare, 2005: 3.1.122) where Titania wakes up and has this trick played on her eyes so she looks at Bottom, then she looks away and then she looks back at Bottom. We experimented with different funny ways of how you could make that very pleasurable. We invented this thing, the ‘Doyoyoyoying’, which is like a cartoon with your eyes out on stalks. The kids loved it. Far from them being scared of us or not wanting to play, they actually really enjoyed it. The teachers were very quickly onside. I spent three extremely happy years playing and making up games, always on the theme of looking, seeing and loving, and finding moments in Shakespeare where that could be embodied and where the children could be given the opportunity to push through their struggles and, as it were, come out the other side. Robert: Did you have a base in terms of particular schools that you were working with? Kelly: One was the Glebe School near Beckenham.5 I went there once a week, every week, for three years. It taught me how to do this. I really felt like I knew what these games should be and out they poured. The same with The Tempest: that became more about games of language, with Caliban learning to speak and the characterisation of Prospero and his magic. The idea of Caliban repeating the words ‘This island’s mine’ (Shakespeare, 2005: 1.2.333), and then us working with the non-verbal couple of kids just using the ‘m’ sound and that mother sound of them just humming and holding onto themselves as if they’re embracing territoriality. Robert: How did you go from there to forming a company? Kelly: Firstly, I was with these four younger actors who I took with me from this rather unhappy RSC season.6 We formed this little group, Touchstone, working at the school in West Wickam. We had the same group of kids and teachers for three years. Then I stopped for a while. I went back to being an actor and working in the theatre and sort of forgot. I went back to the RSC four or five years later and bargained with them to do it again. I knew there was something there that was unfinished. Also, for all sorts of reasons, I wanted to do that education project as opposed to being in another RSC show. I worked in the Hay Lane School in Colindale, and 5

6

The Glebe School, West Wickam, is a foundation secondary special school for pupils aged eleven to nineteen, which include those with autism, ADHD, speech and communication difficulties and other learning problems. These were Joe Englan, Matt Sitton, Laura Hayes, Victoria Duarri and Liz Hurran.

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that was a real wake up.7 I thought that I had nailed how to work with people with autism from doing this one school with these twelve kids who really liked me, and then I ended up in this place on my own with children I didn’t know. A much harder demographic. Most kids were in care or fostered and no-one had English as a first language. The school staff members were not particularly enthusiastic except for two teachers who absolutely loved it, but it wasn’t me with four or five actors, it was just me and these couple of teachers and these ladies who I called the dinner ladies who looked at me as if I were mad when I tried to throw donkey faces and do all this stuff. The kids wouldn’t even sit down to settle. I really thought I’d made a big mistake, but I had committed myself to doing it for a year and got the RSC to fund it, so I kept going. Little by little it started to work, and I started digging deeper into what the heartbeat rhythm was doing, because when I was first doing this at Glebe the heartbeats were a transition to the games. I ended up doing hours of heartbeats. I started really understanding the extended panic attack inside someone with autism that could be soothed by these. Robert: There’s a difference between a workshop and a series of games and a show which has an overall rhythm and then nested rhythms within that. Kelly: Music was not part of it other than the rhythm of the voice and the body, which is music in itself. I never had any musical instruments, ever, but it was always musical. I was quite adamant that no one held anything so that you could hold hands and you could use touch. I hear Shakespeare as a set of maps of feeling, patterns and rhythms. I’m riding waves of rhythms of music when I’m looking at the words of Shakespeare, let alone speaking them, let alone standing up and enacting them. The singing and instruments didn’t come until we ‘made’ the plays. I started to really understand the patterns of autism at its most profound, and how the games could give an immediate sense of empowerment to the children. There were, again, a couple of kids who responded quite quickly really, amazingly, who would see me down the corridor, start making heartbeats, run towards me, and they didn’t like doing anything else in school. They were non-verbal and quite troubled, sweet individuals. Whilst I was doing that, and working as an actor at the RSC, I became much more the director in my head. Every bit of me felt more alive in the school with these kids and was thinking about how I could make what I discovered into a theatre practice. Then I was invited by the RSC to meet with Ohio State University (OSU) to talk to their science department and their theatre department to see if we could make a research project to find out what was happening in the games and if they worked, which I find now a rather odd proposal.8 7 8

The Hay Lane School in North London catered for pupils aged four to nineteen with autism, severe learning difficulties and complex and profound physical difficulties. It closed in 2010. The partnership with Ohio State University’s Psychology Department, Nisonger Center and Wexner Medical Center lasted from 2011 to 2014. For an account of the scientific study and its findings, see Mehling, Tassé, and Root, 2017. See also Shaughnessy, 2018.

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Robert: One of the challenges is the idea that you’re doing something to fix the autism or to provide therapy or even cure. This, in particular, is problematic from the point of view of autistic persons, if it implies imposing a neurotypical world. Kelly: Those problems I recognise because of the American [US] scientists, which I went along with at the time and then felt increasingly uncomfortable about and I don’t like at all. The thing I’ve created, crucially, is not trying to change anybody, neither the actors nor the people who come to play with us. Certainly it’s true that some people on the spectrum struggle with anxiety and struggle with the ability to share their feelings and thoughts with another person. It’s nothing to do with changing a person, it’s to do with using Shakespeare to know ourselves. It was always a little bit uncomfortable at Ohio because they were trying to find out if something works whereas, I was always saying you can’t do it right or wrong, you just jump in and share. Robert: They were judging the work in terms of whether it would have an impact on certain things that could be measured such as verbal functioning. Kelly: Exactly. The usual measurements that are chosen are recognising facial expressions on the Venn chart and so on: all quite basic stuff. During the three-year project, every three or four months I went back to Ohio and visited the workshops, and they were doing it every week. The kids were unrecognisable. Where they had been shy and anxious, they felt free and confident. Where they had been non-verbal, they were talking. Where they had been dyspraxic, they were literally doing ballet. I’m not exaggerating, it was amazing. It was all about forming the habit of playing once or twice a week with these actors. They became more themselves and had a fantastic time. The scientific results that came from that didn’t reflect that in the slightest. There was a series of charts and proposals. With the best will in the world, I think the question was not the right question at the heart of it, but what I took away from it was, if these kids have formed the habit of playing, there’s no end to the amount of pleasure that they can have. It’s a theatre practice that puts pleasure and joy at its deepest level at the centre of our endeavour. Robert: How did Flute then became a company and how does it operate in terms of who your relationships are with and where you’re based, where you work and who you work with? Kelly: On the back of the project with Ohio State University, I wanted to start using this artform to make actual productions. Having just done another three years as an actor with the RSC, I knew that I couldn’t be an actor anymore. The OSU and the RSC did a co-production of The Tempest. The show originally had three RSC actors and three OSU actors.9 The OSU had been playing the games for about three years, so they really knew them. 9

These were Greg Hicks (Caliban), Chris Macdonald (Ferdinand and Stephano), Kevin McClatchy (Prospero), Mahmoud Osman (Ariel), Robin Post (Trinculo) and Eva Lily Tausig (Miranda).

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It was still in the circle, so in one way it felt like a rather fancy workshop. We added a floor cloth, so it looked beautiful. The actors were in very basic but very beautiful costumes, and we gave a few actors ukuleles and drums and finger cymbals, and we put a bit of light on it. Really importantly, we performed it at the RSC in one of their main theatres, The Courtyard. The biggest leap was not being tucked away in a classroom in a school but saying this is a theatre practice, and today this public space opens its doors to these families who are often marginalised and think that theatre isn’t for them. We used very short scenes as the narrative (we don’t have all the characters). Within each scene it’s like you press a pause button, and you let the children and the actors dive deeper into the sea of feelings that is encompassed in that scene: for example, the frustration of Caliban when he’s saying ‘this island’s mine’, or the falling in love for the first time (the ‘changed eyes’ of Miranda and Ferdinand), or the sword fighting of Prospero and Ferdinand, or Caliban trying to get too close to Miranda. All of these things have an essential human experience inside them. Each time something would happen in the scene, we’d just repeat it again and again, and the actors would come into the circle with the children who are sitting with them and they play the games. The thing gets put on pause and gets repeated for as long as the kids need to share the feelings, and then on you go to the next game. It did feel very exciting. It felt like we were inventing a new artform. Robert: New vocabulary. Kelly: Yes. Families came, and schools came, and they said they’d never experienced things like that before. There was one boy with autism who said, ‘For the first time I felt like I was just there.’ The question for me is do you feel alive? Are you able to experience your life even a little bit more? Robert: There is a tension there, isn’t there, because in order to be able to appeal to people to fund the work, there has to be this sense that this is work which is beneficial rather than being work which changes. How do you negotiate that? Kelly: The mother of Marcus, who we worked with on the three-year project, put it brilliantly. She said he was connecting with other human beings for the very first time, and all his life he had been locked away and never looked at anybody or allowed anybody to look at him and had certainly never gone to someone and offered himself to have some physical contact. She walked into the workshop and he was in the middle of all these actors, looking at them, playing with them, stretching out his hand to take their hand, connecting to them and wanting to be known. Robert: There’s two things, one is about how you can create a place for the autistic voice in the work, and the other is what you and the actors learned from the autistic people that you work with. How could that have changed how the people involved might think about acting, might think about Shakespeare, about theatre, about autism?

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Kelly: People always ask why we make theatre. If it can serve to allow people to know themselves better and to reach out to other people to be known, then I can’t think of any better result. People are living in increasingly lockedaway worlds where the individual is key, and you could argue that we’re forgetting how to be part of a group and to work with each other and play with each other and really realise that there is someone else on the other side of a room. You feel more connected and what a lot of people say, is how quickly everyone knows each other in these games and how quickly people feel at home with each other, as if we just accept exactly who we are, all of us, and share the essential feelings, which is what Shakespeare does. If you boil Shakespeare down, which this does, it is to essentially have feelings, and art allows you to do that. It’s too embarrassing otherwise. It gives you a chance to express your best self, not your well-behaved self, but your deep core feelings. Right at the beginning we do a series of games where we warm up by letting the children play different faces, as if we’re having different masks and we keep the ‘hello heartbeat’ going. In many countries that we go to around the world we do the angry face and they say we don’t want our children to do that because that’s scary and they might get violent. What is that teaching them and what does that mean? There seems to be this fear, even within 10 minutes of a workshop, of expressing what everybody knows, as if something terrible is going to happen if you just express your anger. Robert: Picking up on that, the work is performed in different languages. It started off in English, and so far it’s been in Catalan and in Japanese … Kelly: … Polish and Romanian and Swedish. Robert: What happens in that process of translation? Kelly: We made our Tempest in English. I then formed Flute Theatre and we kept performing and I got invited to Barcelona in 2017, with a group of young actors at Teatre Lliure. I went to Barcelona quite nervous but knowing that the show was good and that they all spoke English, Catalan and Spanish. I worked for two weeks with the Catalan actors creating the show that I had made already, and it just changed overnight. It immediately became more musical. Everything that had one layer of harmony now had eight layers of harmony. Everything that was kind of syncopated was now completely off the beat. It landed, it fell into a whole other place. We went to the school where you’ve been – Escuela Especial Montserrat Montero – up in the hills of Granollers, just north of Barcelona. Honestly, I stood at the top of the hill at this school and thought I want to come back here for the rest of my life because I feel so at home. I was watching how the children were greeted by the staff every day as it were Christmas. The kids were getting out of the cars and out of the buses, and the teachers were there, and they were hugging them and kissing them. These children were as autistic as any group of autistic children I’ve met anywhere else, but they felt different because the culture around them, the physical contact and physical life, was so completely different.

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  The actors translated the games into Catalan, and that was the easiest bit. Caliban’s ‘This island’s mine’ is ‘aquesta illa és meva’ in Catalan. The ‘m’ sound is still there, so some of the kids who don’t have language just went, ‘mmm’. It didn’t feel difficult at all. In fact, it felt more expressive because it wasn’t being defined by the English language. We had gone from Shakespeare’s English through to an English that one could understand, through to Catalan and through to the autistic child. The actors were amazing: a good actor is one who is not thinking about themselves, but about the other actor and doing service to the play. It’s a complete act of confidence and not an act of vanity. I owe so much to those Catalan actors because they rocked my world and they changed me, and they gave me so much confidence in this thing that I made because I really saw it working. I’d seen it working when we’d done it in Stratford, but then it landed somehow in Barcelona, and I’ve been going back there ever since. Robert: It goes back to what you said at the beginning that part of this came out of your sense as an actor of working in a mainstream context of the communication that you were having with an audience. Kelly: With these shows I am there for every performance. This isn’t something that we’re doing and franchising out. My relationship with the actors is at best that I’m leading this group and I am the director and I did create this work, but as much as possible I’m passing it onto them so they own it. It has to be theirs because I know that if you don’t own the thing and if you don’t feel responsible and feel that it has to be you, then it could be anybody. That’s a horrible feeling. Again, that’s something that was happening at the RSC. At worst an actor in a big company feels undervalued because they know that if they weren’t there someone else would do it. You don’t feel a real sense of ‘I have to do this really well because the child next to me really needs me to do that.’ At the same time, we’ve all got each other’s back, so there’s me and there’s six or seven actors in the room. If something goes awry, if someone forgets something or if a child is in real trouble, or just the general pattern doesn’t go according to plan, there’s no blame attached. It’s a proper ensemble where people know that they’re all doing their best because that’s been instilled in the rehearsal. I work people very hard, but that’s so that they can then feel incredibly good about what they do. Robert: What are the biggest challenges you are facing? Kelly: There are the practicalities of keeping the company together when we work project by project and when I very stubbornly will do things my way: it’s a small company led by me with this massive ambition, but I’m not going to work for anybody else. When I’ve got a great group of actors, one of the challenges is having the facility to give them enough work. Every time we do it, every time we land on it, it’s really important for the autistic young people and their families. They’ve made this leap of faith that they can come to the building and it will be okay. There are high levels of anxiety and fear from the families when they walk in. I like rising

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to that challenge. I really enjoy that. I always sit in the foyer and wait for families and make sure that I know everyone’s name before we walk in and meet the actors. I’m very conscious that they probably didn’t want to come at some level. I’m conscious of family rows and all sorts of stuff that goes on, on the day when you’re going to go and do that ‘theatre thing’. Someone’s said I don’t want to go, or there’s too much expectation. They bounce in and they want their world to be completely changed, and that won’t happen. There’s all this fierce energy. That’s this glorious challenge that I love. I think that’s the thing that was missing all those years ago at the RSC: the audiences had no expectation whatsoever. They just came in. They sat down. Of course, that’s not true for everybody. Of course, for some people it was a big thing to come, but it didn’t feel like the need was there, not the real need that I think theatre can meet. We’ve had experiences now, especially this year, when we were working in Poland, doing four shows a day in Polish with different people with autism coming in every 2 hours and the need they had was incredible. They really wanted something to happen every single time and we really rose to it. This particular group of actors wanted to push themselves and change society. They’re very young and I love their frustration at the world because it can be channelled into this work. These are great challenges. They’re actually the challenges that theatre should grapple with as opposed to in any way sitting back and just entertaining people. For me, that’s fine for some people. It’s not that that doesn’t belong in the world, but I don’t feel in any way comfortable doing that. I just feel like I’m wasting my time. I want a challenge. Robert: In a deep sense, this work is political. Not trying to change anything about the autistic person, but changing the whole environment within which things are happening. Kelly: That’s right. It’s political in that it must continue to happen in public spaces so that marginalised families don’t feel marginalised, that they feel that the public space is for them. It’s not just for people who do that thing called going to the theatre. It’s not therapy – that’s a dead end. It’s about the politics of public spaces genuinely being inclusive, because people talk about inclusion all the time, but actually genuinely saying we will take the risk because there might be some really, really big meltdown from somebody, but it doesn’t matter. If our attitude towards the families or the school is ‘it’s okay’, these things happen. If you’re doing Shakespeare, which is all about people having meltdowns, to be honest, and collapsing and breaking the rules … Robert: From nowhere quite often as well. Kelly: Yes. Then you must learn to accept that in other people and accept that these things happen. The over-valued manners and politeness: that’s the bit that somewhere deep inside me is someone who doesn’t like that. I do not feel comfortable. It’s not about being rude, it’s not about not saying thank you, it’s not about not being kind, but it’s about true acceptance of what people can be.

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References Hunter, Kelly, 2015. Shakespeare’s Heartbeat: Drama Games for Children with Autism (London: Routledge). Mehling, Margaret H., Marc J. Tassé, and Robin Root, 2017. ‘Shakespeare and Autism: An Exploratory Evaluation of the Hunter Heartbeat Method’, Research and Practice in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities 4.2, 107–20. Shakespeare, William. 2005. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Shaughnessy, Robert, 2018. ‘“All Eyes”: Experience, Spectacle and the Inclusive Audience in Flute Theatre’s The Tempest’, in Fiona Banks (ed.), Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences (London: Bloomsbury), 119–38. Shaughnessy, Robert, 2019. ‘Give me your hands’, Shakespeare Studies 47, 71–80. Zukofsky, Louis, 1987 [1964]. Bottom: On Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press).

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chapter 18

The Viola Project

Learning to Defy Gender Norms On Stage and Off Skyler Schrempp

Introduction While scholars and theatre practitioners may ponder the exact details of how Shakespeare’s plays were performed, there is one point all may agree on: Shakespeare’s plays were written to be acted by a troupe of entirely male actors. Shakespeare’s England wasn’t devoid of female performers – not exactly. Women performers enjoyed access to street entertainments and carnival-style revels. High-born women and girls performed in court masques. However, the professional London stage with its high rhetoric and scripted plays was ostensibly off limits to anyone without a formal education or theatre training; that is to say, girls and women.1 As far as we know, Shakespeare and his company did not attempt to break this rather significant gender barrier. Despite the abundance of strong female leads, no woman during Shakespeare’s time (that we know of) ever spoke Lady Macbeth’s lines at the Globe. No girl ever propositioned Romeo to marry her. No dame commanded that York’s head be posted over York. No Weird Sister was ever an actual sister. It goes without saying that a young lady never held Yorick’s skull in her hand, nor challenged Tybalt to a fight. While women contemporaries of Shakespeare experienced his plays as only spectators, within the text female characters are anything but on the sidelines. Women, after all, plot regicide in Shakespeare! They don disguises to serve Counts as boys. They argue on the quality of mercy in Venetian courtrooms, they command armies, they speak up against wouldbe abusers. 1

Recently, much has been made of perceived illegality of women on stage in Shakespeare’s time. There is scant evidence that an actual law existed on the books though significant barriers kept Shakespeare’s roster of actors all male: see Korda (2011), McManus (2002) and Williams (2014).

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And yet even on the stage, equal power evades Shakespeare’s female characters. Juliet must still grapple with her parents’ arranged marriage for her, even after she has married the man of her choice. Lady Macbeth must still convince her husband to kill the king in order to gain power as his proxy. Tina Packer, the founding director of Shakespeare and Company, makes this observation of the female characters: women are always looking at power: either how to acquire some or how to avoid its worst violence, how to circumvent it or how to acquiesce to it, but they must watch it all the time. It is not a neutral subject to them. And of course, they never assume it’s theirs to organize and exploit, as many of the men do. (Packer, 2015: xiv–xv)

To that end the women in Shakespeare’s plays and in his audience shared a common barrier. Women and girls have made significant gains in the 400 years since Shakespeare’s death. But in far too many spaces, women are still playing spectators or are unable to participate as fully as men. The Council on Foreign Relations reported that in 2020 there were only four female heads of state of 193 countries (Council on Foreign Relations, 2020). The Pew Research Center notes that US women earn only 85 per cent of what their male counterparts make, a percentage that shrinks further when only women of colour are surveyed (Pew Research Center, 2019). The narratives on stage and screen that we consume are also lacking in equal gender representation. This is despite the availability of highly trained actresses. The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film’s annual report for top grossing movies in 2019 revealed that female characters accounted for only 34 per cent of speaking roles and only 37 per cent of major characters (Lauzen, 2020: 1). And of course, Shakespeare is still a widely produced playwright whose work can be seen on local stages as well as in movie theatres. His male characters outnumber his female characters seven to one. Unless a Shakespeare theatre or a specific director is dedicated to gender conscious casting, performances of Shakespeare are hardly models of gender equity. Enter Viola Project.

Origins In 2004 recent college graduates Ellie Kaufman and Reina Hardy sat down with a bottle of wine and began talking about the lack of opportunities for girls in the arts, and specifically, about the lack of opportunities for girls in Shakespeare.

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‘It’s always the girls who want to be in the plays’, one said. ‘And there are always more roles for the boys’, the other one said.

That was the tip of the iceberg, of course. If we accept that art holds a mirror up to life, then the absence of women on stage indicates an egregious lack of opportunity off stage. Wine was poured. Expletives were uttered. What ifs were bandied about. Ellie and Reina had both recently returned to Chicago, a city known for embracing big ideas for theatre in small storefronts. The 1990s and early 2000s had already seen a growing number of feminist theatres take on male-dominated plays and spaces: Babes with Blades put women and stage combat at the centre of their work; Rivendell Theatre emerged as the city’s only equity house committed exclusively to women’s stories. Professional women-helmed theatre projects had found a home and an audience in Chicago. Perhaps it was time to let girls play too. By the morning a half-formed idea of what would become The Viola Project was born. It would be a theatre programme dedicated to girls performing Shakespeare. No boys allowed. At The Viola Project Hamlet would be played by a girl, along with Gertrude, Claudius and of course, Ophelia. Shakespeare’s stage didn’t have room for women, let alone girls. Why not make room now?

The Viola Project Today Today, The Viola Project is much more than an all-girl Shakespeare programme.2 It is an overtly feminist organisation with the specific mission of empowering girls and gender non-conforming youth through the performance of Shakespeare’s text. Amplifying the voices of students is at the heart of all programming, despite the fact that one author looms rather large. Shakespeare scene work anchors class activities, and texts are explicitly mined for themes of consent, body autonomy, racial and gender bias, and more.

2

As discussed in a later section, The Viola Project now serves girls and gender non-conforming youth. I have endeavoured to explore the evolution from ‘all girls’ to ‘girls and gender non-conforming youth’ throughout the chapter. However, many sections, particularly those pertaining to the early evolution of The Viola Project are shaped by the understanding of gender norms as they relate to cisgender girls’ experience. These experiences are still touchstones for The Viola Project programmes; however, the experiences of gender non-conforming youth now help shape programmes as well.

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The Viola Project is certainly ‘little’ compared to many other theatre programmes in Chicago, though she is most definitely ‘fierce’.3 In a given year the programme serves between 75 and 100 individual students, many of whom attend multiple programmes. Class sizes are capped at eighteen with two teachers to ensure students receive ample individual attention. The Viola Project hosts tuition-based day-long theatre workshops and week-long summer camps, as well as ten-week after school programmes that are provided at no cost to schools with 75 per cent low-income enrolment. An average of 60 per cent of all students attending the programme benefit from financial assistance. In addition to teaching artists, The Viola Project is run by two part-time, paid administrators who oversee everything from programme management to professional development. The programme is a charitable organisation and receives funding from state and local grants as well as foundations and individual gifts. As of summer 2020, The Viola Project is an official programme of City Lit, a theatre dedicated to dramatising literary works.

From Indirect to Direct Feminism The evolution from an ‘all girls, no boys’ programme to one specifically designed to address gender inequity was not instantaneous. For many years, The Viola Project acted as a sort of girls’ club house. It was fun, rowdy, mischievous and filled with the voices of young girls playing Shakespeare’s great heroes and villains. In a way, The Viola Project was indirectly feminist; it benefited from the inherent feminism of an all-female space but in programming was much the same as any mixed-gender theatre class. There were games, there was rehearsal, there was performance. Occasionally, someone shouted ‘Girl Power!’ and the website displayed a somewhat broad mission with a cheeky nod to girls’ empowerment. It read: ‘Viola Project: Where a girl can be whoever she wants to be. Even Hamlet’. When new leadership took over in 2012 and subsequently had to revisit the mission statement, the question, Are we feminist, and if so, just how feminist do we want to be? was squarely up for debate. Given the year, the question should not have felt as risky as it did. This was before Beyoncé featured feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her single ‘Flawless’. It was before Taylor Swift had normalised the label ‘feminist’ in mainstream pop culture. It was before the 2016 release 3

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Helena says of Hermia, ‘And though she be but little, she is fierce’ (Shakespeare, 2017: 3.2.325).

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of the Trump Access Hollywood tape where he infamously boasted about sexually assaulting women. This was before the #MeToo era and before the 2017 Women’s Marches that were held all over the world. In 2012, ‘feminist’ was a word that many women recoiled from and one that could be detrimental to a young non-profit organisation.4 And anyone who works with young people can attest to the fact that in addition to appealing to them, one must also appeal to and appease their gatekeepers (librarians, teachers and, most of all, parents). If we embraced a feminist approach to how we taught and what we taught, would we risk alienating families who were simply looking for something fun for their daughter to do? The following questions needed answering: Why, exactly, is it important to get girls performing? And why, exactly, should they perform Shakespeare? The answers to these questions ultimately transformed The Viola Project into a programme that uses theatre and Shakespeare to address and defy the culturally prescribed limits of gender.

The Need for Feminist Programming The target age of The Viola Project students is eight to sixteen years. From a developmental standpoint, girls typically reach puberty during this time. Beyond the purely physical, this is a time of extreme transformation when dreams and goals are formed, and aspirations are moulded. This is also a time when pressure to conform to cultural norms reaches a boiling point. For girls, cultural norms can have dire consequences. Traditionally speaking, girls are expected to be nice, polite, comforting and compliant. Educator Rachel Simmons describes the pressure on girls to be good as a curse: [It] erodes girls’ ability to know, say, and manage a complete range of feelings. It urges girls to be perfect, giving them a troubled relationship to integrity and failure. It expects girls to be selfless, limiting the expression of their needs. It demands modesty … It diminishes assertive body language, quieting voices and weakening handshakes. (Simmons, 2009: 3)

Such values encourage girls to be spectators and supporting characters, rather than masters of their own fate.

4

While many US citizens do self-identify as feminists, the term continues to be polarising. See Barroso (2020) and Meltzer (2014).

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There is far more to the effects of traditional gender expectations than simply stifled ambition. Desire to be physically attractive can be overwhelming for any adolescent, but there is particular pressure on girls to adhere to often impossible beauty standards. It’s no coincidence that during this period, many girls begin developing body dysmorphia. The American Academy of Pediatrics notes that half of adolescent girls report being dissatisfied with their body (Golden, Schneider, and Wood, 2016: e5). As such, the rates of girls with eating disorders outnumber boys nine to one (Golden, Schneider, and Wood, 2016: e2). Intimate partner and sexual violence are also prevalent in the lives of young women. In a 2015 data brief, the Center for Disease Control reported 43.2 per cent of all female rape victims experience the assault prior to age eighteen (Smith et al., 2018: 4). Sexual violence is traumatising regardless of one’s age, but its effects are particularly devastating for those who experience abuse during critical periods of brain development. Discovering why abuse happens in the first place is another subject altogether, but knowing that abuse does happen, perhaps we should do better by our girls than to expect them to be nice, compliant and pleasing to look at. What if we told them their voices need not be gentle whispers, and their opinion need not please every person in the room? What if we told them that they deserved their lofty goals and should make great plans to achieve them?

Making Wants External The beauty of Shakespeare’s plays, as compared to realistic contemporary work, is that there is little guesswork to do in terms of knowing what many main characters want and what they are willing to do to achieve that want. Ample soliloquies provide the audience with a direct line into a character’s desire. Take the opening of Richard III. There is no question what Richard wants: to be king. There is no question as to why he wants it: he’s tired of people laughing at his disability. There is no question as to what he will do to get it: play the villain, or to be blunt, commit lots and lots of murders. Throughout the rest of the play, the audience watches him suit the action to the word, the word to the action. While Richard III’s deeds are hardly something to aspire to, his articulation of what he wants more than anything in the world, is something that is very new for many girls, or at least is in danger of going dormant during adolescence. This overt voicing of want, of need, of desire is something that adolescent girls are meant to do privately or indirectly; within the

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confines of a journal, or in private conference with a friend. Certainly not out loud, and certainly not in a room full of people. And certainly not at full volume. I want is a powerful phrase. Whether one wants to be the first in their family line to attend college, or wants to start a new club after school, or simply wants to be left alone. By performing Shakespeare’s text, an adolescent girl is able to practice this revolutionary act of voicing want. First in someone else’s words and then in her own. Within the bounds of The Viola Project class the students’ wants and wellbeing are guiding stars. Each day, the group checks in with an opening circle in which every member is given the opportunity to speak. They check in with a ‘rose’ and a ‘thorn’, something that is going well for them or that they’re excited about and something that is challenging for them. This expression of wellbeing enables both the teachers and the other students to assess how another member of their community is doing. It gives the individual member a space to voice something they might otherwise brush off as unimportant or inconvenient. At the close of the day, students are asked to give feedback on what surprised them, delighted them or made them want to hit the wall, a practice borrowed from the teachings of Shakespeare and Company in Lennox, Massachusetts. Giving students a dedicated platform at the beginning and end of the day to express their thoughts and feelings does more than simply provide a nice opening and closing ritual; it signals to the students that their voice, their feelings and their opinions are worthy of being expressed and deserve to be listened to.

Myriad Narratives At the core of The Viola Project’s classroom is the Shakespeare scene. Classes and camps are typically based around certain themes, and scenes are chosen to support those themes. The popular Warrior Queens programme is filled with scenes starring Joan of Arc, Queen Margaret and Cleopatra. The Quality of Mercy programme focuses on The Merchant of Venice and issues of justice and prejudice in the text as well as in our contemporary world. All programmes are designed around a central question such as ‘How do issues of bias affect our lives and our power?’ or ‘How do we interact with and expand our idea of gender?’ No matter the scene or the size of the role, all material provides the opportunity to explore and deconstruct gender. This is most explicit when students play a character of a different gender than their own. For many students who identify as girls, stepping into the shoes of a male

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character can be revelatory. The Viola Project students rally their troops at Agincourt, see floating daggers before their eyes, wax poetic on Queen Mab. They are property owners, merchants and wise fools. Where many female characters can be bound up in desires connected to family or love, male characters tend to exist independent of domestic ties. This is not to say that desires and wants that revolve around the traditional feminine sphere are inferior to those that don’t. Love, after all, is worth fighting for. One’s marriage is worth fighting for. But when we cultivate these desires in only one gender, we deprive them of the full spectrum of human experience. Providing students with alternate narratives is about reminding them that there are choices. Raising a family is no less important than going off to fight for England. But if a girl has been told all her life that raising a family is the only worthwhile thing she could do, then there is an obligation to offer alternative paths. Of course, many of Shakespeare’s heroines walk the line between male and female spheres. The project’s namesake, Viola, refers to the young woman of Twelfth Night who dons male attire after being shipwrecked in Illyria. Characters like Viola, Imogen, Portia and Rosalind serve as a reminder that women can adapt to a male space in order to survive, and even thrive. What’s more, they remind us that gender does not exist only within a male or female space. There is ample room between this binary to explore and to celebrate.

Changing the Narrative Rather than revere and admire Shakespeare, The Viola Project students are encouraged to challenge the plays and make discoveries in the text. Specifically students are encouraged to adapt the text where possible and pen their own scenes where Shakespeare, frankly, missed the mark. For example, Orlando’s love talk of Rosalind’s ‘fairness’ and her ‘white hand’ (Shakespeare, 2006: 3.2.10; 92; 378) reinforces stereotypes of female beauty as well as white supremacy. The Weird Sisters’ spells are full of racist tropes. Rather than cutting the text and sanitising it for the class ahead of time, teachers help students make their own discoveries and determinations about how the work may be adapted to provide a more empowering scenario. Sometimes the class may decide not to cut certain issues from the text in order to explicitly point out Shakespeare’s shortcomings. In many cases, new text is generated to respond to plays that reinforce unhealthy power structures. I remember a Saturday workshop focused on The Taming of the Shrew. For the final activity of the day, each student wrote a letter as Kate to either her husband Petruchio or father Baptista.

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The letters were searingly honest and often funny, but one was particularly striking. A twelve-year-old student, generally soft spoken and thoughtful, got up and raged as Kate at her father and husband. She was defiant, bold and full of unbridled anger. Memorably, she promised that her submission was not the end of the story. If I recall correctly, she closed her letter with the following words: ‘I will have my revenge.’ The simple act of letting students address problems in the text undoes centuries of reinforcing of a very dangerous status quo. And, on a practical level, it increases their buy-in to the material, and their ownership of their performance.

Collaborations When bringing 400-year-old material to a twenty-first-century generation, The Viola Project has challenged teachers to envision collaborations with organisations that are decidedly non-Shakespearean in order to deepen student understanding of the text. In Chicago, there is a rich community of exciting non-profits and social justice initiatives that are enthusiastic about partnering with an organisation like The Viola Project. Typically, such partnerships happen during longer programmes, such as a week-long summer camp. During a week spent focusing on Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Viola Project teachers expressed a desire to encourage students to think critically about Proteus’s near rape of Silvia. While teachers planned on discussing the problematic nature of this scene during class, ultimately it was decided that additional expertise was needed. The Viola Project invited the performance cadre of the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health to provide a supplemental workshop on healthy relationships. During the workshop they discussed power dynamics, boundaries and consent. This discussion laid a valuable groundwork for students to articulate why Proteus’s near assault should not be taken for granted. During a week spent on financial literacy (aptly titled Oh My Ducats!) the teacher wanted to address gender wage gaps and the importance of financial independence. As such, she chose scenes of negotiation and commerce; she also established a play economy at the beginning of camp. Heartland Alliance, an organisation dedicated to breaking the cycle of systemic poverty, led students through an age-appropriate financial literacy workshop as part of a collaboration. Students learned about tax brackets, interest rates, credit cards and student loans. Parents later wrote to us to say their daughters had come home wanting to talk about the importance of financial independence.

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During a week devoted to performing great fight scenes from the canon, we wanted to open up a broader conversation about violence. Self-defence practitioners were brought in to teach students skills from how to respond to unwanted attention from both strangers and family members, to how to throw an effective punch, to how to report violence after it has happened. During fight rehearsal, students were directed to ask for consent before physically touching their scene partner. As a result students walked away with a stronger sense of body autonomy. As rich as Shakespeare’s plays are, The Viola Project students have ultimately benefitted from collaborations that helped them explore issues presented in the play outside the written text. Furthermore, connecting Shakespeare’s text to the work of organisations outside The Viola Project has highlighted the contemporary relevance in these 400-year-old plays.

The Gender Spectrum While exploration of gender has always been at the heart of The Viola Project, for many years The Viola Project propagated the understanding that gender was binary. Even in the pursuit of having candid conversations about gender, there was no explicit acknowledgement of the trans, nonbinary and gender non-conforming community. To be frank, we did not see this community and failed to recognise that some of our students were likely to be part of it and had not come out. In recent years, The Viola Project has sought to address the fact that gender is a spectrum in several ways. In 2018, Lurie Children’s Hospital trained The Viola Project teachers on practices that can significantly impact the wellbeing of LGBTQIA+ students. As a result, it is no longer assumed that all students that have been identified by their teachers and parents as ‘girls’ identify as such themselves. Parents are now asked to fill out student pronouns as part of basic intake. During the first check in of the first class, students who want to share pronouns are encouraged to do so. Teachers model this regardless. As a result, there has been an increase of ­self-identified gender non-conforming youth in the programme. Similarly, there are students who entered our programme using the pronouns ‘she/her/hers’ that have now voiced that their pronouns are ‘they/them/theirs’. Ironically, while the word ‘feminist’ does not seem to carry significant risk with it these days, sharing pronouns has unsurprisingly ruffled a few feathers. Additional gender inclusive measures include ensuring students have access to gender-neutral bathrooms and referring to the class in gender neutral-language such as ‘ensemble’ or ‘team’ rather than ‘girls’ or ‘ladies’.

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Within the past year we have received a flurry of positive feedback on these changes. Students wrote to us that they were excited to have a safe space where they could meet other non-binary students. Parents expressed relief knowing that there was a programme where their child was welcomed and celebrated. As for the cis-gendered5 girls in the class, they were notably unphased by the inclusion and more interested in asking what their classmates were reading than challenging them on whether or not they belonged in The Viola Project classroom. In 2020, the mission statement was officially changed to acknowledge the myriad gender identities of our students. It currently reads: Using the works of William Shakespeare, The Viola Project unites and empowers girls and gender nonconforming youth from diverse backgrounds so they may grow up to be whoever they want to be.

Despite previous shortcomings and despite the disapproval of some gatekeepers, The Viola Project is delighted that there are gender ­non-conforming youth who have found a platform in our programme. We will endeavour to do right by them and humbly accept the fact that in order to do so, we must become students ourselves.

Dead White Men While The Viola Project has been a champion of young women’s voices and now gender non-conforming voices, the fact remains that the curriculum and core activities of the programme revolve around a dead white man of the Western canon. Unlike our resident playwright, The Viola Project students represent a wide range of racial and ethnic backgrounds. In fact, The Viola Project specifically works to ensure that the student body is diverse. This is not always easy, even in a major city. Chicago is highly segregated. Early on it became clear that transportation was often prohibitive for many students of colour to attend programmes. In response, The Viola Project worked with community organisations and neighbourhood schools to bring programming directly to students. Given the racial make-up of the student body, one must ask again, why Shakespeare? Why should young people of colour lend their voices to a white Englishman who has been dead for four centuries? 5

Cis-gendered: denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.

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There seem to be three ways of addressing the dominant influence of dead white men in theatre programmes. One is to provide a platform for new diverse voices to produce alternatives to the classic canon. Another is to lift up the voices of under-produced playwrights of colour that have been overlooked by history. The last, is to insist on de-segregating the space within the classic canon and making it as inclusive as possible. The Viola Project falls squarely in the latter, although there are ample opportunities for original student work to be performed alongside Shakespeare’s plays. However, even in this case, the drive to create stems from a dead white male voice. As much as we may find merit in what Shakespeare had to say, increasing the gender and race diversity of who gets to perform those works is not the same as increasing the gender and race diversity of whose work gets performed in the first place.

Where Boys Fit In To state the obvious, The Viola Project does not serve cis-gendered boys. Through the years I’ve become increasingly aware of the lack of genderfocused programmes that exist for this group. Could boys benefit from a space that allows them to deconstruct the limits of traditional gender expression? Should boys be allowed to have this conversation in a safe, allboy space? Could boys benefit from exploring traditionally female roles? Yes, absolutely yes! When teaching Macbeth in a mixed gender, public school drama class, I always prepped my students to be open to playing someone of a different gender than their own. I would begin by asking the class ‘Is it okay for girls to play boys?’ All the hands would go up. I would follow with ‘Is it okay for boys to play girls?’ And the room would either be silent or erupt into laughter. Needless to say, no one wanted to raise their hand. Or no one felt comfortable enough. I’d follow with ‘Lady Macbeth is one of the best characters in Shakespeare. Honestly, she’s actually a little cooler than Macbeth, it would make me sad if someone told me I was never allowed to play a part this great because of my gender.’ I then passed out a survey for students where they could answer this question privately. I’ll never forget Michael, the only boy who indicated on his survey that he’d be comfortable being cast as a woman. In his list of desired roles, he wrote ‘Lady Macbeth’. My heart soared, and yet ultimately I cast him as a male character. To be honest, I was terrified of how his classmates would react. I anticipated he would be made fun of and that the administration would question my casting choice. Most of all, I feared the reaction of his parents.

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Not casting Michael as Lady Macbeth likely did save him from teasing or worse, brutal bullying. And yet in the long term, I myself perpetuated the idea that it is laughable and even dangerous for a boy to step into a girl’s shoes. Michael would have made a wonderful Lady Macbeth. I couldn’t provide the opportunity in my class, and The Viola Project was not an option for him. But kids like him need a space to explore gender as well.6

Conclusion The Viola Project may source material from Shakespeare, but the mission has been shaped by our contemporaries. The Viola Project has evolved significantly since 2004 through a willingness to listen to students and learn from the research, experience and expertise of peer organisations. To that end, what is past is prologue. In order to remain relevant, The Viola Project must be willing to grow along with its students. We learn more about the fluid nature of gender and the long-term ramifications of gender bias every day. Further, the younger generation has a much more expansive idea of gender expression and identity than their teachers. As such, keeping The Viola Project relevant will require learning and listening from all involved as well as a willingness to change, even if the primary text remains the same.

References Babes with Blades, n.d. https://babeswithblades.org/. Barroso, Amanda, 2020. ‘61% of U.S. women say “feminist” describes them well; many see feminism as empowering, polarizing’. Pew Research Center, 7 July. www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/07/61–of-u-s-women-say-feministdescribes-them-well-many-see-feminism-as-empowering-polarizing/. Beyoncé, 2013. ‘Flawless’. Beyoncé (Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records). Council on Foreign Relations, 2020. www.cfr.org/article/womens-power-index. Golden, Neville H., Marcie Schneider, and Christine Wood, 2016. ‘Preventing Obesity and Eating Disorders in Adolescents’, Pediatrics 138.3, e1–10. Heartland Alliance, n.d. www.heartlandalliance.org/economic-opportunity/. Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, n.d. www.icah.org/fyi. Korda, Natasha, 2011. Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). 6

See Chapter 21 for an account of Edward’s Boys Company in which boys play male and female roles.

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Lauzen, Martha, 2020. It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: Portrayals of Female Characters in the Top Grossing Films of 2019, Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film. https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/ 2020/01/2019_Its_a_Mans_Celluloid_World_Report_REV.pdf McManus, Clare, 2002. Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court (1590–1619) (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Meltzer, Marisa, 2014. ‘Who is a Feminist Now?’ New York Times, 21 May. www .nytimes.com/2014/05/22/fashion/who-is-a-feminist-now.html Mikva Challenge. https://mikvachallenge.org/ Packer, Tina, 2015. Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). Pew Research Center, 2019. www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/03/22/genderpay-gap-facts/ Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, n.d. https://rivendelltheatre.org/ Shakespeare and Company, n.d. www.shakespeare.org. Shakespeare, William, 2006. As You Like It, edited by Juliet Dusinberre (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare). Shakespeare, William, 2017. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare). Simmons, Rachel, 2009. The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence (New York: Penguin Press). Smith, S. G., X. Zhang, K. C. Basile, M. T. Merrick, J. Wang, M. Kresnow, and J. Chen, 2018. The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NIPSV): 2015 Data Brief – Updated Release (Atlanta, Georgia: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Williams, Deanne, 2014. Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

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chapter 19

‘All Corners Else o’th’Earth Let Liberty Make Use Of’ The Shakespeare Prison Project Steve Dunne and Rob Pensalfini This chapter is based on a conversation between the authors – an actor and a director – who had worked together on numerous occasions over eight years in the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble’s (QSE) Shakespeare Prison Project (SPP). The conversation was a kind of mutual interview, in which Steve Dunne, the actor who had been in prison, and Rob Pensalfini, the director who had worked with him there, gained insight into the reasons each of them remained involved with the project, and into one ­another’s experiences of Shakespeare and of prison. Steve was released in 2018 after almost eighteen years in prison in Queensland, Australia. He was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum served sentence of fifteen years. In 2001, when Steve went to prison, there were no smartphones, many people didn’t have internet access and social media as we know it now didn’t exist. A long-serving prisoner is cut off from family and friends and misses opportunities for spiritual and social growth. Steve approached the new world slowly: reading, playing the guitar and socialising with very few family and friends. His capacity to understand a variety of viewpoints, the development of a keener sense of community and the desire to heal severed bonds all developed among other places in the SPP, and allowed him to negotiate the tides of re-entry. While in prison, Steve obtained a Bachelor of Arts in History and Literature from the University of Southern Queensland, and a Graduate Diploma in Theology. Rob Pensalfini, Associate Professor in Linguistics and Drama at the University of Queensland and Artistic Director of QSE, has been leading the SPP since its inception in 2006, and has directed the majority of its productions. The SPP works with high security inmates to produce a 60- to 90-minute version of a Shakespeare play. Audiences include inmates, prison staff, participants’ families, invited guests and (since 2013) members of the general public (Pensalfini, 2013; Pensalfini, 2016: Chapter 3). The SPP is 295

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Australia’s first and only ongoing contribution to the global phenomenon of Prison Shakespeare, which has a history in the United States and United Kingdom going back to the 1980s (see Shailor, 2011; Pensalfini, 2016).1 Rob and Steve met in 2010 when Steve volunteered for the SPP. The previous year, when Rob had directed the SPP Julius Caesar at Borallon Correctional Centre, a privately run high-security prison in south-east Queensland, Steve had been living in a unit with one of the participants, who played Mark Antony. Steve’s cellmate invited him to attend the performance of Julius Caesar in 2009, as each prisoner in the project had been permitted to invite two other inmates. However, on the day of the performance itself, prison administration decided not to allow any prisoners at all in the audience. The reason given was that the centre’s intelligence officers were concerned that some of the prisoners on the invitation list posed a risk, and so no prisoners would be allowed to attend. This incident itself posed a threat to the performance. A number of the prisoners in the project said that they would not perform if their comrades could not attend. The SPP team agreed that it was an unreasonable response and were also concerned that a performance solely for outside guests risked becoming a ‘showcase’ for the prison rather than something for the participants, but argued firstly that some of the performers had family coming from outside, and secondly that if the performance did not go ahead, that would represent a victory for the faction of prison staff that did not approve of the project. The men agreed to perform, but Steve never saw that production. What Steve did see, however, was the impact that the project had had on his cell-mate who returned from rehearsals in a better mood. He generally tended to be moody and sullen, but always returned from SPP sessions full of joy, and sparking with life and motivation. Having experienced the project first-hand since then, Steve now believes the SPP served as an antidote to the kind of wallowing in personal issues that is characteristic of incarcerated people. In prison, whatever you’ve got going on in your life, whether on the inside or outside, tends to be your focus. Traumatic events last for hours or days, but fixation on them becomes a mood, and if you keep staying in that after a month it becomes a temperament, and after a year it becomes a characteristic. Prison encourages people to stay there. The SPP exposes people to new stimuli, new physical experiences and new ideas, and provides both a break and an alternative way of being. 1

For more on prison Shakespeare, see Chapter 8.

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Steve came to Borallon in 2009 after eight years at Woodford Correctional Centre, where he had done numerous courses on anger management, making non-violent choices and substance abuse – the recommended rehabilitative programmes run by corrections staff required by the parole board. Borallon’s Senior Psychologist at the time, Mary McKenzie, suggested to Steve that he’d done enough of those courses and should start looking for other things to do. She argued that too many of these courses, all similar in structure and style and all built on the same Cognitive Behavioural approach (Burns, 1980), could be detrimental to his personal growth. She suggested he look for activities that would develop his sentience and adaptability, not just keep working away at the same set of core skills, and recommended the SPP. The SPP was something that Steve could do for himself – not because it was mandated by corrections staff, not because it would improve his chances with the parole board or increase his employability. Prisons are largely devoid of activities that might come under this umbrella of ‘personal growth/satisfaction’, instead being full of goal-directed activities that relate specifically to offense-reduction or employability in mainstream industries. The exception to this has long been visual arts, with many prisons hosting very active painting studios. Steve commenced tertiary studies around the time that Rob met him. Through his study of literature, history, philosophy and theology he came to understand that a lot of the grief we experience is inherited, and that no amount of cognitive training or rehabilitation will help if one is unaware of generational and cultural trauma. In 2010, Steve became the first prisoner in the history of the SPP to play a woman. One of the few rules of the SPP was that major roles should be played by the prisoners. QSE facilitators were happy to step on stage in a supporting role or fill in if someone could not perform at the last minute (Pensalfini, 2013; Pensalfini, 2016), but to do a play like Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra, prisoners needed to volunteer to play the title roles. Prior to 2010, the prisoners unanimously said they did not want to play women’s roles. Partially informed by this, the first SPP production was The Tempest, in which the only woman’s role, Miranda, was played by one of the QSE facilitators. In 2009, the two small women’s roles in Julius Caesar were likewise played by QSE artists. In 2010 there was great interest among the group for Macbeth, but Rob insisted that one of the prisoners would have to take on the role of Lady Macbeth. Steve volunteered. In subsequent years the SPP has never been short of volunteers for the women’s roles. Men have

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since played roles such as Viola, Olivia, Ladies Macduff and Macbeth (in a subsequent production in 2016), and Silvia and Lucetta in Two Gentlemen of Verona. Dreier (2019) has wisely pointed out that perhaps the specific role of Lady Macbeth, a woman who begs to be ‘unsexed’, was part of the reason for this watershed moment. Perhaps the unsexed Lady Macbeth is a ‘gateway woman’, the next step being someone like Cleopatra (though the next women’s role to be played by a prisoner in the SPP was the Courtesan from Comedy of Errors). Regardless, the result was that an important part of the SPP culture had changed. Men were willing to be seen playing women. Admittedly, some of the men lining up to play women in subsequent years had as their first impulse a desire to send up femininity, to almost play ‘in drag’, as it were. But even these men, in stepping into the roles and working through the rhetoric and the emotional states of their characters, developed empathy for women. The presence of women in the facilitation team provided the stimulus for interesting discussions. After the men had had some fun playing ‘at’ being women, satirising stereotypical women’s voices and movements, it was instructive to note the women facilitators and dissect the differences between such stereotyped representations of women and real women (intelligent, articulate, passionate, highly educated and with wicked senses of humour). As Pensalfini (2019) has suggested with his notion of ‘ripples’, performance to colleagues means that this willingness is then performed within the prison, and has an effect, subtle and gradual, on the culture of the prison itself. There are always some prisoners in the audience, often those most successfully wearing the ‘prisoner’ mask, who rib participants about doing drama, prancing around on a stage talking oddly. But when these men are in the audience, the toughest of the tough are often the most impressed, the most effusive in their praise for the men who dared to get up and share themselves in that way. There are cracks in the mask, and genuine admiration for skill, courage and determination emerge. They are moved by the courage that the participants have to step outside the norm, to act (in both senses) against the prevailing norms of the institution. They probably have their own unexplored stories that they wish they had the courage to open up and explore. Their bravado and toughness is actually a way of not being seen, not being noticed. They see a different kind of bravery modelled before them by fellow inmates, a different kind of strength: vulnerability. Steve believes there’s a part of everyone that would like to be seen on stage or in some public way, unmasked. In this way, activities that involve sharing with non-participants can function to level the values placed on different kinds of activities, and different kinds of bravery.

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Steve did not volunteer for every subsequent SPP, but over the years played Peter Quince and a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2014), Toby Belch in Twelfth Night (2015) and Capulet in Romeo and Juliet (2017). He found key connections, internal resources, for each of the roles he played. Quince appealed to Steve’s tendency to prod people, to encourage them to be more than they currently are. Belch is a drunk, something that Steve had had experience with. As is increasingly understood in the therapeutic context, substance addiction is not about the substance, but a response to unbearable pain. Steve looked for Toby’s suffering rather than ‘playing drunk’, and in so doing vaulted ahead of many professional actors approaching the role. Capulet, Steve’s final SPP role, was a significantly less sympathetic character than his previous roles. Steve dug deep to find his connection with Capulet, to find a not entirely comfortable desire to defend and protect his family, those closest to him. Capulet’s actions come from an arguably misguided sense of what he believes is best for Juliet. He has integrity within his world view, and he displays his humanity through that to those around him. Steve: When you speak Shakespeare’s lines, they have an innate perspective to you and your background. To try and understand any character and make it resonate and make that character good, it has to have some sort of connection to you. So I started reading lines and thinking ‘Well this is really hitting home about some of the things that I believe and think or that I would like to think.’ And then I started asking other people ‘What are you reading when you read this line? How does it hit home for you?’

The process of standing in the shoes of a variety of characters, seeing the world from their perspective, thinking their thoughts and speaking their words, is a practice of empathy. Steve found that the accumulation of a number of years of having these experiences gave him insight into ways in which other people may think. He had to understand the context and the history of the character, what led to the formation of their values and the strategies they use in order to achieve their aims. It increased his appreciation for how his own values were similar to and deviated from those of others, each justified within the history in which they developed. This is no different to the process that most actors engage in with a new character. What makes it particularly potent in the prison context is the nature of incarcerated life itself by contrast. Greg Gardner, a former prisoner who participated in the SPP in 2006, 2009 and 2010, spoke of this at a panel following a showing of Shakespeare Behind Bars (Rogerson, 2005) by QSE in 2011, saying ‘In jail the only emotion you’re allowed to show is

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anger, and even then you have to be really circumspect about how you do it.’ Steve believes that this comes from a lack of confidence, and is a cover for a fear – a defence against vulnerability. Vulnerability and fear cannot be expressed, as the cost would be exploitation and domination. As mentioned earlier, when prisoners see their comrades performing for audiences in the SPP, they see a kind of bravery modelled that differs from the bravado that is the prisoner’s common currency. This is not to suggest that the average prisoner is devoid of a certain kind of bravery: most would run into a burning house to save a child, or pull someone out of a wreck, but these are conditioned reactions rather than choices. Most of them would not be willing to be seen to be sad, or scared, or confused. In these ways, the SPP provides a model of adult behaviour that differs from that promoted by prisoner culture. It also provides a model of reflection that differs from the state-approved rehabilitation programmes, whose working assumption is that criminal behaviour results solely from individual choices. They tacitly assume that the locus of criminality is always individual and avoid discussion of cultural and social causes of crime. These courses are requirements for most prisoner’s parole consideration, and thus are seen as hoops to jump through in order to attain a goal, rather than useful in themselves. The way that these courses are completed, through a ‘tick-and-flick’ paper exit test of short-answer or multiple-choice questions, assesses a prisoner’s understanding of the concepts of the course, and not whether they have been able to embody them in their lives. The courses are further compromised by the existence of ‘cheat sheets’, providing answers to the assessment modules, which circulate among prisoners. A prisoner can pass these courses with sketchy attendance and without having actually learned central concepts, let alone demonstrated any ability to apply them. Prisoners can, and often do, undertake all of the offered and mandated courses within the first few years of their sentence. Some courses, on the other hand, cannot be taken until a prisoner is within a year of their earliest parole date. This might seem a means to ensuring the rehabilitative learning is spaced through the sentence, but a prisoner serving a long sentence, as Steve was, effectively runs out of rehabilitation courses after a couple of years, and then has to wait a decade or more before they can take the final ones. What’s lacking is firstly a way of inviting or demonstrating progressive change over a long sentence, and secondly courses to help with reintegration. The SPP, without blatantly setting out to rehabilitate anyone, filled this gap, where skills were developed because participants saw intrinsic value in them, rather than as a means to an end. It involved people coming in

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from the outside where we could just be people again, we could learn how to communicate again, we could work as a team, and we could discuss complex issues. There is an alarming lack of outlets in prison where a prisoner can discuss complex issues, be they personal, political, philosophical or moral. The only options are other inmates and, sometimes, if they are open-minded, chaplains. Other inmates, however, are bound by the code of prisoners, which rigidly circumscribes the emotions and ideas one can express. Some things can’t be discussed, other things are denigrated by the prevailing culture as ‘arty farty’, ‘highbrow’, ‘weird’, ‘effeminate’ or, worst of all in a men’s prison, ‘coming across as smarter than the others’. Chaplains are constrained by their spiritual agenda to some degree, which has a tendency to stonewall investigation. Generational grief, trauma and abuse are absorbed rather than learned from birth, much like one’s native language, and its operation in us as adults is habitual, performed with barely any thought. None of what Steve had encountered in prison had helped him address his central ‘why’. Not so much why he committed his crime, but rather why he had thought that violence was a reasonable – indeed the only reasonable – solution to his situation. Where did that thinking come from? Where had he learned it? There had been no precedent for the violent act that constituted his crime. He hadn’t been a bully, a brawler, a gangster of any sort. This is not as unusual a story as many might think. It is a strange outcome of a judicial system in which, despite rhetoric about the rehabilitative purpose of incarceration, there is an almost inverse relationship between the lengths of sentences for certain crimes and recidivism. That is, those crimes for which we reserve the longest of jail sentences, the various murders and violent assaults, are generally committed by people who have never done something like that before and never do it again (Liem, 2013). If the rehabilitation courses are of limited value to a long-term prisoner, most sanctioned recreational activities are not much better. The most common activity, and most highly respected and accepted pastime, is working out. While this certainly promotes physical health on some level, the frequency of workouts, their focus on muscle-building and disregard for cardio-vascular training (some men were panting heavily after a single gentle Salute to the Sun), suggests that health and wellbeing are not the motivation, but rather muscle bulk and aesthetics (more men than women prisoners shave their legs). These help to build the invulnerable mask of the prisoner, writing their pre-destined role onto their bodies.

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While this exterior armour is the model of toughness promoted by the culture in prisons, Steve notes ‘I now realise that being tough is going to work every day, is sending the kid off to school, is sitting with a loved one in pain, is putting the dog down. Fighting and violence aren’t tough, because they don’t scare me.’ One of the usual properties of recreational activities is that they differ in some way from a person’s daily or work activities. They increase life fulfilment and create a more well-rounded person (Trnka, Zahradnik, and Kuška, 2016). For many participants in the SPP, it is the activities on the surface that provide that welcome change. Nowhere else in the prison can they let off some steam by playing games that simultaneously engage the body, the voice and the mind. The SPP creates an environment that differs from that of the rest of the prison in other ways too, welcoming experiences and conversations that are not found elsewhere. For Steve, the biggest difference was that, after most of a decade in prison, he started to feel emotions that he hadn’t experienced for a long time, that he wasn’t even sure whether he had anymore: fear, vulnerability, shame and joy. He also found a sense of camaraderie that he hadn’t experienced since he played sports, and a trust in a leader that was not coerced or enforced. Recreational activities, especially artistic ones, are collaborative and supportive, not competitive. Some of the most exciting moments of SPP performances were when ‘errors’ were made: lines forgotten, the wrong scene commenced, prop and costume failures. SPP participants immediately rallied and helped each other by prompts or creative improvisation. The intention was always to contribute to the whole, never to denigrate or show up someone who had made a mistake. Steve described the experience of seeing in a cast-mate’s eyes that they had lost their line, or the next action, and of there being no question on anyone’s part but to jump in and save them. Rob observed a difference between how the SPP participants did this and how professional actors typically would: that is, with a more immediate willingness, almost an eagerness, to help one another out, to make sure that the story progressed. The SPP is not a study group, the atmosphere is not that of a classroom. It is recreational, not educational. Most people who find themselves on the margins of society, if not born there, are there because of a disconnection that happened earlier in their lives. For many, if not most, this happens at school. The schooling environment, or anything that resembles it, reminds many prisoners of a time that they were outcast, felt stupid or incapable, or were in some way traumatised. They are at a disadvantage from the moment they walk in, and their time-honoured defence is to

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switch off. Walking into the SPP, by contrast, the atmosphere is calm and casual, and everyone, including the facilitators, sits in a circle on the floor. Even if there is expertise in the room, there isn’t hierarchy or authority. There is flow, give and take, rather than a rigid structure and a transfer of information. Recreation, unlike education, takes place in a safe space. In a recreational programme, mistakes are not signs of failure, but potential challenges to be accepted or ignored without judgment. Participants are willing to take risks in order to extend their experiences and repertoire precisely because nothing extrinsic is attached to success or failure. When Steve chose to play Lady Macbeth in his first SPP in 2010, he flouted precedent and cultural norms, because he found something in the character he could relate to: she came from nowhere, seized an opportunity, took decisive action, gained her prize, but it was all too much for her. It was true that ‘we don’t play women in here’, but it was also true that ‘we don’t do drama’, so why not break two taboos for the price of one? That was the right choice for Steve, but might not be for another given prisoner at a given point in time. Theatre allows for participation within individual limits and boundaries, and those limits do not detract from the whole. Attuned to the company, casting (which is done collaboratively, with all participants given space to express an interest in a specific role or type of role) takes account of abilities, desires and willingness. This places the expertise of the QSE artists at the service of the group as a whole, modelled on the pedagogy of Freire (1970), and enacted in the SPP through the structure, processes and mindset of Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal, 1979). A criticism of recreational programmes might be that because the experiences are evoked for their own sake and as ends in themselves (putting on a play) – rather than participants being led to see applications to their own lives in a structured way – for most prisoners they can serve at best as a temporary relief, a momentary escape (pun intended), or at worst a means of artificially calming prisoners through providing a physical and emotional release for pent-up frustrations and energy. What these criticisms miss is that a temporary experience (of joy, grief, excitement …) is still an experience. To have such an experience, in a prison of all places, to survive it and feel a little lighter for it, shows the participant that they are capable of it, and may one day have it again. Perhaps more importantly, even if it’s an experience a participant rarely has, they know that it’s an experience that others have, and can appreciate and understand it. It builds empathy. These experiences of long-forgotten emotions and growing empathy are not some magic that Shakespeare weaves on prisoners alone. The reason

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Rob became a trainer of Shakespeare and voice is because of the experiences he had when first (re-)discovering Shakespeare in his late twenties. Over a few years, he became more sensitive, more vulnerable, more willing to acknowledge and express ‘negative’ emotions, more articulate about affect, more understanding of different experiences and points of view among others. He didn’t become more confident, if anything quite the opposite. He became more willing to show the person who lived behind the confident mask he wore as his identity. This is basically a prerequisite for a professional actor. The difference between that and something like the SPP lies entirely in the context. The SPP evokes and celebrates these experiences in a setting that generally denigrates them. Recreation differs from education in that it is not necessarily telic, goal directed. The learning is circular, or rather like a spiral, not linear. An education course is something that one takes, which has a beginning and an end, and then one (hopefully) graduates. In a recreational activity one undertakes the same actions or series of actions time and time again; the learning is a kind of deepening process, each time the knowledge becomes deeper, more accessible, tighter, like a descending spiral boring into oneself. For prisoners who take part in the SPP multiple times, there is an exponential flourishing of both self-knowledge and empathy. Steve describes playing a role as an opportunity to go into himself and open a whole bunch of doors that haven’t been opened before, or in a long time, and see what’s behind them. An inmate of Rebibbia prison in Rome, Italy, who had been working with Fabio Cavalli’s project and had played several roles in Julius Caesar, said he kept coming back because each time he played a new character, he saw the world through different eyes, thought different thoughts and understood a bit more about how people can and do think and act (Pensalfini, 2016: 137). The scene after an SPP performance is quite stirring. The desire of so many strangers to congratulate and meet the performers was one of the reasons that the SPP began to hold separate performances for family members and for the general public. It was important for incarcerated participants to both spend time with their loved ones after a performance and to engage in conversation with appreciative members of the public. Steve argues that the performance triggers experiences in the audience that makes them realise, consciously or otherwise, our common set of experiences, motivations and desires, and that there is essentially nothing that separates ‘them’ from ‘us’. If the power of programmes like the SPP derives as much from their context as their content, then it follows that the context must permit the

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operation of the programme. The programme must negotiate the various factions within prison management and operations. Senior management have always been supportive of the SPP, both in the prisons and in the state department of corrections that oversees them. When Steve was first moved to the newly refurbished Borallon in 2016, he was pulled over by the General Manager of the prison, Peter Henderson, who asked ‘Where do I know you from?’ Henderson had been to see Twelfth Night at the Southern Queensland Correctional Centre in 2015 and remembered Steve from that performance. Henderson had specifically requested the SPP be part of the recreational programming at the refurbished Borallon (now state-run) after seeing that performance, and pulled out all stops in supporting the project in all its phases. There were consequences for him when he allowed the SPP performance in 2017 to take place in the officers’ mess. For two days, half of the mess was taken up by a stage and audience seating. The officers’ union was called in, and the following year’s performances were not permitted to be held in that space. Those custodial staff who attended the performance remarked that they had seen a side of individual participants of which they had previously been unaware, and spoke of them with respect and appreciation. It is by no means assured, but at least possible, that future encounters between at least these officers and those prisoners are infused with a sense of shared humanity. This may extend over time to relations with other prisoners, which in turn may influence relations between officers and prisoners generally, or at least change the balance of interactions in the prison (see Pensalfini, 2019). Steve identified a common motivating factor between SPP facilitators and managers like Henderson. He believed that their faith in prisoners motivated them to strive to do better. More than any of the instruction, coaching or discipline they showed, it was the simple act of believing they were capable that drove prisoners to succeed. So much for tough love. It may well be that programmes like the SPP only have impact, or have most impact, on people who have already come to a place of wanting to make some sort of change in their lives, attitudes, ways of being in the world. Programmes of this nature may not be the proximal cause of such changes. However, the desire to make a change in itself is not enough. There has to be opportunity to explore such changes. The SPP is just one such opportunity, one experiential laboratory and it may not appeal to everyone. However, for those who choose to embrace it, the SPP offers space to develop empathy, achieve perspective, rehearse new strategies, build community within the prison, and connect to other humans beyond the correctional setting. These are unique and powerful opportunities.

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Steve: We went in there with just words. We were all novices. We leaned on each other, some cried, we laughed, we grew as people. We were this community in prison that made this magic thing. And by the end of the time, it was magic. We all walked away feeling great: stronger, bonded together. I guess that’s what a society would want. All of us have our different roles, but we’re all trying to head in the same direction. So that’s what I’m thinking now: what can I do with my life experience to try to better our play of life?

References Boal, Augusto, 1979. Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Urizen). Burns, David, 1980. Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (New York: Morrow). Dreier, Jenna, 2019. ‘From Apprentice to Master: Casting Men to Play Shakespeare’s Women in Prison’, Humanities 8.3, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.3390/ h8030123. Freire, Paolo, 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder). Liem, Marieke, 2013. ‘Homicide Offender Recidivism: A Review of the Literature’, Aggression and Violent Behavior 18.1, 19–25. Pensalfini, Rob, 2013. ‘Shakespeare of the Oppressed,’ in Kate Flaherty, Penny Gay, and Liam E. Semler (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Centre: Australasian Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 225–36. Pensalfini, Rob, 2016. Prison Shakespeare: For these Deep Shames and Great Indignities (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Pensalfini, Rob, 2019. ‘The Play’s the Thing: Performance in Prison Shakespeare’, in Michael Balfour, Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, Linda Davey, John Rynne, and Huib Schippers (eds.), Performing Arts in Prisons: Captive Audiences (Bristol: Intellect), chap. 9. Rogerson, Hank (dir.), 2005. Shakespeare Behind Bars (Philomath Films, USA). Shailor, Jonathan, 2011. Performing New Lives: Prison Theatre (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers). Trnka, Radek, Martin Zahradnik, and Martin Kuška, 2016. ‘Emotional Creativity and Real-Life Involvement in Different Types of Creative Leisure Activities’, Creativity Research Journal 28.3, 348–56.

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chapter 20

Teaching Shakespeare in Oman

Exploring Shared Humanity and Cultural Difference through Shakespeare’s Texts Tracy Irish and Aileen Gonsalves Butterfly is a London-based theatre company specialising in performing classical texts in interesting places. Our passion is moment-to-moment responsiveness; connecting actors, audiences and text through exploring the uniqueness of every performance and performer. We have played Shakespeare comedies and tragedies in the shadows of underground caverns and facilitated performance festivals for primary school children to create their own Macbeth in the caves. We have had fairies and spirits flying through the trees in ancient woodlands, and had Shakespeare ask a family audience for help in creating characters with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican. The natural world inspires us but anywhere from castles to working breweries provides a space to share a story and allow the audience to become part of how we share it.1 Working in Oman provided huge learning opportunities for us in understanding the capacity of theatre to uncover deep human connections beneath more superficial cultural differences, and the obstacles those still very real differences can create. Situated on the south-eastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, the Sultanate of Oman is an Islamic country of around five million people with close historical ties to the United Kingdom. Shakespeare is not on the curriculum in Oman, so most Omani students, and many of their teachers, know little of his work, but they recognise his global literary status. One teacher told us she wanted her students to learn about Shakespeare to connect them better to world cultures. Our work in Oman began with the World Shakespeare Festival (WSF), part of the 2012 London Olympic programme. Alongside the performance festival, Tracy led an enquiry for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) to explore the extent to which Shakespeare features as ‘the world’s playwright’ (as the WSF tagline described him) in the world’s schools. In 1

For more about Butterfly Theatre Company and up-to-date information on projects: https://www .butterflytheatre.com/.

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collaboration with the British Council, this role included working with students, teachers and practitioners from seven focus countries: India, South Africa, Czech Republic, the United States, Brazil, Hong Kong (China) and Oman (Irish, 2012). While there was a different story behind the inclusion of each of these countries and a different bespoke project around each inclusion, the Oman project was the most in-depth and provides context and comparison for Butterfly’s Oman project in 2016, which is the main focus of this chapter. Aileen joined Tracy for phase two of the WSF project and this serendipitously began an ongoing professional partnership that drew Tracy into the Butterfly collective – an extended ensemble family of artists led by Aileen as artistic director. There is often a bonding element to residential work that requires practitioners to share ideas and values. In our case we discovered a strong mutual interest in how theatre practice can engage young actors and audiences in what Liam Semler (2016) describes as ‘ardenspaces’; learning spaces where exploratory thought and dialogue are actively encouraged. We spent one long afternoon on Quarm beach in Muscat, talking until the sun went down about what the culturally loaded phrase ‘the world’s playwright’ could mean in practice, and the potential of Shakespeare as a site rich of possibilities for the ardenspaces of intercultural communication. Phase one of the WSF project introduced teachers and supervisors from across Oman to RSC rehearsal room pedagogy to support them in creating a performance of a Shakespeare play with their students for regional festivals.2 This initial phase proved the most challenging because cultural differences in attitudes to gender, physically expressed through such things as dress codes, levels of comfort in proximity to the opposite sex, and the willingness of women to speak and be seen in a room with men, made the working environment feel significantly different for us. Translation issues further exacerbated the sense of distance. Tracy has elsewhere written of the obstacles and opportunities created (Irish, 2019), but what emerged of most note was how culturally complex difference is – attributable to personal experiences and attitudes as much as national expectations and religious ideals. Each individual in Oman, as anywhere else in the world, brings their own complex experiences to bear on any exchange, and perhaps the greatest value the arts can offer is to provide metaphors and thought experiments to challenge our thinking and provoke dialogue about our differences in light of our similarities. 2

For more about RSC rehearsal room pedagogy: www.rsc.org.uk/education/.

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Each of the four Omani regions involved in the project – Batinah North, Batinah South, Dakhiliyah and Muscat – have similar but different traditions, perhaps symbolised by the warm welcome we always received accompanied by coffee and the always delicious but locally varied version of halwa (a densely sweet dessert). Each region had chosen a different play and a different approach for their festival. We gave feedback on rehearsals and led workshops with the students to help develop their performances of Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet and King Lear. As we travelled around the starkly beautiful desert country of Oman, we were taken to school halls to watch the students perform, but were awake to the opportunities of other performance spaces: the market area in rural Nizwa, the caves in Dakhiliyah and the forts that dotted all the regions. Working with the Omani young people was a continual revelation for us. From the moment we witnessed the contemporary anguish of a traditionally costumed Shylock in the first performance, we were deeply impressed by the students’ openness, lack of self-consciousness and enthusiasm. There was a common style with recorded music, elaborate sets and costumes, but beneath this was a compelling emotional depth: the young people in Oman seemed remarkably comfortable in reaching for the heightened emotion Shakespeare’s language often demands. Their responses gave us an insight into how Shakespeare’s stories, rhythms, characters’ flaws and strengths, fears and desires, can be seen afresh – not only through the different cultural inflections, but in how intensely and passionately the plays could be performed while retaining a deep level of truthful connection. For Western sensibilities this can be challenging but the Omani young people brought an instinctive, openhearted willingness to risk exposing their emotions and allow the heightened language to support them in doing so. We played theatre games to redirect scenes and bring out characters’ objectives. One particularly interesting example was with ‘Claudius’ watching the ‘play within the play’ in Hamlet. The fifteen-year-old actor appeared obviously guilty, so Aileen initiated a game whereby if anyone watching became suspicious of him, they stood up. The actor soon responded to their actions by getting more adept at hiding his feelings and it became like watching a pressure cooker. Because the actor had started so fully engaged in the truth of the scene, it was wonderful to watch him realise the power in the struggle of a character trying to hide what is going on in their body with their face and words. He described the sensation as ‘feeling like there is a volcano in my stomach’. His subsequent performance created a palpable tension in the room as he found his need to speak the words Shakespeare had given him in order to express what he needed to say in that moment.

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Following the regional Shakespeare festivals, four boys from Nizwa  – Mohammed, Ahmed, Said and Mohammed (the Claudius described above) – came to London in September 2012 to join fifteen other students in forming an International Youth Ensemble (IYE). Our conversation on that sunny beach in Muscat earlier in the year had also engendered the idea of this IYE for the arts education conference at Tate Modern in London, which was being planned as the culmination of the WSF education enquiry (Irish, 2015). We had discussed the important principle that a conference of artists and educators from around the world exploring the value of Shakespeare in young people’s lives should hear from a diverse and international group of young people. We imagined how an ensemble performance could emerge from this group’s thoughts on issues of family, status, poverty and wealth that are universal to all countries but also culturally distinct. We settled on King Lear as a challenging site for the young people to explore these questions, with a focus on what is left to us as ‘unaccommodated’ human beings, stripped of the ‘lendings’ (Shakespeare, 2007 [1997], 3.4.105–7) built up from our cultural accretions of traditions and expectations. In addition to the Nizwa boys, the IYE was composed of nine other young people Tracy had brought together from the seven countries she had visited, along with six young people from across England. The students spoke ten different languages between them with English as a common language for all except the Omanis. Aileen worked with the IYE for two days to create a 15-minute King Lear inspired piece, which was performed in a keynote event on the last day of the conference. She made full use of their language abilities and their unique skills. The young Omani actors’ openness and passion, despite speaking only a few words of English, inspired others in a way that allowed them all to be bolder and more truthfully engaged in their performance. The result is best expressed by Anmol, from India, who wrote: Shakespeare united us and although I couldn’t understand much of what others said, I understood everything they expressed. I was overwhelmed to see how emotions cut across language barriers and Lear came alive in Arabic, Czech, Hindi, Zulu and Chinese. Exploring issues related to the play of poverty, greed and family dynamics brought us together as a group, trying to send a message to the world from a truly global platform. (Personal communication, 2013)

Mohammed, one of the Omani boys, summarised this in his own way: ‘Although we have different languages and cultures we were able to find coherence together.’ The achievements of this ensemble, not just in terms

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of their performance, but also their openness and joy in working together, has been a highlight of our careers and a key inspiration for how and why we continue to work in education and theatre. So far, so straightforward in terms of project management and realisation. We returned to Oman in February 2013 to lead the final project phase of further training with the teachers. Although this visit proved to be another deeply rewarding experience for us, with WSF over, it was of limited interest to the RSC, whose priorities had understandably moved on. It had been a rare luxury for an arts project to work within the infrastructure of large cultural organisations like the RSC and the British Council, and within the context of a widely publicised international event like the Cultural Olympiad and its unusual level of funding. There were strategic issues to consider and a weight of operational details and budgetary considerations to manage, but at the end of the day, our energy could be mainly focused on generating and developing ideas for content and delivery of the project without needing to worry about spending unpaid busy time on writing proposals and finding funding. Those issues, the perennial considerations of any small arts company, came when our Omani contact, Zuweina, asked us to put together a proposal, this time with Butterfly, for the British Council’s 2016 project ‘Shakespeare Lives’ (British Council, 2016). We were delighted, not least for the opportunity to work with Zuweina again, and agreed on a five-phase outline with her. From the start our aim was for the project to culminate in Butterfly actors working with Omani young people to create site-specific and bilingual performances in those unique spaces of markets, caves and forts we had seen around the country. As 2016 progressed, initial plans for starting the project in June for completion by the end of the year seemed unlikely and our hopes for the project began to fade into the busyness of our normal lives. We were then pleasantly surprised when an email came through inviting us to deliver training for teachers in Muscat in September. Support and funding had been agreed with the Ministry of Education for phase one and the plan was to deliver this initial training and take the opportunity of being together to further plan the next phases. When we arrived in Muscat in September 2016, we had both been developing ideas influenced by our previous cultural exchanges with our Omani colleagues. Some stimulating conflict had arisen during that last phase in 2013 and we were keen to learn and share more. A key example of this conflict occurred working on King Lear when we challenged what turned out to be a strongly held Omani belief that a father always deserves

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respect from his children. The teachers appeared united in the belief that Goneril’s duty was to indulge her father and his knights and they could not understand how we could question a father’s authority. It was a tricky moment in which we recognised our own cultural assumptions but also our passion, shared with many of the participants, to open up rather than close down the conversation. A big shift occurred when we brought in Lear’s response of cursing his daughter with sterility. This caused a heated discussion between our participants as they saw nuance and complexity in what had previously seemed a relatively simple clash between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ character. This fictional father–daughter relationship then led into a discussion around what is fair and just in contemporary family and gender relationships. Finding ways to make it matter to the actor and to the audience is a key element of Butterfly practice and it was fascinating to see what really mattered to the Omanis in that moment. We were exploring an actor’s craft in working with Shakespeare but we were also using Lear and Goneril as a metaphorical ‘case study’ to open up discussion about habitus, in Bourdieu’s terms, of the ‘socialised subjectivity’ of what we take for granted about the cultural values and behaviours around us (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 126). Effectively, we were using the text to explore Peter Brook’s idea of the ‘culture of links’ – the deeper, universal connections that exist between individual social human beings, beyond the socialisation of the ‘culture of the state’ in which they live (Brook, 1996). Living this ‘culture of links’ requires cultural intelligence. While cultural capital now seems an overused phrase in education, cultural intelligence is still a relatively undervalued skill in preparing young people for the values of diversity that can help build their futures. It is a term increasingly used in business contexts to describe and measure intercultural competencies and concerns the extent to which someone is aware that other people may think differently to them, and their ability to develop strategies for communicating when they find difference. Going forward, we need young people not just to know the cultural heritage of the world around them, not just to be more tolerant of communicating across difference, but also to wonder ‘what if things were different?’ Central to theatre practice is the experimentation of thought implied in asking ‘what if?’ As we stumbled into our work on King Lear, we were creatively and playfully sharing ideas, beliefs and opinions through the relatively safe space of a 400-year-old play that can encourage innate human curiosity about difference, rather than an all-too-common habitus of fear. With all this in our minds, we put together a programme of work for our 2016 project that introduced key principles of Butterfly’s ensemble

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practice of staying open and responsive to others3 and, crucially, built on our prior experiences of working with Omani teachers and students. We used A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the focus for the project because, as well as being one of the more well-known plays, it gently raises a number of interesting cultural questions around identity, duty and love through interweaving the stories of characters from different worlds. We arrived in Muscat in September 2016 with a comforting sense of familiarity. It is easy to underestimate the cognitive load for practitioners in new environments. Meeting a new group in a new space in your own country requires a sustained high level of energy to absorb the context and then engage and enthuse the participants. In a country with different cultural norms and expectations, this load is proportionally magnified and any familiarity is helpful. We gained another bonus when we met our group, since around a third were familiar faces, particularly the men who were supervisors in their regions. They had returned because they enjoyed our work and were supportive of what it could achieve and so it was advantageous, as well as comforting, to have their experience and perceived authority in the room. Many of the new faces were young women and while some were shy and seemed unsure why they were there, others brought a bright-eyed energy and intelligence and were keen to learn. We chose not to look at any Shakespeare text on the first day, instead focusing on establishing familiarity, trust, physical responsiveness and the communication values of clear storytelling. Our previous experiences informed our approaches: for example, rather than working in a circle during vocal and physical warm-ups, we asked the women to stand behind the men in rows so that they did not feel self-conscious about being watched by the men. As confidence built, we could slowly move into a circle as the shape of a democratic group that shares thoughts and ideas towards a common goal. We established the principles of storytelling by setting up the universal idea of a marketplace, but elicited culturally specific details of the characters and situations that might emerge in an Omani market. We continued by asking for ideas about what moments of conflict might arise, how that might play out, and built through dialogue an understanding of how to craft the resulting story into a piece of theatre for an audience. We moved on to explore the importance of responsive relationships through being fully open to your fellow actors and understanding and pursuing objectives. 3

For a more in-depth exploration of Butterfly’s principles, rooted in the work of Sanford Meisner, see Gonsalves and Irish (2021, Chapters 11 and 12).

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On the second day, we moved into the world of the play, adapting a sequence of work Tracy had first used on a British Council project in India, but which she had developed following our experience of working on King Lear in Oman in 2013, as mentioned previously. The sequence began by asking participants to respond to a generalised statement – ‘A child should always obey their parents’ – by standing along a line in the room depending on the extent to which they agreed or disagreed. As had also occurred with Tracy’s groups in India, while some ‘outlier’ participants chose to take an extreme stance at either end of the spectrum, most were bunched in the middle with the response, ‘It depends …’. We then moved on to work on the first scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream through various activities designed to explore the objectives and relationships of the characters through the given circumstances of the text and the possible interpretations that could follow. Our group had varying degrees of proficiency with English and we had barely managed to learn to count to ten in Arabic, so we were reliant on translators. Building on warm-up exercises exploring the verbal and nonverbal communication aspects of speaking text, we modelled each exercise ourselves. Most of our participants could not understand the exact words we spoke but had read the Arabic translation and could focus on how we were communicating those words in response to each other in terms of tone and body language. Our approaches owe a huge debt to Cicely Berry’s work, which is ‘about releasing both the actors’ and the directors’ subconscious response to the sound of the text, and through that response to find a deeper and “other” layer to its literal, surface meaning’ (Berry, 2008: 1). Butterfly actors depend on this principle, responding moment to moment to that ‘other’ layer. This makes them highly dependent on each other and builds trust. Our modelling allowed the participants to viscerally understand the aims of the exercise without long translated explanations. It also mitigated the tendency (common with adults in any culture) of attempting to intellectually analyse the text before speaking it aloud. Seeing us model a range of possible responses, responding on our feet within the boundaries of the exercise rather than working to p ­ re-determined ideas, encouraged the participants to try this for themselves and experience an actor’s approach of what feels right rather than what you think should be right. It also reflected the truthfulness we had seen the Omani young people achieve so instinctively. We ended this sequence by asking the participants to respond to a second question, ‘Should Hermia obey her father and marry Demetrius?’ This second provocation gave a specific example of the first more generalised

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question of whether a child should always obey their parents. Now, rather than bunch into the middle around the qualifier ‘It depends …’ the participants had a concrete, qualified example of a parent–child relationship with which they had discovered a personal, imaginary relationship through the exercises we had given them. Translation issues made this a less rich conversation in feedback than Tracy had found with groups in India, who had instinctively used words and phrases from the text to justify their positions. Nevertheless, a broader spectrum of opinion was evident from the physical positions of the participants along the line of ‘yes’ to ‘no’ and conversation between participants was clearly richer, though only a fraction could be translated to us. The sequence also avoided the conflict we had inadvertently created when exploring the relationship between Goneril and Lear, since any challenge raised about a daughter’s duty to her father came from their discoveries through exploring the text, not from us directly. Over the remainder of the second and third days, we continued further into the play, introducing a range of techniques for creating a performance, always emphasising the key Butterfly principle of ‘Discovery First’, which means being open and responsive to others’ words and actions, rather than intellectually planning how to respond. We were careful to pay attention to this principle ourselves in order to learn with and from our participants about what worked best for them and invited in their thoughts and cultural references as much as possible. In pedagogical terms, this ‘Discovery First’ approach is connected to Bruner’s progressive conception of ‘discovery learning’, in that it is not about unstructured play, but instead about the time pressured rigour of a facilitated approach that allows new knowledge and ideas to emerge and build from what is familiar and known (Bruner, 1996: xii). Our last session was working with the Mechanicals’ first scene and explored the importance of emotional stakes when working with comedy. We used this scene to recap the key ideas we had introduced for exploring staging options, interpreting relationships, finding characterisations through movement, and above all, working with the text through objectives to keep the action alive to the moment. As a last, very funny, version of the scene came together played by volunteers with ensemble directing from us all, we recognised a sense of satisfaction of learning through our past mistakes to find real connection with this group of individuals from cultural contexts so different to our own. On a high from the success of this work, we met with officials at the British Council to discuss next steps. Arts organisations of any size always have to balance optimistic enthusiasm with realistic planning and so we

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developed a detailed proposal for the additional phases of the project with full costings, personnel, timelines and a media and marketing strategy. Phase five, the final phase, was the one we were most excited about as it detailed community performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream created with Omani young people responding to their spaces and local traditions. We knew our colleagues believed in the cumulative value of the project, however they needed support and funding from the Ministry of Education. Since phase one was now successfully completed and phases two to four (student festivals) involved a fairly light touch from us, we focused on finding additional support for phase five. A meeting with Omani airlines who had previously expressed interest in sponsoring the project yielded no results but our application to the London based Anglo-Omani Society was more positive. We had previously given a talk about our experiences to the AngloOmani Society and written an article for their magazine. They were very interested in the project and offered a grant to support phase five, on the proviso that match funding came from the British Council. This seemed a real bonus and we hoped it would provide greater support for our Omani colleagues in securing the funding needed on their side. However, as dates slipped, communications were irregular, and busy lives were busy, we saw the project slipping away. The Anglo-Omani Society held their grant for us as long as they could but in March 2017, with a new financial year looming and no definite commitment on the horizon from Oman, they had to release the funds, letting us know that they would look favourably on any future reapplication. Zuweina apologetically informed us that the delays had arisen due to personnel changes at the Ministry of Education, which meant the project’s champions had been lost. It seemed with the impetus of ‘Shakespeare Lives’ over, an education/community Shakespeare project was no longer a priority. We had to chalk up phase five to unrealised potential and the time we had invested in planning and in writing proposals was lost. This was not the first and will not be the last project Butterfly have worked on that fails to gain funding despite clear potential for achieving wide impact and public engagement. For a small arts organisation, ideas, passion, skills and talent are rarely in short supply, but the funding to pay even the minimal wages of the artists involved often means good work cannot happen. This time we did not have the weight of WSF behind us in terms of RSC and London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games branding and the additional funding and opportunity that provided. Undoubtedly this made a difference to the commitments the Omani organisations were willing and able to offer, as did the ending of the ‘Shakespeare Lives’ agenda before the completion of our project.

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We hope an opportunity will arise again to take Butterfly actors to Oman, either simply as a cultural sharing, or as a ­research-through-practice investigation of Shakespeare as a site for intercultural dialogue. Discussing Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare, Graham Holderness asks ‘is it possible that Shakespeare “goes native” every time he crosses a geographic or national border?’ (Holderness, 2014: 86). For us, the most obvious explanation for this ‘going native’ is that as a play text Shakespeare’s words are incomplete until brought to life in the living body and breath of an actor; and that actor, professional or student, necessarily brings their own cultural perspectives and experiences to bear in order to breathe those words into life. In that way we discover Shakespeare’s skill, as Brook has described, of offering ‘an endless multitude of points of view with their own fullness of life’ (Brook, 2013: 16). We personally learned a great deal through our experiences in Oman that have informed our thinking and practice, not least that ways of understanding how others see the world and wondering together ‘what if?’ are crucial for us to exist and learn together. Working with Omanis really underscored for us how Shakespeare can provide a useful site to build cultural intelligence and explore the opportunities of Brook’s ‘culture of links’. We found so much connection through this journey with Oman that has deepened our own engagement with Shakespeare’s texts. Freshly realised characters emerged as the Omani teachers and students reimagined them and their genuine openness and bravery made it both exciting and rewarding to explore politics, gender roles, family conflicts and all the big themes of human existence found in Shakespeare, which though universal are also always specific and of their time and place. As one Omani teacher said: ‘Shakespeare is not for Oman or Britain or anywhere else. He is about feelings, so is for all. We all have feelings.’

References Berry, Cicely, 2008. From Word to Play: A Handbook for Directors (London: Oberon Books). Bourdieu, Pierre and Louis Wacquant, 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press). British Council, 2016. www.shakespearelives.org/programme/ Brook, Peter, 1996. ‘The Culture of Links’, in Patrice Pavis (ed.), The Intercultural Performance Reader (London: Routledge), 63–6. Brook, Peter, 2013. The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare (London: Nick Hern Books). Bruner, Jerome, 1996. The Culture of Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

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Gonsalves, Aileen and Tracy Irish, 2021. Shakespeare and Meisner: A Practical Guide for Actors, Directors, Teachers and Students (London: Bloomsbury). Holderness, Graham, 2014. ‘“An Arabian in My Room”: Shakespeare and the Canon’, Critical Survey 26.2, 73–89. Irish, Tracy, 2012. ‘Shakespeare: A Worldwide Classroom’, Stratford-upon-Avon: RSC. www.academia.edu/23423997/Shakespeare_a_worldwide_classroom. Irish, Tracy, 2015. ‘Performing Shakespeare in the Olympic Year’, in Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan (eds.), Shakespeare on the Global Stage (London: Bloomsbury), 65–77. Irish, Tracy, 2019. ‘Theatre, Education and Embodied Cognition: Young Women in the Changing World’, in Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 755–74. Semler, Liam E., 2016. ‘Prosperous Teaching and the Thing of Darkness: Raising a Tempest in the Classroom’, Cogent Arts & Humanities, 3.1. Shakespeare, William, 2007 [1997]. King Lear, edited by R. A. Foakes (London: Thomson Learning).

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chapter 21

Edward’s Boys in the South of France

Inventing an International, Collaborative Ardenspace Perry Mills and Janice Valls-Russell

Prologue Edward’s Boys, the all-boy acting troupe based at King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon, whose productions of early modern plays constitute the largest corpus of early modern drama in present-day performance worldwide, have attracted a great deal of professional interest over the past decade, from academics and theatre practitioners alike.1 Directed by Perry Mills, they have provided rich insights into plays written specifically with boy performers in mind by the likes of John Lyly, John Marston and Francis Beaumont, and contributed decisively to a better knowledge and understanding of the work of early modern companies such as Paul’s Boys.2 This chapter explores a novel angle to their work. In 2016 and 2018, academics in Montpellier (France) working with local secondary school teachers on a collaborative ‘Shakespeare in the classroom’ project invited Edward’s Boys to perform before audiences of Francophone teenagers, for whom these spectating experiences combined a number of challenges: seeing plays they had never heard of, performed in English, by an all-boy company. The tours were new for Edward’s Boys too: hitherto they had never taken their work outside the United Kingdom and performed for non-Anglophone audiences. In this chapter, Perry Mills views the project from ­Stratford-upon-Avon, then Janice Valls-Russell views it from Montpellier. Perry and Janice then unpack one example of the way this experience helped to create an ephemeral ‘ardenspace’, ‘a space of creative interactivity’ (Semler, 2013: 53), where the young performers and spectators could address sensitive issues. Drawing on interviews and debriefing sessions, we hope to show that 1 2

A selection of academic responses is available on the Edward’s Boys website, www.edwardsboys.org. See also McCarthy (2020). The company’s actors were drawn from the choir of St Paul’s Cathedral (Gair, 1982).

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Edward’s Boys’ visits to the south of France offer a cross-border instance of collaboration on multiple levels: peer-to-peer, with young people from one country performing for young people in another country; between secondary school teachers and higher education faculty; between the worlds of research and education, and the world of theatre – a point that Florence March from the Université Paul-Valéry covers more fully in Chapter 2. In 2016, the Montpellier-based Institute for Research in the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical era and the Enlightenment (IRCL) celebrated the fourth centenary of Shakespeare’s death with a year-long programme of events.3 These included 24–heures Shakespeare, a round-the-clock Complete Shakespeare, staged by students of Université Paul-Valéry (March and Vienne-Guerrin, 2016: 67); scenes from Shakespeare performed by secondary school students during a mini-festival, the Printemps des collégiens, embedded in Montpellier’s international Printemps des comédiens theatre festival; and performances by Edward’s Boys in Montpellier and Béziers. All this proved highly popular with teachers and pupils, who wanted more of the same. By 2018, Montpellier and Béziers were ready for a second visit from Edward’s Boys.

Enter Stage Left: The Project Viewed from Stratford-upon-Avon (by Perry Mills) There is always educational value in purposeful extra-curricular activity undertaken in schools; that is the primary reason why the Edward’s Boys Project continues. Students learn a lot from being involved in a play, more when they go on tour, and even more when they are part of a company with a continuing tradition and ethos. My favourite tribute came from the school’s Headmaster when he described the company as ‘The best vertical tutor group in the school’. In 2016 the touring party comprised twentytwo students (aged thirteen to eighteen) and three adults; in 2018, twenty students (aged twelve to nineteen), again accompanied by three adults. The invitation to tour the south of France in April 2016, with Francis Beaumont’s The Woman Hater, and again in April 2018, with John Lyly’s The Woman in the Moon, was a tremendous opportunity and challenge – perhaps even more than we expected. It determined choices in terms of design, setting and props for a show that was going to be performed at home before going on tour. It also meant thinking carefully about the 3

The IRCL is a joint research unit of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3.

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language of performance, the use of music, the emphasis on costuming and colours; this approach was further developed in the light of feedback from our first visit, and worked more thoroughly into our production of The Woman in the Moon, which we set in the flower-power 1960s, with appropriate costumes and songs. There were also practical aspects to consider: we were travelling with our costumes, props and musical instruments. So, while being visually effective, we needed to streamline the production in terms of design. Photos of the performance areas enabled me to work out what we would need in terms of props that we could not bring over: tables, chairs, an armchair, a keyboard and a full drum kit. The student in charge of lighting and I corresponded directly with the technicians in the two professional venues we used, Théâtre sortieOuest (Béziers) and Théâtre d’O (Montpellier). The Montpellier team and I also discussed the audiences the plays were intended for, and in 2016 we decided that there would be two versions of The Woman Hater: the full 150-minute show and a 90-minute one. Prior to our breaking up for the Easter holidays, however, I decided that we should focus solely on the UK leg of the tour. Any necessary adaptations could be left to when we were sitting on the highspeed train (TGV). It came as a mild surprise therefore when I informed the company of the need for two versions. However, no one demurred; it’s simply what we do, a ‘Job o’ Work’. We spent a couple of hours speeding through France, going through the four different plots and fileting some of the longer speeches. One or two short scenes were excised, and we cut the interval. It was then a ‘simple’ case of remembering the new cues. In 2018, we didn’t need to cut The Woman in the Moon: Lyly writes shorter plays and we had enriched the visual and musical languages of the performance. ‘Having never seen Edward’s Boys before, these audiences had to be won and retained’ (Dan Wilkinson, an actor in the company). Performing for a different kind of audience – young, non-English native speakers – involved simply playing in the way they should do all the time (clear storytelling; playing the extremes/tonal shifts) but in an even clearer, broader style. This is probably just called better acting. In notes I urged them to remind themselves of their character’s function in a scene and to strive to convey that as clearly as possible employing voice, gesture, facial expression, blocking and so forth. I re-emphasised the importance of listening hard to an audience; don’t simply do what you’ve done in the performance before. You have to respond to the people in front of you and take them with you.

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On each visit, the boys gave three performances. One was at the Maison des Chœurs, a seventeenth-century chapel in the historic centre of Montpellier, for audiences that most resembled the ones the company is accustomed to in England: predominantly adult, academics interested in the boys’ companies, as well as university and Baccalauréat-level students (the equivalent of A-levels). Undeniably there was a special frisson as a result of performing plays littered with sexual innuendoes and potential blasphemy in a church. Somehow the atmosphere seemed to raise the stakes, both with The Woman Hater, the full version being performed in traverse, and The Woman in The Moon, where most of the performance took place before the altar and in the side chapels. At the end there were standing ovations and the Q&As ran for another hour. In 2016, they had previously performed in the assembly hall of a Montpellier secondary school, Collège L’Assomption, with actors and spectators – approximately 240 students and staff – in very close proximity. We have a number of well-worn phrases in Edward’s Boys and a constant refrain is: ‘TELL THE STORY!’ We had chosen to set The Woman Hater in 1950s Little Italy, with the Mafia vibe suggested through costumes and props; the music was appropriate to this setting, and chosen to illuminate the narrative as clearly as possible. Nevertheless, as a very experienced member of the company came offstage after his first scene, he confided to me, ‘This is hard!’ (Fin Hatch). Gradually, however, it became clear that the show was going well and the story was getting across. The performance style needed to be emphatic – indeed, possibly over-emphatic. ‘We instinctively became more reliant on the non-verbal ways of telling the story. Movements, gestures and facial expressions onstage became more exaggerated to compensate for what was being lost “in translation”’ (Charlie Waters, an actor in the company). None of the company was fluent in French, but almost without thinking certain lines began to be rendered into our hosts’ language: levez-vous; merci; tête de poisson … ‘People seemed to enjoy it when we threw in bits of French. Even when it was grammatically incorrect! I think they appreciated that we’d made the effort’ (Dan Power, an actor in the company). Having to vie for attention in order to accurately convey the story was a difficult task. We had to control the audience in a different, more demonstrative manner. This was a novelty, but I felt that the college show was, in some ways, the most alive, emotionally engaging, dangerous performance we’ve ever given. I imagine it is much closer to what a contemporary audience would have been like. (Dan Wilkinson)

In 2018 the first performance was in a professional venue, the 300–seat Théâtre d’O (Montpellier). They performed at yet another professional

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venue, sortieOuest, in both 2016 and 2018, a theatre with a proscenium arch and a raked amphitheatre, housed within a ‘big top’ in the middle of a vineyard on the outskirts of Béziers, an hour’s drive from Montpellier. It was totally unlike the traverse design we had used for all the productions of The Woman Hater hitherto, in the United Kingdom and in Montpellier. ‘This is an amazing place, I’ve never performed in somewhere like this’ (Will Groves, an actor in the company). The vicissitudes of touring provide the opportunity to re-invent. Many of the boys were experienced – seven of them were leaving school after this performance – but even the youngest understood that our job was to make the most of the opportunities the new circumstances offered. We worked hard for a couple of hours, reminded ourselves of the cues for the 90–minute version, and then they were ready. That afternoon they gave perhaps their best performance of The Woman Hater. Performing in venues which we’d only been in for one day added another dimension of fun to each performance. People were making use of the different environments (the double doors, the balcony and the altar in the chapel; basically everything in the festival theatre at sortieOuest) to get creative with their entrances and exits. This inventiveness kept the cast on their toes and stopped the performance from ever feeling stale. (Dan Power)

The sortieOuest theatre has a special atmosphere, and on our second visit, those who had already been there rushed into the dark venue, followed by the others, round the back of the seats to the front. The house lights went up. The newcomers gasped with delight and within seconds everyone was up on the stage and in the wings, taking possession. It was really pleasing to see the democratic way in which the members of the company passed the microphone around during Q&As, so that everyone got a chance to respond. One of the benefits of a tour like this is that in addition, the younger ones had heard the responses given the previous day, and then felt they could give that answer themselves: yet more evidence of the much-vaunted peer-to-peer ‘apprenticeship’. Usually a Q&A session begins with me onstage answering a few questions while the company get changed and then they join me and we respond together. On one occasion, I was called away to the front of house at the end of the performance. When I returned to the auditorium, the company were onstage running the session themselves – brilliantly. That was the model we followed in 2018. Mutual support and trust are central to the way the company works. This was revealed time and again over the five days on tour. ‘We were

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greatly impressed by the solidarity between them and their excellent team spirit, on top of their obvious talents. You can be proud of what you achieve with your boys!’ (Florence March). On both visits, we received very generous hospitality from our hosting families, the arrangements having been sorted by the university and the secondary school. One ­parent emailed me later: Thank you so much. Our son had a ball. He had so much to tell us. His family were charming. They treated him as one of the family, playing games like French monopoly and table tennis with him. He helped them with their English. He has returned with an even more confident head on his shoulders and has been a joy at home since. Long may it continue! (Katie Clark)

New friendships between students of different nationalities were a gratifying result of the collaboration. The company had done the necessary preparation weeks before in the United Kingdom, huddled around school tables scrutinising the text for clues as to what it meant and what it might mean. We had worked hard to find the best ways to ‘Tell the Story’ using staging, props, costumes, music and movement. In France, they had to discover a few additional ways to ‘Tell that Story’ as clearly as possible. One important discovery was the crucial value of hitting the right rhythms and employing greater physicality in engaging their new audiences. I felt that performing in France and the language barrier actually gave us an advantage. When an audience aren’t following the speech word-for-word the actors are given more freedom with what they do and what emotional state they represent. In this sense … some parts of the performance felt like a kind of scripted improv. That’s not to say that the language was overlooked: ‘relish’ the language is what we all did. At times, even if they couldn’t follow precisely what we were saying, it seemed like the audience got a kick just from the sounds of the words. (Dan Power)

It is often remarkable what students can achieve with the right levels of confidence and conviction – but always matched by a healthy dose of humility. There is no room for arrogance. For many of these audiences it wasn’t only the first time seeing The Woman Hater, but it was the first time seeing a boys’ company – and for some the first time they had seen a play – a rare occurrence if you live near Stratford-upon-Avon. It was therefore a truly unique, often humbling, and of course incredibly enjoyable tour. (Dan Wilkinson)

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Enter Stage Right: The Project Viewed from Montpellier and Béziers (by Janice Valls-Russell) Preparation for the visits involved tasks one doesn’t usually have to worry about in a research programme: arranging accommodation for the Edward’s Boys and the three accompanying adults; finding a solid, serviceable armchair; hiring a drum kit; recruiting a security guard; negotiating access through a pedestrian area for a van loaded with musical instruments; liaising between Perry and theatre staff. Institutional collaboration involved finding venues and obtaining funding, which we received from the Ministry of Culture and the Printemps des comédiens festival. Importantly, time was spent on discussions with Perry in order to adapt the plays for school audiences for whom English is a foreign language, and with their ‘collège’ teachers to prepare them for the performances they were going to attend. They needed to feel we were taking them ‘seriously’, bringing the shows for them. Simultaneously, we wanted the Boys to realise that they were really being made welcome, that their visit had been prepared and that the audiences were expecting them. Following a series of meetings with the secondary school teachers (mostly English language teachers), Florence March and I prepared a teaching pack in French and English. For each play this included: notes on the dramatist and on children’s companies; a scene-by-scene breakdown; a presentation of the key mythological figures and planets (for The Woman in the Moon); links to online material, including the Edward’s Boys website; and a series of questions, prepared with Perry, intended to help the students think about the setting chosen for the production. The material was designed to be open ended, so that teachers could adapt it to their needs. This was backed up by a series of talks in the schools on the Shakespearean stage, on boys’ companies and the early modern period. The Boys’ two visits fitted into a wider, ongoing, ­research-cum-pedagogy project, ‘Shakespeare and Citizenship’ (discussed in Chapter 2), in which academics work hand-in-hand with secondary schools and the Printemps des comédiens festival, the second-largest in France after the Avignon festival. We wanted school audiences to discover for themselves that Shakespeare belonged to a prolific and versatile theatre culture; that he did not write for an élite. The remit is both to create spectating experiences and to discover the world of theatre through acting. Through a hands-on involvement with Shakespeare’s plays, on and off stage, the theatre also becomes a space where a variety of issues – gender, otherness, tolerance,

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dialogue – may be explored more readily than in what Semler calls ‘formal courts of learning’ (2013: 56). In class, teachers explored subjects such as artistic illusion versus ‘real life’, and the art of spectating – what it means to be a member of an audience, in terms of codes (behaviour, silence), involvement and reception. They also provided guidance for the Q&A sessions, inviting their students, for instance, to look out for the different languages of performance, such as the colour coding of costumes, wigs and balloons in The Woman in the Moon, and anything that enables them to understand a play even when they may not master the text. While this preparatory phase took place in the classroom, the whole experience marked a departure from their usual curriculum. The information they were provided with was aimed to help them enjoy the show: no assessment was attached. Visiting lecturers from the university made a change from their usual lessons. The students learned about Elizabethan stage conventions, with all-male performers taking on female roles too. But this remained abstract until the first female characters appeared on stage. Students turned to each other and murmured: ‘It’s not possible. Those can’t be boys!’ This owed much to the talent of the actors: the costumes, wigs, ways of walking, talking and moving were so convincing. As one member of the company explained, ‘It’s easy, I just observed my sister closely’, a comment that was echoed by the reaction of one student: ‘I just can’t believe there were only boys, their clothes, their acting (even the songs) were so good that one felt the “girls” present in the play were girls in their everyday life’ (Yousra). Edward’s Boys brought the young French audiences a stimulating cocktail of contrasting emotions: proximity through belonging to the same age group as their audience, and the distancing effect of a novel linguistic and cultural experience. Those little-known plays were rejuvenated thanks to the age of the company and the twentieth-century settings chosen by Perry; but also, by being performed for young audiences. The plays may have been 400-odd years old, but the performers and spectators were young millennials. Hearing the voices and witnessing the reactions of those young spectators was a key aspect of the project. This was made possible by the fact that the experience of seeing Edward’s Boys was loosely incorporated into their learning activities, and linked to their other forms of artistic engagement with the world of Shakespeare. To adapt what Jan Wozniak writes about Shakespeare, early modern theatre discovered through Edward’s Boys was ‘not a school, not an object or site of education, but

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a story to be retold in the voices of the young people … in whatever voice they choose’ (2016: 209). The students shared their experiences in a number of ways. Those whose families had hosted Edward’s Boys used social media to have exchanges with the performers – another selfregulated form of collaborative, peer-to-peer experience. Others contributed to blogs: ‘It made me want to go to the theatre; I’d never been, because I thought it was something for old people’ (Mikaël). ‘I’ll willingly go back to the theatre!’ (Joséphine). ‘It was almost like watching a television series’ (Sarah). A few pupils chose to give a presentation on Edward’s Boys for an examination on the arts that is part of the ‘Brevet des collèges’, an exam equivalent to the GCSE. What emerged from all this is that they understood the plays and appreciated the absence of a fourth wall: A superb play, with excellent actors and lots of humour! The language was difficult to understand, but was not a barrier between the actors and the spectators. Lots of interaction with the spectators which enabled them to get into the spirit of the play. Amazing play! (Mélanie)

One fascinating, indirect form of collaboration was the impact the play had on a group of pupils who were rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as their teacher explained: They told me that seeing Edward’s Boys had had an impact on them. They identified with the Boys, since they too were playing in English for a nonEnglish audience. So they worked harder to develop non-verbal languages, it helped them to understand the importance of mime and facial expressions (like the Woman Hater when he talks about women) to help the audience appreciate the play. They chose to enter behind the audience and down the sides of the performance hall, as Edward’s Boys had done, to draw the spectators into the show and break down the barriers between theatrical illusion and ‘reality’.

Creating a Safe Ardenspace for ‘Direct Talk’: ‘Are you Gay?’ (by Perry Mills and Janice Valls-Russell) It is time to address The Kissing – in both plays. At one point in The Woman Hater, Lazarillo is required to kiss the prostitute, Julia. The kissing blew their [the audience’s] minds. Performing the scene with Charlie [Waters] was surreal. Some people laughed nervously. A lot gasped. A few looked away squeamishly. When we kissed most people screamed. This was pretty tense for us on stage. We had no idea how the audience

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P. Mills and J. Valls-Russell were going to respond, and because they were so volatile it would likely be either fantastic or terrible. Fortunately, they liked it. So we did it again! The impromptu kiss at the end definitely wouldn’t have happened if the audience was as composed and respectful and dull as an English audience would be. One of my lines near the end of the scene is ‘Lady, this kiss is yours!’, and the word ‘kiss’ got people on the edge of their seats again. Despite their initial hesitance, the audience quickly embraced the ridiculousness of the scene. They were all expecting one last snog to wrap things up. It seemed rude not to give it to them. (Dan Power)

The Béziers audience responded differently. Having an audience react to the kisses in such a genuinely shocked way, and the silences that fell whenever the revolvers were pointed in anger, suggested that they were totally engaged. However, the response was one we seldom experience in England. To some extent, our audiences have become accustomed to the company and know what to expect. Such vocal and volatile reactions have probably not been received since the company was founded. (Dan Wilkinson)

In The Woman in the Moon, Joe Pocknell played a sexually provocative Pandora, teasing the shepherds with innuendoes and kissing them enthusiastically (Figure 21.1). The reactions in the young audience were mixed, with laughter that ranged from pure enjoyment to embarrassment, and quite a few ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’. The post-performance Q&A session got off to an abrupt start, with a boy asking outright: ‘Are you gay?’ The response was quiet and measured – and perfectly judged: ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s just a part. It’s what we do’ (Jack Hawkins). This defused the tension, and was received with a round of applause. Gentle teasing and self-mockery followed. In response to the question, ‘What was your favourite scene?’ Joe answered, ‘When I kiss Charlie’. And Charlie promptly added, ‘My favourite scene is when I kiss Joe’ – to the audience’s evident delight. The kissing beautifully illustrated the ‘beneficial uncontainability’ of ardenspace (Semler, 2013: 49). Speaking for the parents of students onstage, one mother noted: It seems to me that the boys (and not just the ones actually playing the female roles) were encouraged to explore various issues surrounding women. As young men – particularly in an all-boys’ school – this is a really important part of their education. What a great opportunity the theatre offers to explore and discover these things. (Maddy Lesser)

Following a debriefing session with teachers, a discussion was arranged with the class of the boy who had asked ‘Are you gay?’. I (Janice) was invited to meet the students with their English teacher, after they had performed their own show – an adaptation of Measure for Measure – for

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Figure 21.1  The Woman in the Moon, directed by Perry Mills for Edward’s Boys: Pandora (Joe Pocknell), Gunophilus (Jack Hawkins). Rehearsal, Stratford-upon-Avon. Photograph courtesy of Nick Browning (2018) for King Edward VI School and Edward’s Boys, www.nickbimages.com/

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the Printemps des collégiens. I explained how important it was for us to have their feedback on their dual experience, as spectators and performers, and asked if anyone objected to my recording the session on my mobile. No names were attached to who was talking. I let them take the lead, after telling them how much I’d enjoyed their Measure for Measure. Spontaneously, they brought the conversation round to The Woman in the Moon. Clearly this was what they wanted to talk about. It was an animated, frank exchange. A number of boys expressed cultural unease about homosexuality; others were more comfortable. Some focused on the idea of role playing, with actors called upon to perform men, women, gods, elderly people. Importantly, despite some initial tension, by the end they were expressing their opinions and disagreeing amicably as to whether they would feel up to taking on cross-gendered parts: ‘I just couldn’t’; ‘Well I could! I was a gangster in Measure for Measure, so I can play a woman, I’m an actor!’ The girls expressed strong disapproval of an all-boy performance that excluded female actors. My approach resembles the one endorsed by practitioners who work with young refugees: ‘approachable, non-judgemental and empathetic’ (Barnes, 2009: 40). The fact that I was not their teacher, was not involved in assessing them, marking them or enforcing discipline, that they had met me before, when I came to talk to them about Shakespeare or attended their rehearsals, made me seem, perhaps, more approachable. All this contributed to create that ardenspace that met the ‘overarching principles of direct talk and safe spaces’, in which the ‘[t]he instructor has a responsibility to let the students know that the classroom is the place to ask questions and make statements about race, gender, ability, and sexuality in Shakespeare without fear of censorship’ (Thompson and Turchi, 2016: 730). In this ethnically and culturally mixed school, a number of students come from families where issues such as homosexual love are still very much taboo. What emerged from that meeting and further discussions with their teachers was that some of them felt they had been insufficiently prepared for an all-male performance with a lot of playful ‘sexiness’. Discomfort is part of the theatrical experience; but perhaps we at the Montpellier end ought to have been more alert to the students’ context – taking stock of that and, working from there, helping them move forward by empowering them. Describing her theatre work with young refugees, Stella Barnes insists on the need to ‘have a “blame-free” approach … and acknowledge that changes of attitudes can be slow and that [certain] issues are very complex for the young people’ (2009: 37).

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Epilogue: Whither? This cross-Channel experience has confirmed that, in addition to the cultural and artistic experience this collaboration brought the students in terms of performing experience and audience awareness, it provided a space where they could ‘discuss difficult subjects, subjects that need to be encountered and thrashed out, on the neutral-seeming territory of a sixteenth-century play’ (Thompson and Turchi, 2016: 726). One drawback is that these are one-off events, hence the need to arrange such visits and encounters within a wider educational framework, such as Montpellier’s ongoing work with secondary schools, whereby similar goals may be pursued from the same ethical stance. Another challenge is viability, in terms of funding and human resources. Certainly, this project could not have succeeded without a genuine collaborative spirit based on trust: between the academics and the teachers; on the part of the funders and sponsors; between Perry (and the Headmaster of King Edward VI School) and the Montpellier team; between the members of the company; between students and teachers. Problems were dealt with professionally and efficiently. Trust is the lynchpin, alongside mutual respect, with evident understanding and respect for the different aims, needs and ways of working for all involved.

References Barnes, Stella, 2009. ‘Drawing a Line: A Discussion of Ethics in Participatory Arts with Young Refugees’, in Stella Barnes (ed.), Participatory Arts with Young Refugees (London: Oval House Theatre), 34–40. Gair, Reavley, 1982. The Children of Saint Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company (1553–1608) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ‘Les Edward’s Boys à sortieOuest’, 2016. Moulin On Line: Journal du Lycée Polyvalent Jean Moulin, Béziers, 11 April. http://journaldelacite.canalblog.com/ archives/2016/04/11/33584514.html. March, Florence, and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, 2016. ‘A Shakespearean Odyssey in Montpellier’, Cahiers Élisabéthains 91, 67–75. McCarthy, Harry R., 2020. Performing Early Modern Drama Beyond Shakespeare: Edward’s Boys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Semler, Liam E., 2013. Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning Versus the System (London: Bloomsbury). Thompson, Ayanna, and Laura Turchi, 2016. ‘Embodiment and the Classroom Performance’, in Valerie Traub (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 724–36. Wozniak, Jan, 2016. The Politics of Performing Shakespeare for Young People: Standing Up to Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury).

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Afterword

Majestic Visions Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen and Jacqueline Manuel

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, arch-projector Prospero shares with the young lovers ‘[s]ome vanity of mine art’, a supernatural masque that Ferdinand declares ‘a most majestic vision, and/Harmonious charmingly’ (Shakespeare, 2013 [2011]: 4.1.41, 118–19). If you have read through the twenty-one chapters of this book, you will have passed through twentyone majestic visions, a kaleidoscope of ardenspaces, called forth by the imaginative drive of project leaders, partners and participants. Without such drive and willingness to ‘be bold’ (4.1.119) the very same leaders, partners and participants would have continued within the ‘confines’ of their mundane worlds rather than feeling ‘called to enact’ these ‘present fancies’ (4.1.121–2). These collaborative projects vary in scale and duration, form and process, yet whether they function theatrically, analytically, culturally or digitally, and whether they ‘melt into thin air’ (4.1.150) after a season, a festival or a generation, their ‘vision’ is neither ‘baseless’ nor ‘insubstantial’ (151, 155). They grip the real. They discover the world. They free us in Shakespeare. It is the nature of complex systems and collaborative projects that their cascading sequences of impact and inspiration are impossible to fully comprehend and map. It is clear from numerous chapters that many project leaders do not know where their projects will lead or how long they will last, but they have enough vision to get started, enough energy to question their boundaries, enough presumption to propose a partnership. Such optimistic open endedness is a challenge to many educational systems that find comfort in containment. No-one is claiming these projects are perfect. Rather, they are perfectly human. They are not tame versions of education. They educate wildly. They are not solo or unconscious ventures. Their participants collaborate self-reflexively. They don’t have everything solved. Nor is this their claim. Quite the opposite. They wear their contingency on their sleeve and coax others to share the adventure. So, why not project Shakespeare your way? 332

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Be provoked or inspired by these projects and launched by their ingenuity or failings. Extend their ideas or upend them. Strike out in your own direction towards fresh partnerships. Look around you. Go find your world. In some fundamental way, all these projects are about being. In a world where institutions powerfully orchestrate our routines, and greater systematisation is perceived as greater professionalism, it is easy to go through the motions of teaching and learning unconsciously or at least unquestioningly. This very easiness is why we need alternative spaces, unpolished visions, risky dreams via which we might collaboratively teach and learn, make mistakes and reconsider, fall and catch each other. In such spaces, participants have a heightened sense of being and a receptiveness to experiencing the new with others. Knowledge comes from being in these spaces and that knowledge is authentic, personal, lasting. If we are not projectors, we risk remaining in the protocols of normalcy, never discovering not what might have been, but what actually is. ‘O brave new world’, cried Miranda famously (5.1.183). Prospero’s reply, ‘’Tis new to thee’ (184), may seem harsh, yet he speaks insightfully: the world is seen from each of our perspectives and the new is never absolute, but always new in respect to something or someone. Every collaborative Shakespeare project worth the name has its Miranda. Surely it is her perspective – ‘O wonder!’ (5.1.181) – we are all seeking as we reimagine Shakespeare education.

Reference Shakespeare, William, 2013 [2011]. The Tempest, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare).

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Index

Aboriginal languages, 145 loss of, 152 Aboriginal people assimilation of, 147 culture of, 148 active pedagogies, 36–7 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 284–5 American Academy of Pediatrics, 286 Ampithéâtre d’O, 44–5 Andriessen, Jerry, 132 Anglo-Omani Society, 316 Animated Tales, 28–9 anti-intellectualism, 36–7 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 297–8 Arabic language, 46–7 ardenspace, 10–12, 24–5, 69–74, 93, 308 coinage of, 71 Edward’s Boys creating, 327–30 Shakespeare Reloaded as, 71–4 SysEd contrasted with, 74, 79–81 Arnold, Carole, 198–9 Arrowsmith, Charly, 98 Arrevillaga Serrano, Hugo, 133 Arts Council England, 31–2 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 69, 71–2 Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A-S-I-A), 213–14 asynchronous pedagogy, 247 Attainment 8, 36–7 audience, 23–4 LEMDO, 245 at Pop-up Globe, 177–9 Australia, 56–7 colonialism in, 145, 148, 156 Indigenous people in, 57–8 institutional burdens in, 70–1 primary education in, 57–8 Australian Research Council, 69 autism, 272–3, 275–6, 279 Autistic Spectrum Disorder, 35

Babelism, 46–7 Babes with Blades, 283 Baker, Michael, 132 Balfour, Michael, 135–6 Bankstown West Public School, 57–60, 64, 67 Barbican, 307 Bard Blitz, 80 Bard College, 129 Barker, Granville, 119–20 Barker College, 69, 73, 76, 78, 81–2 Barnes, Stella, 330 Beaumont, Francis, 51, 319–3, 327–8 BEEED. See Bibliography of Editions of Early English Drama Belarus Free Theatre, 118–19 Bell, John, 54 Bell Shakespeare, 13, 24–5, 56–7, 120, 121, 142, 146, 147, 153 Artist-in-Residence programms, 54–5 beginning of, 58–60 on cross-curricular exploration, 64 Emanuel on, 60–1 Erskine on, 58 Floyd on, 60, 67 high expectations at, 65–6 history of, 54–5 on meaning, 65 Parke on, 65–6 pedagogy, 60–2 performance-based approach of, 60–1 primary education and, 59 principles of, 62–6 reception of, 59–60 schools working with, 57–8 on Shakespearean language, 62–3 on story changes, 63–4 Vaughan on, 66 vignettes, 55 Berger, Harry, 218–19 Berry, Cicely, 29, 162–3, 165, 314 Better Strangers, 10, 24–5, 69–71, 76, 81

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Index activities created by, 80 Annual Report, 76 fifth phase of, 81 impact of, 78 Solomon on, 78 Béziers, Edward’s Boys Company in, 325–8 Bibliography of Editions of Early English Drama (BEEED), 242–3 Billing, Christian M., 267 #BlackLivesMatter movement, 226 Blackman, Ellery, 151 Blayney, M. W., 211 Bloom, Gina, 207, 251–4, 256–60 body dysmorphia, 286 boodjar (Country), 150–1 Boston, Jane, 198–9 Bourdieu, Pierre, 311–12 Bowles, Margaret, 251 Bracknell, Kylie, 145, 149–50, 152–3 on Noongar language, 151–4 Brady, Linzy, 73, 76 British Council, 311 British Shakespeare Association, 2–3 British Sign Language (BSL), 97 Brook, Irina, 49 Brook, Peter, 119–20, 311–12 Bruner, Jerome, 315 BSL. See British Sign Language Bundjalung, 148 Butterfly, 268, 307 Discovery First principle, 315 in Muscat, 311–12 in Oman, 307–8, 311, 313, 314, 317 principles of, 313 Byron, Sammie, 127–8 Cambridge University Press, 2–3 case studies, Knowsley, 32–4 Casey, Jim, 205 Cavalli, Fabio, 304 Cavanagh, Sheila T., 88–9, 127, 129, 130, 137 CCB. See Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, 282 Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCB), 170 Charlie Hebdo, 41–3 chastity, 169–70 Cheeseman, Tom, 230–1 Christie, Will, 69–70 citizenship. See also Shakespeare and Citizenship in France project French definition of, 43 spectatorship and, 51 civil rights, 42–3 spectatorship and, 43

335

civility, 42–3 CNRS. See French National Centre for Scientific Research collaboration, 5–7 asynchronous, 247 border-crossing in, 88–9, 100–1 glitches and, 260 planning for, 9 Play the Knave and, 253 in Shakespeare and Citizenship in France project, 48–52 spatial context of, 89 at SSF, 39 third space via, 93 at Viola Project, 289–90 collaborative learning, 225 collective activity, 132 College Behind Bars, 129 collège Croix-d’Argent, 51–2 collège de la Mosson, 42, 48, 50–2 Colnan, Shauna, 69–70 colonialism, in Australia, 145, 148, 156 Common Good Atlanta, 127–8 communication technology, 89 community, 195 complexity theory, 82, 206 defining, 71 Shakespeare Reloaded and, 74 SysEd v., 71 Conscience Alley, 61 Conseil départemental de l’Hérault, 48–9 Continuing Professional Development (CPD), 29 Coover, Robert, 209 Coram Group, 27 Coram Shakespeare Schools Foundation (CSSF), 27. See also Shakespeare Schools Foundation Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 118, 122 Cort, Julia, 159 Council on Foreign Relations, 282 Country (boodjar), 150–1 COVID-19 pandemic, 81–2, 117, 225, 232, 271 remote learning in, 116 Cowen, Rachel, 260 CPD. See Continuing Professional Development criminality, as societally caused, 300 Critical Race Theory, 2–3 Crowley Tony, 198–9 Crystal, Ben, 198–9 Crystal, David, 197–8 Crystal, Hilary, 198–9 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 253 CSSF. See Coram Shakespeare Schools Foundation

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336 cultural capital, 312 Shakespeare and Citizenship project and development of, 47–8 cultural intelligence, 312 Cultural Olympiad, 311 culture, common, 48–52 culture of links, 311–12 Cunningham, Anne, 255–6 Cymbeline (Shakespeare), improbability in, 28 Dacre, Kathy, 198–9 dance culture, 169–70 Dancer=Propeller=Sea, 8 Dash Arts, 118–19 Database of Early English Playbooks, 242–3 D/deaf children, 97–8 death, 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s, 41, 320 Debray, Régis, 51 DEGASE. See Department for SocioEducational Action Deleuze, Gilles, 225–7 democratisation, 24 Department for Children, Schools and Families, 36 Department for Socio-Educational Action (DEGASE), 163–4 Digital Renaissance Editions (DRE), 239–40 digital Shakespeare, future of, 210 digitisation, 2–3 Dimock, Wai Chee, 222–3 disadvantaged schools, 32 SSF defining, 28 discovery learning, 315 disruption-transformation paradigm, 24–5 do Morro, Nós, 162–3 Dobson, Michael, 93–5, 98–100 domaine d’O, 44–5 Donaldson, Peter S., 205–6, 233 Doran, Gregory, 98 Double Trouble, 62 Drawing out Shakespeare symposium, 79 DRE. See Digital Renaissance Editions Dromgoole, Dominic, 132–3 Dunne, Steve, 269–70, 295 emotional growth of, 303–4 rehabilitation courses of, 300 roles of, 297–9, 303 on SPP, 296–8, 306 Early Modern English Encyclopedia (EMEE), 240–1 edge of chaos, 12, 71 Shakespeare Reloaded and, 79–82 Education Endowment Foundation, 38–9

Index Edward’s Boys Company, 51, 268, 269–70, 319 ardenspace created by, 327–30 in Béziers, 325–8 Mills on, 320–4, 327–30 in Montpellier, 320–7 mutual support in, 323–4 Q&A sessions, 323 Valls-Russell on, 325–30 Wozniak on, 326–7 Egan, Gabriel, 103–4 Elliott, Michael, 234–5 Ellis, Francesca, 24–5 Emanuel, Zoe, 64 on Bell Shakespeare, 60–1 on Shakespearean language, 63 embodied analysis, 167–70 EMEE. See Early Modern English Encyclopedia emergence, 12 Shakespeare Reloaded and, 74–9 Solomon and, 74–9 Emerson, Russell, 174–5 Emory University, 87, 127–30, 132, 133, 137–8 empathy, 303 empathy drum, 174, 177 The Endings Project, 241 Enfolded Hamlet, 214, 214 English language, 46–7 English pedagogy, Irish on, 36–7 English Short Title Catalogue, 242–3 epilogues, 46 equality of opportunity, Shakespeare and Citizenship in France project and, 52 Erne, Lukas, 218–19 Erskine, Joanna, 24–5, 55 on Bell Shakespeare, 58 on Macbeth, 58–9 on Romeo and Juliet, 63–4 on Shakespeare, 55 Escolme, Bridget, on Fórum Shakespeare, 167–70 Estill, Laura, 245 Evans, James, 65, 149–50, 153 Evans, Peter, 153 Every Child report, 31–2 Ewing, Robyn, 24–5 on Shakespeare, 55 Facebook, 123–4 fake blood, at Pop-up Globe, 180, 181 fathers, 130 fear, of Shakespeare in secondary school, 56–7 feminism, 290 direct, at Viola Project, 284–5 feminist programming, 285–6

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Index Fendler, Lynn, 226 Fernie, Ewan, 2, 95, 99, 323 fieldwork, portal pedagogy, 118–19 First Nations 2013, 118–19 Fitzpatrick, Tim, 174–5, 185, 186 on Shakespeare’s Globe, 185, 186 Flaherty, Kate, 69–70 Fletcher, John, 109–110 Flirting with Shakespeare workshop, 171–2 Floyd, Robyn, 57–60, 66, 67 on Bell Shakespeare, 60, 67 on inclusivity, 61 on meaning, 65 on Shakespearean language, 63 Flute Theatre, 268, 268–9, 271, 275, 277–8 establishment of, 271, 272 Folger Shakespeare Library, 210, 211, 229, 243–4 Fontcarrade, 43–4 Fordism, 2–3 Fórum Shakespeare, 142–3, 159, 162–3 Escolme on, 167–70 on plurality, 163 Silverstone on, 170–2 Fraga, Guti, 164–5 France, post–World War II reconstruction of, 44–5 Frankenstein (Shelley), 209 Freire, Paulo, 196–7, 303 French Civil Code, Article 25, 41 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, article 11, 42–3 French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), 41–2 Friedlander, Larry, 210, 223 fun, portal pedagogy and, 125 Gaidin, Boris, 231 García Ochoa, Gabriel, 89, 113, 116–17 Garfield, Paula, 98 Gay, Penny, 69–70 GCSE. See General Certificate of Secondary Education Gdański Teatr Szekspirowski, 193 Gee, James Paul, 10–11 gender, 281 equality, 46, 282 performance and, 297–8 spectrum, 290–1 wage gap, 289–90 gender nonconforming youth, 283 at Viola Project, 290–1 General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), 30–1, 37–9 SSF workshop, 37 generational trauma, 301

Geral, Vigário, 164–5 Gidabal, 148 Gifted and Talented classes, 58 Gillies, John, 209 The Girl from the Fog Machine Factory, 50 Glebe School, 273 glitches collaboration and, 260 defining, 253–4 Play the Knave utilising, 253–4, 260–1 Global Shakespeares, 213–23 origin of, 213–14 the Globe. See Pop-up Globe; Shakespeare’s Globe Gonçalves, Marco Antônio, 171 Gonsalves, Aileen, 269–70, 308, 310 Goodbody, Buzz, 91–2 Grace, Chris, 28–9 Graham, Elspeth, 141, 143, 188 Grand Bassin, 44–5 Grant, Tobias, 181 Greer, Germaine, 61 Gregory, Fiona, 89, 113 Gregory, Miles, 174, 183 on Pop-up Globe, 176–9 Griffiths, Andy, 58–9 group flow, 253 Grupo Cultural AfroReggae, 164–5 Guattari, Félix, 225–7 Gummow, Margaret, 148 Gurr, Andrew, 103–4 Habima National Theatre, 119–20 habitus, 311–12 Hamlet (1946 film), 221, 234–5 Hamlet (1964 film), 221–2 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 56–7, 76, 168, 309 film adaptations, 211 in MIT Global Shakespeares, 233–4 HamletWorks, 210, 212, 214, 219–20, 223 Hansen, Claire, 69–70, 73 Hardy, Reina, 282–3 Harper, Anthony, 180 Hay Lane School, 273–4 Heartland Alliance, 289–90 Hecate, 142, 145–7, 149–51, 156 development of, 146, 147 Morrison in, 151 premiere of, 148–50 reception of, 154 songs in, 152–5 workshops, 152 Yibiyung on, 154 Henderson, Peter, 304–5 Henry IV (Shakespeare), 132–4

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337

338

Index

Henry V (Shakespeare), 43, 76, 213, 218–19, 230, 244–5 at Pop-up Globe, 181, 182, 184–5 Heritage, Paul, 162 on Romeo and Juliet, 163–7 Herold, Niels, 136 HHM. See Hunter Heartbeat Method Hicks, Greg, 162–3 higher education, internationalization and, 116–17 Higinbotham, Sarah, 127–8 Hodgkiss, Laura, on SSF, 33 Holderness, Graham, 317 Hollande, François, 41 Hollar, Wenceslaus, 174–5 Hood, Andrew, 24, 69–70 Hoole, Charlie, 180, 181 Hot Seating, 37, 61 at SSF, 38 Hugo, Victor, 231 Hunter, Kelly, 268, 269, 271–9 Hunter Heartbeat Method (HHM), 271 Hutchins, Mitchella, 154 hybrid learning, 116 iambic pentameter, 64 Imaginarium, 81, 195–7 imagination, 4 in projecting Shakespeare, 9 impact, public funding and government definitions of, 108 inclusivity Floyd on, 61 promotion of, in Shakespeare’s plays, 44 Renshaw on, 61 of Shakespeare Schools Festival, 31–2 Indigenous people, in Australia, 57–8 Ingold, Tim, 192 inkhorn controversy, 46 Inner London Education Authority, 167–8 Inside-Out, 131 Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and the Enlightenment (IRCL), 41–2, 47–50, 320 on Shakespeare and Citizenship in France project, 49, 52 institutions burdens of, in Australia, 70–1 creative projects outside of, 5–6 as frozen thought, 10 habits of thought at, 70–1 power of, 5, 333 Shakespeare education and, 4–7 intercultural experience, 167–70 International Decade of Indigenous Languages, 147–8

international portal space, 113 International Youth Ensemble (IYE), 310 internationalization, higher education and, 116–17 Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE), 223, 228, 239–40 intimate partner violence, 286 IRCL. See Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and the Enlightenment Irish, Tracy, 269–70, 308, 310, 314 on English pedagogy, 36–7 Irving, Henry, 215 ISE. See Internet Shakespeare Editions IYE. See International Youth Ensemble Jackson, Scott, 127–8 Jackson, Shelley, 209 Järvetä, Sanna, 132 Jenstad, Janelle, 205, 207 John Bell Scholarship, 54 John Colet School, 57–8, 60–1, 63, 64 Jones, Saskia, 130 Jonson, Ben, 120–1 Joubin, Alexa Alice, 206, 213–4 JSTOR, 210, 212–3 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 61, 296 Just Macbeth!, 58–9 Karim-Cooper, Farah, 87–8, 102–112 Kaufman, Ellie, 282–3 KCL. See King’s College London Kelly, Philippa, 118–19 Khan, Iqbal, 99 The King and I (Kelly), 118–19 King Edward VI School, 51 King Lear (1983 television), 234–5 King Lear (Shakespeare), 61, 115, 118–19, 121–2, 150, 172–3, 310, 312 in MIT Global Shakespeares, 233–4 Warren on, 211 King’s College London (KCL), 12–13, 87, 102 employability and, 107–8 the Globe and, 105–7 Kings’ Games, 80 Kliman, Bernice, 223 Knave Kit, 260–2 Knevet, Ralph, 248 Knowsley, 143, 188–9, 195–6 case studies, 32–4 demographics of, 190–1 hybrid identity of, 191–2 Saints Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Primary School, 33–4 SSF and, 32 St. Anne’s Catholic Primary School, 33

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108778510.034 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index Kobayashi, Kaori, 213–14 Korol Lir, 234 Kozintsev, Grigori, 234 Kozintsev, Sergei, 221–2 Kurita, Yoshihiro, 215 Kurosawa, Akira, 235 Laban, Rudolf, 29 Ladjali, Cécile, 47 language, 144. See also multilingualism; Noongar language; Shakespearean language Aboriginal languages, 145, 152 Arabic language, 46–7 English language, 46–7 of Liverpool, 198–9 Lanier, Douglas, 226–7 Latif, Nadia, 96 learning discovery, 315 models of, 130 Learning Together, 130, 131 LeCoq, Jacques, 29 LEMDO. See Linked Early Modern Drama Online Lesser, Maddy, 328 Lexicons of Early Modern English, 245–6 LGBTQIA+ students, 290 Li, Ruru, 209 LINCS Project, 242 Lindsay, Geoff, 57 linguistic ghetto, 47 Linkage Projects, 69 Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO), 205–7, 239 affordances, 243–7 asynchronous pedagogy and, 247 audiences, 245 editorial notes, 246 information architecture of, 243–5 linking in, 243 objectives of, 240–3 open access licenses, 248–9 overview of, 239–43 students and, 247–9 ‘Literary Hypertext’ (Coover), 209 Liverpool, 190–1 language of, 198–9 living variorum, 210, 213 Local and Global Shakespeares, 114, 117 local audiences, 121–2 Local Government Act of 1972, 190–1 LOCOG. See London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games London Bridge terror attack, 130 London Globe. See Shakespeare’s Globe

339

London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG), 316 London Symphony Orchestra, 307 Lovett, Tom, 196–7 Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOA), 32 Lozinskij, Mikhail, 231 LSOA. See Lower Layer Super Output Areas lusorium, 189 Luz, Thom, 50 Lyly, John, 51, 319–22, 328, 330 MA Shakespeare and Creativity programme, 92, 100–1 MA Shakespeare and Education programme, 92, 100 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 63, 76, 77, 98, 134, 145, 167–8, 292 Erskine on, 58–9 translation of, 149–50 ‘The Witches Song’, 55 Magill, Tom, 127–8 Makarov, Vladimir, 231 Mallaburn, Tom, 177 Manuel, Jacqueline, 69–70 Māori community, 170–1 The Maori Merchant of Venice, 170–1 Map of Early Modern London, 242–3 March, Florence, 24, 319–20, 325 Marokakis, Michael, 73, 78 Marston, John, 319 Martinez Corrêa, José Celso (known as Zé Celso), 215, 222 Massai, Sonia, 245 McDonald, Sarah, 116–17 McDowell, Miriama, 177 McKellen, Ian, 27 McKenzie, Mary, 297 McLaney, Paul, 174, 177 McMullan, Gordon, 89–90, 102–12 McPherson, Kathryn, 240–1 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 45, 168, 169–70, 328–30 Meisei Folio, 218–19 Melbourne, 118 Melbourne Malthouse, 119–20 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 1, 119–20, 287 in MIT Global Shakespeares, 233–4 Merritt, Jack, 130 Mersey Travel, 192–3 meta-cognition, 229 #MeToo, 45, 284–5 Mickey B, 127–8, 132–3 Microsoft Teams, 113, 123–4 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 43, 55, 63–4, 66, 76, 119–21, 149–50, 299 Oman performance, 312–16

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108778510.034 Published online by Cambridge University Press

340 Milford Haven, 36 Shakespeare Schools Festival at, 28–9 Mills, Perry, 319–20, 325, 328 on Edward’s Boys, 320–4, 327–30 Millwood, Mikaela, 182–3 MIT Global Shakespeares, 210, 233, 235 Hamlet in, 233–4 King Lear in, 233–4 Merchant of Venice in, 233–4 The Tempest in, 233–4 ModLab, 251–3 Monash Shakespeare Company, 120 Monash Warwick Alliance, 89, 113–16, 125 Moncrief, Kathryn, 240–1 Mondzain, Marie-José, 46–7, 51 Monk, Nicholas, 116–17 on portal pedagogy, 117 Montpellier, 42, 47–9, 319 Edward’s Boys Company in, 320–7 Morrison, Kyle J., 146, 148–50 in Hecate, 151 Mousley, Joanna, on SSF, 33–4 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare), 174 Mueller, Martin, 243–4 Muhammad, 42–3 Mulryne, Ronnie, 190 multi-disciplinary approaches, 26 multilingualism, 46, 46–7 Mulvany, Kate, 150–1 Munro, Lucy, 102–12 Muscat, 313 Butterfly in, 311–12 music, 198–9, 274 Naylor, Ben, 177, 180 Neighbours, 121–2 NESB. See non-English speaking backgrounds New Internet Shakespeare Editions (NISE), 240–1 Nice, 49, 49 NISE. See New Internet Shakespeare Editions non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB), 57–8 non-institutional spaces, 10–11 Noongar, 145–6 Noongar language, 142, 145, 153, 155 Bracknell on, 151–4 endangerment of, 147 Shakespearean language and, 152 translation to, 150 Yibiyung on, 148–9 Nunn, Trevor, 91–2 O’Hanlon, Jacqui, 93–100 Olivier, Laurence, 221, 234–5

Index Oman Butterfly in, 307–8, 311, 313, 314, 317 A Midsummer Night’s Dream performance in, 312–13 regions of, 309 youth in, 309 Othello (Shakespeare), 1 Othello the Remix, 132–3 The Other Place (TOP), 87–8, 91–2, 99 as creative engine, 92 RSC and, 92 UOB and, 93 Packer, Tina, 282 Padre Severino, 163–4, 166 Parker, Kathryn, 61 on Bell Shakespeare, 65–6 Parsons, Phillip, 177 particular drama, 177–8 passive encounters, 89 passive pedagogies, 36–7 Patchwork Girl (Jackson, Shelley), 209 pedagogy. See also portal pedagogy; rhizomatic learning asynchronous, 247 Bell Shakespeare, 60–2 in prison projects, 131 of SPP, 303 video-based, 231–5 of WSP/SC, 137 Pensalfini, Rob, 131, 136, 269, 295–6 on prison programs, 131 on ripples, 298 People’s Palace Projects (PPP), 162, 170 performance, 118. See also specific topics gender and, 297–8 prison projects and, 298 spectator in, 43 of SPP, 304–5 Perth Festival, 154, 155 Perusall.com, 228, 229 Pew Research Center, 282 Play the Knave, 13, 205–7, 251, 253, 257–8 collaboration and, 253 development of, 251–3 glitches utilised by, 253–4, 260–1 implementation of, 258 Knave Kits, 260–2 in university classrooms, 259 Pop-up Globe, 12–13, 118, 142, 143, 174, 185–7 audience at, 177–9 building of, 174–6 design of, 175–6 fake blood at, 180, 181 Gregory, M., on, 176–9

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108778510.034 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index Henry V at, 181, 182, 184–5 performances at, 175–6 playing at, 176–7 repertory system at, 177 seasons of, 174 Shakespeare’s Globe compared with, 175–6, 179 tensions and synergies at, 185–6 transformational educational experience at, 178–85 workshop sessions at, 186 portal pedagogy, 113 assessment in, 121–2 challenges in, 122–4 creative exercises, 119–21 defining, 115–16 fieldwork, 118–19 fun and, 125 intensive teaching, 124 Monk on, 117 outline of, 115–17 syllabus, 118–19 technical considerations, 122–4 Power, Dan, 327–8 PPP. See People’s Palace Projects Premodern Critical Race Studies, 2–3 Prescot Playhouse, 189–90 Prescot Playhouse Project, 188 Prescot’s Heritage Hub, 190–1 Prescott, Paul, 89, 113 primary education in Australia, 57–8 Bell Shakespeare and, 59 in United Kingdom, 57 in United States, 57 primary schools, Shakespeare education in, 57–8 Printemps des collégiens, 42, 50, 328–30 Printemps des comédiens, 41–2, 44–5 prison projects, 88–9, 127–8 emotions in, 135 exchanges with students in, 133–5 goals of, 131 identification with Shakespeare in, 132 pedagogy in, 131 Pensalfini on, 131 performance and, 298 prison rules navigated by, 128 results of, 128 prison rules prison projects navigating, 128 Tofteland on, 128–9 Progress 8, 36–7 projecting Shakespeare, 7–14, 89–90, 333 defining, 7 imagination in, 9

341

projectors, 7 prologues, 46 Pronouncing Shakespeare, 197–8 pronouns, 290 Pujante, Ángel Luis, 231 Pupil Referral Units, 29 Q Brothers’, 132–3 QME. See Queen’s Men Editions Queen’s Men Editions (QME), 239–40 Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble, 12–13, 295 Queensmill School, 35 Quince, Peter, 43 RaceB4Race, 2–3 racial diversity, at Viola Project, 291–2 Radical Mischief, 92–7, 100–1 Radical Mischief Conference 2018, 95–7 rage, 134–5 Railway Town Public School, 57–8, 62, 67 Ramnanan, Angela, 66–7 Ran, 234–5 rape, 286 Rathe, Stuart, 24–5 Read Not Dead project, 109–10 recreational activities, prison, 301 critiques of, 303 education contrasted with, 304 SPP ad, 302, 302–3 Reginalds, Emily, 184–5 rehabilitation courses Dunne in, 300 SPP and, 300 rehearsals, Shakespeare Schools Festival, 29–30 relationships, 23–4 remorse, 135 remote learning. See also portal pedagogy in COVID-19 pandemic, 116 Renaissance, 45 Renegade Theatre, 132–3 Renshaw, Diane on inclusivity, 61 on Shakespearean language, 63 rhizomatic learning, 226–28 text-based collaboration, 228–31 rhizomatic structure, 206 of Internet, 227 the rhizome, 226–7 Rhodon and Iris (Knevet), 248 Richard Brome Online, 243–4 Richard II (Shakespeare), 48 Richard III (Shakespeare), 286 ripples, Pensalfini on, 298 Rivendell Theatre, 283 Rokison-Woodall, Abigail, 93–100

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342

Index

Role on the Wall, 37, 38 at SSF, 38 romantic love, 65 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 64, 142–3, 180, 297–9 Erskine on, 63–4 Heritage on, 163–7 Rowland, Steve, 88–9, 127–9, 137 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), 12–13, 57, 87, 118, 124, 162–3, 272–4, 307–8 programming at, 92 Research and Development at, 94–5 TOP and, 92 Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST), 91–2 RSC. See Royal Shakespeare Company RST. See Royal Shakespeare Theatre Ryutopia Company, 215, 222 Sabatella, Leticia, 164–7 Saint-Denis, Michel, 91–2 Saints Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Primary School, 33–4 Salloum, Sara Liber, 198–9 Sanchez, Melissa E., 230 São Paulo Fórum, 159 Sawyer, R. Keith, 253–4 SBB. See Shakespeare Behind Bars SC. See Shakespeare Central School for Spectators, 50 Scofield, Paul, 234–5 secondary schools, 25 fear of Shakespeare in, 56–7 Sellars, Peter, 163 Selous, H. C., 215 Selwyn, Don C., 170–1 Semler, Liam, 10–11, 69–70, 93, 308 SEN. See Special Education Needs schools Severini, Gino, 8 sexual violence, 286 Seymour, Rae, 57 The Shadow King, 118–20 Shake Freestyle, 49 Shake Nice!, 49 Shakeserendipity, 80, 81 Shakespeare, William. See specific topics Shakespeare and Citizenship in France project, 23–4, 41–2, 325–6 aims of, 42–5 civil values of, 42–3 collaboration in, 48–52 cultural capital developed in, 47–8 equality of opportunity and, 52 IRCL on, 49, 52 School for Spectators, 50 solidarity fostered by, 48

Shakespeare and Me course, 129 ‘Shakespeare and Pedagogy’ Elements series, 2–3 Shakespeare Behind Bars (SBB), 127–8, 299–300 Tofteland on, 131 Shakespeare Brazil, 210 Shakespeare Census, 240–1 Shakespeare Central (SC), 13, 127, 129, 131–3 pedagogical goals of, 137–8 Shakespeare education. See also specific topics active and passive approaches to, 36 growth of field, 6–7 institutional history of, 2, 323 institutions and, 4–7 landscape of, 1–4 paradoxes of, 1, 11 in primary schools, 57–8 projecting, 7–14 Shakespeare Schools Festival and, 30–1 Shakespeare Electronic Archive, 209–11, 215, 223 Shakespeare for all Ages and Stages, 36 Shakespeare FutureEd symposium, 79, 81–2 The Shakespeare Imaginarium, 80 Principles of Imaginaria, 81 Shakespeare in India (Trivedi), 209 Shakespeare Lives, 311 Shakespeare North, 143, 188 Community Curators, 196–7 community education projects, 195–9 dialogism of, 192–5 history of, 188–2 professional and cultural values at, 193–4 project development, 192–5 Shakespeare North Community Symposia, 197–9 Shakespeare North Playhouse, 189–90, 192–3 planning permission, 195 Shakespeare North Trust, 189–90 Shakespeare on the Chinese Stage 1979–1989 (Li & Gillies), 209 Shakespeare Prison Project (SPP), 12–13, 268, 295, 304 atmosphere of, 302–3 behaviour models promoted by, 300 camaraderie in, 302 Dunne on, 296, 297, 297–8, 306 pedagogy of, 303 performances of, 304–5 recreational activities and, 302–3 as tacit rehabilitation program, 300 Shakespeare Redrawn, 80–2 Shakespeare Reloaded, 24–5, 69. See also Better Strangers Academic-in-Residence programs, 72 activities created by, 80

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108778510.034 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index as ardenspace, 71–4 complexity theory and, 74 components of, 72–3 design of, 74 edge of chaos and, 79–82 education conference, 73 emergence and, 74–9 impact of, 78 postgraduate units, 73 Travel Fellowships, 72, 76, 78 website, 69–70, 73 Shakespeare Schools Festival, 27 goals of, 32 history of, 28–31 inclusivity of, 31–2 intergenerational nature of, 32 at Milford Haven, 28–9 offerings at, 35 performance night, 30 rehearsals, 29–30 Shakespeare education and, 30–1 Shakespeare Schools Foundation (SSF), 23–4 assessment, 37–8 Assessment Objectives, 37 case studies of, 28 collaboration at, 39 disadvantaged schools defined by, 28 future of, 39 GCSE workshop, 37 Hodgkiss on, 33 Hot Seating at, 38 impact report, 30–2, 36 Knowsley and, 32 Mousley on, 33–4 objectives of, 31, 34 pedagogy, 35 projects of, 27–8 pupil-led approach at, 37 Role on the Wall at, 38 SEN schools and, 35 Teacher Director Workshop, 37 UK education system and, 36–9 Shakespearean language, 230 Bell Shakespeare on, 62–3 Emanuel on, 63 fear of, 56 Floyd on, 63 Noongar language and, 152 Renshaw on, 63 students intrigued by, 58 Vaughan on, 62 Shakespeare’s Globe, 12–13, 44, 87–8, 102, 105–7, 132–3, 179, 189–90 employability and, 107–8 Fitzpatrick on, 185, 186

343

KCL and, 105–7 Pop-up Globe compared with, 175–6 Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company and, 150 Shakespeare’s Life and Times (SLT), 240–1 Shakespeed, 80 Shaughnessy, Robert, 269, 271–9 Shaw, George Bernard, 120–1 Shelley, Mary, 209 Shewring, Margaret, 190 Shores, Amanda, 207, 251–3, 255–6, 259, 260 Signing Shakespeare project, 97–9 Silverstone, Catherine, 143, 159 on Fórum Shakespeare, 170–2 SLT. See Shakespeare’s Life and Times socio-economic status, arts activities and, 31–2 solidarity, 42–3 Shakespeare and Citizenship in France project fostering, 48 soliloquies, 58–9 Solomon, Lucy, 76 on Better Strangers, 78 emergence and, 74–9 Sonnets in Noongar project, 150 The Spanish Tragedy, 165 Special Education Needs (SEN) schools partnerships with, 27 SSF and, 35 spectatorship citizenship and, 51 civil rights and, 43 in performance, 43 Spottiswoode, Patrick, 103, 109–10 SPP. See Shakespeare Prison Project SSF. See Shakespeare Schools Foundation St. Anne’s Catholic Primary School, 33 standardisation, 79–81 Standardised Assessment Tests, 34 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 29 Stanley, Ferdinando, 188–9 stereotypes, female, 288 Stone, Rita, 179 storytelling, 313, 324 strategic presentism, 226 Stratford-upon-Avon, 118, 120, 124 students challenging, with Shakespeare, 45–8 exchange with, in prison projects, 58 LEMDO and, 247–9 LGBTQIA+, 290 Shakespearean language and, 58 as stakeholders, 247–9 technical, 29–30 transition to university, 70 Suematsu, Michiko, 213–14 Supple, Tim, 119–20

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344

Index

Swarbrick, Chlöe, 229 Sykes, Kimberly, 99–100 syllabus, portal pedagogy, 118–19 synergic pedagogy, 37 SysEd, 10, 74–5, 78 ardenspace contrasted with, 74, 79–81 coinage of, 70–1 complexity theory v., 71 defining, 71 systems theory, 70

United Kingdom, primary education in, 57 United States, primary education in, 57 universalism, 115 University of Birmingham (UOB), 87, 91 TOP and, 93 University of California, 251–3 University of Sydney, 81–2 University Paul-Valéry Montpellier, 41–2 Unlearning Shakespeare symposium, 76, 79 UOB. See University of Birmingham

Taft, Bill, 127–8 Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare), 1, 288–9 te reo Māori, 170–1 Teaching and Learning Caskets, 80, 81 Teaching Shakespeare (magazine), 2–3 technical students, 29–30 TEI Guidelines, 242, 247 teleconferencing, 123–4 telenovelas, 163–4 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 8, 35, 63–5, 76, 230, 332 in MIT Global Shakespeares, 233–4 terrorism, 130 Text Encoding Initiative, 241–2 text-based collaboration, 228–31 Thatcher, Margaret, 167–8 Théâtre d’O, 44–5, 322–3 Theatre in Prison (Balfour), 135–6 Theatre of the Oppressed, 303 Theatregoround, 91–2 theatrum, 189 Thomson, Leslie, 185–6 Time Out of Joint (documentary), 127–8 Times Educational Supplement, 27 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 1 Tofteland, Curt, 127–8 on prison rules, 128–9 on SBB, 131 TOP. See The Other Place Tosh, Will, 102–12 traditional classroom approaches, 27 translation, 25–6, 230, 231, 277–8 trans-space, 120–1 Trivedi, Poonam, 209 Trump, Donald, 284–5 Turchi, Laura, 255–6 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 43–4, 115, 118–20, 125–6, 159, 171–2, 299, 304–5 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 289

Valls-Russell, Janice, 319–20 on Edward’s Boys Company, 325–30 Vaughan, Jane, 57–8 on Bell Shakespeare, 66 on meaning, 65 on Shakespearean language, 62 video-based pedagogy, 231–5 Vidigal, 168–9 Vimeo, 233 Viola Project, 268 collaboration at, 289–90 contemporary state of, 283–4 on dead white men canon, 291–2 direct feminism at, 284–5 external wants in, 286–7 feminist programming at, 285–6 gender nonconforming youth at, 290–1 myriad narratives in, 287–8 narratives changed by, 288–9 origins of, 282–3 racial diversity at, 291–2 target age for, 285 violence, 129 intimate partner, 286 sexual, 286

UK education system, SSF and, 36–9 Understanding Shakespeare, 210, 212–13, 223 UNESCO Expert Group on Endangered Languages, 146

Waabiny Time, 150 Wanamaker, Sam, 103, 105, 189–90 Ward, Brendan, 259–60, 259 Ward, Sophie, 10–11 Warren, Michael, 211 on King Lear, 211 Warwick–Monash Co-Teaching Initiative, 12–13, 87–8 Waters, Charlie, 322 Weber, Lauren, 69–70, 73 ‘Weird Words and Bloody Battles’ unit, 76, 77 Wenley, James, 181, 184–5 Wentwork, F., 215 WhatsApp, 123–4 Whyman, Erica, 92, 93–6, 98–100 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 230, 231 Wilcock, Julian, 65

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108778510.034 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index Wilkinson, Dan, 322 Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 132–3 ‘The Witches Song’, Macbeth, 55 The Woman in the Moon (Lyly), 51, 320–2, 328, 330 The Woman-Hater (Beaumont), 51, 320–2, 328, 330 women. See also feminism; gender characters in Shakespeare’s plays, 282, 288 in Shakespeare’s time, 281 stereotypes about, 288 Wootten, Angela, 97 workshop sessions, at Pop-up Globe, 186 World Shakespeare Bibliography, 242–3 World Shakespeare Festival (WSF), 114, 307–8, 310, 316 World Shakespeare Project (WSP), 13, 127, 129, 131–3 pedagogical goals of, 137–8

345

World War II, reconstruction of France after, 44–5 Wozniak, Jan, 326–7 WSF. See World Shakespeare Festival WSP. See World Shakespeare Project Yibiyung Winmar, Roma, 145, 156 on Hecate, 154 on Noongar language, 148–9 Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company, 142, 143, 146, 148–51 Shakespeare’s Globe and, 150 Yong, Li Lan, 213–14 Young, Alan, 211 YouTube, 233 Zakharov, Nicolay, 231 zones of proximal development, 115 Zoom, 113, 116, 123–4 Zukofsky, Louis, 272

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108778510.034 Published online by Cambridge University Press