Shakespeare and Performance Pedagogy: Overcoming the Challenges

Abstract

Although performance-based pedagogy has clearly given new life to the study of Shakespeare, with ‘performance’ or ‘active’ approaches becoming increasingly dominant as a method, acquiring the status of the ‘proper’ way to teach Shakespeare, it is important to examine the limitations of this method. This article will begin by surveying the theoretical basis for performance pedagogy and the spectrum of performance methods available and will then go on to address three issues: limitations of time, deficient student acting and lack of teacher expertise. The issue of time can be addressed by the cost–benefit analysis of methods, the use of alternative approaches, the incorporation of film and desk-based performance. Poor acting can be improved through the acting exercises of Cicely Berry. Teachers can compensate for a lack of theatrical expertise by taking courses and studying the materials recommended in the article.

Keywords:

• Performance pedagogy
• Shakespeare
• pedagogy
• performance
• active approaches

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Bar-Ilan University for the Presidential Fellowship for Outstanding Scholars that partially funded this research.

Notes

1. In the United States, this approach is usually referred to as ‘performance’, whereas in Britain it is often called an ‘active’ approach. I will use the terms interchangeably throughout.

2. In the introduction to a book of essays she edited, Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance, Milla Cozart Riggio (1999) cites an example of a teacher contributing to a book of essays published in 1881, who was already clearly using performance techniques, without naming them as such, and in 1912 and 1917 articles that cited the importance of pedagogical performance of Shakespeare’s plays were already being published in English Journal (Haughey 2012).

3. One example: at the 2017 National Council of Teachers of English convention, there were eight presentations on the teaching of Shakespeare, and all of them appeared to focus on performance.

4. Even in pedagogical guides that do not purport to propagate performance methods, performance is often an intrinsic, taken-for-granted part of the approach. For example, see Teaching Shakespeare to Develop Children’s Writing and Holistic Shakespeare, both of which include activities that fall under the rubric of performance, even though the author’s emphasis is on other theoretical approaches.

5. I have found that these exercises can be productively used with non-Shakespearean texts as well.

6. Although these resources are intended for the high school classroom, with adjustments they can be productively used in other settings.