Shakespeare in the Classroom

There is sometimes a perceived divide between the scholarly monograph and the textbook, at least in the minds of the academic community and its funding bodies. Certainly this is the case in the UK's all-consuming Research Assessment Exercise - the method by which all Higher Education Institutions are vetted and rated for their 'research quality' by the funding arm of the British government - the influence of which on this year's output of critical studies is palpable in terms of monographs by UK academics (many of which I will come to in the last section of this article). Only the 'scholarly', 'full-length' monograph is usually deemed suitable for submission as part of an individual academic's publishing and research profile. And yet, as a host of publications this year demonstrate, some fine work is published in the textbook domain, and is frequently fed directly by cutting-edge research. The shorter, pithier book may do its intellectual work more efficiently and with a potentially broader reading audience than some over-stretched 'full-length' rivals. One of the interesting themes to emerge, then, amongst this year's batch of books is a deep concern with Shakespeare in the classroom, how we deploy his works, the manner and context of our teaching of Shakespeare, but also how we encourage students to do their own things with those works. Two collections of essays are notable in this regard: G. B. Shand’s Teaching Shakespeare: Passing it On and Laurie Maguire’s How to Do Things with Shakespeare.