'What is the most wonderful thing about teaching this play in our classrooms?' Using this question as a starting point, Shakespeare's Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning presents a conversation between four of Shakespeare's most popular plays and our modern experience, and between teachers and learners.
The book analyzes King Lear, As You Like It, Henry V, and Hamlet, revealing how they help us to appreciate and responsibly interrogate the perspectives of others. Award-winning teachers Lisa Dickson, Shannon Murray, and Jessica Riddell explore a diversity of genres tragedy, history, and comedy with distinct perspectives from their own lived experiences. They carry on lively conversations in the margins of each essay, mirroring the kind of open, ongoing, and collaborative thinking that Shakespeare inspires.
The book is informed by ideas of social justice and transformation, articulated by such thinkers as Paulo Freire, Parker J. Palmer, Ira Shor, John D. Caputo, and bell hooks. Shakespeare's Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning advocates for a critical hope that arises from classroom experiences and moves into the world at large.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Shakespeare, the Classroom, and Critical Hope
Part One: King Lear
Keep Falling, Alice: Rabbit Holes, Monkey Wrenches, and Critical Love in King Lear
Jessica Riddell
Impossible Choices and Unbreakable Bonds in King Lear: Close Reading, Negative Capability, and Critical Empathy
Shannon Murray
"Bless Thy Sweet Eyes, They Bleed": The Ethics of Pedagogy and My Fear of Lear
Lisa Dickson
Part Two: As You Like It
Learning as an Act of Becoming in As You Like It
Jessica Riddell
"Sweet Are the Uses of Adversity": Duke Senior’s Arden as a Hopeful Creation
Shannon Murray
Something Wicked: Verse and Bodies in As You Like It 5.2
Lisa Dickson
Part Three: Henry V
Henry V: Prophecy, Hope-Speak, and Future-Speak
Shannon Murray
Orators of Hope or Rhetors Gone Rogue? The Ambiguities of Persuasion in Henry V
Jessica Riddell
"We Should Just F**k around with Some Text": Henry V and the White Box Classroom
Lisa Dickson
Part Four: Hamlet
Chasing Roosters on the Ramparts: Three Ways of Doing in Hamlet
Lisa Dickson
Acknowledging the Complexity of Unknowing as an Act of Critical Hope in Hamlet
Jessica Riddell
Wonder and Dust in a Hopeful Hamlet
Shannon Murray
Epilogue: The Value of the Edges
Works Cited
Index
About the Author :
Lisa Dickson is a 3M National Teaching Fellow and a full professor of early modern literature and literary theory at the University of Northern British Columbia.
Shannon Murray is a 3M National Teaching Fellow and a full professor of early modern and children's literature at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Jessica Riddell is a 3M National Teaching Fellow, Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence, and a full professor of early modern literature at Bishop's University.
Review :
"This wonderful and wonder-filled book cracks open traditional ideas of scholarship."
--Sandra Bell, University of New Brunswick, Saint John
"This is a book you will read once for sheer pleasure, again for inspiration, and a third time to be reminded why teaching and learning in the humanities classroom matter, now more than ever."
--Arlette Zinck, The King's University
"Three self-proclaimed 'wyrdos' offer their takes on four frequently taught plays. Through their marginal banter, Dickson, Murray, and Riddell punningly 'under-stand' each other - and thereby model the intellectual friendship that all readers endlessly reenact through Shakespeare's words."
--Scott Newstok, author of How to Think like Shakespeare
"Framing Shakespeare pedagogy around ideas of critical hope, critical empathy, and critical love, this book speaks to a post-pandemic age. Smart, witty, theatrically engaged, and profoundly compassionate, it reimagines writing about Shakespeare as a playful act of multivocal interruption - guaranteed to have readers reaching for their pens to fill the margins with their own interruptions."
--Carol Chillington Rutter, University of Warwick
