Teaching Shakespeare and His Sisters

This Element explores an embodied approach to teaching Shakespeare and his 'sisters', bringing drama activities into the English Literature classroom.

This Element explores the possibilities of an 'embodied' pedagogical approach as a tool to inform literary analysis; such an approach does not 'minimize' the distinction between the literary and the theatrical, but rather, explores how these two modes interrelate.What are we teaching, when we teach Shakespeare? Today, the Shakespeare classroom is often also a rehearsal room; we teach Shakespeare plays as both literary texts and cues for theatrical performance. This Element explores the possibilities of an 'embodied' pedagogical approach as a tool to inform literary analysis. The first section offers an overview of the embodied approach, and how it might be applied to Shakespeare plays in a playhouse context. The second applies this framework to the play-making, performance, and story-telling of early modern women – 'Shakespeare's sisters' – as a form of feminist historical recovery. The third suggests how an embodied pedagogy might be possible digitally, in relation to online teaching. In so doing, this Element makes the case for an embodied pedagogy for teaching Shakespeare.