I was finalizing this book, while juggling the usual frenzy of the end of the academic year. On a Saturday morning, I ordered bagels for my kids for breakfast through a phone delivery app, hoping to gain a few hours to write. After I placed the order, I received a confirmation text with an estimated delivery time. Twenty minutes later, as I settled down to work, I received another text letting me know my order was on the way. Then the doorbell rang, and the bagels arrived. I placed the bagels in the kitchen and sat down at my desk again, attempting to write. At that point I received a third text notifying me that my order had arrived. Every time a text arrived, I picked up my phone automatically and, without noticing, clicked on a few more apps. Despite my best efforts, I started work an hour later than intended that morning.

In 2017, I began giving lectures to parents about technology overuse through my school outreach program. I explained that this is not just about kids playing video games all night, but that it is about all of us. We are all over-users. We all love our technologies too much. We all use them much more than we intend. I talked about the costs to ourselves, our families, and our relationships. I discussed self-help measures because I knew parents wanted a solution. But I was honest about the difficulty of limiting kids’ use of smartphones, social networks, and games. I then opened the floor for discussion, hoping parents could give one another ideas that had worked in their community. During the first year, what followed astounded me. As one parent after another spoke, revealing their struggles, the other parents turned around to one another. “You too?” was the resounding reaction. Followed by reactions such as, “My daughter said I was the only parent prohibiting her from using Snapchat!” There was a sense of surprise, but also a sense of relief that they were all together in this.

Industries rely heavily on resources. Resource scarcity and price fluctuations can significantly affect business outcomes. Traditional industries rely on tangible materials. The automobile industry, for example, uses iron, aluminum, glass, and other physical resources. In recent years, we have seen a shift toward increased use of intangible resources, like patents or information.1 The Internet economy is not the first to rely on intangible resources, but it does one thing differently. It keeps these resources at the back of the stage – in the shadows.

I graduated from law school in the mid-1990s with a concentration in intellectual property law. I was interested in the new economy; in technology; in legal change. After law school, I moved from the United States to Israel, where I started working in a leading law firm in Tel-Aviv. The law firm was as old school as could be, and so were many of its clients. I hoped to work on intellectual property cases, but – to my dismay – the law firm assigned me to work on antitrust cases. Antitrust was the antithesis of where I expected to start my career. I viewed it as the law of brick and mortar. Indeed, antitrust law grew regulating the old economy; railroad and oil companies dominate the classic antitrust court cases.1

Most parents came to hear my talks because they were desperate. They wanted to know what to do to re-engage with their kids. Without fail, when I switched to my slide that listed the self-help methods, parents took out their phones to take pictures of that slide. I suggested using apps limiting time on devices. I talked about creating device-free times and zones during mealtimes or certain hours before bed. I talked about the importance of modeling. When parents spend a lot of time on their phones, so will children once they get them. I spoke at length and offered a list of strategies. I wanted badly to offer hope. But by 2019, I felt discouraged. I was no longer a believer. I still felt these methods could make a difference, especially when the children were on board. But I realized that self-help could only solve a small part of the problem.

In 1998, I worked in a law firm in midtown Manhattan. I spent too many long days and nights at my desk, unsurprisingly gaining weight. I wanted to diet, but it turned out to be a bigger challenge than I had expected. Until then, I had lived most of my life in Israel. The Israeli diet is very different from the American diet. I grew up regularly eating vegetable salads with light dressings. My American friends are often amazed when they realize my family and I still eat vegetables for breakfast. I recall, then, my disappointment as I tried out many lunch places around my office. These lunch joints offered mainly sandwiches. When I spotted a dish that resembled a salad it usually floated in mayonnaise.

Premiering at Perth Festival in 2020, Hecate is the first stage adaptation of 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. Australia is home to hundreds of Aboriginal languages, most of which are endangered due to settler-colonial suppression of Aboriginal culture. Today, although there are over 30,000 Noongar people, the Noongar language is rarely heard spoken in full sentences. More than being a significant artistic achievement, presenting Shakespeare in Noongar has provided a rare opportunity for Noongar and other people to actively engage with the Noongar language in deep and lasting ways. As a nation with a noted cultural cringe, Australia places high cultural value on Shakespeare. The opportunity to develop Hecate as a Noongar-language work arose because engaging with the English literary tradition – and particularly Shakespeare – attracted the necessary government and philanthropic support, media attention and audience interest. In Hecate, Shakespeare’s venerated status has been subversively used as a chink in the settler-colonial armour through which Noongar cultural activism, and deeper ‘felt’ intercultural understanding has been achieved via various collaborative processes, most importantly in developing a Noongar language-speaking ensemble of Noongar actors.

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.

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, England 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.

The Pop-up Globe took as its starting point ground-breaking research into the second Globe playhouse, and its size and configuration reflect the geometry theorised in that research. Its design maps onto the archaeology of the first and second Globes much more accurately than does Shakespeare’s Globe in London, and its reproduction of the geometry of the original Globes results in an actor–audience relationship that is markedly more intense and intimate. It has delivered seven critically acclaimed and successful seasons (Auckland 2016, 2017, 2017/18, 2018/19; Melbourne 2017/18; Sydney 2018; Perth 2019) that have created a whole new audience for Shakespeare in repertory, often with transformative educational effects.

But it is a scaffolding building, not timber framed as is the London Globe; the features of its stage and scenae frons and the staging practices employed in its productions have developed from one iteration to the next, referencing historical practices and staging theories but overtly prioritising modern production imperatives. So, what is it that constitutes its historical authenticity?

The authors of this chapter are the principal academic and theatre maker involved in this collaboration, and they reflect on the relationships between a pure historical research project into the architecture of the second Globe playhouse and its application in the Pop-up Globe, on the effects of that architecture on its audience, and on the issues and creative tensions that flow from two radically different but inter-dependent projects.

In 2001, King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre created a collaborative Shakespeare Studies Master’s degree programme – the first Master’s in Shakespeare Studies to be taught jointly by a university and a theatre – that has run for twenty years and continues to thrive. This chapter is an edited conversation between four of the academics who have taught on the degree programme – two based at King’s, two at the Globe – in which they address the unique nature of the Globe as a combined theatrical/educational organisation, the origins of the collaboration between King’s and the Globe, and the value it has brought to both partners. The conversation turns to the pedagogical value of the degree, the difference it has made not only intellectually but also to the employability of its alumni, and the impact it has had on the cultural sector in London and beyond. The participants also address the difference this collaboration between an experimental theatre and a university has made to the research orientation of the academics involved and, finally, they discuss the question of the reproducibility of the degree and the conditions that need to be in place for an educational collaboration of this kind to be sustained.