This conversation between Robert Shaughnessy and Kelly Hunter, which was recorded in December 2019 and so prior to the COVID 19 pandemic, gives an account of the principles and practices of Flute Theatre, a company founded by Hunter in 2014 to create Shakespeare performances with autistic young persons and their families. Beginning with the origins of the Hunter Heartbeat Method (HHM) in workshop game activities devised and developed by Hunter in a range of educational and community settings in the 1990s, the discussion highlights the core values of HHM: that the work is primarily artistic rather than pedagogic, therapeutic or remedial, and that performances are not designed to alleviate or overcome autistic symptoms and behaviour (classically, challenges in communication, personal interaction and repetitive and stereotyped behaviours) but to create a rhythmic space for interactive play. It tracks the evolution of a company and body of work that as to date resulted in three productions, The Tempest (2014), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2017) and Pericles (2019) and has led to the formation of a globally connected community of players, participants, supporters and artistic allies and collaborators, working across borders and in multiple languages.

This chapter describes The Viola Project, which is a theatre programme based in Chicago. It is an overtly feminist organisation with the specific mission of empowering girls and gender non-conforming youth through the performance of Shakespeare’s text. Amplifying the voices of students is at the heart of all programming. Shakespeare scene work anchors class activities, and texts are explicitly mined for themes of consent, body autonomy, racial and gender bias, and more. In any given year the programme serves between 75 and 100 individual students, many of whom attend multiple programmes. The programme is a charitable organisation and receives funding from state and local grants as well as foundations and individual gifts. Rather than revere and admire Shakespeare, The Viola Project students are encouraged to challenge the plays and make discoveries in the text. The Viola Project may source material from Shakespeare, but the mission has been shaped by our contemporaries. The Viola Project has evolved significantly since 2004 through a willingness to listen to students and learn from the research, experience and expertise of peer organisations.

This chapter describes the Better Strangers/Shakespeare Reloaded project, which is a collaborative education research partnership between the University of Sydney and Barker College (Sydney). The project’s initial design and its philosophical grounding in complexity theory are discussed before a detailed account is given of one teacher’s long-term involvement in project activities. The chapter describes many research and teaching initiatives and outputs generated during the life of the project and explains how they represent a pursuit of educational ardenspaces. Such ardenspaces are argued to be a necessary response to overly constraining educational systems because they allow imagination, creativity and freedom to flourish in teaching and learning.

This chapter describes a collaboration between its authors – a professor and an undergraduate (post-secondary) student – to develop an education programme for Play the Knave, a mixed-reality digital Shakespeare game. As part of an effort to bring the game to local elementary and secondary school English classrooms, the authors co-ran an internship programme at our university, where the game was created. Interns, most of whom were English majors interested in education, learned to create and then teach lesson plans for Play the Knave, subsequently researching the game’s impact on learning. Our chapter discusses the challenges of collaborating in a university environment, comparing these to the challenges players experience when interacting with avatars in Play the Knave. Like Knave’s players, participants in our programme faced difficulties connecting with other participants, including ourselves and local teachers. We maintain that flawed connection – which players of digital games describe as ‘glitchiness’ – need not undermine effective collaboration but can actually enhance it, as participants are pushed to adapt constantly to shifting circumstances. In contrast to theories of artistic collaboration that prioritize participants achieving a state of ‘flow’, we argue that, in fact, collaborations can be most successful when marked by fits and starts, lags and the imperfect connections endemic to living in a digital world.

The Shakespeare North Playhouse comprises a re-creation of Whitehall’s sixteenth and seventeenth century Cockpit in Court, enfolded in a modern building and performance garden housing community and educational activities. This chapter outlines the overall aims and the educational philosophy of the Shakespeare North project during its long phase of development (2004–21), as it worked towards the Playhouse’s realisation in 2022.

The chapter begins with a description of, and a meditation on, the implications of Shakespeare North’s location in the Liverpool City Region borough of Knowsley, a particularly deprived area of England. Summarising the historical background to Shakespeare North’s commemoration of the early modern performance culture of Knowsley, it suggests that viewing theatre history from the perspective of the regional might provide a fresh perspective on configurations of region, metropolis and nation both historically and in a modern context. From this, the chapter argues that connectivity and the dialogic might be central to all of Shakespeare North’s activities, especially the educational.

Following deliberation on enablements and difficulties involved in creating the playhouse as a heritage-based, urban-regeneration initiative through the interactions of diverse partnership organisations, the chapter finally suggests how the dialogic might inform Shakespeare North’s community education activities and experiments.

In May 2015, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and the University of Birmingham launched a five-year collaboration with the ambition to redefine the relationship between academic work and artistic practice. This chapter takes the form of an interview with RSC and University of Birmingham personnel, and discusses the processes and structures of the collaboration, whilst also engaging with the challenges and lessons learned over the course of the past five years. Liam Semler’s concept of ‘ardenspace’ is referenced to support the idea of a new space being created: a space where artists, scholars and students can experiment together to explore new possibilities for teaching, research and theatre practice. This chapter highlights the importance of collaboration and creative experiment while also reflecting on the challenges of enacting change beyond the walls of the rehearsal room or the teaching space. The collaboration ultimately asks for a redefinition of terms such as ‘research’ and ‘impact’ by challenging the University and the RSC into new ways of thinking, researching and teaching.

In 2016, France celebrated Shakespeare in the aftermath of devastating terrorist attacks which questioned the very notion of citizenship. In this context, the Institute for research on the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical Era and the Enlightenment (IRCL), together with the Printemps des comédiens, the second biggest theatre festival in France in terms of attendance and international visibility, launched an innovative and experimental educational project on Shakespeare and citizenship, involving five secondary schools with different social profiles in Montpellier. Throughout the year, six classes of students aged 14 to 15 worked on a Shakespeare play with their English, French and Civic Education teachers, researchers from the IRCL, actors and the staff of the festival, to put on their own school festival. Its preparation is as important as the result, since it allows the partners to address the three main values attached to the notion of citizenship: civility, civic rights and duties, and solidarity.

To meet these objectives, the IRCL, the festival and the schools progressively opened the collaborative project to other partners, and now have to find common ground between scientific, artistic, educational and socio-political logics. Shakespeare is the nexus between the various institutions working together on a project that reaches far beyond its initial educational purpose to confront and question methods, practices and policies, suggesting new, cross-bordering paths to explore collaboratively – all this in the jovial atmosphere of the Montpellier festival.

Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO) is an infrastructural project designed to host the New Internet Shakespeare Editions (NISE) and other anthologies of early modern plays. This chapter – the first scholarly piece about LEMDO as a project – begins with a brief overview of the origins of LEMDO and its three principal objectives: to preserve the work of the old ISE and its sibling projects; to build a platform that sets new standards for preparing and preserving digital editions; and to create a networked hub for the study of early modern drama. LEMDO provides tools to view Shakespeare ‘in combination’, serves multiple user groups and supports asynchronous collaboration. Although LEMDO disseminates both digital and print outputs through its partnership with UVic ePublishing, editors agree to leave their editions ‘open’ for future pedagogical annotations so that the edition can capture the performances and criticism that the edition inspires. Students are stakeholders in and co-creators of LEMDO as part of their education, not merely consumers of its outputs. The involvement of students makes long-term preservation an ethical matter.

Edward’s Boys’ productions of early modern drama provide valuable insights into a repertoire that was written mostly with children performers in mind, attracting a great deal of professional interest from academics and theatre practitioners. This chapter focuses on a collaboration between Edward’s Boys and the Montpellier Institute for research in the Renaissance, the neo-Classical era and the Enlightenment (IRCL). In 2016, 2018 and 2022, Edward’s Boys were invited to perform before audiences of Francophone teenagers in the context of an action research programme led by the IRCL with six high schools that explores ways of fostering civic values and linguistic skills through acting and spectating experiences (Florence March discusses this programme in Chapter 2 of this volume). For Edward’s Boys, performing in France represents a break with their usual performance and audience culture and offers a novel adaptive and educational experience. This chapter traces how this collaborative project was imagined, designed, implemented and experienced, and how adjustments were introduced between the 2016 and 2018 visits. It considers the underlying ethos of the project’s work with young performers and audiences, and reflects on the benefits and challenges such opportunities offer for creative, peer-to-peer interaction within a research context.

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.

A director who has facilitated Shakespeare programmes in prisons for fifteen years in conversation with a former prisoner who served eighteen years and who participated in four of those programmes. The authors explore the ways in which performative Shakespeare programmes fill a niche otherwise unoccupied in the prison system – a recreational programme that offers opportunities for collaboration, growth and the development of empathic and communication skills that are not constrained by a deficit-based and outcome-oriented pedagogy. The programme offers models of camaraderie and support that are not ‘in opposition to’ other groups, and promotes collaborative over individual achievement. The development of intrinsic motivation is a key component in functioning as a free citizen, but is actively discouraged by the correctional system. Prison Shakespeare programmes develop these skills in addition to offering a practical critique to the model of ‘toughness’ promoted by the prisoners’ own cultural milieu. The chapter speaks to the value of recreation for its own sake, and how it can be a vital component in both education and rehabilitation precisely because it does not set out to do either.

Working in different countries provides huge learning opportunities for theatre practitioners in understanding the capacity of drama pedagogies to uncover deep human connections beneath more superficial cultural differences, and to learn ways of negotiating the obstacles those cultural differences create. As recent years have brought more focus on both the social justice imperatives and the overall value of diversity and inclusion across schools and societies, the need to connect across cultures becomes ever more important. In this chapter we describe the journeys of our work exploring Shakespeare through intercultural dialogue with Omani colleagues. We describe the content and timeline of two interlinked multiphase education projects on Shakespeare with Omani teachers and students: the first with the Royal Shakespeare Company, which began as part of an education enquiry for the World Shakespeare Festival in 2012, and the second with Butterfly Theatre Collective, a small Meisner rooted company who specialise in exploring the uniqueness of every performance and performer. We offer a comparison of the practicalities in carrying out similar projects with two very different arts companies, and share the conceptual and emotional learning we found through our associations with Omani teachers, directors, actors and young people.

The World Shakespeare Project (WSP), directed by Sheila T. Cavanagh at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and Shakespeare Central (SC), created and led by Steve Rowland in Seattle, Washington, collaborate together regularly. The WSP uses site visits and videoconferencing to link diverse students, teachers and arts practitioners in Shakespearean-based conversations and performance exercises across many geographic, socio-economic and other divides. SC seeks to facilitate Shakespearean pedagogy in order to further its tenets that ‘Shakespeare is for Everyone’ and that ‘Shakespeare Changes Lives.’ The WSP/SC partnership takes many forms, but this Shakespeare in Prison project continues to teach us about ways to integrate personal experiences with academic undertakings. Shared explorations of Shakespeare appear to increase learning for everyone involved.

Cooperative learning as a pedagogical method effectively reflects the communal character of the performing arts. By creating knowledge about Shakespearean performance collaboratively, students and educators lay claim to the ethics and ownership of that knowledge, an act that is particularly urgent and meaningful in the age of COVID-19 when we need to rebuild sociality.

This chapter demonstrates how communal writing assignments and digital, video-based pedagogy turn textual and performative variants in Shakespeare’s plays into a cluster of inclusive narratives for critical analysis. Shakespeare is no longer a white canon with culturally predetermined meanings.

One effective tool for communal writing assignments is Perusall.com, an open-access platform that incentivize and support collaborative annotation of texts, images and videos. Grounded in the notion of textual variants, the pedagogy encourages students to claim Shakespeare’s language rather than aiming for interpretations that are gratuitous or merely politically correct.

Working in tandem with collaborative textual analysis is video-centric collaboration. By turning a large number of performance versions into common objects of study, my digital video project makes links between adaptations that were previously regarded as distinct. In pedagogical contexts, the malleability of digital video puts play texts and performances to work in an interactive environment. Online performance video archives can encourage user curation and interaction with other forms of cultural records. In practice, this redistributes the power of collecting, re-arranging and archiving cultural records away from a centralised authority to the hands of student users.

Borrowing a term from Larry Friedlander’s 1991 essay on the future of Shakespeare study in the digital age, “Shakespeare, Linking Archives, and the ‘Living Variorum’” argues that while extensive online Shakespeare archives and collections now exist, the future of online Shakespeare education might be well served by recalling the ambition of the pioneering pre-Web cross-media projects, and by: (1) expanding and linking existing archives in such a way that a student, researcher or anyone else interested in Shakespeare can access materials relevant to a line of text across all available media classes — text, commentaries, digital facsimiles of early editions, works of art and videos of performances and films; and (2) focus educational initiatives on the expanded possibilities, including support for student creation of multimedia essays, discussions and pathways that reading and writing across media in such a linked archives can provide. The chapter provides examples of such cross-media reading by drawing on existing projects including the MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive and Shakespeare Electronic Archive as well as HamletWorks, and Understanding Shakespeare to create sample pathways a student or researcher might take through key moments in Hamlet variant texts, illustrations, commentaries, and videos drawn from productions and films from the United Kingdom, Brazil, Japan and Russia.

This chapter investigates questions of language, context, cross-cultural communication and collective learning through three examples from Fórum Shakespeare. For the past twenty years, the (almost) bi-annual project Fórum Shakespeare has brought young actors from Brazilian peripheries together with theatre makers and audiences to ask questions about multicultural, multilingual and potentially mutually beneficial ways of engaging with Shakespeare. The three case studies discussed in this chapter include: Paul Heritage’s work on Romeo and Juliet with a group of juvenile prisoners in Rio de Janeiro in 1999; Bridget Escolme’s workshops for young people in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Brasília in 2011, 2013 and 2014; and Catherine Silverstone’s lecture and workshop for general audiences in São Paulo in 2016. The Fórum – and each case study – insists on the plurality of Shakespeare. The chapter explores how professional and non-professional participants have disturbed the harmful assumptions and challenged the negative expectations that limit young people, while teaching pleasure, resilience and compassion through performance. In Fórum Shakespeare meaning has consistently been constructed through exchange, with participants’ embodied acts of translation introducing new understandings of how working inter-culturally with Shakespeare’s texts can allow different stories to be told.