The conclusion ties together some of the arguments that have recurred throughout this book. Productions of Shakespeare often cast a spotlight on core debates within a conflict, but do not have fixed wartime identities and are, instead, malleable and responsive as a result of their multi-layered networks of production and reception, which is the core methodological framework proposed in this book. It examines the recent use of Hamlet during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to reflect on the future of ‘wartime Shakespeare’ and the need for further studies that emphasize the transnational mobilization of Shakespeare that reflects the increasing ‘place-less-ness’ of modern conflict.

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.

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.