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Shakespeare’s Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning

Shakespeare’s Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning

by Lisa Dickson, Shannon Murray and Jessica Riddell

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

3 colour illustrations, 5 b&w illustration

Digital download
9781487570545
Published: December 2022

Digital download
9781487570538
Published: December 2022

Description
Contents
Authors

"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.

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

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 professor of English and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Excellence at Bishop’s University.