Teaching Shakespeare beyond the Centre: Australasian Perspectives ed. by Kate Flaherty, Penny Gay, L. E. Semler (review)

The teaching of Shakespeare, no matter where or at what level, comes with much baggage. Many of the preservice secondary Drama and English teachers I help to train, anticipating students “forced” to read Shakespeare, find themselves asking questions that reestablish stereotypical boundaries and tired assumptions about the cohorts they will teach: Is it better to champion the text or explore the play as written for performance? How do I combat the preconception that Shakespeare is too “hard” and/or “boring”? How do I break through the fog of social-media-addled brains? Why are we teaching four-hundred-year-old plays at all? Or perhaps the ultimate cliché of the prospective Shakespeare teacher: how do I make him relevant? Teaching Shakespeare beyond the Centre is, at times, an inspiring collection of essays devoted to working against the grain of such thinking. The approaches covered here are often simultaneously innovative and resistant: encouraging creativity and collaboration while at the same time never accepting that engaging with the text should be anything less than at the center of Shakespeare pedagogy. It is a book predominantly committed, despite its antipodean focus, to providing adoptable models and strategies that could be applied in any Shakespeare classroom.

The editors feel that we are very much “beyond” the “Centre” at issue in the volume’s title, acknowledging that, at least historically, the extra burden of teaching or performing Shakespeare in Australia and New Zealand has often involved redressing encumbrances that are as much postcolonial as pedagogical, invoking old bugbears like the “cultural cringe” or a sense of being at the margins of the old Empire. Shakespeare still dominates theater repertoires and English curricula in ways that homegrown playwrights do not. As Kate Flaherty reminds us in “Habitation and Naming: Teaching Local Shakespeares,” the essay that perhaps best encapsulates this book’s sense of place, “Shakespeare is still the most popularly performed playwright in Australia” (79), and yet, it is “entirely possible to study Shakespeare without encountering one Australian example” (78). Flaherty’s chapter makes an impassioned plea for the greater inclusion of local Shakespeare productions as objects of study in Australian universities as a means of both interrogating the persistent cultural centrality of these works and understanding the “situatedness” of what it means to read, teach, perform, and study them on Australasian shores (84). “In gazing across the expanse of sea to a spectral otherness of Shakespeare,” she argues, “the student misses the bracingly complex, lived and felt work of making Shakespeares on Australian soil and the reality of his or her own potential to contribute to that work” (85). It is a point well made (even if a touch zealously at times) and one worth heeding as perhaps the most fervent clarion call of the collection to teachers in this region.

More contemplative figurations of place and locality can be seen in the three fine historical essays that comprise the book’s opening section. However, it is the chapters in the volume’s central section that establish one of its strongest recurring themes: a riposte to the idea of Shakespeare teaching (or nearly any subject for that matter) as being only about knowledge transmission from ivory towers to students as mere passive consumers of information. Instead, a far more playful, exploratory kind of teaching is promoted, one both irreverent and critically reflective. These essays ask that teachers and students rethink, and even unthink, received ideas about Shakespeare in ways that build capacity for unfettered critical thinking and collaborative engagement. This is certainly the case with Jennifer Clement’s thought-provoking chapter, “Admitting to Adaptation in the Shakespeare Classroom”—partially a reflection on teaching Macbeth in a school in Christ-church, New Zealand by way of the suburban burger-joint politics of Billy Morrissette’s film adaptation Scotland, PA. Whether...