Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays ed. by Laurie Ellinghausen (review)

Google the term “Teaching Shakespeare” and among the top hits will be: “How to Teach Shakespeare so Your Students Won’t Hate It,” “Teaching Shakespeare the Fun Way,” “How to Teach Shakespeare and Make It Understandable for Your Students,” and “Using Humor to Teach Shakespeare.” If this search is any indication, it seems clear that instructors want (or are required to) include Shakespeare in their curriculum, but how to do it in a way that engages students is not always evident. That’s where Laurie Ellinghausen’s Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays comes in. In this book, Ellinghausen has assembled a selection of excellent essays that collectively provide a thorough and innovative guide to bringing Shakespeare’s history plays to life in the modern classroom.

The book is broken up into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” provides instructors with resources for primary texts, performance, many branches of critical tradition based on the instructor’s interests, and digital resources. Part 2, “Approaches,” presents nearly thirty essays that provide exciting new material that is informative and accessible for everyone from a novice teacher to even the most seasoned instructor of Shakespeare, covering everything from the geography of the still-emerging Britain of Shakespeare’s time to land use, political power, ecological stewardship, and visualizing stagecraft. In Rebecca Ann Bach’s essay “Queering Richard II: Teaching Love, Sex, and Gender Historically,” the author takes us through an example close read of the text with a class. Bach points out that, in recent years, so much has changed in the United States in regards to gender and sexuality that students must take care not to make one-to-one comparisons in our modern thinking with what people in England thought four hundred years ago. In Lisa Siefker Bailey’s essay “Hustling Masculinity: Teaching 1 Henry IV with My Own Private Idaho,” the reader learns about the experiences Bailey’s students have had putting these two works in conversation with each other. Bailey notes that confronting the issues presented to them in Shakespeare’s text and Gus Van Sant’s movie emboldens students to engage in challenging dialogues.

When asked about the challenges this particular aspect of Shakespeare’s canon poses for students, one respondent talked about the fact that, when it comes to the comedies, students seem to come in with relatively positive ideas about them and “with tragedies, students seem to come to class knowing they are important and that they will be good” (24). However, with the history plays, students come in not understanding them or wanting to read them. Shakespeare’s history plays were written in a particular political and religious context that isn’t generally taught to students in the twenty-first century. Also, the issues don’t just begin and end there. It’s not difficult to see why students would be frustrated, with so many kinds of history at work in Shakespeare’s plays including (but not limited to) “medieval fabulae, urban history, chronicle history, classical allusion, and typological biblical history” (24). The essays compiled by Ellinghausen provide readers with specific approaches, relevant topic expansion, and additional resources.

Moreover, the book is laid out in a way that is both intuitive and user-friendly. Each essay offers unique perspectives and arguments that contribute to the reader’s sense of security and possibility. Using each essay as a jumping-off point leaves readers easily able to imagine additional activities and topics for exploration on their own. Hugh Macrae Richmond’s essay, “Teaching Shakespeare’s Histories Using the Internet,” provides a remarkably clear and concrete path to using the internet in tandem with the history plays. In “Teaching Shakespeare’s History Plays in the Composition Classroom,” by Diane K. Jakacki, the reader is presented with specific examples of assignments and even evaluation from Jakacki’s own classroom. With this essay in particular, it’s easy to see how an instructor can...