ABSTRACT
Though most people today admire Shakespeare and believe he should be taught both to adult students and children of all ages, many also question, often based upon unhappy high school experiences, whether an art so clearly intended for public performance can possibly be presented effectively within a classroom setting. In part, it was the serious difficulty of helping university English students experience the joys of Shakespeare in performance that prompted me to found an amateur acting troop, ACTIO, that is dedicated to exploring how performance enhances, affects, and effects the meaning of literary texts. Though only some of its exercises can be brought into a classroom, ACTIO has altered my pedagogy enough that if someone now asks how I teach Shakespeare, my first response is to say that our class plays with “the Bard” through performance games that seek the spirit of each play we study. To borrow from that great actor and theorist of the theater, Hamlet, we seek to use performance to “hold the mirror” of our human “nature,” body and soul, so as to reflect the splendor of Shakespeare’s art, without attempting to “pluck out the heart of [his] mystery” (Ham. 3.2.20, 348).
