ABSTRACT
This chapter gathers sample classroom exercises and assignments solicited by the editors, both privately and through an open call for submissions, from teachers of Shakespeare who relate his work explicitly to the classics and the idea of the "classic." Shakespeare's Othello is often read side by side with Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi, widely acknowledged as the main source for the play. The title may prompt the student to pursue the broad question of (dis)-continuities - discursive and/or textual - between the medieval and early modern periods. This can then be narrowed by the student to a comparative and contrastive investigation of one or more topics such as gender norms, sexuality, genre, literary and social conventions of courtly love or romance, and so on. Renaissance schoolboys were time travelers - their studies took them on imaginative journeys to the classical past, journeys that allowed them to pilfer valuable linguistic and cultural treasure from the ancient world and bring it home to England.
