Industries rely heavily on resources. Resource scarcity and price fluctuations can significantly affect business outcomes. Traditional industries rely on tangible materials. The automobile industry, for example, uses iron, aluminum, glass, and other physical resources. In recent years, we have seen a shift toward increased use of intangible resources, like patents or information.1 The Internet economy is not the first to rely on intangible resources, but it does one thing differently. It keeps these resources at the back of the stage – in the shadows.

I graduated from law school in the mid-1990s with a concentration in intellectual property law. I was interested in the new economy; in technology; in legal change. After law school, I moved from the United States to Israel, where I started working in a leading law firm in Tel-Aviv. The law firm was as old school as could be, and so were many of its clients. I hoped to work on intellectual property cases, but – to my dismay – the law firm assigned me to work on antitrust cases. Antitrust was the antithesis of where I expected to start my career. I viewed it as the law of brick and mortar. Indeed, antitrust law grew regulating the old economy; railroad and oil companies dominate the classic antitrust court cases.1

Most parents came to hear my talks because they were desperate. They wanted to know what to do to re-engage with their kids. Without fail, when I switched to my slide that listed the self-help methods, parents took out their phones to take pictures of that slide. I suggested using apps limiting time on devices. I talked about creating device-free times and zones during mealtimes or certain hours before bed. I talked about the importance of modeling. When parents spend a lot of time on their phones, so will children once they get them. I spoke at length and offered a list of strategies. I wanted badly to offer hope. But by 2019, I felt discouraged. I was no longer a believer. I still felt these methods could make a difference, especially when the children were on board. But I realized that self-help could only solve a small part of the problem.

In 1998, I worked in a law firm in midtown Manhattan. I spent too many long days and nights at my desk, unsurprisingly gaining weight. I wanted to diet, but it turned out to be a bigger challenge than I had expected. Until then, I had lived most of my life in Israel. The Israeli diet is very different from the American diet. I grew up regularly eating vegetable salads with light dressings. My American friends are often amazed when they realize my family and I still eat vegetables for breakfast. I recall, then, my disappointment as I tried out many lunch places around my office. These lunch joints offered mainly sandwiches. When I spotted a dish that resembled a salad it usually floated in mayonnaise.

Premiering at Perth Festival in 2020, Hecate is the first stage adaptation of Shakespearean work, in this case Macbeth, to be performed entirely in one Aboriginal language from Australia, specifically the Noongar language from Western Australia’s southwest. Australia is home to hundreds of Aboriginal languages, most of which are endangered due to settler-colonial suppression of Aboriginal culture. Today, although there are over 30,000 Noongar people, the Noongar language is rarely heard spoken in full sentences. More than being a significant artistic achievement, presenting Shakespeare in Noongar has provided a rare opportunity for Noongar and other people to actively engage with the Noongar language in deep and lasting ways. As a nation with a noted cultural cringe, Australia places high cultural value on Shakespeare. The opportunity to develop Hecate as a Noongar-language work arose because engaging with the English literary tradition – and particularly Shakespeare – attracted the necessary government and philanthropic support, media attention and audience interest. In Hecate, Shakespeare’s venerated status has been subversively used as a chink in the settler-colonial armour through which Noongar cultural activism, and deeper ‘felt’ intercultural understanding has been achieved via various collaborative processes, most importantly in developing a Noongar language-speaking ensemble of Noongar actors.

Shakespeare education is being reimagined around the world. This book delves into the important role of collaborative projects in this extraordinary transformation. Over twenty innovative Shakespeare partnerships from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, Europe and South America are critically explored by their leaders and participants. Structured into thematic sections covering engagement with schools, universities, the public, the digital and performance, this book offers vivid insights into what it means to teach, learn and experience Shakespeare in collaboration with others. Diversity, equality, identity, incarceration, disability, community and culture are key factors in these initiatives, which together reveal how complex and humane Shakespeare education can be. Whether you are interested in practice or theory, this collection showcases an abundance of rich, inspiring and informative perspectives on Shakespeare education in our contemporary world.

This chapter describes an innovative collaborative teaching model developed by colleagues Paul Prescott (Warwick), Fiona Gregory (Monash) and Gabriel García Ochoa (Monash) using what is known as ‘the international portal space’, a state-of-the-art teleconferencing system developed by the University of Warwick, England and Monash University, Australia. This technology is fundamentally different to platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, the use of which became widespread during the COVID-19 global pandemic of 2020. Unlike Zoom, portal pedagogy is predicated on in-person learning that it combines with digital technology to allow students from different institutions to work together in real time (in our case, early morning in the United Kingdom and evening in Australia) and in real spaces on a shared syllabus. In the unit ‘Local and Global Shakespeares’, offered in 2016 and 2017, students on opposite sides of the globe were able to engage with Shakespeare, building their own and a shared knowledge of Shakespearean performance in local and global frameworks. Working alongside students from a different cultural context also forced students to reconsider their understanding of the ‘natural’ and ‘given’ in relation to Shakespeare, and thus, in relation to their understanding of culture more broadly. This chapter examines the application of portal pedagogy and other strategies that we employed to show how this unit sought to reimagine the possibilities of internationally collaborative Shakespearean teaching and learning.

The Pop-up Globe took as its starting point ground-breaking research into the second Globe playhouse, and its size and configuration reflect the geometry theorised in that research. Its design maps onto the archaeology of the first and second Globes much more accurately than does Shakespeare’s Globe in London, and its reproduction of the geometry of the original Globes results in an actor–audience relationship that is markedly more intense and intimate. It has delivered seven critically acclaimed and successful seasons (Auckland 2016, 2017, 2017/18, 2018/19; Melbourne 2017/18; Sydney 2018; Perth 2019) that have created a whole new audience for Shakespeare in repertory, often with transformative educational effects.

But it is a scaffolding building, not timber framed as is the London Globe; the features of its stage and scenae frons and the staging practices employed in its productions have developed from one iteration to the next, referencing historical practices and staging theories but overtly prioritising modern production imperatives. So, what is it that constitutes its historical authenticity?

The authors of this chapter are the principal academic and theatre maker involved in this collaboration, and they reflect on the relationships between a pure historical research project into the architecture of the second Globe playhouse and its application in the Pop-up Globe, on the effects of that architecture on its audience, and on the issues and creative tensions that flow from two radically different but inter-dependent projects.

In 2001, King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre created a collaborative Shakespeare Studies Master’s degree programme – the first Master’s in Shakespeare Studies to be taught jointly by a university and a theatre – that has run for twenty years and continues to thrive. This chapter is an edited conversation between four of the academics who have taught on the degree programme – two based at King’s, two at the Globe – in which they address the unique nature of the Globe as a combined theatrical/educational organisation, the origins of the collaboration between King’s and the Globe, and the value it has brought to both partners. The conversation turns to the pedagogical value of the degree, the difference it has made not only intellectually but also to the employability of its alumni, and the impact it has had on the cultural sector in London and beyond. The participants also address the difference this collaboration between an experimental theatre and a university has made to the research orientation of the academics involved and, finally, they discuss the question of the reproducibility of the degree and the conditions that need to be in place for an educational collaboration of this kind to be sustained.

This conversation between Robert Shaughnessy and Kelly Hunter, which was recorded in December 2019 and so prior to the COVID 19 pandemic, gives an account of the principles and practices of Flute Theatre, a company founded by Hunter in 2014 to create Shakespeare performances with autistic young persons and their families. Beginning with the origins of the Hunter Heartbeat Method (HHM) in workshop game activities devised and developed by Hunter in a range of educational and community settings in the 1990s, the discussion highlights the core values of HHM: that the work is primarily artistic rather than pedagogic, therapeutic or remedial, and that performances are not designed to alleviate or overcome autistic symptoms and behaviour (classically, challenges in communication, personal interaction and repetitive and stereotyped behaviours) but to create a rhythmic space for interactive play. It tracks the evolution of a company and body of work that as to date resulted in three productions, The Tempest (2014), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2017) and Pericles (2019) and has led to the formation of a globally connected community of players, participants, supporters and artistic allies and collaborators, working across borders and in multiple languages.

This chapter describes The Viola Project, which is a theatre programme based in Chicago. It is an overtly feminist organisation with the specific mission of empowering girls and gender non-conforming youth through the performance of Shakespeare’s text. Amplifying the voices of students is at the heart of all programming. Shakespeare scene work anchors class activities, and texts are explicitly mined for themes of consent, body autonomy, racial and gender bias, and more. In any given year the programme serves between 75 and 100 individual students, many of whom attend multiple programmes. The programme is a charitable organisation and receives funding from state and local grants as well as foundations and individual gifts. Rather than revere and admire Shakespeare, The Viola Project students are encouraged to challenge the plays and make discoveries in the text. The Viola Project may source material from Shakespeare, but the mission has been shaped by our contemporaries. The Viola Project has evolved significantly since 2004 through a willingness to listen to students and learn from the research, experience and expertise of peer organisations.

This chapter describes the Better Strangers/Shakespeare Reloaded project, which is a collaborative education research partnership between the University of Sydney and Barker College (Sydney). The project’s initial design and its philosophical grounding in complexity theory are discussed before a detailed account is given of one teacher’s long-term involvement in project activities. The chapter describes many research and teaching initiatives and outputs generated during the life of the project and explains how they represent a pursuit of educational ardenspaces. Such ardenspaces are argued to be a necessary response to overly constraining educational systems because they allow imagination, creativity and freedom to flourish in teaching and learning.

This chapter describes a collaboration between its authors – a professor and an undergraduate (post-secondary) student – to develop an education programme for Play the Knave, a mixed-reality digital Shakespeare game. As part of an effort to bring the game to local elementary and secondary school English classrooms, the authors co-ran an internship programme at our university, where the game was created. Interns, most of whom were English majors interested in education, learned to create and then teach lesson plans for Play the Knave, subsequently researching the game’s impact on learning. Our chapter discusses the challenges of collaborating in a university environment, comparing these to the challenges players experience when interacting with avatars in Play the Knave. Like Knave’s players, participants in our programme faced difficulties connecting with other participants, including ourselves and local teachers. We maintain that flawed connection – which players of digital games describe as ‘glitchiness’ – need not undermine effective collaboration but can actually enhance it, as participants are pushed to adapt constantly to shifting circumstances. In contrast to theories of artistic collaboration that prioritize participants achieving a state of ‘flow’, we argue that, in fact, collaborations can be most successful when marked by fits and starts, lags and the imperfect connections endemic to living in a digital world.

The Shakespeare North Playhouse comprises a re-creation of Whitehall’s sixteenth and seventeenth century Cockpit in Court, enfolded in a modern building and performance garden housing community and educational activities. This chapter outlines the overall aims and the educational philosophy of the Shakespeare North project during its long phase of development (2004–21), as it worked towards the Playhouse’s realisation in 2022.

The chapter begins with a description of, and a meditation on, the implications of Shakespeare North’s location in the Liverpool City Region borough of Knowsley, a particularly deprived area of England. Summarising the historical background to Shakespeare North’s commemoration of the early modern performance culture of Knowsley, it suggests that viewing theatre history from the perspective of the regional might provide a fresh perspective on configurations of region, metropolis and nation both historically and in a modern context. From this, the chapter argues that connectivity and the dialogic might be central to all of Shakespeare North’s activities, especially the educational.

Following deliberation on enablements and difficulties involved in creating the playhouse as a heritage-based, urban-regeneration initiative through the interactions of diverse partnership organisations, the chapter finally suggests how the dialogic might inform Shakespeare North’s community education activities and experiments.

In May 2015, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and the University of Birmingham launched a five-year collaboration with the ambition to redefine the relationship between academic work and artistic practice. This chapter takes the form of an interview with RSC and University of Birmingham personnel, and discusses the processes and structures of the collaboration, whilst also engaging with the challenges and lessons learned over the course of the past five years. Liam Semler’s concept of ‘ardenspace’ is referenced to support the idea of a new space being created: a space where artists, scholars and students can experiment together to explore new possibilities for teaching, research and theatre practice. This chapter highlights the importance of collaboration and creative experiment while also reflecting on the challenges of enacting change beyond the walls of the rehearsal room or the teaching space. The collaboration ultimately asks for a redefinition of terms such as ‘research’ and ‘impact’ by challenging the University and the RSC into new ways of thinking, researching and teaching.

In 2016, France celebrated Shakespeare in the aftermath of devastating terrorist attacks which questioned the very notion of citizenship. In this context, the Institute for research on the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical Era and the Enlightenment (IRCL), together with the Printemps des comédiens, the second biggest theatre festival in France in terms of attendance and international visibility, launched an innovative and experimental educational project on Shakespeare and citizenship, involving five secondary schools with different social profiles in Montpellier. Throughout the year, six classes of students aged 14 to 15 worked on a Shakespeare play with their English, French and Civic Education teachers, researchers from the IRCL, actors and the staff of the festival, to put on their own school festival. Its preparation is as important as the result, since it allows the partners to address the three main values attached to the notion of citizenship: civility, civic rights and duties, and solidarity.

To meet these objectives, the IRCL, the festival and the schools progressively opened the collaborative project to other partners, and now have to find common ground between scientific, artistic, educational and socio-political logics. Shakespeare is the nexus between the various institutions working together on a project that reaches far beyond its initial educational purpose to confront and question methods, practices and policies, suggesting new, cross-bordering paths to explore collaboratively – all this in the jovial atmosphere of the Montpellier festival.