An important part of the ongoing quest to make literary education more inclusive has involved recognizing the individuals who have enriched Shakespeare studies over the years. This includes acknowledging the students and teachers operating within that most unlikely of places: the colonial school. While Gauri Viswanathan argued that, in British India, ‘the Eurocentric literary curriculum of the nineteenth century’ was ‘a vital, active instrument of Western hegemony’, a growing number of critics have drawn attention to the ways in which the students and teachers within the colonial English literature classroom refused to accept imperial diktat, and instead re-interpreted Shakespeare on their own terms.

This easily overlooked passage within a somewhat obscure volume describes what may very well be the first private shrine to Shakespeare, an indication of the long-departed playwright’s elevated status in this particular household.

The household in question was that of the 4th Earl of Shaftesbury and his wife, the Countess, Susanna Ashley-Cooper, foundress and leader of the Shakespeare Ladies Club. This group of women, in the late 1730s and through the turn of the decade, was responsible for petitioning and persuading London theatre managers to stage Shakespeare’s plays more frequently and revive many of his dramatic works that had not been performed since the Restoration. Now that the theatre was a commercial venture, no longer sustained by royal patronage, it was common for influential aristocratic persons to request (or ‘bespeak’) performances of particular plays.

Paul Prescott concluded the last survey of Shakespeare productions outside London with mention of his favourite production of 2019, a Hamlet in Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands. His injunction to remember that there is ‘a world elsewhere’ feels ever more timely in a year that has seen the UK government neglecting (or forgetting) Northern Ireland as it negotiates trade deals, and whose devolved policies on COVID-19 restrictions have made border crossings within mainland Britain an unusually fraught process. In inheriting this column – with its remit to cover productions in England outside London – the question of borders that separate Theatr Clwyd from Liverpool Everyman (my two local theatres growing up) or Watford Palace from the Globe (at what point is one outside London?) feels part and parcel of an England that too often forgets it is not, in John of Gaunt’s words, ‘bound in with the triumphant sea’.

In the summer of 2020, libraries were closed and the universities in the UK were in chaos, in the wake of decisions being made by the government about student results and social distancing. Writing about Shakespeare pedagogy under lockdown conditions sharpens one’s focus in terms of the resources that are available, physically, digitally and intellectually. In addition to the loss of access to the libraries in person, having recently given up my position at Royal Holloway University of London, I found myself in digital isolation, in terms of access to resources that were formerly at my fingertips. The cancellation of the 2020 International Shakespeare Conference on Shakespeare and Education in Stratford intensified this isolation in thinking about pedagogic practice in my study, rather than in the classroom or in a conference seminar room. However, what remained available to me was my international network of colleagues, with whom I have been discussing for many years the possibilities that the digital world opens up for supporting the teaching of Shakespeare in performance.

With the proliferation of online learning, a phenomenon that has been exponentially magnified by the COVID-19 crisis, the physical classroom can no longer be taken for granted as the default Shakespeare learning experience. We are increasingly being asked to transform our teaching in ways that will be compatible with the online environment. At first glance, it may seem that the online environment is more conducive to traditional lecture and discussion-driven pedagogies for teaching dramatic texts because such methods can be transformed into their online counterparts in a relatively straightforward fashion. In contrast, performance and active learning are more complicated to put online, often requiring substantial reimagining to function within an online framework. However, performance brings to the classroom a vital energy and active engagement with drama that is worth the trouble. Focusing on performance and active learning methods, the current article will explore options for engaging with performance pedagogy to teach Shakespeare’s dramatic texts in an online setting.

In a speech delivered in 1943 at the British–Norwegian Institute in London at the British Council’s request, T. S. Eliot asked his audience what relevance poetry had in the society of that period; of course, he could not articulate more explicitly the question that was clear to all those attending the conference: that is, what is the use of poetry when society is being devastated by a global war? The conflict was raging throughout Europe, and when it finally ended, Eliot repeated the same speech and asked the same question in a recently liberated Paris, in May 1945. According to T. S. Eliot in ‘The social function of poetry’ – the title under which his address was finally published in The Adelphi in July 1945 – it is undeniable that poetical language must in the first place ‘give pleasure’; however, the author is also persuaded that poetry is not only pleasure-giving but useful, in that it is able to convey ‘some new experience, or some fresh understanding of the familiar, or the expression of something we have experienced but have no words for, which enlarges our consciousness or refines our sensibility’. To put it differently, poetry possesses a unique power to endow all people, even those ‘who do not enjoy poetry’, with words for what they experience but would not know how to say otherwise. Ergo, it does have a relevance in any society and at any time in history. And this is true for all poetic languages, I argue, including dramatic poetry, and Shakespeare’s above all.

Tim Smith was born on 24 April 1955, his birthday falling, in his words, ‘the day after Shakespeare’s – probably’. His father, an evangelical minister, surrounded his son with Bible stories, like the father of the protagonist, Luke Jones, in the novel series Smith later wrote about a Shakespeare-loving cop: ‘I was raised in a land of absolutes. I’m not comfortable living in a land of absolutes. My dad’s a fundamentalist preacher. He’s a good man, but he can form a stronger opinion in less time, on less information, than anyone I’ve ever met.’

As well as being, in all likelihood, ‘Shakespeare’s School’, King Edward VI School in Stratford-upon-Avon has another long-lasting connection to the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. For over a decade, ‘K. E. S.’ has been home to Edward’s Boys, an all-boy acting troupe whose productions of plays by Francis Beaumont, Thomas Dekker and John Webster, John Ford, Ben Jonson, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, John Marston, Charles May, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Nashe and John Redford constitute the largest corpus of early modern drama in present-day performance.

In 1612, with the sudden death of Henry Frederick, King James I and VI’s oldest son and heir, a potential future was cut short. Henry Frederick had been an icon of futurity, a ‘champion of Protestant and national interests, promoted in the context of a neo-chivalric revival’. As J. W. Williamson shows in his study of the prince’s mythology, ‘the quality of Protestant symbology as it applied to Prince Henry was unusually relentless’. He was, to the Scots poets who eulogized his birth, a ‘Hercules’ who offered a future free from vice. With his death, these hopes were ended. Henry Frederick, who fashioned himself as a far more militant figure than his father, could be mourned only for the battles he might have won. In a letter to Lady Carleton, dated 19 December 1612, Isaac Wake describes Henry’s armour being paraded before his mourners, ‘every parcel whereof, to his very gauntlet & spurs was carried by men of quality’. His funeral was punctuated by military music: ‘Henry’s obsequies, which buried him with the trappings of a Protestant warrior-king, were more reflective of what might have been than of what was.

Problems with putting on a play are a staple feature of drama at the turn of the seventeenth century, in both tragic and comic modes. Revenge tragedies, for example, use theatrical errors to correct moral errors, in productions like ‘Soliman and Perseda’ (in The Spanish Tragedy) and the ‘The Masque of Juno’ (in Women Beware Women). City comedies use problems on stage to comment on class, as when setting the script of ‘The London Merchant’ against the improvised plot of The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Literary critics tend to approach such moments in two ways, either relishing their metadrama or finding parallels with the main themes of the play. Only William West deals with early modern confusion in plays as a topic in its own right, arguing that plays of the 1580s and 1590s dramatized errors to prompt questions of epistemology and hermeneutics; he does not discuss real-life mistakes on stage. Roger Savage looks at continental (especially Italian) playbook prefaces and production manuals which have advice implying a pragmatic understanding of what can go wrong.

In 2017, the American Shakespeare Center (ASC) launched an initiative to engage new plays in conversation with Shakespeare’s. Proposed by Jim Warren (ASC co-Founder, with Ralph Alan Cohen) and implemented by Ethan McSweeny (named Artistic Director in 2018), ‘Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries’ promises to debut thirty-eight new plays – one for each of Shakespeare’s thirty-eight – over the next few decades. To date, three ‘New Contemporaries’ have been performed in repertory, with the works that inspired them. In February 2019, during the ASC’s Actors’ Renaissance Season, Amy E. Witting’s Anne Page Hates Fun debuted beside The Merry Wives of Windsor; in May 2019, during the ‘Hand of Time’ Tour Homecoming, Mary Elizabeth Hamilton’s 16 Winters, or The Bear’s Tale played in repertory with The Winter’s Tale; in May 2020, in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, Emma Whipday’s Defamation of Cicely Lee debuted as a live-stream reading in consort with a streamed performance of Cymbeline offered under the title of Imogen.

The Ghost’s depiction in recent film and stage productions of Hamlet ranges from paternal and benevolent to potentially demonic. In Branagh’s 1996 film, it (Brian Blessed) whispers to Hamlet from among the trees in an ominous wood, before descending out of nowhere and grasping him by the throat. It continues to whisper with a harsh intensity, but its voice conveys little change in emotion and its expression is fixed. Its eyes are a shining pale blue, evoking the supernatural; it is easy to think that this Ghost might be demonic. In contrast, Doran’s Ghost (Patrick Stewart) speaks and acts like a living person, alternating between distress, outrage and indignation, physically expressive and pacing about energetically. At one point it clutches Hamlet in a fervent embrace – after temporarily assaulting him. Doran’s performance was consistent between stage production and its accompanying film released the following year.

Wherever English language, literature and culture have travelled in this world, it has been Shakespeare who received the greatest adulation. Bengali literature too was not divorced from such an activity. It was quite natural that Bengali literature adopted the subject, content and style of Shakespeare as evidenced in the schema of world literature. However, in the context of Bengal, the assimilation was not restricted to aspects of dramatic forms only, and mediated beyond literary imagination to engage into a deeper level of political and cultural discourse. While nineteenth-century Bengal evidenced widespread changes in intellectual temperament leading to a heightened intellectual ferment and creativity, it also resulted in a restructuring and reshaping of imported ideas, thereby evolving a new indigenous culture, which gave Bengal a distinctive identity. The inclination for an education in the English language among the middle classes eager to take advantage of knowing the language and acquiring the culture of the colonial rulers, along with a rapidly growing print culture, led to a growing demand for Shakespeare’s works, which at least initially, captured the imagination of Bengalis as a repository of Western culture.

As elementary and secondary school educators increasingly adopt digital games to teach content in a range of subjects, and as education and game scholars turn their attention to ‘serious games’, it is worth noting that serious games are nothing new to Shakespeare classrooms. Non-digital games and playful performance practices have long been a standard part of teaching the dramas of Shakespeare. Indeed, the use of physical, play-based methods of teaching Shakespeare – or what we shall call ‘playful pedagogy’ – has become something of an industry in the world of Shakespeare education. Theatrical games and dramatic playfulness are central to the teacher-training programmes touted by Education departments in many well-established Shakespeare theatres. The Royal Shakespeare Company calls their programme ‘rehearsal room pedagogy’, Shakespeare’s Globe has its ‘Globe Strategies’, Chicago Shakespeare has its ‘drama-based strategies’, and there are similar initiatives at other theatres, including the American Shakespeare Center in Virginia and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Education departments of these and other Shakespeare theatres offer specialized workshops that train teachers to use playful pedagogy in their classrooms.

One of Jack Cade’s more utopian demands in King Henry VI, Part II is to dispense with books altogether, arraigning the Lord Say not only for being complicit in the loss of Normandy but also for the corruption of ‘the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school’ whereby books were the new currency issuing forth from his own paper-mill, ‘contrary to the King his crown and dignity’ (4.7.31, 34–5). This is no simple parody of the fall-guy conspirator, however, for there – unexpectedly – is some force in his objections to civility. The act of appointing Justices of the Peace who could try poor men who knew not how to answer so as to claim benefit of clergy (4.7.38–43) has its own cogency, even if it is bundled up with the same mob mentality that also cares not to enquire about personalities when Cinna the Poet in Julius Caesar is in the wrong place and at the wrong time (3.3).

Shakespeare claims a significant place in pedagogical and performative environments of many kinds, including an increasing number of correctional facilities. As the increasing number of book and articles focused on Shakespeare in Prison describe, textual and performative engagement with this drama offers thematic resonances, while supporting physical, emotional and intellectual development; and opportunities to engage in communal activities for people who have often experienced more trauma than success in their previous lives. Thanks to the virtual Shakespeare in Prison Network and the biennial Shakespeare in Prison conference, many international prison practitioners, current programme participants and alumni are forging strong ties that help individual groups to create programming, share strategies and gain the confidence built through common pursuits. These bonds have been particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many face-to-face meetings were cancelled, particularly in correctional spaces, since these environments often breed widespread infection. Virtual associations, therefore, have provided valuable opportunities to geographically distanced Shakespeare in Prison practitioners, eager for community during challenging times. Connections between far-flung Shakespeare and Prison programmes have only recently begun to encompass India, however.