Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Does the audience of Hamilton need to understand "history" to be aesthetically and critically engaged?Crowds watching early productions of Shakespeare's histories would have been in much the same position.Two hundred years after the historical fact, an audience might recognize big names and major conflicts.The intricacies of plot would feel new, however; many details would be allusive noise, yet somehow transformed into a narrative with compelling characterization and themes.With only a genealogical chart and mini-lecture on the Wars of the Roses, most of our students will be as prepared for Shakespeare as they are for Lin-Manuel Miranda.But how we teachers of the histories can inspire the fervour audiences bring to Hamilton is at the heart of Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays, a collection of pedagogical resources and strategies from instructors aware of the barriers to learning the histories: overwhelming dumps of names, sometimes incomprehensible political stakes, a focus on the unrelatably high and great (with seemingly invisible female characters), and (at least in North America) none of the cachet of Hamlet.Editor Laurie Ellinghausen provides an excellent addition to the Modern Language Association's Approaches to Teaching series.The book follows the forms common to the entire series and succeeds in targeting specialists and non-specialists, whether they are teaching one text or many.Summarizing results of a survey of 130 experienced teachers of the histories, part 1 offers "Materials" that include preferred editions, useful supplementary resources, key primary texts, critical traditions, and available performances and digital resources (and related scholarship).Part 2 provides a trove of 29 brief essays guaranteed to inspire whatever your approach, available class time, or interest.Having difficulty helping students find their way in?Have students make a map to understand geographic and cultural disjunctions; build word clouds to understand political campaign messaging; employ Stanislavskian method, or make a text-based legend with coloured pencils to understand characterization.Want a theoretical approach?Try the ecocritical, global, or gender offerings by noted experts in their fields.Tired of Richards and the popular Henries?Get an idea for incorporating Henry VI (1-3), King John, or Henry VIII.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".