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Teaching Shakespeare’s Theatre of the World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2025
Summary
This Element engages Shakespeare's greatest thought-experiment: how does one navigate the 'theatre of the world'? Throughout, it examines how Shakespeare challenges this metaphor's vertical hierarchies in response to changing understandings of cosmological order. Teachers will find rich contextual frameworks to help students investigate how Shakespeare recognises 'worlds' as emerging from dynamic variables, raising urgent questions about how identity and justice are environmentally constructed. Each discussion features student-centred 'Explorations', which are play-specific classroom activities, but also may be applied across Shakespeare's corpus and adapted for either secondary or university-level students. These exercises encourage students to practise non-linear critical and creative thinking, to contemplate big ideas and to generate new perspectives about the shared points of contact between Shakespeare's world and theirs.
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- Online ISBN: 9781009109888Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication: 31 December 2025
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