About this Book

For over four hundred years, Shakespeare’s plays have captured readers and audiences around the globe, coming to life in innovative ways with each generation and culture that encounters them. In this book, students at McMaster University critically analyze and creatively intervene in this ongoing legacy through a focus on Shakespeare and/as adaptation.

To embolden future students to engage critically and creatively with Shakespeare, the book offers a repository of outstanding Shakespeare and/as Adaptation projects by students enrolled in English 2HT3 Fall 2020 (as well as one project from an earlier course at McMaster taught by Dr. Chantelle Thauvette in 2012).

Please note, while this book as a whole appears under a CC BY-NC license, several student authored chapters are separately licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND license. Please consult licenses for those individual chapters.

Prior to working on their final projects, students analyzed how Shakespeare’s plays engage creatively and critically with cultural narratives familiar to early modern English audiences and readers. They also analyzed how people from subsequent time periods and cultures have engaged, and continue to engage, creatively and critically with Shakespearean narratives. Through a variety of short assignments, they practiced formulating engaging questions about Shakespeare and working closely with Shakespeare’s plays — and adaptations of those plays — to develop critical and creative thinking, writing, and research skills.

The Shakespeare and/as Adaptation final project gave students an opportunity to revisit and synthesize these knowledges and skills by applying them, in greater depth, to one Shakespeare play from our course list. For this project, students chose one of three possible options.

• Option 1 provided students a structured vehicle for creating and then analyzing their own adaptations of Shakespeare — borrowing from the master borrower himself, as it were, as a means of speaking to their own targeted audiences.
• Option 2 offered students the chance to consider in greater detail how an artist or writer from a later time period borrows from Shakespeare, adapting one of his plays to explore messages of particular relevance to that artist or writer’s audience.
• Option 3 gave students the opportunity to explore in a more focused way how Shakespeare himself used old texts and stories to say new things to his early modern audience.

In all three options, the book’s student authors close read a scene from one play to demonstrate their argumentation and creativity in connection with key themes from Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, including but not limited to tyranny, revenge, disability, misogyny, race, religion, and colonialism.

This book also serves as a resource for instructors. The English 2HT3 Shakespeare and/as Adaptation Final Project assignment itself borrows and adapts models generously shared by Dr. Chantelle Thauvette (McGill University, formerly an instructor at McMaster University and assistant professor at Siena College) and Dr. Natasha Korda (professor at Wesleyan University). Just as Dr. Thauvette and Dr. Korda’s pedagogical innovations inspired us to further amplify student voices through this book, so Shakespeare and/as Adaptation seeks to inspire new pedagogical experiments rooted in student-instructor partnerships.

To that end, Section IV includes two easily adaptable templates: an invitation letter to be sent to potential student contributors, and a student consent form. The consent form asks each student contributor to choose how they wish their chapter to be attributed and which Creative Commons license they wish their individual chapter to be published under. We hope that these documents will be helpful to instructors interested in partnering with student contributors on future Open Educational Resources aimed at encouraging and amplifying student engagement.