Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

New approaches to teaching a familiar work

By the time they encounter Romeo and Juliet in the classroom, many students have already been exposed to various, and sometimes incongruous, manifestations of Shakespeare's work. This volume makes a virtue of students' familiarity with the preconceptions, anachronisms, and appropriations that shape experiences of the work, finding innovative pedagogical possibilities in the play's adaptations and in new technologies that spark students' creative responses.

The essays cover a wide area of concerns, such as marriage, gender, queer perspectives, and girlhood, and contributors embrace different ways of understanding the play, such as through dance, editing, and acting. The final essays focus on decolonizing the text by foregrounding both the role of race and economic inequality in the play and the remarkable confluence of Romeo and Juliet and Hispanic culture.

This volume discusses the following texts: Valeria Luiselli's "Shakespeare, New Mexico," James Lujan's Kino and Teresa, Guadalupe Garcia McCall's Shame the Stars, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Taylor Swift's song "Love Story" is discussed in the volume, as are the following films: Alan Brown's Private Romeo, Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, Carey Williams's R#J, Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins's West Side Story, and Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.