Teaching Reading Shakespeare

Teaching Reading Shakespeare is warmly and clearly communicated, and gives ownership of ideas and activities to teachers by open and explicit discussion. John Haddon creates a strong sense of community with teachers, raising many significant and difficult issues, and performing a vital and timely service in doing so.

- Simon Thomson, Globe Education, Shakespeare’s Globe

John Haddon offers creative, systematic and challenging approaches which don’t bypass the text but engage children with it. He analyses difficulty rather than ignoring it, marrying his own academic understanding with real sensitivity to the pupils’ reactions, and providing practical solutions.

- Trevor Wright, Senior Lecturer in Secondary English, University of Worcester, and author of 'How to be a Brilliant English Teacher', also by Routledge.

Teaching Reading Shakespeare is for all training and practising secondary teachers who want to help their classes overcome the very real difficulties they experience when they have to ‘do’ Shakespeare.

Providing a practical and critical discussion of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays present problems to the young reader, the book considers how these difficulties might be overcome. It provides guidance on:

• confronting language difficulties, including ‘old words’, meaning, grammar, rhetoric and allusion;
• reading the plays as scripts for performance at Key Stage 3 and beyond;
• using conversation analysis in helping to read and teach Shakespeare;
• reading the plays in contextual, interpretive and linguistic frameworks required by examinations at GCSE and A Level.

At once practical and principled, analytical and anecdotal, drawing on a wide range of critical reading and many examples of classroom encounters between Shakespeare and young readers, Teaching Reading Shakespeare encourages teachers to develop a more informed, reflective and exploratory approach to Shakespeare in schools.

Teaching Reading Shakespeare is warmly and clearly communicated, and gives ownership of ideas and activities to teachers by open and explicit discussion. John Haddon creates a strong sense of community with teachers, raising many significant and difficult issues, and performing a vital and timely service in doing so.

- Simon Thomson, Globe Education, Shakespeare’s Globe

John Haddon offers creative, systematic and challenging approaches which don’t bypass the text but engage children with it. He analyses difficulty rather than ignoring it, marrying his own academic understanding with real sensitivity to the pupils’ reactions, and providing practical solutions.

- Trevor Wright, Senior Lecturer in Secondary English, University of Worcester, and author of 'How to be a Brilliant English Teacher', also by Routledge.

Teaching Reading Shakespeare is for all training and practising secondary teachers who want to help their classes overcome the very real difficulties they experience when they have to ‘do’ Shakespeare.

Providing a practical and critical discussion of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays present problems to the young reader, the book considers how these difficulties might be overcome. It provides guidance on:

• confronting language difficulties, including ‘old words’, meaning, grammar, rhetoric and allusion;


• reading the plays as scripts for performance at Key Stage 3 and beyond;


• using conversation analysis in helping to read and teach Shakespeare;


• reading the plays in contextual, interpretive and linguistic frameworks required by examinations at GCSE and A Level.

At once practical and principled, analytical and anecdotal, drawing on a wide range of critical reading and many examples of classroom encounters between Shakespeare and young readers, Teaching Reading Shakespeare encourages teachers to develop a more informed, reflective and exploratory approach to Shakespeare in schools.

John Haddon has over 30 years’ experience of teaching English in the classroom, 17 of them as a Head of Department. He has contributed to a number of titles on A Level teaching practice, English in the National Curriculum and teaching fiction at Key Stage 3.