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Jun 12, 2026
Teaching Shakespeare's Theatre of the World
Summary
Teaching Shakespeare's Theatre of the World (Cambridge University Press, 2025) engages with one of Shakespeare's greatest thought-experiments: How does one navigate the 'theatre of the world'?
It invites students to examine how Shakespeare challenges this metaphor's vertical hierarchies in response to shifting understandings of cosmological order.
Teachers will find rich contextual frameworks for exploring how Shakespeare envisions 'worlds' as emerging from dynamic variables, raising urgent questions about how identity and justice are environmentally constructed.
Focal plays include A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello.
Each discussion features student centered 'Explorations'.
These play-specific classroom activities can also be adapted across Shakespeare's corpus and tailored for both secondary and university-level students.
These exercises encourage non-linear critical and creative thinking, inviting students to contemplate big ideas and generate new perspectives about the shared points of contact between Shakespeare's world and their own.
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John Yargo
John Yargo is Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. He has published in Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies.
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