The Shakespeare Set Free Books

PEGGY O'BRIEN: The idea behind Shakespeare Set Free is that— parts of them are about scholarship and new ways to look at plays, and if you are an American teacher of Shakespeare, you most often teach the same play year after year, or the same couple of plays. And so the idea of how scholars are looking at these plays in new ways is very refreshing and enlightening.

And the other thing is that teachers are busy people, and how could we organize information, new information, new insights on plays and new insights on ways of teaching these plays in a way that would be useful for teachers? And the idea is that nobody knows how to teach better than a middle school or a high school teacher. They are the people who are brilliant at really knowing how to get that stuff across—get anything across!

Not to say that people who are teaching the post-doctoral seminar are not brilliant, but you know what? They don’t know how to teach the way these guys do. So, my notion was—let’s get the best teachers on earth and get them to work together and get them to create a set of source books that then could be made available to teachers all over the country. And so that’s where this three volume series Shakespeare Set Free came from, and it’s been very popular. But teachers have really found them useful. They use them like cookbooks. I mean they take them, they mark them up, they add their own stuff, they pass them around to their department. And they can tell right off that these ideas, which have been tested with real students in real classrooms, have really been created by real teachers who are interested in them and improving their work.