Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays

When I saw this title listed to be reviewed, doing so immediately drew me.  Without hesitation, I offered to critique it and looked to the project with eagerness. Here I suppose I must digress a bit to explain why this title intrigued me.

In the spring of 1960, I took my sophomore level introductory Shakespeare class. At that time the University of Louisville did not have a resident Shakespeare specialist.  The class was rotated among interested faculty whose areas of concentration were not the English Renaissance.  The professor whose turn was to teach Shakespeare that semester was Dr. David W. Maurer, a nationally known linguist, whose specialty was the argot of criminals, prostitutes, and conmen. His most important book was 1940’s The Big Con, the source for the 1974 Paul Newman and Robert Redford Academy Award winning movie The Sting. On the first day of class, Maurer announced that the semester would be spent on reading Shakespeare’s history plays. I suppose many of us students barely audibly groaned.  Having already read a few of Shakespeare’s plays, including Macbeth and Hamlet in high school, I was eager to move on to As You Like It, Othello, and King Lear, plays which I knew were rated among Shakespeare’s best, Luckily I was familiar with Richard…