Shakespeare & Violence Prevention

A Practical Handbook for Educators

Amanda Giguere

• Publisher: University of Wyoming Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781646427239, 9781646427222
• eBook ISBN: 9781646427246
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama

Shakespeare and Violence Prevention is a handbook that guides educators through an exploration of Shakespeare's potential to address the public health issue of youth violence. Amanda Giguere presents Shakespeare's plays as a tool to understand, address root causes of, and prevent violence in our own communities. Performance-based engagement with the plays in an educational setting allows students to explore violence-prevention strategies, practice empathy, and build safer communities. Youth violence is an all too relevant topic, and this text helps educators, theatre companies, and academic theatre departments understand new ways in which the performing arts can positively impact young people.
 
Framed by examples from Giguere's work with the Shakespeare & Violence Prevention program, an interdisciplinary outreach project for K–12 schools developed at the University of Colorado Boulder, the text offers helpful entry points, digestible research, and practical exercises to align a violence-prevention curriculum with Shakespeare's plays. It provides a condensed overview of key findings from violence prevention, clear synopses of the plays, and practicable strategies to implement the program. Guided by firsthand experience with a tried-and-true school program that reaches thousands of K–12 students annually, Giguere shares the Colorado Shakespeare Festival method, which focuses on "upstander" roleplays to practice violence-prevention strategies. Using a clear distillation of Shakespeare studies and violence-prevention research, she shows how the two fields naturally reinforce the concepts of teamwork, empathy, change, and hope.
 
Shakespeare and Violence Prevention is a new spin on these classic texts that empowers teachers and community leaders to use these tools to create research-guided university engagement programs, theatre company outreach programs, and K–12 student engagement with Shakespeare, even for those without expertise in violence prevention or Shakespeare.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Macbeth: Empathy and Violence
• 3. Julius Caesar: Targeted Attacks and Warning Signs
• 4. Romeo and Juliet: Suicide and Community Violence
• 5. Much Ado About Nothing: “The Merry War”: Rumors, Gossip, and School Climate
• 6. Twelfth Night: Bullying and Cyberbullying
• 7. The Comedy of Errors: Presence, Breath, and Mindfulness
• 8. The Taming of the Shrew: Gender and Relationship Violence
• 9. The Tempest: Prospero’s “Rarer Action”: Forgiveness and Breaking the Cycle of Violence
• 10. Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A: Macbeth Materials
• Appendix B: Julius Caesar Materials
• Appendix C: Romeo and Juliet Materials
• Appendix D: Much Ado About Nothing Materials
• Appendix E: Twelfth Night Materials
• Appendix F: The Comedy of Errors Materials
• Appendix G: The Taming of the Shrew Materials
• Appendix H: The Tempest Materials
• References
• Index
• About the Author