Study Guide: Basics

American Shakespeare Center Study Guides are a valuable resource for educators at the Advanced Placement and collegiate level, providing a start-to-finish outline for exploring a play through the ASC’s methods of performance-based learning. Our mission is to help you recover the joy of Shakespeare with your students through both his wordcraft and his stagecraft. Your students will discover that Shakespeare uses their language to tell their stories — stories of love and hate, jealousy and betrayal, dysfunctional families and challenging friendships — as vital and vivid now as they were four hundred years ago. Our goal is to get teachers out of the mindset that they have to teach Shakespeare like a novel. We encourage you to rearrange your classroom so that students explore the plays on their feet.