Shakespeare on Zoom!

Drama-based pedagogy, in the form of active Shakespeare, was an integral part of teaching The Merchant of Venice in the Language Arts classrooms of a Singaporean secondary school. It offered students the opportunity to engage playfully and imaginatively with Shakespeare, a playwright who could otherwise seem culturally and linguistically distant to them – positioning them ‘within’ the text as active co-creators of meaning, rather than ‘outside’ the text, struggling to understand it from a distance. When the COVID-19 pandemic drastically changed classrooms – taking lessons online and severely restricting in-person lessons – teachers found themselves asking if dramatic engagement with the play was possible amidst such constraints. This chapter describes how teachers explored ways to transfer drama-based pedagogy online, guided by the central principles of active Shakespeare and their strongly held ethos of the classroom as a social and dialogic space. It illustrates the flexibility and resilience of drama-based pedagogy and ‘active’ approaches, even under the most challenging of circumstances, and argues that the online space offers specific and surprising opportunities for imaginative engagement that differ from what is possible in a physical classroom.