‘Play’ing Shakespeare: Use of Boardgames in Shakespearian Pedagogy

Abstract

Since Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest, the teaching of Shakespeare in India has been seen as a hangover of British colonization serving to export the English worldview; and, over the years, academia has advocated either replacing him with indigenous and/or global narratives, or utilizing his text as allegories of critical theories. The teacher of Shakespeare, thus, faces a double challenge: the preconceived notions that students commence with – that Shakespeare is intractable and archaic or too philosophically ‘high’ culture to be enjoyable, as well as the ‘postcolonial’ stance of modern academia that he is irrelevant to life, culture and the academic career of students. The teaching of Shakespeare as a literary text that can be creatively and culturally engaging as well as socially and politically resonant becomes challenging in the face of student apathy – students are no longer motivated to learn or enjoy the plays or appreciate the nuances of the language. Therefore, to make Shakespeare more accessible and ‘fun’ for undergraduate students of literature, a board game was conceptualised employing the ‘active method’ pedagogy. The game, which included text-based questions and performance, dramatization and analysis, tested and reinforced the student’s knowledge of the text, as also her interpretive, dramatic and improvisation skills. This paper is a discussion of the gamification of a Shakespearian play, the kinds of questions it poses and challenges it addresses in the Shakespeare classroom.