Shakespeare & Violence Prevention: A Practical Handbook for Educators
By Amanda Giguere (Thtr'10)
(University of Wyoming Press; 278 pages; 2025)
Shakespeare and Violence Preventionis 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 student
s to explore violence-prevention strategies, practice empathy, and build safer communities. Youth violence is an all too relevant topic, and this text helpseducators, 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 鶹Ƶ, 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.