SOURCE: Skrebels, Paul. “Transhistoricizing Much Ado About Nothing: Finding a Place for Shakespeare's Work in the Postmodern World.” In Teaching Shakespeare into the Twenty-First Century, edited by Ronald E. Salomone and James E. Davis, pp. 81-95. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Skrebels attempts to bring out the universal human themes in Much Ado about Nothing by comparing the circumstances of the characters in the play with those of members of the British royal family in late-twentieth-century England—a pedagogical approach Skrebels calls “transhistoricization.”

Teachers and students studying Shakespeare's plays in the classroom (and teaching is surely another form of study) face a crisis, but the crisis is not a new phenomenon. It has existed at least since the early years of the twentieth century, when bodies charged with implementing educational policies in English-speaking societies—the Newbolt Committee in Britain after the First World War is...