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By Amanda Giguere (Thtr'10)

(University of Wyoming Press; 278 pages; 2025)

Shakespeare and Violence Prevention��is 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 helps��educators, theatre companies, and academic theatre departments understand new ways in which the performing arts can positively impact young people.
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Framed by examples from Giguere’s work with the Shakespeare & Violence Prevention program, an interdisciplinary outreach project for K–12 schools developed at the ɫ�����ֱ��, 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.
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