For much of the twentieth century Shakespeare was taught in universities as a poet to be read. The argument that the plays are scripts, written for actors and completed only in performance, moved from theatre history into criticism during that century (Styan, 1977) and from criticism into the classroom. In schools it took the form of the active methods associated with Gibson (1998), and theatre companies with education departments have since developed detailed rehearsal-room pedagogies (Banks, 2014; Winston, 2015). The common principle is that students learn the plays by doing what actors do: speaking the lines aloud, moving, making choices and comparing them.

Most of this literature assumes, without saying so, a room of students for whom English is the first language and Shakespeare's English the only obstacle. That assumption fails in a great many universities, both in countries where English is a medium of instruction alongside other languages and in anglophone institutions with internationally recruited or locally multilingual cohorts. Students in such rooms read early modern verse through a second or third language. They also bring resources that monolingual students lack: experience of moving between languages, familiarity with other verse and theatre traditions, and often a first acquaintance with the plays in translation.

This article proposes a module design that treats those resources as central. It describes a semester-long sequence for teaching one tragedy through performance in a multilingual undergraduate class, with the reasoning behind each phase. It is a proposal built from published practice and theory. No cohort has been taught with it for the purposes of this article, and no outcomes are reported.

The design draws on three bodies of work that are seldom read together: performance approaches to Shakespeare, the pedagogy of multilingual classrooms, and the use of drama in additional-language teaching.

Four principles govern the proposal. First, depth over coverage: one tragedy is studied for the whole semester, through a limited number of scenes worked in detail, with the rest of the play read and summarised. Macbeth is a sensible default because it is the shortest of the major tragedies and its plot is easily held in mind, though the design does not depend on the choice. Second, every session follows the experiential sequence described by Kolb (1984), from concrete experience through reflection and conceptualisation to renewed experiment, so that analysis grows out of practice. Third, students' languages are used by plan and for a stated purpose, never merely tolerated. Fourth, teaching activities and assessment tasks are aligned with the intended outcomes in the manner recommended by Biggs and Tang (2011): if translation and staging choices are how students learn, they are also what students are assessed on.

The module is planned in five phases, summarised in Table 1. Within every phase the weekly workshop follows the same cycle, shown in Figure 1, so that students quickly learn the routine and attention can go to the text.

Assessment follows the phases. The recorded reading in the second phase and the annotated script in the third are low-stakes tasks intended mainly for feedback. The group performance is marked on the clarity and textual grounding of the rationale, not on acting skill, and each group submits a short written statement in which members' contributions are identified. The individual essay carries the greatest weight. Criteria should be published in advance and should name the use of performance and translation evidence explicitly, so that students do not suspect that the practical work is a diversion from what really counts. Spoken English is not itself graded in a literature module. Where an institution requires a language outcome, the mediation descriptors of the Common European Framework offer wording that can be adapted (Council of Europe, 2020).

The design assumes a group small enough to work in a cleared room and a teacher willing to lead practical exercises, but no theatre training or equipment. Large cohorts can be divided into workshop groups that meet in alternate weeks, with lectures carrying context. Where a class shares one language other than English, the comparative element changes character: the published translation tradition in that language becomes a major resource, and care is needed to ensure that English is still spoken enough for the verse to be heard. Where a class has many languages and few shared, glossing into English becomes the common ground and translation is done individually and reported. Teachers should also expect some students to resist physical work on cultural or personal grounds. Roles such as director, dramaturg or translator allow full participation without performing.

The proposal has not been tested. It combines practices that have been described separately, and the evidence base for each is itself uneven: the literature on active Shakespeare consists largely of practitioner accounts, and research on drama in language education is still developing (Stinson and Winston, 2011). Whether the combination works as intended is an open question. An evaluation would need to look at least at the quality of students' critical writing compared with conventionally taught groups, at participation by students of differing English proficiency, and at students' own accounts of whether using their languages helped or felt like a detour.

There are risks in the design as well. Translation exercises can privilege students with strong literacy in a prestigious language over those whose home language is mainly oral or lacks a Shakespeare tradition. Bilingual staging can slide into decoration if the rationale requirement is not enforced. Performance work is time-consuming, and the decision to study a few scenes deeply means that students read less of the canon. And a teacher who does not share the students' languages must be content to assess reasoning about translations that cannot be checked directly. These costs may be worth bearing, but they should be weighed openly by any department that adopts the approach.

Performance pedagogy and multilingual pedagogy share a premise: learners understand a text by doing something with it, using all the means of expression they have. The module proposed here joins the two for the teaching of a Shakespearean tragedy. It sequences ensemble work, verse speaking, scene rehearsal, contrasted stagings and critical writing, and it asks students at each stage to treat translation between their languages as a form of close reading. The design is offered as a reasoned starting point for teachers and as a candidate for classroom research. Its merits remain to be demonstrated by those who try it.

To be declared by the author(s) before publication.

To be declared by the author(s) before publication.