English teacher John Garrison and senior Max Turetzky ‘25 co-authored a book review analyzing three new Shakespeare teaching guides recently released by the Folger Shakespeare Library. The reviewed guides focus on “Hamlet,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Macbeth,” with additional guides on “Othello” and “The Tempest” forthcoming. The book review will be published in the peer-reviewed journal Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching.
Garrison said the collaboration emerged from their shared experience studying Shakespeare in his Honors English IV: Good Grief class, where Turetzky is currently a student. Garrison said their complementary perspectives, as educator and student, respectively, offered a unique lens through which to evaluate the teaching materials.
“Max and I read Hamlet together in class, but we also read parts of other Shakespeare works,” Garrison said. “When there was this opportunity to write a book review of these new guides, we decided it would be a fun project to integrate what he sees as a student and what I see as a teacher.”
Turetzky said the writing process was both collaborative and iterative, with he and Garrison writing sections independently before they came back together to review and revise each other’s work.
“We had a rough outline for what we wanted to write,” Turetzky said. “We each wrote drafts of our assigned paragraphs, then met several times to put them together and edit. Through that process, we created one unified coherent voice.”
Turetzky said the review article examined how the guides engage current students of Shakespeare by incorporating contemporary cultural references and discussing the intersection of themes like race, gender and class.
“What we tried to do was strike a balance between what the books did well in engaging students with Shakespeare and constructive criticism about elements that could be improved,” Turetzky said.
Turetzky said this experience represented a shift from the traditional student-teacher dynamic.
“It’s someone who grades the things you write, now working collaboratively where there’s not that same teacher relationship,” Turetzky said. “It’s more like a relationship between two writers or colleagues.”
Garrison said he views such collaborations as essential for fostering a deeper engagement with classic literature among contemporary students.
“A great work of literature can only stay alive if people talk about them regularly,” Garrison said. “It becomes important to work with students to give people a vocabulary to talk about books with each other.”
