Why a book about theatre-based practice for teaching Shakespeare now? What are we hoping to share with our fellow teachers, practitioners and scholars? What practices and what questions are we inviting you to explore? In order to answer this, we want to introduce this book partly with considerations of what Shakespeare needs from us, as teachers, to be accessible and relevant to young people; but more centrally to explore what do young people need, if anything, from Shakespeare? In this introductory chapter, we outline the contours of these key questions and debates that we will further shape and engage with in this book as a whole. What are young people facing in their futures as we move towards the fourth decade of the twenty-first century? Despite the assurances of thinkers like Rosling (2018), Harari (2018) and Pinker (2018) that people’s lives are generally getting better, they offer no guarantees. None of them doubt the threats from a growing environmental crisis, deepening the complex picture of how humanity survives together or not at all. Furthermore in more recent years, we have seen a shift towards increasing political extremism, instability and a global pandemic. Educationalists have long expounded on the need for a curriculum and pedagogical focus on ‘twentyfirst-century skills’, but as we move further into the twenty-first century itself, our understanding of what these skills might be has moved beyond the initial call for a creative, digital-focused, knowledge-based economy and now points towards something much more complex and fundamental. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) calls for teachers across the globe to ‘do more than transmit educational content’if they are to prepare students for the uncertainties of the future. This means cultivating ‘students’ ability to be creative, think critically, solve problems and make decisions’(Schleicher 2016: 3) in order to thrive in ‘a world where trust will have to bridge differences and a world in which their lives will be affected by issues that transcend national boundaries’(Schleicher 2016: 16). A more recent OECD report looks specifically at the exponential progress of artificial intelligence (AI), proposing that shifts in education will need to happen to better equip young people in dealing with a world where AI levels of literacy and numeracy are generally higher than their own.