Teaching Shakespeare Straight Up
No 'Shakespeare and Imperialism' or 'Shakespeare and Gender.' Students like the real thing just fine.
ENLARGEOf all the courses I have taught over my 30 years as an English professor, the one that I enjoy teaching most and that students seem to enjoy taking most is "Shakespeare."
That's the title. Not "Shakespeare and the Elizabethan World" or "Shakespeare and Stagecraft"; not "Shakespeare and Imperialism," "Shakespeare and Gender," or "Shakespeare and Postmodern Theory."
I don't even title the course, as I once did, "Introduction to Shakespeare," though it is open to all students and has no prerequisites. Appending "introduction to" would admittedly emphasize the fact that Shakespeare is a vast and deep terrain, but it would also suggest that the course leads to "Advanced Shakespeare."
This is not the case. The Shakespeare course is not the first step in a graded ascent but an immersion in a world. I want it to be Shakespeare without addendum or dilution. My belief is that anyone at any level can derive benefit from this course, not because I teach it so well but because reading a certain number of Shakespeare's plays with close attention is an end as well as a beginning. It can yield rudimentary insights but it can also yield highly advanced and sophisticated ones.
Since all English courses at my university are capped at 25 or fewer students, discussion is central to the class. In the old days, I would assign secondary readings and show film clips of key scenes to help spark this discussion. I've largely stopped doing this. It is Shakespeare's writing that I want students to focus on.
The classroom seems to me the only place where rigorous, communal attention to the words on the page is possible. Reading this way prepares students to better appreciate a live production when the opportunity to see one arises, and it helps them appreciate Shakespeare's inimitable use of language—his poetry and his prose—in a rigorous, intimate way. It also prepares them to better understand the politics of family and society and to deal more intelligently with friendship, love and career. Only by studying the plays closely in a classroom setting, where many voices contribute to understanding, can these ideas be fully probed.
A good example occurred in a class awhile ago in which we discussed Rosalind's disguise in "As You Like It." One of my students observed that Ganymede, the swaggery male persona assumed by the heroine during her exile in the Forest of Arden, reminded him of Superman, alter-ego to the mild-mannered Clark Kent. The student then quickly qualified the comparison: Superman is the real self, and Clark Kent is the disguise, he said, while Rosalind is the real self, and Ganymede the disguise.
But many in the class objected to this distinction: Rosalind is a character created by Shakespeare and originally played by a boy actor, they noted; the play's epilogue brings this to the fore. Where does the real self in such a case lie? As for the comic-book hero, which persona is more "real," the superhero or the regular guy he pretends to be? The class veered off into definition and self-interrogation. What was a "real" self anyway? What was theirs?
These questions led to the question of costume and identity. Is the petticoat of Rosalind less or more of a disguise than the doublet and hose of Ganymede? The discussion had grown complex but the class was fully engaged, despite having read nothing in ontological philosophy or gender theory.
Would they have arrived at the same place had I assigned essays on these subjects? Possibly. But I doubt that there would have been the same excitement as students explored these ideas on their own. The class's insights seemed more original, more accessible, and less doctrinaire by virtue of being theirs rather than imposed by others.
One of the great lessons I've learned as a teacher is how satisfying it is to leave good material alone—not to vamp it up with theory or aggressively coordinate it with other readings. I like discussing Shakespeare in the context of the present. I like discussing how his work dovetails with ideas about the self and society. But I like these discussions to emerge organically in the course of looking closely at the plays.
Keats referred to "negative capability" as a facet of the poetic process. He meant that not directing or imposing meaning, not trying too hard to make sense of things, can free the imagination to do its work. This applies to teaching as well as poetry.
Teachers tend not to trust our students as much as we should. Trusting doesn't mean capitulating to them or allowing them to dictate the curriculum. It means arming them with what Matthew Arnold called "the best that has been thought and said" and trusting them to be able to discern what is profound and insightful, funny and moving, in that material. Shakespeare is a teacher's unfailing resource in this effort.
Ms. Cohen is an English professor and dean of Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University. Her novel "Beatrice Bunson's Guide to Romeo and Juliet" will be published by Paul Dry Books next January.
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