New-Minting Shakespeare: Old Currency in a New Classroom Economy
(1993 SAA Research Seminar Paper:  Postmodern Pedagogies/Early Modern
Classrooms)
 
What is much less clear is how we can get beyond this particular ideology.
For Shakespeare as fetish has, in this time of perceived crisis in the
humanities, become the ideology of our age.
(Garber 250)
What all this activity means for Shakespeareans mainly concerned with
teaching the works of the playwright to the relatively uninitiated is not
immediately clear.			(Willson  207)
 
Given developments in contemporary literary theory, especially as they
address our own personal, pedagogical, and political concerns, given the
changing function of the teacher in the classroom, and given the changing
constituents of the undergraduate classroom, teaching Shakespeare today can
be rather confusing, an endless succession of compromises that compromise.
 
On the one hand, our institutions, students' parents and families, and even
students themselves often expect (and sometimes demand) courses in "greats"
like Shakespeare.  The motivation may be unabashedly materialistic:
potential employers might be impressed by students' liberal education, so
some students want names that they can trade on.   Or it may be a subtler
but equally troubling matter of self-worth, one that our very means of
making a living--teaching Shakespeare--validates:  familiarity with
Shakespeare signifies being educated, intelligent, etc.   On the other
hand, many of us who teach Shakespeare want to disrupt both universalist
views of the Bard as a reservoir of abiding truths and the often
unconscious connections between the study of Shakespeare and the worth of
one's education.  At the very least we want students to recognize and
question the 'value' of Shakespeare in several senses.
 
The problem above--so common a topic of discussion at professional
encounters, formal and informal--is further complicated by the gradual
change in the make-up of our classes themselves:  many of us are no longer
teaching simply 18-22 year-old, financially secure, white students.  These
changes are exhilarating.  For instance, at Augsburg College I teach
Shakespeare in the Weekend College, a regular degree program for
non-traditional students--in this case a mixture of women and a few men,
between the ages of about 25 and 60, from the suburbs and the inner city,
from wealthy and disadvantaged homes, working both in and out of those
homes, of various sexual orientations, in and out of committed
relationships, with and without children, and predominantly but seldom
exclusively white and/or native speakers of English.  Moreover, some have
suffered various forms of abuse and dependency--sexual, physical, and
chemical; their education may constitute an important stage in their
recovery and the establishment of a new life.  Indeed, I know so much about
these students because discussing Shakespeare with adults who have a broad
range of experiences outside the academy means talking about their lives.
 
But there are problems.  For a few of these students the identification of
Shakespeare with the enhanced personal and professional status they are
seeking through education may be particularly strong and resistant to
inquiry; questions about the value of Shakespeare undermine in their eyes
the worth of the eduation they may be making great sacrifices to obtain.
Other students are inordinately insecure about reading literature generally
and Shakespeare in particular.  Often, the greater the number of years
since high school, the greater the anxiety when Elizabethan blank verse and
diction don't make sense at first glance.  Many students want lectures that
will give them the magical key to Shakespearean texts and illuminate those
Shakespearean truths they've heard about; indeed the very sense that there
is a demand of this sort is hard to resist: like most members of SAA I can
fill three hours of a Saturday afternoon with talk about my Shakespeare.
The decentering effect of the group performance project I assign students in the
 traditional undergraduate program is not
easily transferred to the Weekend program; because of their complicated
personal obligations and/or full-time employment, the necessary
collaboration outside of class is nearly impossible.  Sometimes I think it
would be better to avoid the whole problem of satisfying these various
needs and tastes:  I could just feed students the Shakespeare I was taught,
spiced up with a little current critical pepper--the educational equivalent
of institutional meat loaf.  But that can't be what either education or
teaching Shakespeare is about.
 
This paper outlines some implications--for new Shakespeare classrooms--of
the conjunction of a non-traditional educational constituency and recent
trends in literary and pedagogical theory and practice.
 
 
I.  Shakespeare's Currency
 
At the University of Dayton, where I had my first opportunity to teach the
regular Shakespeare course (1986-88), I felt like friends of mine elsewhere
who had been to graduate school during the theory wars of the seventies and
early eighties and then done an itinerant stint of one-year positions from,
say, Maine to Minnesota:  my relief at finding steady work allowed me the
time to think about the disjunction between what I had been doing in the
classroom--the close reading that characterized my own undergraduate
classes--and the scholarly and critical projects I had pursued in graduate
school and after.  Having done most of my reading in theory after a fairly
traditional graduate education, I was particularly excited about engaging
students in the theoretical considerations that had so recently and deeply
affected my own ways of reading and views of literature.  But since I
hadn't yet found an easy or effective way to bring the Elizabethan
translations of Seneca into the typical Shakespeare class, I wasn't at all
sure how to bring in Derrida.  I have always been a little slow about such
matters--and still am.
 
***
 
"Shakespeare has written . . . "   I looked up from the stack of English
102 compositions I was attempting to reduce--and to avoid.  That name, so
familiar in class, rarely comes up on commercial TV.  What was going on?
Snapshots of famous golf pros were appearing and disappearing against a
sky-blue background.  Beneath them were captions, read aloud by the same
anonymous voice that had originally intoned the hallowed name:  "Some are
born great . . . Some achieve greatness . . . And some have greatness
thrust upon them."  Well, either the writers were using the Shakespeare
found in Bartlett's or Madison Avenue was pulling a fast one on the
promoters of the golf tournament.  The latter greatly appealed to me:
there was something amusing about the Malvolio-like pretensions of those
who had bought an ad that used Shakespeare to aggrandize a pastime of the
middle class and well-to-do, when the context of the original suggested
precisely the opposite--the deflation of the subject's self-importance.  I
felt quite self-satisfied.
 
But should I have been?  I was relying, as so many American academics do,
on familiarity with Shakespeare as the hallmark of a superior education:
"Diverse groups insist that they have the true Shakespeare because, almost
like a religious relic, he constitutes a powerful cultural token"
(Sinfield, "Introduction" 130).  For many educated Americans, Shakespeare
is the touchstone of good breeding and proper schooling.  How amusing if
the ad execs and the promoters did not get it right?  My knowing a little
Shakespeare would allow me to feel superior--a small consolation for making
so much less money for teaching them and their children just enough
Shakespeare to abuse in this way.  Or if the ad does contain an in-joke,
then I am one of the lucky few to snicker with
self-satisfaction--Shakespeare as the cultural talisman betokening
membership in a club I could not otherwise afford and would consciously and
conscientiously object to.
 
But like most American academics I have not taken up Shakespeare in lieu of
golf.  I teach Shakespeare because I enjoy reading and re-reading these texts
 (such enjoyment is not quite or always the same as
liking them or what they say).  What is troublesome and exciting, however,
about teaching Shakespeare in light of current critical theory and debates
over literary canonization is that one is constantly mining the ground one
is standing on:  one may feel compelled, as I have at times, to introduce
traditional views of Shakespearean texts in order to undermine them; when
one doesn't rehearse canonical readings, one may discover, as I have, that
students find a theory less than compelling because literary discourse and
current academic debate are alien to most of them.
 
Derrida has said of his own re-reading of the classical texts of Western
metaphysics "that the passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning
the page of philosophy (which usually consists of philosophizing badly),
but in continuing to read philosophers in a certain way" (288).  The
question, concerning Shakespeare, is not only how to read him "in a certain
way" but also how to suggest ways in which such "alternative Shakespeares"
make a difference.   As Shakespeareans, how effectively can we circumvent
what Alan Sinfield calls "culturism"--"the belief that the wider
distribution of high culture through society is desirable and that it is to
be secured through public expenditure [and, in America, through corporate
and private donation, as well]" ("Royal Shakespeare"  164)?  Moreover, in
this country, for the educated middle and upper classes and for many of
those aspiring to such status, Shakespeare continues to constitute and
betoken individual sensibility, intellectual prowess, and membership in a
cultural elite:  "The problem, of course, is Shakespeare--the whole aura of
elusive genius and institutionalized profundity . . The underlying
preference is toward deference and inertia"  (Sinfield, "Royal Shakespeare"
 178).
 
***
 
Five years later, though some things have changed, I am still struggling
with some of the same concerns:  I want my students to be able to read, but
also in a sense to see through, Shakespeare.  And I want them to recognize
their relation to these texts as constituted by and constituting the
culture.  Certainly, it helps that I have found work at a small urban
college, where there is institutional support--financial and
intellectual--for pedagogical inquiry and experiment and a lively faculty
exchange on methods and new developments.  Certainly strategies like those
outlined by Sharon A. Beehler and Martha Tuck Rozett demonstrate how theory
can inform the classroom-- both the constitution of its dynamics and the
students' own inquiries into the texts--without (or with less) imposition
by the instructor.  But for me the central contradiction remains:  by
teaching Shakespeare, one may be engaged in re-constituting the culture as
it is, especially with so much emphasis on returning to the "basics," of
which the canonized Shakespearean texts form a central part.
 
 
 
II.  Performance and the New Classroom Economy
 
Though I agree with Ann Thompson's assessment that the 1984 Special Issue
of Shakespeare Quarterly on"Teaching Shakespeare" is notable for "the
almost total absence of literary theory and cultural politics" from its
many essays (139), I am not quite so sure that implicates performance in a
grand scheme to re-mystify Shakespeare studies and classrooms.  Indeed, in
an article that examines the intersection of "Pedagogy, Psychoanalysis, and
Theatre" in the Shakespeare classroom, Barbara Freedman speaks indirectly
to the potential of performance:  "A pedagogy based on theatricality keeps
changing definitions, boundaries, and activities in relationships; it
accepts that blindness is constitutive of insight and that such blindness
can only be displaced, not replaced" (186).  Edward Rocklin asserts that as
a pedagogical method performance complements theoretical inquiry into the
plays; he articulates well one reason for my own gravitation to this
method:  "in order to explore the performance possibilities of a playtext,
they [students] must explore the social dimension of the characters who comprise
 that play's world, and at the
same time they must explore their own social world in the collaborative
effort with their peers" (154).  Though I was late in coming to it, the
performance project has helped me alter the dynamics of the Shakespeare
class in ways that developed students' capacities for independent inquiry,
speculation, and experimentation.
 
The performance project I assigned to students in Augsburg's regular
undergraduate program had two components:  production of a scene or scenes,
lasting at least 10 but not more than 20 minutes; a collaborative paper
that explained why they had chosen their scene(s), why they had performed
it as they had, how it reflected their view of the entire play, what
alternative interpretations they had considered, and virtually any other
matters they wished to raise.  I should note that the last time I taught
this course in the regular "Day" program as opposed to the non-traditional
Weekend College, it was still open to non-majors fulfilling distribution;
the recent institution of rather innovative General Education requirements
and a new pre-requisite for intermediate and upper level English courses
has meant that "Shakespeare" is now a course primarily for majors.  So my
assignment was also designed to encourage collaboration between majors and
non-majors, experienced students and novices.
 
Because the course is set up to cover the histories, comedies, tragedies,
and romances, I usually encouraged productions focused on either problem
comedies and romances (All's Well, Cymbeline, and The Tempest), where
comparisons with works in the other genres are fairly evident and
particularly fruitful.  If more than one group had to work on a single
play, we tried to focus their concerns differently:  for instance, a group
also engaged in Women's Studies and/or active in issues of gender and
sexuality on campus chose to work on feminist approaches to Cymbeline; a
largely female group, part of their commentary dealt with compulsory
cross-dressing in their production of the wager scene.  Their fellow
'Cymbelinian' group consisted of English majors with a decidedly
aesthetic-formalist bent; their version of Posthumus's dream--a scene that
no other group before or since has chosen, I believe, because of its
resistance to the largely realist or naturalist impulses of most
students--was wholeheartedly operatic:  they moved us out into the
cavernous foyer of the old building we were in, took into account the
effect of the setting sun behind them, made use of an unused staircase with
an elaborate balustrade, and (even before we entered) had transformed the
entryway through an atmospheric musical accompaniment.  Though not all
productions and commentaries were as polished as these two, they are
nonetheless fairly typical of performance projects for the class.
 
Several refinements, worked out in an 'interim' course (Augsburg's January
term) on contemporary drama, society, and politics, helped the
Shakespearean performance projects:  plays and groups were chosen early;
students turned in regular progress reports, which also indicated who
participated; I met with groups formally two or three times in the term and
at any other times they requested.  I also suggested ways to write
collaborative papers: divide the topic into sections, assign the paper to a
sub-group less involved in the production, have everyone write papers and
then decide what to include and how to organize and revise it, etc.
Everyone was responsible for all aspects of the project, right down to
proofreading the paper (actors had to demonstrate an understanding of the
commentary; writers, of production decisions and effects); everyone had to
field questions from the class and me.  This system balanced fairly well
the autonomy of the groups' work with what I see as my responsibility to
help them succeed and to offer the rest of the class an instructive
experience.
 
Based on self-evaluations and anonymous course evaluations, I have few
doubts about the success of this performance assignment:  it empowers students
 by playing to their strengths; transforms the
sometimes competitive, often hierarchical dynamics of the classroom by
fostering collaboration; and encourages students to use what they've been
reading and learning during the term.  As they get into the project, I find
that students' interest in the other plays is heightened and that students
participate more readily in discussions.  Almost all groups turn to some
critical and scholarly work on their play--primarily to take what they can
use.  And here, of course, I'll admit the kind of trap that Thompson hints
at:  performance has its own seductions and blindness.  Since it tends to
favor what 'works' over what doesn't, amateur performance at least tends to
exclude ideological critique of its own practice; though the paper helps to
compensate for flaws in execution that obscure intention, the essay is
often not sufficiently meta-critical to expose contradictions and
problematic assumptions in the group's own interpretive process.
Certainly, the pedagogical benefits of this performance project, though
considerable, do not always coincide with post-structuralist theories, and
I'm not at all sure I would call this classroom post-modern in any more
than a temporal sense.
 
And yet collaboration--though resisted most by the best paper writers, who
are reluctant to relinquish total control over their work and grade--has
raised historical questions among students about the company for which
Shakespeare wrote as well as questions about contemporary production of the
plays.  As mentioned above, the necessity of cross-dressing in their own
productions has led to discussion of the feminist and historicist debates
about the practice in the Renaissance.  Moreover, these questions arise and
are often pursued with a minimum of intervention on my part:  this
undergraduate initiative and engagement outweighs for me any lack of
theoretical rigor.
 
 
III.  Old Shakespeare in a New Market
 
Having told my success story, I wish to end with an outline of and
questions about my current quandary.  I mentioned at the outset that I am
now teaching students of non-traditional age (i.e., adults whose median age
is 32-33) in a program that has, as I see it, a twofold goal:  to make the
undergraduate education and experience of a small college accessible to
those for whom it is considered no longer possible and to do so without
diluting the requirements and courses we offer in the traditional program.
In other words, Augsburg has been trying to avoid the kind of two-track
program in which "continuing education" courses are less rigorous and hence
devalued by those both in and out of the institution.  Leaving the success
or failure of the Weekend College (WEC) program aside, I would like to
discuss the pedagogical bind resulting from this rather admirable aim.
 
Like my colleagues in other fields, I began adapting the Shakespeare course
by 'covering' in eight three-and-a-half hour bi-weekly sessions the same
ten to twelve plays I would cover in a regular semester.  Though the
contact hours are reduced, there are some advantages:  The long sessions
foster uninterrupted discussion of key issues, especially since WEC
students are much less inhibited than traditional undergraduates; it is not
unusual for every member of the class to participate voluntarily at almost
every meeting.  Moreover, WEC students are very rarely unprepared; indeed
they come to the first class session having already read several sonnets
and a comedy, as well as having completed some introductory assignments.
Because their circumstances or their own inclinations prevented a
traditional college education, these latecomers to higher education are
motivated in ways that most undergraduate instructors welcome:  they are as
likely as not to enjoy learning for its own sake, concerned about doing
well (in part to qualify for tuition reimbursement from employers) but no
more "grade-grubbing" than the traditional undergraduate, willing to put in
long hours of hard work, responsible enough to seek help on their own
initiative, and able to draw on rich and varied personal experiences in
 connection
with what they read--including Shakespeare.  Though I, unlike Michael J.
Collins, am sometimes uncertain about how and why we are studying
Renaissance drama and Shakespeare in particular, WEC students--apprehensive
and yet curious as they are about the plays' "otherness"--seem to have an
innate sense that historicist "contextual readings neither foreclose other
lines of inquiry nor of themselves claim greater authority" (258):  no
Ph.D. (certainly not this waffler ) can browbeat these independent,
open-minded, inquisitive, various students into a monolithic approach to
the texts, however intellectually engaging they may find it.
 
What concerns me now is first that I cannot effectively offer them what I
do their Day-school counterparts and, second, that I am only offering them
what I do their traditional fellows.  Though these students invariably
enjoy reading, studying, and discussing Shakespeare, cramming twelve plays
into the eight sessions inevitably creates an unfortunate "rushed feeling,"
as one student politely put it on a mid-term evaluation.  And given the
lively, extensive, and intense discussions, I feel it, too.  So the obvious
solution (I don't need an SAA session for this!) seems to me to worry less
about "coverage."
 
The other half of the problem is what I don't offer these students but
certainly could--given their own curiosity and motivation, the long seminar
sessions, and the ample time for preparation.  So I am planning more direct
contact with current criticism of and theoretical approaches to the plays:
supplementing those Riverside introductions with more recent developments
in theory and Shakespeare studies.  Indeed, if the project works here, I
may try taking it back to the regular Shakespeare class when I return to it
the year after next.  I should note an institutional change that will
foster these developmens in both programs:  the English department's
decision to make Shakespeare one of several "capstone" options--a decision
made more for practical than for canonical reasons.     Since the course
will be populated increasingly by upper level majors, the integration of
theory into the subject matter of the course--as opposed to its invisible
presence as the instructor's question-generating apparatus--is more likely
to succeed.  Or so I hope.
 
Finally, I would like to offer WEC students the same intimate contact with
the text that performance affords Day students.  Though I devised a watered
down dramatic reading exercise, coupled with a "translation"  and
interpretive essay, it has not had nearly the impact on students and class
dynamics that performance has had.  Needless to say, accommodating my
perception of WEC students as too besieged for collaboration outside of
class has meant denying them an educational experience before risking its
failure.  Though students speak well of the reading exercise, it is evident
to me that they would get much more out of working together.  A revised
syllabus should allow not only for the introduction of criticism and theory
but also for regular use of a half an hour to forty-five minutes of class
time for group meetings, where I would be available for consultation and
students could set assignments and out-of-class sessions.  I am at any rate
ready to try--despite Edward Pechter's insistent whispering in my ear:
"It's one thing to decide in May [or March] what you should be doing in the
eighth week [or third session] of your Shakespeare course next November [or
January]; but when November comes, what you should be doing may look
different altogether, and what you wind up actually doing yet something
else again" (172).
 
Works Cited
 
Beehler, Sharon A.  "'That's a Certain Text': Problematizing Shakespeare
Instructions in American Schools and Colleges."  Shakespeare Quarterly 41
(1990): 195-205.
 
Booth, Stephen.  "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time and All
Others."  Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990):  262-68.
 
Collins, Michael J.  "For World and Stage: An Approach to Teaching Shakespeare."
  Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990):  251-61.
 
Dollimore, Jonathan, and Alan Sinfield, eds.  Political Shakespeare.
Ithaca:  Cornell UP, 1985.
 
Drakakis, John, ed.  Alternative Shakespeares.  New York:  Methuen, 1985.
 
Freedman, Barbara.  "Pedagogy, Psychoanalysis, and Theatre:  Interrogating
the Scene of Learning."  Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990):  174-86.
 
Frey, Charles.  "Teaching Shakespeare in America."  Shakespeare Quarterly
35 (1984): 541-59.
 
Garber, Marjorie.  "Shakespeare As Fetish."  Shakespeare Quarterly 41
(1990):  242-50.
 
Graff, Gerald.  Professing Literature.  Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1987.
 
Jameson, Fredric.  "The Politics of Theory:  Ideological Positions in the
Postmodernism Debate."  1984; rpt. in Contemporary Critical  Theory.  Ed.
Dan Latimer.  San Diego:  Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989.  369-83.
 
Pechter, Edward.  "Teaching Differences."  Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990):
 160-73.
 
Rocklin, Edward L.  "'An Incarnational Art':  Teaching Shakespeare."
Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990):  147-59.
 
Rozett, Martha Tuck.  "Holding Mirrors Up to Nature: First Readers as
Moralists."  Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 211-21.
 
Sinfield, Alan.  "Give an Account of Shakespeare and Education."  Dollimore
and Sinfield 134-57.
 
-----.  "Introduction: Reproductions, Interventions."  Dollimore and
Sinfield 130-33.
 
-----.  "Royal Shakespeare: Theatre and the Making of Ideology."  Dollimore
and Sinfield 158-81.
 
Thompson, Ann.  "King Lear and the Politics of Teaching Shakespeare."
Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990):  139-46.
 
Willson, Robert F., Jr.  "Why Teach Shakespeare?  A Reconsideration."
Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990):  206-10.