Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major 3031242238, 9783031242236

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Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major Edited by  M. Tyler Sasser · Emma K. Atwood

Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major

M. Tyler Sasser  •  Emma K. Atwood Editors

Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major

Editors M. Tyler Sasser Honors College University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, AL, USA

Emma K. Atwood Department of English University of Montevallo Montevallo, AL, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-24223-6    ISBN 978-3-031-24224-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Tibbut Archive / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To all the Instructors in the English Department at the University of Alabama. M. Tyler Sasser To my students at the University of Montevallo. Emma K. Atwood

Acknowledgments

This essay collection has been six years in the making. Its beginnings are rooted in a pedagogy-focused conference Sasser co-directed and Atwood attended as part of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama in February of 2018, as well as seminars at the 2018 and 2022 annual meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America and the 2017 annual meeting of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. The first draft was submitted as the world entered the COVID-19 health pandemic, which not only generated several delays and difficulties for this group of teachers but also demanded that all teachers, as well as all books about teaching, now address online education. As editors, we must acknowledge and share with readers the considerable amount of gratitude we have for all the contributors here who remained dedicated to this collection during this difficult time. More specifically, Sasser would like to thank the English Department and the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama, especially David Ainsworth, Joel Brouwer, David Deutsch, Michelle Dowd, and Steven Trout for the various travel stipends he received during these years. Foremost, however, Sasser wishes to express a deep appreciation for the inspirational group of non-tenure-track faculty he worked with in the English Department for seven years (2015–2022) as an instructor. These scholars, writers, and teachers were a constant source of inspiration during this time, as the department relies on them to teach a majority of the students under financially demanding situations. However unconventional, he wishes to express his gratitude to these colleagues by listing them here: Wells Addington, Paul Albano, David vii

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Bedsole, Serena Blount, Garrett Bridger-Gilmore, Brook Champagne, Barry Cole, Cade Collum, Tasha Coryell, Anna Davis-Abel, Geoffrey Emerson, Emily Fine, Clay Greene, Brock Guthrie, Heather Hamilton, Nicholas R.  Helms, Brandi Hodo, Seth Johnson, Natalie Loper, Christopher Love, Michael Martel, Marsha McSpadden, Jason McCall, Ashley McWaters, Scott McWaters, Matthew Minicucci, Anne Morgan, John Newell, Thom O’Rourke, Brian Oliu, Ashley Palmer, Jenifer Sang Eun Park, Nathan Parker, Eric Parker, Sara Pirkle, Mary Margaret Popova, Marni Presnall, Christa Reeves, Juan Reyes, Tristan Riesen, Adam Roberts, Cordelia Ross, Brett Shaw, Amanda Snyder, Seth Stewart, Travis Turner, Raymond Wachter, John Walters, Kevin Waltman, Joshua Weathersby, Shanti Weiland, Brian Phillip Whalen, Bonnie Whitener, and Austin Whitver. All these instructors have terminal degrees and are published writers and scholars, and Sasser’s work on this book is dedicated to them. Finally, he is grateful to his parents (Cheryl and Franklin) for the decades of sacrifice they made so that he would be surrounded by great teachers. Atwood would like to echo Sasser’s gratitude for the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama, specifically for encouraging her contributions at the 2018 Shakespeare In and Beyond the Classroom conference and again at the 2020 The Future of Teaching Shakespeare conference, which impelled her involvement with this collection. Fostering not only scholarly ideas but a sense of community amongst colleagues is the kind of contribution all programs should seek to emulate. She also thanks the University of Montevallo and specifically UM’s Faculty Development Advisory Committee (FDAC) for providing financial support towards this project, the kind of vital encouragement that she would like to see all faculty and teacher-scholars enjoy. Atwood is grateful to her parents Bethany and David, who took her to her first professional Shakespeare performance at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, and acknowledges with gratitude her scholarly village of mentors—Mr. Geoffrey Young, her high school Shakespeare teacher; Dr. Bruce Mills, Dr. Amy Smith, and Dr. Ed Menta at Kalamazoo College; Dr. Mary Crane, Dr. Andrew Sofer, and Dr. Caroline Bicks at Boston College. Endless thanks to Atwood’s unrivaled friendship support team—Robert Atwood, Austin Creel, Ashley Wurzbacher, Andrea Eckelman, Melissa Shepherd, Lindsey Dietrich, Alice Waters, and the deeply missed Kiara Kharpertian. Finally, we are both grateful to Eileen Srebernik, Kishor Kannan Ramesh, our anonymous reviewers, and the entire editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan. Their support and general guidance throughout the project has been a professional blessing.

Contents

 Teaching Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century  1 M. Tyler Sasser and Emma K. Atwood  Teaching Shakespeare off the Tenure Track 21 Natalie Loper  One-Act Shakespeare: Teaching Cultural Legacy Through Excerpts and Adaptations 41 Joseph Navitsky  “To Double Business Bound”: Shakespeare and Gen Ed 57 Heather Hirschfeld “The Refusal of Compassion”: Teaching The Merchant of Venice in a General Education Course 71 Joanne Diaz  Getting a Return on Investment in Shakespeare 91 Gregory M. Schnitzspahn  Green Shakespeare and the Environmental Studies Classroom103 Emma K. Atwood

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Shakespeare Pedagogy and Twenty-First Century Multicultural Sensibilities121 Andani Kholinar Enhancing Creative Engagement with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, and Othello and Gen-Z Culture135 Patricia Marchesi  “Some Enchanted Trifle”: Shakespeare and Popular Culture in the Community College149 Cordelia Ross  Choose Your Own Adventure: Embracing Student-Selected Readings in the General Education Shakespeare Course167 Rebecca Olson  Online Shakespeare: Beneficial Learning Experiences for Non-Majors 181 Loreen L. Giese  Online Shakespearean Role Playing197 Jennifer Black  “We Must Follow the Leaders”: Shakespeare Beyond the Classroom215 Sarah Enloe  Existential Shakespeare: Citizenship in the International Service-Learning Classroom225 Sujata Iyengar, Mikaela LaFave, and Hayden M. Kelley Index243

Notes on Contributors

Emma K. Atwood  is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Montevallo, Alabama’s only public liberal arts college. She teaches courses on Shakespeare and Contemporary Society, Early Modern Drama, and Renaissance Women and Gender. She has published articles in Comparative Drama, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Borrowers and Lenders, and This Rough Magic. She is an associate of the Shakespeare and Dance project and has contributed to public-­facing scholarship with the American Shakespeare Center and JSTOR Daily. She earned her PhD from Boston College and her BA from Kalamazoo College. Jennifer Black  has a PhD in Renaissance Studies from Boston University, and is a Lecturer in English at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho. She teaches introductory literature and Humanities courses, advanced English and early modern literature courses, and a first-year seminar focused on critical thinking through literary study. She has published articles about online teaching, flipped classroom pedagogy, and contingent faculty issues, and has presented at numerous conferences about Shakespeare, early modern women, online teaching, and college pedagogy. Joanne  Diaz  is an Associate Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University where she teaches courses in literature and creative writing. She is the author of two poetry collections—My Favorite Tyrants and The Lessons—and with Ian Morris, she is the co-editor of The Little Magazine

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in Contemporary America. Her work on using early modern archives with undergraduates has appeared in Pedagogy. Sarah  Enloe  previously served as the Director of Education at the American Shakespeare Center where she supervised and facilitated programming in the areas of College Prep, Research and Scholarship, LifeLong Learning, and Educator Resources. Sarah co-edited Shakespeare Expressed and contributed “Playing with Character – Audience Members in Early Modern Playhouses” to the collection; her current work is focused on the practical application of performance techniques for the English classroom. In 2017, she won the Sidney Berger award from the Shakespeare Theatre Association. Enloe currently teaches primary and secondary education at Harrisonburg City Schools in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Loreen L. Giese  is a Professor of English at Ohio University, where she teaches in-person, hybrid, and online courses in Shakespeare, early modern English drama, and composition. The author of books and articles on Shakespeare, teaching Shakespeare, and early modern English courtship and marriage, she is working on a monograph that examines practices of and attitudes toward marital cruelty in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London court cases. Heather  Hirschfeld is a Professor and scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century British literature at the University of Tennessee who specializes in Shakespearean drama and the institutional and conceptual contexts in which it flourished. She has recently edited The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy and The New Cambridge Shakespeare Hamlet. She currently serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies for her department. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Sujata Iyengar  is a Professor of English at the University of Georgia and author of many books and articles on early modern studies, is winner of the Special Sandy Beaver Award for teaching excellence and of Fellowships from the Office of Service-Learning and the Office of Online Learning at UGA.  Her teaching-­focused publications include a composition reader (with Allison Kellar Lenhardt), a guide to Love’s Labor’s Lost (with Frédérique Fouassier-Tate), and most recently (with Nathalie VienneGuerrin and a team of international authors and student digital editors)

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the peer-reviewed, digital, multimedia Open Educational Resource Focus on Henry V, supported by the Partner University Fund/French-American Cultural Exchange Foundation. Hayden  M. Kelley is a Reading and English instructor at Athens Technical College and an advisor for the college’s chapter of Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society (PTK). Hayden graduated with her Bachelor of Arts in English from UGA in 2018 and graduated with her Master of Arts in English from UGA in 2020. She teaches a variety of English classes to students across the college and emphasizes the use of gamification to engage students in active learning. When she’s not prepping her lessons or planning PTK events, she enjoys spending time with her family, her husband Blake, and their dog Riley. Andani Kholinar  is a lecturer in the Department of English Education at the University of Education, Winneba. His research interests include Shakespeare and inclusive pedagogy as well as the impact of new technologies in critical pedagogies in contemporary multicultural classrooms. Mikaela LaFave  is a third-year PhD student at the University of Georgia specializing in Shakespeare and Appropriation, examining the iterations of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in contemporary film, TV, and YouTube, as well as through other avenues. Her current research project examines contemporary film adaptations of both Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy and the replacement of religion with technological anxieties. Natalie Loper  is Associate Director of First-Year Writing at the University of Alabama. She is co-editor of Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare and has published essays on the films of Baz Luhrmann, Julia Stiles as Ophelia, adaptation/appropriation theory, and pedagogy. Patricia Marchesi  teaches AP Literature at Holy Family High School, a Catholic college preparatory school in Broomfield, CO. Before deciding to move back to Colorado, she was a college English professor specializing in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama and taught at LaGrange College (GA) and Northern Arizona University (AZ). Her academic research into the role of trees and forests in Shakespeare’s plays led to her discovery of how precious and rare old-growth forests are, and inspired her to write

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Florissant, which was the Grand Prize Winner of the 2019 Eyelands International Book Award and a First Place in the Dante Rossetti Award for Young Adult Fiction (Chanticleer International Book Awards). Before embarking on the young adult fantasy genre, she wrote two science fiction novels for middle grade readers, Shelby & Shauna Kitt and the Dimensional Holes and Shelby & Shauna Kitt and the Alterax Buttons, both of which were self-­published and won Children’s Literary Classics gold awards. Joseph  Navitsky  is an Associate Professor of English at West Chester University in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where he teaches upper-division Shakespeare course for English majors, Introduction to Writing and Topics in Literature, and a general education course for non-majors. His essays on Shakespeare and early modern literature and culture have appeared in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, English Literary Renaissance, Journal of American Culture, and The International Journal of the Classical Tradition. Rebecca  Olson  teaches early modern literature and culture at Oregon State University. She is the author of Arras Hanging: The Textile that Determined Early Modern Culture and oversaw the production of the student-edited open textbook Romeo and Juliet (https://open.oregonstate. education/romeoandjuliet/). She has published a number of articles in journals including Pedagogy, PMLA, and Modern Philology, and co-edited, with Stephanie Pietros, the pedagogically focused seminar “First Generation Shakespeare,” Volume 14 of Early Modern Culture. Cordelia  Ross  earned her doctorate from the University of California, Davis (UCD) and her master’s degree from the University of Chicago. Her research interests include medieval and early modern studies, environments in literature, sciences in literature, the digital humanities, and gamification. She has taught writing, literature, and medieval studies courses at the UCD and the University of Alabama. She was formerly an Assistant Professor at Brazosport College and currently teaches at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin, TX. M. Tyler Sasser’s research appears in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare Newsletter, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Theatre Journal, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Children’s Literature in Education, and Children’s Literature. He has contributed essays to Liberating Shakespeare: Adaptation and

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Empowerment for Young Adult Audiences (Arden 2023), Shakespeare and Geek Culture (Arden 2020), Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture (Palgrave 2018), and Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction (Cambridge 2017). He earned his PhD from The University of Southern Mississippi, MA from Georgia Southern University, and BA from Mercer University. He is Assistant Professor of Honors at the University of Alabama where he teaches courses on Shakespeare, world literature, children’s literature, the King James Bible, film, and gender and race studies. Gregory  M.  Schnitzspahn’s ongoing scholarship takes an ecofeminist approach to the drama, poetry, and prose of early modern England. His most recent peer-­reviewed articles on works by Thomas Middleton (a contemporary and likely collaborator of William Shakespeare’s) can be found at Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England and This Rough Magic. Schnitzspahn also regularly presents his work at professional, academic meetings, including the Shakespeare Association of America, the Northeast Modern Language Association, and the Shakespearean Studies Seminar at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center. Prior to joining the faculty at Fisher College, Schnitzspahn taught English composition and literature at Boston College, Suffolk University (in both Boston and Dakar, Senegal), Tufts University, and Lesley University.

List of Figures

Teaching Shakespeare off the Tenure Track Fig. 1 Number of positions advertised in the MLA job list, 1975–76 to 2019–20. (Modern Language Association, 2022)

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“The Refusal of Compassion”: Teaching The Merchant of Venice in a General Education Course Fig. 1 Image 60 of The most excellent historie of the merchant of Venice. Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed 21 June 2021

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List of Maps

Green Shakespeare and the Environmental Studies Classroom Map 1 Section from Civitas Londinum (the Agas Map) (Jenstad et al., 2018)110 Map 2 Section from the Copperplate Map of London (Franken, n.d.) 111 Map 3 Section from the Civitates Orbis Terrarum Map (Braun & Hogenberg, n.d.) 112

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Teaching Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century M. Tyler Sasser and Emma K. Atwood

In act one of The Taming of the Shrew, Lucentio arrives in the great university city of Padua, hoping to advance his educational opportunities after exhausting such pursuits in Pisa and Florence. His servant, Tranio, challenges his overtly enthusiastic master by suggesting that “No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en. / In brief, sir, study what you most affect” (Shakespeare, 1997,  1.1.39–40). In other words, Tranio encourages Lucentio to find profitable pleasure in his early educational experiences rather than quickly moving away from them, hoping for something more prestigious. Much like Lucentio, many Shakespeare scholars move from city to city with the ultimate goal of more prestigious settings and more advanced classrooms, at times believing that upper-level college classes, single-author courses, or even graduate seminars are more stimulating,

M. T. Sasser (*) University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA e-mail: [email protected] E. K. Atwood University of Montevallo, Montevallo, AL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3_1

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more challenging, and more rewarding. Teaching such classes is certainly viewed as a professional marker of success. But what if we were to embrace teaching Shakespeare in general education courses and relish the opportunity to “breathe and haply institute / A course of learning and ingenious studies” (Shakespeare, 1997, 1.1.8–9) that reaches beyond the major? This collection considers a common task—teaching Shakespeare in service or general education courses—that is often seen as obligatory, perfunctory, and ancillary to the generally accepted primary goal of research and upper-level teaching. Instead of believing that general educational courses require basic or introductory professional abilities, we demonstrate throughout this collection the need for a more nuanced understanding of the great wealth of ways such courses can be taught in colleges and universities. While most, if not all, of the teaching books on Shakespeare currently on the market assume its readers teach upper-level courses, teaching Shakespeare outside of the major demands its own praxis, its own theory, and its own pedagogy. Teaching eight plays to a junior English major in a single-author course is neither the same rhetorical space nor the same pedagogical experience as teaching one play to lower-classmen or business majors and should not be treated as such. The essays in this volume engage with pedagogical theories and practices that inform how we teach students in general education courses who are often freshmen and sophomores, non-majors, or are enrolled in otherwise non-traditional educational environments, such as service-learning courses. Further, these essays demonstrate that we can and must ground pedagogy in intellectual rigor that addresses contemporary critical debates about topics such as gender identity, racial justice, environmental conservation, and cultural production while still adapting to the new labor and digital conditions of twenty-first century academia. Though increasingly more students are entering college and taking general education courses that include Shakespeare on the syllabus, the number of those students actually majoring in English has declined, down a shocking 20% since just 2012 (Flaherty, 2018). Given the decline in English and humanities majors in recent years, it is safe to say that more university students encounter Shakespeare outside of the English major than within. By far the most common—and often the only—place most students encounter Shakespeare in academia is in general education classes, such as first-year composition, transdisciplinary courses, and broad literature surveys. Thus, when we tout the importance of teaching Shakespeare “beyond the major,” we are looking not only to include the 2% of English

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majors amongst college graduates, but also the 98% of students who receive their Shakespeare exposure elsewhere (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020). As the English major has undergone gradual but significant change in recent decades, the classroom also has forever transformed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Online education is no longer a specialty but a potential reality of all college courses. Whereas before the spring of 2020, some scholars focused on digital humanities and online education and others did not, we now know we must all be prepared to mobilize online, hybrid, or asynchronous learning. In the fall of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, 71% of postsecondary students were enrolled in at least one distance education course (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022). Preparing to teach Shakespeare in an online and accessible setting is now essential, a reality that this collection directly addresses, especially in Loreen L. Giese’s “Online Shakespeare: Beneficial Learning Experiences for NonMajors” and Jennifer Black’s “Online Shakespearean Role Playing.” The twenty-first century also has borne witness to the increasingly political polarization of American culture and widespread social unrest. In a twenty-first century, post-pandemic context, we are especially sensitive to concerns relating to equity, social justice, racial justice, geographic diversity, technologies of education, institutional policies and disparities, and other fully lived realities for both our students and our faculty. Shakespeare’s place in political debates in American life has long been addressed, from academic books such as Ivo Kamps’ Shakespeare Left and Right (1991, 2015) to more recent bestsellers such as Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (2018) and James Shapiro’s Shakespeare in a Divided America (2020), yet far fewer books consider the particularities of introducing and addressing Shakespeare and politics in general education. At most universities, the general education classroom is far more politically, demographically, racially, and geographically diverse than upper-level English classrooms. Expertly navigating that diversity can greatly benefit our students but is never without its challenges, and many of the essays in this collection can guide teacher-scholars through this process. Yet in addressing such changes, one concern that teacher-scholars must anticipate is the potential to re-traumatize students who may be bringing acute lived experiences to the classroom that we expect them to discuss and analyze at an objective distance, such as domestic violence, racism, discrimination, or transphobia. For instance, asking a young woman trapped in an abusive relationship to laugh at Petruchio’s gaslighting of

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Katherine when he tells her that the sun is actually the moon (Shakespeare, 1997, 4.5) disregards the very real trauma that such interpersonal dynamics still produce. Likewise, asking Black male students to witness the origins of systemic racism that reduce the respected General Othello to self-effacement, transforming him into an ugly and lingering stereotype, can re-traumatize the student and exacerbate racial injustices if not handled with care. The immediate relevancy of Petruchio’s abuse and Othello’s internalized racism is all the more reason to teach Shakespeare in the general education classroom, but we must do it with sensitivity and situational awareness. In respect to approaching race with Shakespeare specifically, David Sterling Brown and Arthur L. Little, Jr. argue that it is our “ethical responsibility” to not only push back against institutionalized nostalgia for a whitewashed approach to Shakespeare, but to “use those anti-Black moments critically…[and] use them productively in the classroom” (Brown & Little, 2021). An important foundational step to this kind of trauma-informed teaching involves first naming and then working to eliminate the structural injustices affecting our students. Carrie Gaffney relates the particulars of such challenges in her Learning for Justice article “When Schools Cause Trauma”: Students who are experiencing trauma can be retraumatized in school through poorly chosen readings, activities and assignments. Gorski [founder of the Equity Literacy Institute and EdChange] offers an example: “I often hear from students who are learning about racism in the past tense,” he says. “For instance, they are reading To Kill a Mockingbird and learning about what it was like for people of color ‘back then.’ At the same time, they are experiencing racism in school and in their communities in the present tense.” (Gaffney, 2019)

This kind of erasure—an implicit suggestion that the racism students live with is either imagined or exaggerated—can compound the trauma of experiencing that racism. We hope that the assignments, activities, and course designs discussed in this collection can help our fellow teacher-­ scholars confront the challenges of our contemporary moment head on, empowering students in their encounters with Shakespeare rather than further alienating them. While we seek to address significant political and social tensions in our classrooms, the difficulty of this task has only been compounded by worsening labor conditions in higher education, often overlooked or taken for

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granted in teaching resources. For increasing numbers of faculty, service courses comprise a significant part of their responsibilities, and the vast majority of these courses are being taught by contingent faculty. Consider the data. A survey conducted in 2015 by the Modern Language Association’s Office of Research reveals that for PhD graduates who earned their degree between 1996–2011 and have tenure or tenure-track jobs, 14% work at baccalaureate colleges (without graduate students to teach service courses) and 9.4% work at two-year institutions (where service courses are the majority) (“Where are they now?”, 2013). Thus, almost 25% of tenure and tenure-track faculty teach service courses often or all the time; the number of non-tenure track faculty who teach service courses is significantly higher. Likewise, whereas in 1969, roughly 80% of faculty members in American universities were tenured or tenure-track, by 2016, that number fell to 25%, with graduate students, instructors/lecturers, and adjuncts making much of the difference: “In fall 2019, 63.0 percent of faculty members were on contingent appointments; 20.0 percent were full-time contingent faculty members and 42.9 percent were part-­ time contingent faculty members. Only 26.5 percent of faculty members were tenured and 10.5 percent were on tenure track” (“The Annual Report,” 2021). So severe is this problem that a number of organizations have arisen hoping to address the abuse, organizations such as The New Faculty Majority which is “dedicated to improving the quality of higher education by advancing professional equity and securing academic freedom for all adjunct and contingent faculty” and the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, a “network of North American activists working to improve higher education” by improving the work environment of contingent workers (Jaschik, 2021). Unions are now rapidly forming in American universities to protect the faculty and graduate students who teach the largest number of students often with deteriorating wages. Therefore, one of the purposes of this collection is to address the need for all of our Shakespeare teachers, despite their labor status, to have access to pedagogically-driven teaching resources. There has long been a market for resources that aid primary and secondary education teachers on the subject of teaching Shakespeare, and in recent decades, this market has expanded into higher education as well: Rex Gibson, Teaching Shakespeare: A Handbook for Teachers (Cambridge University Press, 1998); the Shakespeare Set Free series (Folger Shakespeare Library, mid-1990s, and 2000s); Ralph Cohen’s ShakesFear and How to Cure It (Prestwick House, 2007); and

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G.B. Shand, Teaching Shakespeare: Passing It On (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Other texts have aimed to connect Shakespeare pedagogy to recent trends in literary criticism: Derval Conroy and Denise Clarke’s Teaching the Early Modern Period (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Ayanna Thompson and Lisa Turchi’s Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centered Approach (Bloomsbury Arden, 2016), and Hillary Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman’s Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). These are all valuable resources, many of which are referenced by our contributors and inform our own teaching. Nevertheless, this collection offers approaches to Shakespeare’s language, performance, critical theory, and social application in ways that explicitly address the unique pedagogical situation of teaching Shakespeare outside of the major—asking not only who we are teaching but also who is doing the teaching—which has not previously been a sustained focus of pedagogical research. Further, none of these earlier publications specifically attend to how teaching Shakespeare in a general education composition or literature course or in a service-learning course differs from teaching Shakespeare in an upper-level course with traditional English majors. In an upper-level course, such as a traditional single-author class, one can reasonably assume that most or all of the students are English or theatre majors who have completed previous literature courses, understand and perhaps even value the benefits of close reading, and have at least some curiosity and enthusiasm for Shakespeare. These courses also tend to afford faculty and students the luxury of fifteen weeks studying one author, genre, or time period. By comparison, the learning environments we discuss in this collection are composed of a variety of majors who likely are new to close reading and often get only two weeks on Shakespeare before moving to vastly different authors, genres, and time periods. These students may even feel forced to be studying any type of literature, let alone Shakespeare. In short, the resources that currently exist for teaching Shakespeare at the college level do not transfer easily across these spaces. Whereas every Shakespeare scholar-teacher knows that geography, demographic, race, age, gender, class, and ethnicity all shape the classroom, these previously published books collectively overlook students’ majors and their attitudes towards general education, as well as practical concerns that emerge when also having to focus on engagement, composition skills, or the coverage requirements that constitute a survey course.

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Likewise, books and essay collections with a pedagogical purpose traditionally have been assembled or written by R1, tenure-track professors, many of which often exclusively teach upper-level major courses or graduate seminars to consistently engaged and well-prepared students, versed in the conventions of literary study and ready to embark on more nuanced explorations. In response, this collection of essays considers a variety of approaches to teaching Shakespeare “beyond the major,” considering topics such as: applying reader response criticism in a multicultural classroom; teaching through bilingual immersion in a service learning context; building a community of learners in an online environment; articulating the relevancy of Shakespeare in the educational life of a community college student; developing core skills for English language learners in a first-year composition course; engaging students majoring in specific or transdisciplinary fields such as business, criminal justice, and environmental studies; and the possibility of connecting the college classroom with high schools as part of a community outreach program, to name a few. While we include several contributions from senior faculty at R1 universities, we also bring in lesser-known scholars, whether they are graduate students, instructors/ lecturers, or faculty from regional public universities, community colleges, or liberal arts universities. Our contributors also teach Shakespeare across the United States—in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Oregon, Massachusetts, Ohio, Idaho, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C.—offering a wide range of geographical diversity and experiences. After all, as Natalie Loper explains in chapter two, as the number of English majors decline, these are the types of instructors teaching Shakespeare to the largest number of students. As experts on the practical application of contemporary Shakespeare pedagogy, their voices need to be heard. Some of the essays collected in this volume began at the Teaching Shakespeare in and beyond the Classroom symposium co-directed by Nicholas R. Helms and M. Tyler Sasser and hosted by the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, as well as the “Shakespeare and Service Learning” seminar at the annual conference of the Shakespeare Association of America in Los Angeles, CA, chaired by Kelly Neil of Spartanburg Methodist University. Both events occurred in 2018, with a few of the contributors participating in both the symposium as well as the seminar. These two events brought together teachers, scholars, students, and practitioners in formal and informal settings to exchange knowledge about and discuss our subject matter. When we began assembling the essays, our primary goal was to showcase the

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multi-faceted ways Shakespeare is taught outside the traditional English or theatre major classroom. Anecdotally, we initially believed that some combination of lecture, New Criticism, and a Socratic question-and-answer unpacking of a scene likely dominated the non-major classroom. We were skeptical about the possibility of finding the same pedagogical variety in these classrooms as we knew existed when teaching majors. We have been pleasantly mistaken. What we found was that the line between cultural production and the Shakespeare we teach is always mutually constitutive. The specificity that each essay in this collection offers—focusing on a particular pedagogical approach to a particular demographic of student at a particular type of university—is not intended to provide absolute coverage, but rather to underscore the range and diversity of opportunities to meet our non-majors. Put simply, we address those students who are in our classrooms, traditional or otherwise, right now. Taken as a whole, this collection represents the range of diverse ways teachers from across the country teach, from tenured faculty at large public universities to contingent faculty at small private schools, all teaching Shakespeare beyond the major. Gathered here are teachers who have found ways to teach Othello and Critical Race Theory while dissertating, teachers who teach a 5/5 course load composed primarily of composition, teachers who have won awards for their many years of outstanding work, teachers who introduce Shakespeare to local communities outside of academia, teachers who have transformed online education to include innovative design, teachers who recognize adaptation as a way to reveal and not merely simplify or repeat Shakespeare, teachers who primarily teach business and STEM majors, teachers who recognize the practical limitations of surveys and large lectures, and teachers who use Shakespeare to address today’s most pressing environmental concerns. By offering a volume of accessible essays rooted in pedagogical theory and practice, we aim for this collection to widen the aperture of our field and our pedagogical knowledge base while acknowledging the varied lived realities of the students who actually fill the vast majority of the seats in our classrooms. In other words, we intend this volume to answer the following question: “How can we as Shakespeareans, early modernists, and college faculty best engage the students populating the twenty-first century classroom?” Addressing this question in the 2020s—a decade already attuned to social justice, racial inequity, economic disparity, gender discrimination, climate change, and political unrest—demands that discussions on how to teach Shakespeare must also consider why we should continue to teach

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Shakespeare in the first place. Such a question is difficult to answer, but there are more or less two objective ways to account for Shakespeare’s continued popularity. Either Shakespeare’s value comes intrinsically from within the plays or that value has been manufactured over time through cultural accrual. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. Of course, some critics have begun to ask what position Shakespeare should continue to occupy in our broader culture, the academy notwithstanding. For instance, on February 16th, 2021, Lee Brown of the New York Post published an article entitled, “William Shakespeare ditched by woke teachers over ‘misogyny, racism’” (Brown, 2021). The post was one of many to respond to an article published by Amanda MacGregor a month earlier in the School Library Journal titled, “To Teach or Not to Teach: Is Shakespeare Still Relevant to Today’s Students?” However, the Conservative-leaning New York Post entirely misrepresented the nuanced discussion contained in MacGregor’s article, choosing instead to simplify the concern. The following excerpt from The Washington Post written by Sarah Mulhern Gross, an English teacher at High Technology High School in Lincroft, New Jersey, offers a nuanced approach to why and how we might teach Shakespeare today: As one of the teachers quoted in the original [New York Post] article, I was accused of being part of cancel culture, of being a woke teacher indoctrinating students to hate men, and of being unprofessional and unintelligent. A few hours after learning I was quoted (and misquoted), I was also the topic of conversation on a local talk radio station. I do teach Shakespeare and that’s very clear in MacGregor’s article…. The lens I use upset some folks, and they felt the need to misquote me and attach hyperbolic headlines to a story about professional text selections…. I review my text choices every year to make sure they are relevant, rigorous, and compelling; each year, that means deciding if and how I will teach Shakespeare’s works…. For the last few years, I have taught “Romeo and Juliet” through a neuroscience and juvenile justice lens rather than a traditional canonical lens. The students at my STEM-focused high school respond brilliantly and impress me each year with their analysis…. However, I don’t hold Shakespeare up to my students as the most important writer to ever live. He may be one of the greatest writers of all time, but he isn’t the only great writer… If English teachers do choose to read Shakespeare with students, we must allow our students to interrogate Shakespeare and his stories. My students are working with “Romeo and Juliet” this month, alongside “Antigone,” excerpts from “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson, and a variety of texts focused on adolescent

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brain development, toxic masculinity and violence, and juvenile justice. I am asking them to wrestle with the question: “Should someone be held responsible for the deaths and violence in Verona?” (MacGregor, 2021)

As Gross so clearly explains, canceling Shakespeare is not the most effective way to address what is often problematic about his texts, the culture in which they originated and how they have been (mis)used since the late sixteenth century. Rather, she helps her students to recognize the various concerns in the play and how Shakespeare’s reputation often has overshadowed those concerns, using his place in the canon to excuse whatever cultural problems may arise in the text. For Gross, then, the goal is not only to teach the language, characters, and themes of a particular play, but also to provide students with the critical eye to evaluate Shakespeare in a contemporary context. This debate highlights another requirement that all Shakespeare teachers must accept: when we teach Shakespeare to the 98% of college students who do not major in English, we must also make the case for why Shakespeare is important. Long gone are the days where the value of Shakespeare speaks for itself, and this, we believe, is a good thing. It is a valuable exercise to reassess, to ask ourselves why and not just how, to defend our investment in Shakespeare’s texts and to articulate its ever-­ evolving relevance in a changing world. When teaching literature, we must make our texts relevant to the students’ own lives. We must respect their healthy desire to know how what they are doing today will benefit them tomorrow. We must hear the student who asks, “I don’t understand why I should care about Hamlet” often wishing simply to know how an investment in our courses will help them. We may also be asked to explain to administration—deans, provosts, presidents, boards—how our work in the classroom with Shakespeare will further our university’s larger goals. Accordingly, the essays in this collection by Heather Hirschfeld, Joanne Diaz, and Emma K.  Atwood offer administrative advice on connecting Shakespeare to pre-professional degrees. Given the enormously high costs that go into the college experience today, we are obliged to answer the business, nursing, and chemistry majors who ask such questions, and we can measure our success as a teacher by how we help students find ways to experience literature as fully, pleasurably, intellectually, and personally as they can. Our answers will not be one-size-fits-all, but it is our hope that these essays help new and veteran teachers alike find meaningful ways to

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articulate to students, as well as parents, chairs, and deans, why Shakespeare remains vital in transdisciplinary settings and beyond the major. All essays collected in Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major contain a common thread dedicated to thinking deeply about how to and why teach Shakespeare in classrooms that significantly differ from the classrooms of the early 2000s. The chapters arise from three thematic questions: (1) What are some of the specific challenges, practical and theoretical, that emerge from teaching Shakespeare, both the plays and what the plays might represent, outside of major courses?; (2) How will we teach Shakespeare in a post-pandemic context, where all college courses must be prepared to become accessible, online courses?; and (3) How does Shakespeare speak to contemporary issues relating to social justice, as well as a concern for addressing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in our general education classrooms and beyond? Although our essays move in and out amongst these three questions, we have not organized the volume by these strands of questions, instead electing to order the chapters in such a way that encourages our readers to locate their own intersections. So doing allows readers to cultivate less obvious ideas running throughout the various approaches to our focus. Therefore, itself a practice in diverse representation, our collection employs a hybrid methodology, featuring a range of pedagogies and theoretical applications from reader response criticism and ludic social reproduction to strategic presentism. Further, our chapter summaries include brief references to our contributors’ universities and the culture of those universities to highlight not only the geographic range of classrooms discussed in this collection but also to introduce the context of these scholars’ classes. Yet despite their varied approaches to Shakespearean pedagogy “beyond the major,” our contributors collectively assert a necessary and immediate value in adapting Shakespearean pedagogy for our students’ most pressing challenges, preparing them for futures as fully engaged citizens, that they, like the over-­ eager Lucentio in The Taming of the Shrew, might achieve “treats of happiness” (Shakespeare, 1997, 1.1.19) as they “suck the sweets of sweet philosophy” (Shakespeare, 1997, 1.1.28). The collection begins with Natalie Loper’s essay “Teaching Shakespeare off the Tenure Track” which quantifies the current professional state of teaching Shakespeare in higher education. Loper is Senior Instructor and Associate Director of First-Year Writing in the English Department at the University of Alabama. Her department leans on more than 60 contingent faculty (of the approximately 85 full-time faculty) to teach the majority of

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its general education, which fully exemplifies a “shift in who teaches Shakespeare” today: far fewer tenure-track professors in upper-level courses and far more contingent factory in general education (21). Thus, before turning to the creative assignments she uses to teach Shakespeare in first-year writing and in literature surveys, Loper reflects on the current (2016–2022) trends in academic hiring, thereby addressing not only what Shakespeare is taught, how it is taught, and to whom it is taught but also who teaches it and under what conditions. Loper’s essay assists us in making the argument that the professional world of Shakespeare studies must better take into account who exactly is teaching the most Shakespeare and what is the most common context in which those students learn Shakespeare. With Loper, Associate Professor Joseph Navitsky also looks at the ways we might teach Shakespeare in literature surveys in “One-Act Shakespeare: Teaching Cultural Legacy Through Excerpts and Adaptations.” Navitsky teaches “Introduction to Literature” at West Chester University, a public research university in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Rather than traditionally designating one play for his general education literature surveys, Navitsky selects individual scenes from multiple plays and puts them in conversation with centuries-long debates about a particular idea. For example, he pairs act five of Antony and Cleopatra with readings from Plutarch and images from contemporary sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud to investigate the conversation between art and history. Likewise, he pairs the trial scene in The Merchant of Venice with passages from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Gareth Armstrong’s Shylock to consider perspective as a historical construct. Excerpting Shakespeare, Navitsky finds, helps us to “step back from ingrained pedagogical practices in order to more clearly evaluate the place of Shakespeare in today’s classroom and discover new ways to talk with our students about the relevancy of Shakespeare to our own historical moment” (43). Heather Hirschfeld is Professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, the flagship public university in Tennessee. Her essay, “‘To Double Business Bound’: Shakespeare and Gen Ed,” begins by surveying how general education, from the point of view of both faculty and administrators, has changed in the twenty-first century compared to the middle and late twentieth century. So doing allows her essay not only to anticipate the numerous creative examples we find in this collection of Shakespeare appearing in general education classes other than the sophomore-level literature survey but also to share how Hirschfeld’s university has responded

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to such shifts and where Shakespeare falls amidst these shifts. Hirschfeld created and designed a Shakespeare course that fulfills both a writing and humanities general education requirement. This two-for-one deal, as she explains, makes the course quite popular for non-majors. Her chapter not only looks at the pragmatic and administrative aspects of introducing such a course into a university’s curriculum, but it also considers how her specialization—textual editing—works for non-majors. She builds on the work of scholar-teachers such as David Bevington, Randall Anderson, and Frank Clary, who also incorporate(d) textual studies in their classrooms, essentially to address “ways of knowing” as it relates both to Hamlet and education more broadly (65). Joanne Diaz is Isaac Funk Endowed Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, a small liberal arts college in central Illinois where most students are enrolled in pre-professional degrees. In recent years, she has worked with the Business Department to create a Humanities minor specifically aimed at professional majors. Her essay, “‘The Refusal of Compassion’: Teaching The Merchant of Venice in a General Education Course,” examines the results of those discussions, primarily how she now teaches The Merchant of Venice in a course called “Crime and Punishment: Representations of Justice in Law and Literature.” Diaz outlines the value of in-class performance, bibliographic studies, and film studies specifically for business and pre-law majors studying The Merchant of Venice, ultimately helping these students to “grapple with scenes in which characters refuse to recognize the humanity of others, … sensitize students to these failures, and provide them with frameworks that allow them to critique” it (73–4). Gregory M. Schnitzspahn is Associate Professor of English at Fischer College, a small, urban institution in Boston primarily composed of first-­ generation students, more than half of which receive a Federal Pell Grant. Since Business Management and Criminal Justice are the two most popular majors at Fischer, Schnitzspahn’s essay “Getting a Return on Investment in Shakespeare” stresses how he encourages students to look innovatively at a text as data requiring human interpretation. He brings this approach to three different classes: (1) “Writing and the Literary Arts,” a prerequisite for all Bachelor of Arts degrees including Communication and Media Studies, Psychology, and Biology; (2) “Intermediate Writing,” which fulfills humanities and English prerequisites for several programs; and (3) a 100-level “Introduction to Shakespeare” course which business majors often take to fulfill an English elective. In all three courses, Schnitzspahn is heavily influenced by the decades old “The Moral Leader” course that is

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a part of Harvard University’s MBA program. His Case Study assignment has students apply this MBA model to texts such as Richard II, where students study competing styles of business leadership in the play. Emma K. Atwood is Associate Professor of English at the University of Montevallo, a public liberal arts university in Alabama where faculty members are asked “to collaborate with other subject matter experts in vastly different fields in order to make the liberal arts coalesce” (107). Her essay “Green Shakespeare and the Environmental Studies Classroom” emerges from a collaborative experience with faculty from the humanities, the sciences, and business aimed at addressing how to bring the ethics of sustainability into each of their classrooms. The result for Atwood was the creation of “Green Shakespeare,” an upper-level Environmental Studies course cross-­listed with English that combines five Shakespeare plays (As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, King Lear, and The Tempest) with cartography, environmental theory, and service learning. Atwood’s call for strategic presentism in Shakespeare pedagogy asks us to think about the past through the lens of our present moment. As a PhD candidate at Texas A&M, Andani Kholinar (formally Umar Farouk) was able to address perhaps the biggest excuse many teachers, and likely especially white teachers, give for not addressing race in the classroom: “the veil of anonymity” that comes from teaching Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth so to altogether avoid the so-called race plays (122). Kholinar’s essay, “Shakespeare Pedagogy and Twenty-First Century Multicultural Sensibilities,” offers an extensive and sound exploration into how teachers might turn to Shakespeare to address race relations in America and the need for a more inclusive pedagogy. Kholinar discusses how he uses Othello to address key topics in contemporary cultural discourse, topics such as the white gaze, reactions to racists taunts, and how white supremacists have claimed Shakespeare. Kholinar’s focus on teaching a single-play to English majors overlaps into those classes for non-­ majors that consider only one play, albeit in less time. Also telling are the results of Kholinar’s anonymous student survey and what it reveals about at least some students’ thought-provoking reactions to studying race relations in America in a Shakespeare course, particularly at a large, public school in Texas. Kholinar’s rich anecdotal study procures and then analyzes feedback in a way that can serve as a model for faculty seeking pedagogical development and looking for ways to put student course evaluation feedback into practice.

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Also prioritizing the goal of connecting Shakespeare to contemporary cultural debates is Patricia Marchesi, who spent several years as an Assistant Professor of English at LaGrange College, a four-year private college in Georgia affiliated with the United Methodist Church. In “Enhancing Creative Engagement with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Hamlet, and Othello and Gen-Z Culture,” she shares how her thematic approach to A Midsummer Night’s Dream during an international health crisis, domestic civil unrest, and various state-level political strife that has received national attention since 2018, influenced her focus, which has become the “idea of being blindsided by something beyond [one’s] control, … without our consent, and often without our awareness” (138). With Much Ado about Nothing, students contemplate what the play suggests about the social media action of unfriending, with Othello, issues around the impact of false narratives and conspiracy theories, and with Hamlet, concerns about the effects of isolation on the human and cultural psyche. Her chapter also includes impressive examples from the social media and creative projects she assigns, helping us to think beyond traditional forms of assessment. Cordelia Ross has taught Shakespeare in a wide array of institutions, both geographically and in terms of student culture: University of California (Davis), The University of Alabama, and Brazosport College. Her essay “‘Some Enchanted Trifle’: Shakespeare and Popular Culture in the Community College” combines her pedagogical interests in pop culture with classes where many students enroll in remedial corequisites or cross-requisites. Brazosport College is a public community college outside of Houston, Texas, where many of her students come to class with the assumption that Shakespeare is inaccessible and/or irrelevant. Although this feeling is common for many college students, Ross explains how dispelling such misconceptions about who should or can read Shakespeare is a significant part of her responsibilities as a teacher at a community college. In her second section of freshman composition and rhetoric, Ross matches The Tempest with The Forbidden Planet or Macbeth with Scotland, PA for her “Shakespop Project,” which not only aims to dispel what counts as Shakespeare and for whom is Shakespeare but also helps to make the texts more accessible. Rebecca Olson is Associate Professor of English at Oregon State University, a public-land grant university known for programs in forestry, oceanography, and robotics. Her introductory Shakespeare courses fulfill general education requirements, thus are composed mostly by non-majors.

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Her essay, “Choose Your Own Adventure: Embracing Student-Selected Readings in the General Education Shakespeare Course” considers effective ways to center students in course design. The assignments, workshops, lesson plans, and activities she shares clearly elevate her class to a place where students are empowered to take control of their own education. More specifically, her “choose your own adventure” assignment—where students individually choose the final plays they read, often resulting in as many as 8–10 different plays being discussed on the same day—is groundbreaking pedagogy, especially in is its effective application for asynchronous online education. Indeed, during COVID-19, all teachers learned that online education was no longer a (sub)specialty but rather a necessity for all. Loreen L. Giese, a Professor at Ohio University, has taught Shakespeare in online courses for more than twenty years, and presumably unlike many of us, she was fully prepared when her classes moved online in the spring of 2020. Her essay, “Online Shakespeare: Beneficial Learning Experiences for Non-­ Majors,” explains what for many readers may seem impossible as it addresses three major hurdles: “Asynchronous online courses can exacerbate declining levels of preparedness, can increase the intimidation students feel when studying Shakespeare, and can hinder close reading since students work individually… This exacerbation in an online course can intensify further for non-majors, who usually have less practices reading Shakespeare’s plays” (181). Her focus is on The Taming of the Shrew, but Giese’s essay offers a practical guide for readers looking to teach any Shakespeare online, especially for those who are skeptical of teaching online to non-majors. With Giese’s essay, Jennifer Black’s “Online Shakespearean Role Playing” continues to help us think about creative, non-traditional assignments that are successful in an online space. Black insists that performance-­ based and role-playing Shakespeare are essential to teaching Shakespeare, and they need not be excluded from online education. In her freshman-­ level seminar designed for general education at Boise State University, students from across all majors learn Shakespeare through “video role-­ playing with Macbeth, imaginative text and video role-playing with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and workplace-focused role-playing with The Winter’s Tale” (201). Black’s essay offers the assignments and lesson plans for such activities all grounded in pedagogical theory, and helps us to understand online education more than students passively watching

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videos, taking multiple-choice quizzes, and rarely participating in meaningful interaction. The concluding pair of essays take us even further beyond the major by exploring learning spaces beyond the college classroom, and in so doing, they help us better conceptualize the pedagogical possibilities of teaching Shakespeare in less traditional environments. As a conclusion of sorts, we have chosen to include these essays as part of the collection not only because of the pedagogical expertise of these contributors but also since they provide practical, experiential, and tested pedagogies that could be adopted by readers interested in service learning, leadership training, or community outreach. In “‘We Must Follow the Leaders’: Shakespeare Beyond the Classroom,” Sarah Enloe shifts the focus away from the traditional classroom to a larger community of lifelong learners. Enloe has served as the President of the Shakespeare Theatre Association and was the Director of Education at the American Shakespeare Center in Washington D.C., where she organized programming in the areas of College Prep, Research and Scholarship, Life-long learning, and Educator Resources. As an experienced education coordinator, Enloe is deeply knowledgeable about Shakespeare-related pedagogy, having perhaps taught Shakespeare to more students, and to a greater variety of students, in the last decade than anyone else in the country. In other words, she makes Shakespeare accessible to all. In this essay, she explores numerous ways the American Shakespeare Center, particularly through the proven success of their Shakespeare and Leadership programs, “have brought together people from a range of cultures and given them a touchstone for connection, and given the participants a common basis for creating persuasive communication in their daily lives,” which can be adapted for a variety of pedagogical contexts (216). Finally, with “Existential Shakespeare: Citizenship in the International Service-Learning Classroom,” Sujata Iyengar, Mikaela LaFave, and Hayden M. Kelley detail the challenges and rewards of a three-year international partnership between the University of Georgia, the Université Paul Valéry Montpellier, and a Title 1 middle school in north Georgia. In their essay, we see the great interdisciplinary work departments such as English at UGA are doing to attempt to “set Shakespeare free,” as Peggy O’Brien puts it, so that even those student populations who have “typically been underserved by Shakespeareans” are included in our scholarship and in our pedagogy (O’Brien et al., 2006). Their chapter offers a pragmatic model for this application of service learning but does not paint the

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experience with rose-colored classes. Instead, they discuss the stupendous undertaking of service learning, complete with successes, setbacks, logistics, failures, administrative tensions, intercultural barriers, and financial challenges. The end of their chapter is shocking. Years of planning come to a crashing halt, in great part due to America’s continued legacy of systemic racism and the ways it relentlessly appears in unexpected ways, even when simply  trying to bring A Midsummer Night’s Dream to rural America. Thus, with Iyengar, LaFave, and Kelley, we end this collection by considering how Shakespeare resurfaces amidst a range of existential domestic and world crises, as we and our readers find some solace and solidarity in the shared challenge in asking students to engage with Shakespeare and their “course of learning and ingenious studies” (Shakespeare, 1997, 1.1.9) beyond the major.

References Brown, D. S., & Little, Jr., A. L. (2021, November 9). To Teach Shakespeare for Survival: Talking with David Sterling Brown and Arthur L.  Little Jr. Public Books: A Magazine of Ideas, Arts, and Scholarship. Retrieved December 5, 2021, from https://www.publicbooks.org/to-­teach-­shakespeare-­for-­survival-­ talking-­with-­david-­sterling-­brown-­and-­arthur-­l-­little-­jr/ Brown, L. (2021, February 16). Shakespeare ditched by woke teachers over ‘Misogyny, Racism’. The New York Post. Retrieved September 19, 2021, from https://nypost.com/2021/02/16/shakespeare-­d itched-­b y-­w oke-­ teachers-­over-­misogyny-­racism/ Cohen, R. (2018). ShakesFear and How to Cure It. The Arden Shakespeare. Conroy, D., & Clarke, D., eds. (2011). Teaching the Early Modern Period. Palgrave. Eklund, H., & Hyman, W. B. (2019). Teaching Social Justice through Shakespeare. Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now. Edinburgh University Press. Flaherty, C. (2018, July 18). The Evolving English Major. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved October 2, 2021, from https://www.insidehighered.com/ news/2018/07/18/new-­analysis-­english-­departments-­says-­numbers-­majors­are-­way-­down-­2012-­its-­not-­death Gaffney, C. (2019). When Schools Cause Trauma. Learning for Justice, 62 (Summer). Retrieved September 19, 2021, from https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/summer-­2019/when-­schools-­cause-­trauma Gibson, R. (1998). Teaching Shakespeare: A Handbook for Teachers. Cambridge University Press. Greenblatt, S. (2018). Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. W.W. Norton. Jaschik, S. (2021, July 12). What Academic Labor Wants. Inside Higher Education. Retrieved September 19, 2021, from https://www.insidehighered.com/

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n e w s / 2 0 2 1 / 0 7 / 1 2 / s u m m i t -­a c a d e m i c -­u n i o n s -­e n v i s i o n s -­b r o a d -­ changes-­higher-­education Kamps, I. (1991, 2015). Shakespeare Left and Right. Routledge. MacGregor, A. (2021, January 4). To Teach Or Not to Teach: Is Shakespeare Still Relevant to Today’s Students? School Library Journal. Retrieved September 19, 2021, from https://www.slj.com/?detailStory=to-­teach-­or-­not-­to-­teach-­is-­ shakespeare-­still-­relevant-­to-­todays-­students-­libraries-­classic-­literature-­canon National Center for Education Statistics. (2020). Table  322.10. Bachelor’s Degrees Conferred by Postsecondary Institutions, by Field of Study: Selected Years, 1970–71 Through 2018–19. Retrieved September 9, 2021, from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_322.10.asp National Center for Education Statistics. (2022). Undergraduate Enrollment. Condition of Education. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. Retrieved May 31, 2022, from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/ indicator/cha O’Brien, P., et  al. (2006). Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching a Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth. Washington Square Press. Shakespeare, W. (1997). The Riverside Shakespeare (G. B. Evans et al., Eds., 2nd ed.). Houghton Mifflin. Shand, G. B. (2009). Teaching Shakespeare: Passing It On. Wiley-Blackwell. Shapiro, J. (2020). Shakespeare in a Divided America. Penguin. The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession. AAUP. July 2021. Retrieved November 12, 2021, from https://www.aaup.org/report/ annual-­report-­economic-­status-­profession-­2020-­21?fbclid=IwAR2_lZELkdF_ MYOLN3Z45u7TiKr_0ez6bryJPQGIq_PZNDGiybO5KZL37Q Thompson, A., & Turchi, L. (2016). Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-­ Centered Approach. Arden. “Where Are They Now?” American Association of University Professors. (2013). Retrieved September 19, 2021, from https://mlaresearch.mla.hcommons. org/2015/02/17/where-­are-­they-­now-­occupations-­of-­1996-­2011-­phd-­reci pients-­in-­2013-­2/

Teaching Shakespeare off the Tenure Track Natalie Loper

What does it mean for Shakespeare when tenure-track positions decline each year, and universities rely on more contingent faculty to cover their classes? As the Shakespeare Association of America, the British Shakespeare Association, and other organizations add more sessions and workshops devoted to Shakespeare pedagogy, it is becoming clear that “Shakespeare” is moving beyond a single-author class required for English majors and is not taught by only tenured or tenure-track professors. This shift in who teaches Shakespeare, and how, also relates to broader trends: universities resembling corporations are ever more concerned about rankings, placements, and financial viability, while humanities and the arts fight for funding and recognition. While most of this is not new, it is important to continue having conversations about Shakespeare’s space in today’s

N. Loper (*) University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3_2

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university.1 Who teaches Shakespeare, and what are some best practices when teaching his plays and poems? This chapter will focus on how the job market has changed the nature of who teaches Shakespeare in colleges and universities, how Shakespeare can meet the learning outcomes of general education British literature and first-year writing classes, and how student presentations and creative projects can help students understand and apply Shakespeare’s texts in meaningful ways.

The Job Market As anyone who has been a graduate student or who has taught at PhD-­ granting institutions in the past decade should know, the job market for scholars of Shakespeare has not been good for quite some time. This shift reflects an overall trend in academic hiring, which has seen a decline in advertisements for tenure-track positions and a rise in non-tenure track positions (see Fig. 1). According to the Modern Language Association’s Job List, 1450 English language jobs were advertised in 1975–76, peaked at 2075  in 1988–1989, and hit their lowest number ever in 2019–2020, with 728 positions advertised—the latest data available at the time of this writing (Modern Language Association, 2022, Fig. 1). Of these jobs in 2019–2020, 55% were indexed as tenure-track (TT), 25.6% were indexed as non-­ tenure-­track (NTT), and 19.4% did not specify tenure status (Modern Language Association, 2022). As with the overall job numbers, tenure-­ track jobs are on the decline. Compare this to 2004–2005, the earliest year that the MLA tracked tenure status, when 79.7% of jobs were tenure-­ track, 18% were non-tenure-track, and 2.3% were not specified. The ratio of TT to NTT jobs has fluctuated over the years, but according to the MLA’s data, English language tenure-track jobs have been below 64% since 2016–2017 (Modern Language Association, 2022). These declining numbers reflect broader hiring trends in higher education.

1  For a sustained look at how the changing university has affected the study and teaching of Shakespeare, see O’Dair and Francisco (2019). I wish to thank O’Dair for pushing me to reflect on the job market and the problems of higher education. Her mentorship has made me the scholar I am today. Francisco provided encouraging feedback on an early version of this paper, as did attendees at the conference “Teaching Shakespeare In and Beyond the Classroom,” sponsored by the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama in 2019.

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2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500

2,075 1,978 1,828 1,793 1,826 1,8731,895 1,732 1,739 1,741 1,670 1,680 1,687 1,700 1,857 1,541 1,680 1,517 1,703 1,591 1,441 1,492 1,622 1,515 1,507 1,482 1,637 1,387 1,3801,235 1,368 1,488 1,288 1,365 1,442 1,450 1,3541,3521,338 1,190 1,142 1,152 1,159 1,193 1,361 1,369 1,121 1,327 1,3101,325 1,367 1,369 1,238 1,075 1,134 1,046 1,238 1,015 1,297 1,2271,100 1,192 1,285 946 1,188 1,237 1,129 1,088 1,098 1,166 837828839 1,128 1,109 1,102 1,095 1,047 728 1,027 1,022 949913 808770 751 683 1,575 1,456 1,461

English

1975–76 1976–77 1977–78 1978–79 1979–80 1980–81 1981–82 1982–83 1983–84 1984–85 1985–86 1986–87 1987–88 1988–89 1989–90 1990–91 1991–92 1992–93 1993–94 1994–95 1995–96 1996–97 1997–98 1998–99 1999–2000 2000–01 2001–02 2002–03 2003–04 2004–05 2005–06 2006–07 2007–08 2008–09 2009-10 2010-11 2011-12 2012-13 2013-14 2014-15 2015-16 2016-17 2017-18 2018-19 2019-20

0

Fig. 1  Number of positions advertised in the MLA job list, 1975–76 to 2019–20. (Modern Language Association, 2022)

The MLA’s focus on full-time positions does not account for the rise of part-time and adjunct labor. According to an analysis of U.S. Department of Education data published in the 2019 Almanac by The Chronicle of Higher Education (2019), More than 40 percent of faculty members at all four-year and two-year colleges worked part time in the fall of 2017. Among sectors, four-year public institutions had the highest share of faculty members who were either tenured or on the tenure track—nearly 44 percent—while just over a third of faculty members at four-year private nonprofit institutions were either tenured or on the tenure track.2

Tenure-track declines continued over the next two years. The Chronicle of Higher Education (2021) reports that in 2019, just 33.8% of jobs were held by tenured or tenure-track faculty; the remaining 66.2% of jobs were non-tenure track or had no tenure system. These numbers suggest that the tenure system will continue to unravel, as colleges seek to save money

2  These numbers reflect all academic disciplines in the U.S., not just those represented by members of the Modern Language Association.

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by hiring cheaper labor in the form of part-time and full-time non-tenure track instructors and lecturers. The number of jobs for Shakespeare scholars follows these overall trends. According to the Academic Jobs Wiki, twenty-one full-time tenure-­track jobs and four visiting, limited-term positions were advertised for Early Modern/Renaissance in 2019–2020.3 Most jobs were in the United States, but the list also includes colleges and universities in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Unsurprisingly, advertisements for positions were cut in half during the pandemic year of 2020–2021, with roughly eleven universities posting Early Modern/Renaissance jobs. The market rebounded slightly in 2021–2022, but the fewer than twenty jobs are down from approximately forty positions listed each year for jobs beginning in 2018 and 2019 (Academic Jobs Wiki, 2021, 2018, 2019). While a handful of jobs call for a specialty in Shakespeare each year, most employers desire diverse candidates who research and can teach in several fields or sub-fields. Informal conversations with colleagues on the search committees for these jobs and discussions with advisors trying to secure positions for their PhD graduates suggest that applications to Early Modern/ Renaissance positions each year far outnumber the available jobs. The data summarized here demonstrates the overall downward trend in the number of tenure-track or full-time Early Modern/Renaissance jobs each year. Future years promise to be even more depressing, as institutions of higher education continue to cope with a global pandemic, declining numbers of students seeking a college degree, and other uncertainties. The job numbers do not indicate that undergraduate students are no longer taught by tenured or tenure-track professors, some of whom identify as Shakespeare scholars, but increasingly, they will be and are taught Shakespeare by faculty members whose own status in the university system may be less certain. To provide just one example: the English Department at The University of Alabama, where I am a Senior Instructor and Associate Director of First-Year Writing, is home to the endowed Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies. The Strode Program hosts lectures, 3  Pulling job numbers from a crowdsourced wiki is problematic, but neither the MLA nor the Chronicle of Higher Education includes breakdowns by literary discipline in their job reports, and positions are no longer searchable once their advertisements have been removed. The MLA does post pdfs of its Job List, but the most recent year available as of this writing was 2016–2017. The numbers provided here should give the impression of just how difficult it is to locate and secure a specialized full-time tenure-track position teaching early modern British literature, rather than verify actual hiring processes of all colleges and universities.

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symposia, a Shakespeare film series, a staged reading series, an undergraduate reading group, and many other opportunities for our undergraduate and graduate students to encounter Shakespeare each year. The English department typically offers four upper-level Shakespeare courses per year, most of which reach their twenty-eight-student capacity. The demand for who teaches these classes is high, due in part to the university’s rapid expansion over the past two decades. The University of Alabama is the largest public university in the state and has nearly doubled in size over the past twenty years, from 19,171 students in 2001 to 38,320 students in 2021 (Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, 2021). Rather than receive new tenure lines to fill increased demand for classes, almost all new positions in my department have been for NTT instructors.4 In 2021–2022, the English department had thirty-six tenure-track professors, sixty-three full time non-tenure-track instructors, and thirty-four part-time instructors. The Strode Program consisted of seven tenure-track faculty members, but one has retired from teaching and three served in significant administrative roles: two as Associate Deans and one as Director of the Strode Program. Of the nine full-time instructors with Medieval or Early Modern/ Renaissance PhDs, five researched and published on Shakespeare. These instructors teach primarily freshman-level writing and sophomore-level literature survey courses, but depending on departmental need, they also teach the upper-level Shakespeare course or other literature or creative writing courses. In addition to full-time faculty, the department’s part-­ time faculty and graduate students also teach, primarily first-year writing and literature survey courses.

Student Learning Outcomes Given these numbers, how do non-tenure track and other contingent faculty and graduate students teach Shakespeare and other authors whose work they research and publish on, when the majority of their course load is in freshman composition and literature survey courses? And when they do teach Shakespeare, what is the focus? In the age of measurable outcomes and accountability, instructors must show students (as well as chairs, deans, other administrators, and even parents and the public) that 4  Most of our tenure-track faculty new hires filled vacancies after professors retired or resigned.

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teaching Shakespeare’s works also means teaching valuable skills that will help students think more critically and imagine more empathetically. These lessons are not exclusive to Shakespeare. We must continue to broaden the curriculum to include more works by women, people of color, and other non-dominant discourses, which can be achieved by supplementing Shakespeare with diverse critical essays, adaptations, performances, voices, and experiences.5 But diversifying the curriculum is not enough; we are expected to document our efforts and results for our annual reports and reviews. One trend in education is the need to create measurable student learning objectives (SLOs).6 These objectives typically follow Bloom’s taxonomy, a framework that describes and categorizes student learning from lower-order thinking (memorizing facts) to higher-order thinking (evaluate and create).7 By showing what students will learn in their classes, schools can demonstrate the utility of their courses and ostensibly increase student retention, graduation, and job placement rates. In my department, SLOs are standardized for all first-year writing classes and are derived from the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (CWPA, et al., 2011). These classes focus on rhetorical strategies, the writing process, academic research, knowledge of conventions, and reflection (First-­ Year Writing Program, 2021). Instructors create their own SLOs for literature and other courses but must meet criteria for core designations. According to the Office for Academic Affairs (2021a), to receive the Core Designation of Humanities (HU) our literature survey courses must address “questions of values, ethics, or aesthetics in humanistic fields of learning.” They should be “broad in scope and [take] a global, analytical perspective on the subject matter,” as well as emphasizing “history and appreciation of the humanities, rather than performance.” A literature (L) 5  See, for example, inclusive pedagogy resources compiled by the 2021 social justice and teaching panelists for the Shakespeare Association of America (https://shakespeareassociation.org/resources/inclusive-pedagogy/, accessed 27 July 2022), 6  My university’s Office of Institutional Effectiveness, a division of the Office for Academic Advancement, supports the university “community in a meaningful, measurable, and manageable process of quality improvement,” according to their website (https://oie.ua.edu/, accessed 27 July 2022). They also offer a guide to creating goals, outcomes, and objectives (https://oie.ua.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Quick-Guides_Academic-Units_ Goals_Objectives_Outcomes_ADA.pdf, accessed 27 July 2022). 7  Originally used in K-12 education settings, Bloom’s taxonomy has gained prominence in higher education, and many universities have published guides on how to use it, such as Armstrong (2010).

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course “presents major intellectual and aesthetic ideas, covers multiple genres over a broad historical/literary period, and is broad in scope and content and takes a global and/or analytical perspective of the subject matter. The course includes writing that encourages the development of critical thinking skills and requires students to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate knowledge of literature” (Office for Academic Affairs, 2021b). Shakespeare can be used to meet these objectives and standards. I have taught Shakespeare in several single-semester honors level first-­ year writing classes (EN 103). In my adaptation-themed course, I assign readings on adaption theory, and we discuss the ways in which Shakespeare adapted his sources, how his plays are subsequently adapted, and how critics analyze the plays.8 One semester, we read parts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses alongside Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Julie Taymor’s film adaptation Titus. Other courses have focused on Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Tempest. After we practice close-reading the play in class (Appendix 1), students write a research essay about one of Shakespeare’s plays or an idea sparked by conversations in class. So, students may write about an aspect of the play or an adaptation, or they can research and write about rape culture on college campuses, social media and relationships, an aspect of racism in contemporary America, or another concept rooted in our class readings and discussions. These assignments, including library and web research and multiple stages and drafts of the research essay, as well as regular reflection and a creative final, can all be tied to the course learning objectives. They promote higher-order thinking by challenging students to think more critically about Shakespeare and how his works apply to our world today, and their creative projects (discussed below; see Appendix 2) allow students to use Shakespeare to make something meaningful for themselves. Teaching Shakespeare in a literature survey course can seem more straightforward, but the challenge is teaching Shakespeare well alongside a thousand years of literary history. Because the syllabus allows for only about two weeks to devote to Shakespeare, I typically expand my close reading and presentation assignment (discussed below; see Appendix 1) to 8  I have used Folger editions, Norton Critical Editions, and Bedford Text & Context Editions in my classes, which gather primary and secondary sources into a single text. I also include links to web and library resources in my course LMS. Theoretical readings might include Desmet et  al. (2017), Desmond and Hawkes (2006), Hutcheon (2013), Kidnie (2009), Lanier (2010), and Welsch and Lev (2007).

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cover any of the course texts. Students present throughout the semester, which helps with student engagement and ownership of the class while also spacing out my grading.

Assignments While the university wants my students to meet measurable learning objectives, my personal teaching philosophy is more concerned with getting students involved in their own learning, while feeling valued and supported. The focus is not on me and what I want them to learn, although I do provide resources, structure, and a framework for the class. Following Freire (1968, 2014, p. 59), I do not ascribe to a “banking method” of education where students are passive receptacles for information, but rather I seek to build a classroom community in which “[k]nowledge emerges… through invention and re-invention, through the impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” A major portion of class each day focuses on students’ own discoveries and voices. As bell hooks (1994, p. 8) argues, students get excited about learning when they feel a part of a classroom community where every person’s ideas and presence are valued. My classes have affirmed the findings of Schippers et al. (2015) that students learn best when they set goals and reflect on their learning.9 Research on active learning, defined as “Involving students in doing things and thinking about what they are doing,” shows that students learn best when they are involved and engaged in their learning (Millis, 2012). Higher order thinking occurs when students solve problems on their own, with guidance and support from their instructor. One study by Nobel-winning physicist Carl Weiman found that “students learned more from graduate students he had trained to use interactive teaching methods… than they learned from a tenured, highly-esteemed professor using a lecture-only approach” (Millis, 2012). Offering a structured set of guidelines that are open-ended enough for students to make their own discoveries is one way of doing so. The student presentation, a major component of my literature courses, involves close reading and textual analysis. Students sign up to present on one of the course readings, and one or two students present per day. Presenters focus on a short portion of the text, twenty lines or so. They 9  I built regular goal-setting and reflection into my classes after reading Kamentz (2015), which describes this study, and I have observed more student engagement as a result.

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create a multimodal presentation—usually a PowerPoint or Prezi, but occasionally a website or physical artifact such as a collage or poster. Students explain their chosen passage’s place within the reading as a whole, break it down and explicate short portions of it, locate a word in the Oxford English Dictionary and explain what that word contributes to the passage, describe how a literary device operates in the passage, and explain any allusions.10 The presentations typically include images from performances or films, short film clips or YouTube videos, gifs and memes, and occasionally images students create themselves. Inspired by Inoue (2019) and others, I assess students based on their effort and labor, not on the “correctness” of any reading or interpretation. On course evaluations, many students say the presentation was their favorite part of the course because it taught them to understand and appreciate their chosen text, and they remark that they enjoy learning from their peers. The assignment amplifies students’ voices and talents, and the class learns that there is no one “correct” way to read Shakespeare or anyone else. Another assignment asks students to create their own adaptations or other creative projects, either individually or in groups (see Appendix 2). My students have created and filmed a Macbeth focused on university Greek life, performed a brief contemporary Romeo and Juliet on our theater’s main stage after hours, reimagined Othello as a series of text conversations, written poems and short stories, proposed teen film adaptations, created a playlist that represented every scene of Much Ado About Nothing, and many other projects. These creative adaptations challenge students to consider what is most important about the texts they wish to adapt, and they discover firsthand how Shakespeare’s plays are adapted. When Bloom’s taxonomy was revised in 2001, creating new or original work became the pinnacle of student learning (Armstrong, 2010). Creativity requires higher order thinking than memorizing facts that students may forget after they turn in their final exams. Creative projects challenge students to take what they have learned and apply it in a new setting, and their final products demonstrate personal engagement with the material. I follow both the presentation and creative project assignments with written papers, which ask students to think more deeply about the work they have done. The presentation leads to an essay that applies the close 10  I am indebted to Pamela J. Benson for her close reading and presentation assignment, which I follow quite closely but have adapted for my classes. In a personal email, she gave me permission to re-use and share her work.

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reading of that passage to the text as a whole, while the creative projects lead to a final reflection essay. Curiosity, engagement, creativity, and metacognition are some of the academic habits of mind that support student success (CWPA, et al., 2011). These assignments can help learning stick, while also prompting students to consider the reasons behind the choices they made. To quote my EN 103 student learning objectives, these projects ask students to “apply critical thinking and reading skills to a variety of texts,” treat “the composition of any written text as a deliberate and recursive process,” “deal with questions of values, ethics, or aesthetics,” and “analyze, synthesize, and evaluate knowledge,” to name a few (First-­ Year Writing Program, 2021).

Accessibility and Flexibility Of course, these assignments hold little weight if students are not able to come to class, do the work, or access course materials. I try to keep several things in mind when planning for classes: students should be able to submit work electronically; they need to be shown how and where to access course materials and assignments; instructions should be clearly written and accessible to all; and struggling students appreciate support and empathy. To make my classes as accessible as possible, I post all course documents, handouts, lesson plans, and other information in Blackboard, our LMS, and I grade all work electronically.11 My PowerPoints, which students can access during class, include all writing prompts and group work instructions, plus homework reminders. In my first-year writing classes, I hold one-on-one conferences at least once a semester to check in with students regarding their research and their essays-in-progress. With my heavy reliance on technology, I try to be cognizant of students who lack access to laptops, tablets, or Wi-Fi. My syllabus encourages students to see me if they need help accessing materials. I let them know, in writing and in class, about a campus loan program that provides laptops and hotspots, as well as other programs that help students with various social, physical, and mental health needs. This awareness of campus resources has become even more critical over the past few years, as students struggle with mental health, family tragedy, 11  Our university’s online classes link to a tool accessibility page (https://sites.google. com/itas.ua.edu/accessibility, accessed 28 July 2022).

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and other issues. My late work policy allows students to submit one major assignment up to a week late with no penalty and no questions asked; after this, they lose five points per day. I am flexible with other late work, as well, as long as students communicate with me. I want all students to succeed in my classes and in life, and I try to refer those who are struggling to places where they can get help. As Chavez (2021), Chick (2013), hooks (1994), and others have argued, when students feel safe and cared for, they are more likely to engage with the course content. I am firm about presentations, however. Because presentations go along with the syllabus and presenters are helping to teach the material, they have to show up and do the work unless they have a documented emergency. Accountability is just as important as flexibility because it shows that I notice, and care, when students miss class or fall behind. I want them to succeed and challenge them to work to the best of their abilities. Projects like the ones described in this essay can work on multiple levels. They help students understand and appreciate Shakespeare’s works more deeply. They push students to think more critically, to research independently, to take responsibility for their own learning, and to be creative and even have fun in the process. They engage students in critical conversations that span time, space, and experiences. These are valuable skills for students of any level to learn, so we are more than justified in adding Shakespeare to the curriculum wherever we can, at whatever level we are teaching.

Appendix 1 Close Reading, Presentation, and Paper Everyone will sign up for a presentation on a portion of one of our course texts; this assignment consists of three parts. (1) Before you present, you will perform a close reading of 20-ish lines from the portion of the text assigned for that day and fill out the worksheet below. (2) Using what you learn from the worksheet, you will create a multimodal presentation that helps your classmates understand your chosen passage. (3) After your presentation, you will write an essay that uses what you learned to make an argument about the text.

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Close Reading Passage Worksheet For this portion of the assignment, you will perform a close reading of a passage of your choice. Choose approximately twenty lines from the text you will present on. You do not have to summarize or close read the entire scene, act, play, or work. Download this sheet from Blackboard and type your answers in; submit this form and your paper as one document. 1. Location of passage—act, scene, and line numbers. 2.  Speaker(s) and occasion. What has happened or is happening? What do we know about the speaker at this point in the play? 3. Paraphrase the passage. Break it down and put each line or group of lines into your own words. Cite line numbers and be as specific as possible. Do not consult outside sources for this; I want you to try your best to figure it out. (This should be the most indepth answer.) 4. Why is the character making this speech? Are they persuading someone, lamenting something, trying out an idea, etc.? Justify your interpretation. 5. Is this passage verse or prose? If verse, copy one line and scan it to the best of your ability. That is, write out where the syllables are divided and where the accents fall. If prose, why do you think Shakespeare wrote in prose here? 6. Analyze one figure of speech (metaphor, simile, personification, etc.) and explain what it contributes to the passage. 7. Analyze one or two allusions to people, places, myths, or sources and explain what they contribute to the passage. (If there are any.) 8. Look up one word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Quote the meanings that apply, making sure to cite the part of speech plus definition number and letter. Discuss the word’s use in the passage; what does it contribute? 9. Note any indications of gestures, movements, or facial expressions in the passage. How does Shakespeare build in performance tips for his actors? 10. Why does this passage matter right now when it happens in the poem or play (character development or revelation, role in plot, themes, important words, suspense, etc.)? Please also answer the following two reflection questions:

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11.  Why did you choose your particular passage? What stood out about it before you began this worksheet? 12. After close reading the passage, do you think it means/suggests the same things as your initial reading? What changed, and why? Worksheet adapted from Pamela J.  Benson (“Understanding Texts and Contexts: Teaching Shakespeare to Future High School Teachers” in Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, ed. Naomi J. Miller, 2003: 252–259). Presentation • Your presentation should incorporate what you learned in the close reading in order to illuminate your chosen passage for the class. You do not need to go through every question from the worksheet, but you should discuss the most important or interesting things you learned. You may wish to use the reflection questions as a starting point. You are teaching this portion of the play—why it is important and what it contributes to the play as a whole—to your classmates. • Your presentation must employ some form of multimodal element, such as a PowerPoint, Prezi, web page, poster, collage, etc. You will post this to our class Blackboard page. • If you bring in any outside sources—including critical essays, Shakespeare’s sources or work by his contemporaries, videos, songs, links to websites, production photos, performance clips, etc.—please provide a list of references at the end of your presentation. See Blackboard for links to potential resources. Any outside sources, if used, should support and augment your reading of the play and not take the place of original thought. • Your presentation should be approximately 10 minutes long. Please do not go over 15 minutes. • Have fun with this assignment. Be creative! I’m excited to see what you come up with! Paper • No later than 2 weeks after your presentation, you will turn in a critical essay (800–1200 words / 3–5 pages, not including your close

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reading answers). Include your close reading sheet and answers at the top. Single space the close reading and double space the essay portion. • Your essay will offer an analysis of the play that is rooted in the passage you chose; your thesis should demonstrate thinking about why this passage is important. Include details from your presentation and specific examples from and analysis of the play. • Your paper is not simply a summary of the close reading exercise or presentation; rather, it is an extended critical analysis of the play, informed by the work you did for your presentation. • Format the paper using 12-point Times New Roman or similar font with one-inch margins on all sides and follow MLA guidelines for all citations. If you need help or have questions about any portion of this project, please come see me during my office hours or make an appointment if those times do not work for you. I also encourage you to visit the Writing Center. Rubric for Presentation and Close Reading The presentation: –– Focuses on the most meaningful, interesting, and/or significant aspects of the passage   _____ out of 10 –– Demonstrates that the presenter has carefully read and understands the text   _____ out of 10 –– Uses interesting techniques, including good examples, to engage the class   _____ out of 10 –– Combines close reading with broader analysis of the play; follows assignment guidelines   _____ out of 10 The visual aid/multimodal element/creative response: –– Makes use of resources to illuminate the passage for the class   _____ out of 10 –– Is visually appealing; audience can see and follow along   _____ out of 10

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–– Incorporates the presenter’s own talents (research or technical skills, creative ideas, interpretive techniques, etc.)   _____ out of 10 The presenter: –– Seems well-organized and prepared; answers questions or responds to comments well   _____ out of 10 –– Makes good use of the time allotted   _____ out of 10 The close reading exercise: –– Is complete, thorough, and follows instructions   _____out of 10 Total points (out of 100) _____________

Appendix 2 Final Creative Project and Reflection Essay Your final project will consist of two parts: (1) Creative project presented/ performed in front of your classmates and me during the last 2 weeks of class. (2) Reflection essay. Part 1: The Creative Project –– Either individually or in groups of no more than five people, you will create your own version of a Shakespeare play, a mashup of plays/ scenes/characters, a retelling from another character’s perspective, or a sequel. –– I encourage you to be creative. Your adaptation may include the following: • A dramatic performance in which you update or revise the story and perform for the class • A filmed performance that you record and then show to the class • A musical or dance performance (it could be a parody of or homage to another musical, adapted to Shakespeare) • A short story, poem(s), website, or other written or multimodal piece

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• A work of art—a painting, a comic strip, an illustrated book, or a series of drawings • A proposal presentation, in which you pitch an idea for a new adaptation, suggest casting, provide costume and location ideas (with images), summarize the plot and key scenes, write sample dialogue for a couple of scenes, and possibly choose songs for the soundtrack. –– The presentations should take approximately 5–15 minutes, depending on the size of your group and scope of your project. –– If you are performing your adaptation, you should block the scene (know where each person/character stands, moves, etc.) and use some type of costumes, props, or scenery. Individual requirements will vary depending on what you decide to do, but you should adapt your original work to whatever medium you choose as fully as possible. –– If you choose to work as a group, each person should have approximately the same size role, which will be obvious from your presentation/performance. If someone does not participate as fully as others, or if someone’s role is more “behind the scenes,” you can discuss that during your presentation time and in your individual essays. Part 2: The Reflection Essay –– Each person in the class will write an individual essay describing the adaptation process; no one should have the same essay as their group members. –– The essay must be at least 1200–1700 words (5–7 pages) and follow all formatting specifications of previous essays. You will submit it online by XX date and time. –– In your essay, address the following in any order: • How and why you and/or your group chose to adapt Shakespeare in this way. • The decisions that went into planning, creating, and presenting your adaptation, what you liked most about the process, what you liked least, and why. • How this creative project made you think differently about Shakespeare; what you learned about the process of adaptation. • If you worked in a group, how well you worked together and what you contributed.

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• How other things you learned in class this semester prepared you or informed your choices for this project. • What you learned from your peers’ projects and presentations. • Anything else you want to say about the experience.

References Academic Jobs Wiki. (2018). Renaissance 2018. Fandom. Retrieved January 11, 2022, from https://academicjobs.fandom.com/wiki/Renaissance_2018 Academic Jobs Wiki. (2019). Renaissance 2019. Fandom. Retrieved January 11, 2022, from https://academicjobs.fandom.com/wiki/Renaissance_2019 Academic Jobs Wiki. (2020). Early Modern / Renaissance 2019–2020. Fandom. Retrieved January 11, 2022, from https://academicjobs.wikia.org/wiki/ Early_Modern_/_Renaissance_2019-2020 Academic Jobs Wiki. (2021). Early Modern / Renaissance 2020–2021. Fandom. Retrieved January 11, 2022, from https://academicjobs.fandom.com/wiki/ Early_Modern_/_Renaissance_2020-­2021 Academic Jobs Wiki. (2022). Early Modern / Renaissance 2021–2022. Fandom. Retrieved January 11, 2022., from https://academicjobs.fandom.com/wiki/ Early_Modern_/_Renaissance_2021-­2022 Armstrong, P. (2010). Bloom’s Taxonomy. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved July 28, 2022, from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-­ sub-­pages/blooms-­taxonomy/ Benson, P. J. (2003). Understanding Texts and Contexts: Teaching Shakespeare to Future High School Teachers. In N. J. Miller (Ed.), Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults (pp. 252–259). Routledge. Chavez, F. R. (2021). The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom. Haymarket Books. Chick, N. (2013). Teaching in Times of Crisis. Vanderbilt Center for Teaching. Retrieved July 28, 2022, from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-­sub-­ pages/crisis/ Chronicle of Higher Education. (2019). Tenure Status of Full-Time and Part-­ Time Faculty Members, Fall 2017. Almanac 2019, 18 August. Retrieved May 29, 2020, from https://www-­chronicle-­com.libdata.lib.ua.edu/article/ Tenure-­Status-­of-­Faculty/246310 Chronicle of Higher Education. (2021). Tenure Status of Full-Time and Part-­ Time Faculty Members, Fall 2019. August 15. Retrieved January 11, 2022, from https://www-­chronicle-­com.libdata.lib.ua.edu/article/ tenure-­status-­of-­full-­time-­and-­part-­time-­faculty-­members-­fall-­2019

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Council of Writing Program Administers (CWPA), et al. (2011). Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, the CWPA, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the National Writing Project (NWP). Retrieved July 28, 2022, from https://wpacouncil.org/aws/CWPA/asset_manager/get_file/350201?ver=7548 Desmet, C., et al. (2017). Shakespeare / Not Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan. Desmond, J. M., & Hawkes, P. (2006). Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature. McGraw-Hill. First-Year Writing Program. (2021). Course Descriptions and Outcomes: EN 103. The University of Alabama English Department. Retrieved January 11, 2022, from https://fwp.english.ua.edu/students/course-­descriptions-­and-outcomes/ Freire, P. (1968, 2014 ed.). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge. Hutcheon, L. (2013). A Theory of Adaptation (2nd ed.). Routledge. Inoue, A. (2019). Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. The WAC Clearinghouse, University Press of Colorado. Retrieved July 28, 2022, from https://wac.colostate.edu/ books/perspectives/labor/ Kamenetz, A. (2015). The Writing Assignment That Changes Lives. nprED, July 10. Retrieved July 27, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/sections/ ed/2015/07/10/419202925/the-­writing-­assignment-­that-­changes-­lives Kidnie, M. J. (2009). Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. Routledge. Lanier, D. (2010). Recent Shakespeare Adaptation and the Mutations of Cultural Capital. Shakespeare Studies, 38, 104–113. Millis, B.  J. (2012). Active Learning Strategies in Face-to-Face Courses. Idea Paper #53. Retrieved January 11, 2022, from https://www.ideaedu.org/ Portals/0/Uploads/Documents/IDEA%20Papers/IDEA%20Papers/ PaperIDEA_53.pdf Modern Language Association of America. (2022). Tables and Figures on the MLA Job List, 2019–20. Reports on the MLA Job List. Retrieved January 11, 2022, from https://www.mla.org/Resources/Career/Job-­List/Reports-­on-­theMLA-Job-­List O’Dair, S., & Francisco, T. (2019). Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity. Palgrave Macmillan. Office for Academic Affairs. (2021a). Humanities. The University of Alabama. Retrieved January 11, 2022, from https://provost.ua.edu/humanities/ Office for Academic Affairs. (2021b). Literature. The University of Alabama. Retrieved January 11, 2022, from https://provost.ua.edu/literature/ Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. (2021). Total Student Fall Enrollment, 1831 to Present. The University of Alabama. Retrieved July 28, 2022, from https://oira.ua.edu/factbook/reports/student-­enrollment/historical/total-­student-­enrollment-­1831-­to-­present/

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Schippers, M., et al. (2015). A Scalable Goal-Setting Intervention Closes Both the Gender and Ethnic Minority Achievement Gap. Palgrave Communications, 1, 15014. Retrieved July 27, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1057/ palcomms.2015.14 Welsh, J. M., & Peter Lev, P. (Eds.). (2007). The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation. The Scarecrow Press.

One-Act Shakespeare: Teaching Cultural Legacy Through Excerpts and Adaptations Joseph Navitsky

The historical narrative detailing the assimilation of Shakespeare into American culture, and more particularly into American education, has always been a fragmentary tale. In the nineteenth century especially, this shift was literally the case in at least two senses. As Levine (1988) has shown in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Culture Hierarchy in America, Shakespearean drama in the era predating the playwright’s move from popular to elite culture was piecemeal in nature: that is, audiences experienced the plays in abridged, excised, and burlesqued forms, which had the effect of disseminating them into the “broader world of everyday culture” in a way that was impressively communal but which remained selective and cursory (37). Other forms of Shakespearean entertainment thrived as well, and these, too, often involved cutting the plays down to a manageable size. Such efforts included condensed public readings of the plays, the delivery of well-known soliloquies by actors and trained orators alike, and even the modernized scripts of the first film versions of the plays. As Burton (2011) has explained, this widespread distribution of Shakespeare

J. Navitsky (*) West Chester University, West Chester, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3_3

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in bits and pieces accelerated with the introduction of schoolbooks like the McGuffey Readers, which offered brief selections of Shakespeare’s works “enlisted in moral education and the formation of a citizenry” (Burton, 2011, p. 97). Indeed, speeches from the plays appearing in later editions of the McGuffeys “might be expurgated, rewritten, and/or presented entirely out of context in accordance with the social and moral directives of the series” in order to educate and edify American schoolchildren as they prepared for the responsibilities—civic, communal, and familial—of adulthood (98). Thus, for the vast majority of nineteenth-century Americans, encounters with Shakespeare’s works were perforce partial and fragmentary. But these types of encounters, as I am about to explain, are not consigned to the distant past. In fact, they continue to flourish in modern America despite a widespread, if not universal, educational imperative requiring students to read an entire Shakespeare play or, in some cases, more than one play in the course of their studies. If, before the emergence of a legitimate field of American Shakespeare studies in the 1890s, students primarily encountered Shakespeare’s works in fragmentary forms, then the tendency to dismiss the efficacy of these forms seems understandable. But the truth is that much of our own current pedagogy takes its cues from this history—a history that persists in the uses of Shakespeare’s works in popular culture today. Put simply, the practice of splitting the texts of the plays into constituent parts and offering Shakespeare in highly decontextualized forms is very much alive today. After all, in the classroom instructors can only ever hope to work sequentially through a play by concentrating on a few important scenes and passages. This tradition is reinforced, of course, through one of the main objectives of literature courses: training in critical analysis and cultural literacy as demonstrated through close reading. To be sure, the expectation of Shakespeare instructors everywhere is that their students demonstrate understanding of an entire play. And yet, asking students to identify specific lines from a Shakespeare play, memorize and recite speeches, or even perform a scene in the classroom attests to the continuation of nineteenth-­ century educational and rhetorical modes of engaging with the texts in a piecemeal manner. With this kinship in mind, then, this chapter charts my efforts to experiment with an unconventional method of teaching Shakespeare’s plays through excerpts. In harkening back to the nineteenth century, this approach follows advice to “deal with small moments, small speeches, [and] specific words” (Cohen, 2007, p.  70). It then pairs individual

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passages with texts containing what Demeter (2021) has called “skeptical, oppositional, and antagonistic voices” (72). My motivation in abridging the plays in this manner began with a desire to invigorate my teaching in a course familiar to most English instructors: an “Introduction to Literature” course for non-majors.1 In describing this endeavor and reflecting on the results below, I seek to accomplish three tasks. First, I would like to evaluate the opportunities afforded by teaching The Merchant of Venice through four excerpted passages and alongside modern texts. Next, building on what I see as the chief advantages of introducing a Shakespeare play through brief, highly focused segments, I offer a second example of how an instructor might introduce key passages from Antony and Cleopatra and, in the process, guide students beyond reductive, often one-­dimensional understandings of Shakespeare as an author and playwright. Finally, in my conclusion, I return to the historical role Shakespearean extracts have played, and continue to play, in American education and provide some tentative answers to a question posed by Leinwald (2011): “What pedagogical opportunities might arise were we to return to Shakespeare in fragments, to partial texts extracted from their contexts?” (281–82). Ultimately, I wish to demonstrate how teaching Shakespeare through excerpts makes it possible to step back from and even interrogate ingrained pedagogical practice. As part of this process, I also hope to clarify the place of Shakespeare in today’s classroom and propose new ways to talk with students about the relevance of Shakespeare to our own historical moment.2 The two plays I offer as case studies, The Merchant of Venice and Antony and Cleopatra, may not strike readers as obvious texts to teach in a general education course for non-majors. Indeed, both texts place considerable demands on students and instructors alike and are among the most 1  The “Topics in Literature” course, which I taught in the Fall 2019 semester, serves as one of several options for students seeking to satisfy their humanities distributive requirement. According to the West Chester University course catalog, the course is “designed to develop awareness of literature as being central to all the arts, to increase levels of literacy and critical faculties, and to broaden understanding of the human condition.” See https://catalog. wcupa.edu/undergraduate/general-education-requirements/approved-gen-ed-courselist/. The course also carries a writing-emphasis designation and is capped at 25 students. 2  This is not to discount the potential loss to our understanding of Shylock if we reduce the play to the scenes that feature him. For instance, the omission of the scenes depicting Portia, her suitors, and the casket test removes a valuable opportunity to examine Venice’s treatment of its Jewish population alongside Portia’s casual racism and xenophobia.

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challenging to teach in the canon because of their engagement with—and some might say, dissemination of—harmful stereotypes that carry the potential to traumatize students with who have experienced discrimination firsthand. As Davidson (2017) advises, instructors should cultivate a trauma-informed pedagogy when teaching sensitive material and recognize “how trauma impacts students’ behavior, development, relationships, and survival strategies” (17). Since “students bring their entire lives into the classroom every day, and that on some days, [they] will be actively responding to trauma,” instructors who wish The Merchant of Venice and Antony and Cleopatra must confront a basic question: Why select these plays at this specific moment? (Davidson, 2017, p. 17). And they must be willing to invite, in a sensitive and positive manner, students into a conversation about the decision to assign these plays instead of defaulting to more popular Shakespeare plays such as Romeo and Juliet or Midsummer Night’s Dream. This question could, in fact, provide the basis of an excellent prompt for an initial discussion of reception theory, as students reflect on the challenges and opportunities of reading and responding to texts that depict discrimination without fully disavowing it. Such conversations are especially useful, even necessary in a classroom populated by non-majors. After all, the anti-feminist discourse in Antony and Cleopatra is notoriously vile, though at least Cleopatra can be said to dominate the action at the end of the play and produce an honorable and highly sympathetic defense of her actions. A similar scene-stealing performance does not exist for Shylock, for his celebrated calls for equal treatment before the law are resoundingly crushed in Act 4 and his voice expelled from the play before its conclusion. As a result, the play and others like it—especially Othello and Taming of the Shrew—must be presented with care and thoughtful understanding, especially with non-majors who will probably not have the chance to enroll in multiple literature courses. In other words, instructors only have one chance to connect with non-­ majors, who represent a distinct group of students within the undergraduate population—a group that is often advised to enroll in an “Introduction to Literature” course in their first or second semester in college. Skeptical of general education requirements but also, in many cases, eager to embrace all that college has to offer and willing to try something new, these students are the perfect audience to experience Shakespeare in new and innovative ways. When presenting The Merchant of Venice to students for the first time, instructors can initiate discussion by asking students about the

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presentation of anti-Semitic stereotypes at a time when American public discourse is increasingly dominated by questions of national identity and marked by anti-immigration sentiment. Once again, it is important to recognize the challenges of this line of inquiry and recognize that it may not inspire all instructors. After all, we have the entire Shakespeare canon at our disposal and may not feel an immediate affinity for a play whose very generic affiliations are inconvenient to discuss with today’s readers. Notoriously ambivalent in its presentation of Shylock, not to mention deeply embedded in sixteenth-century economic contexts, the play makes significant demands on an instructor beyond those related to its potentially retraumatizing content. For instance, adequately covering the play’s historical background can seem like an impossible task for the instructor who wishes to teach just one Shakespeare play over the course of the semester. With limited time for introducing prefatory material, an instructor in a general education course can rarely offer students extensive biographical introductions of authors, even ones as culturally dominant as Shakespeare. Moreover, with respect to Merchant, neither can an instructor afford to spend too much time guiding students through the unique position of Venice in sixteenth-century Europe—standard practice when the play is taught in a semester-long, upper-division course. Indeed, such extensive contextual work can easily devolve into lectures that effectively push students further away from the text with which we want them to critically engage. If the objective is to increase the literacy and analytical skills of students while simultaneously enlarging their awareness of basic human feelings and relations—especially ones as distressing as discrimination, revenge, or sexism—then we must privilege the text or, as I am about to argue, position that text in a conversation that reduces the distance between Shakespeare’s concerns and those of our own time period. Teaching The Merchant of Venice through a few key passages can help initiate this type of conversation about the continuing impact of Shakespeare’s writing, while at the same allowing instructors and students to work together to think through what Watson (2007) has referred to as “complacent humanistic Bardolatry” (125). Introducing students to Merchant in an unusually simple form—as a series of four excerpts featuring Shylock—will surely not go unnoticed by students. As a result, another of the instructor’s opening inquiries to students could address the question of pedagogy and ask: Why are we studying the play in this manner and what exactly is gained or lost in so doing? To encourage further self-­ reflection, this question formed the basis of a short writing assignment in

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which I asked students to consider the implications of expending so much focused energy on a single character. Clearly, reading an abridged version of Merchant should not lead students to conclude that Shakespearean excerpts are superior to any other texts in their complete form. Instead, presenting a stripped-down version of the play ideally motivates students to examine their past experience with the plays, “all too often carelessly characterized as culturally transcendent and universally relatable” (Demeter, 2021, p. 70). More specifically, it can also encourage them to move beyond specifically academic engagements with Shakespeare as a way of getting at the heart of the longstanding influence of Merchant in American education: the character of Shylock and how his name resounds across history and even in public discourse today. To state the obvious, working through excerpts gets us to this place faster than reading the entire play. And while it may seem painful to forego a discussion about Portia, the casket test, and the politics of aristocratic marriage in the early modern era, for much of their history Americans have been doing just that, as the play has been produced, read, parodied, and ultimately valued for its presentation of Shylock and the difficult question of anti-Semitism.3 A vastly shortened Merchant, so long as it is in conversation with such modern adaptations as Gareth Armstrong’s one-­actor drama Shylock (1999) or Michael Radford’s film version (2004), gives students the chance to think beyond what otherwise might strike them as an “old” or irrelevant text. In fact, it places Shakespeare’s play in a nexus of conversations about, and responses to, anti-Semitism and discrimination more generally. The ease with which an instructor can extract four key scenes featuring Shylock—1.3, 3.1, 3.3, 4.1—belies the complex pedagogical effects of this seemingly straightforward exercise. Three of these scenes are well-known: 1.3 details the first meeting between Shylock and Antonio and Bassanio when they negotiate and agree to the bond; 3.1 features the play’s most 3  These scenes represent four of the five total scenes featuring Shylock and replicate several of the passages from the play that appeared in The New Select Speaker (1902)—a rhetoric manual analyzed by N. Johnson (2011). Much like Burton argues with the McGuffey readers, Johnson is concerned with the rationale behind the practice of excerpting Shakespeare’s plays; “whether highlighted as examples of elegant composition, oratorical power, or elocutionary force, excerpts are intended to be read within a more general context of a complete understanding of the play” (129). I opted not to include 2.5, which contains the short conversation between Shylock and Jessica before she departs his house with Lorenzo and makes her way to Belmont.

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memorable lines in which Shylock defends the humanity of Jewish people; and 4.1 includes the play’s famous trial scene in which Portia appears disguised as Balthazar, the young lawyer, and renders judgment against Shylock. (The final scene I address, 3.3, details Antonio’s arrest and determination that the “Duke cannot deny the course of law” and is the least vital of the four scenes I review in class.)4 Pedagogically, focusing all of one’s energy on these scenes, two of which are extremely short, can be liberating for an instructor. First, it obviates some of the pressure instructors feel in trying to relieve students’ anxieties about navigating an entire play’s worth of unfamiliar language. It also, in new and exciting ways, makes the text feel manageable to teach across two class periods. And since, as Leinwald has pointed out, “fragments are obviously conducive to intensive scrutiny, whole plays to a broad brush,” leading discussions in this way allows for rewarding, line-by-line readings (282). Thus, instead of merely touching on Shylock’s opening negotiations with Antonio and Bassanio over the loan or the later, justly famous “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech, an instructor working with excerpts can also attend more carefully to the Biblical allusions in 1.3 and the often-neglected background revealed in 3.3, which fills in the past history between Shylock and Antonio. More importantly, thinking through the play in excerpts frees up space to give the trial scene in 4.1 its full due—a scene that instructors often rush through in order to address the play’s more manageable comic resolution. With this degree of intensive close reading, students cannot help but be well-positioned to advance to the second phase of the unit on Armstrong’s Shylock or Radford’s film. Armstrong’s play is told through the voice of Tubal, Shakespeare’s only other Jewish character. In my experience, it is also perfectly suited for the general education classroom because of its forthright exposition of sixteenth-century theatrical conventions and historical contexts—contexts that I previously advised instructors to omit from their introduction to Merchant. Armstrong deftly positions not only the character of Shylock but also the entire theatrical history of Shakespeare’s character within the Western tradition of anti-Semitism. At the same time, a passage such as the one that follows, also implicates Shakespeare in perpetuating that tradition: 4  The Merchant of Venice, 3.3.26. All references to Shakespeare are from the Riverside edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (1974), ed. G.  Blakemore Evans, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. and are hereafter included in the text.

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Comic figures. That’s what we were. That’s what was expected of Jews on stage—comedy and villainy. Comic not because we told jokes (though let’s face it a few Jewish jokes might have livened things up a bit), but comic because people enjoyed laughing at us. To our first audience, Shakespeare’s first audience, that’s what we were—comic villains. Don’t blame Shakespeare. You can’t blame Shakespeare. It was an old English tradition, you know, like disemboweling heretics. A theatrical tradition too. (27)

Armstrong’s approach to the Shakespearean text feels distinctly modern in that it takes readers “inside” of the text because it is narrated by Tubal, whose only lines are delivered at the end of 3.1. Yet at the same time, it also informs readers of the representational history of Jewish people in English literary culture. As a result, students can revisit lines from Shakespeare’s play while simultaneously meditating on the anti-Semitic attitudes of medieval and early modern England. If, after guiding students through three-class periods of Merchant excerpts and Armstrong’s Shylock, an instructor wishes to spend a fourth-­ class period on Shakespeare, Radford’s film can help students gain an even fuller understanding of Shylock as a culturally resonant figure whose comparatively few lines onstage have paradoxically produced an abiding appeal that continues today. My own use of Radford’s film has been guided by an early review of the film written by Daniel (2006). To Daniel, Radford’s unmistakable changes to Shakespeare’s script result in a film so at odds with the text it adapts that, far from establishing the endlessly renewable relevance of Shakespeare’s work to our own historical moment, it seems instead to index the intractable gulf that separates us from contact with that work. (52)

Daniel’s eloquent reading of the “protective anxiety” of the film, which shields audiences not only “from the danger of a misreading” of Shylock as a villain but also of “the text of the play itself” as anti-Semitic allows for a compelling discussion of the adaptational project. But it also allows an instructor to return to the question of Shakespeare’s status in twenty-first century America. Specifically, students can be asked to respond to Daniel’s conclusion that Radford’s film betrays our “deep-seated and narcissistic longing to culturally resemble Shakespeare,” especially since the casting of

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an actor as iconic as Al Pacino helps to further render Shakespeare palatable to contemporary audiences (54).5 Teaching Merchant in four scenes can be not only illuminating for an instructor who has taught the play dozens of times but also for scholars of the play. Concentrating on the scenes I have discussed above allows us to recognize the isolation of Shylock, aligned as he is against an array of adversaries and comforted only by Tubal. Intriguingly, as Armstrong is quick to remind us, readers also notice how few lines Shakespeare actually writes for his famous character. Appearing only five times on stage, and by necessity absent from the comic conclusion of Act 5, Shylock retains all of his complexity in an abridged reading of the play. His sense of wit and aggrievement early in the play, his aggression and thirst for retaliation in the middle, and his devastating defeat in the trial scene all remain intact because the scenes in which he appears are tension-filled and thus inescapably lively. Indeed, the source of this dynamism may reside in the fact that, as Shakespeare has written him, Shylock sits uncomfortably on the boundary between individual and stereotype. When we recall that many of his scenes have an existence beyond the play, students, even if they have never encountered Shylock before, are primed to recognize the basic scenario of an outsider trying to survive in a society structurally built to exploit him by restricting his civil rights. It was this very observation that provided the outline of a prompt I offered to students who wished to write on The Merchant of Venice for their final essay of the semester. The second play that I have taught in an abridged format, Antony and Cleopatra, may not disturb readers the way that Merchant does, but it does offer instructors a parallel opportunity to introduce non-majors to a Shakespearean character with a rich, ever evolving cultural legacy. And the instructor who can successfully read iconic Shakespearean “moments”— such as the trial scene in Merchant—through later adaptations can just as easily move in the other direction and link moments from Shakespeare plays to the author’s source texts. In so doing, students learn that Shakespeare, like today’s film directors and musicians, inherits and reimagines material to fit the needs of his own era. With a character as recognizable as Cleopatra, excerpts from a couple of crucial scenes in Antony and 5  Other texts can also help register this point to great effect, too, such as an interview with Guy Masterson, who has produced and performed in Armstrong’s Shylock, or even a short newspaper article detailing current politicians’ use of the name Shylock as a byword for loan shark.

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Cleopatra can be productively read alongside Plutarch’s Life of Antony before introducing students to more modern treatments of the Egyptian queen. Whatever passages from Life of Antony an instructor chooses, the key is to align scenes from the play with a modern-spelling version of Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch, Shakespeare’s primary source for the play. In a recent course for non-majors, the following scenes served as our “text” of the play: 1.1, containing Philo’s speech condemning Cleopatra’s affection for Antony as “gipsy’s lust” and introducing the two title characters (1.1.10); 1.3, featuring Antony’s departure from Cleopatra; and 2.5, detailing Cleopatra’s recollections of her cross-dressing escapades with Antony. Finally, the play’s famous final scene, 5.2, deserves substantial attention as it interrogates, perhaps more than any single scene in the entire canon, Shakespeare’s own stake in the production of historical narratives. If Enobarbus, Philo, and others provide important external perspectives to the on-again, off-again relationship between Cleopatra and Antony, it is Cleopatra’s own words in the excerpts cited above, and especially in her scene-stealing performance in 5.2, that must remain at the center of an abbreviated discussion of the play. Her temperamental, often explosive demeanor does not, of course, require the testimony provided by the other characters, Egyptian and Roman alike. But an extended analysis of her own lines is necessary to balance this testimony, which ranges from occasionally incisive to patently defamatory. After all, everyone in Antony and Cleopatra obsesses over Cleopatra (and over Antony’s attraction to her), so it makes sense to position Cleopatra’s own defense of her actions—and ambitions for her future memorialization—against the critiques of her Roman adversaries. Eliminating the bulk of the Roman scenes involving the machinations of the feuding members of the Triumvirate and Enobarbus’ desertion of Antony need not reduce the political underpinnings of the action. In point of fact, it permits the instructor to focus more intently on the struggle waged over Antony between Cleopatra/Egypt and Caesar/Rome. And once Antony dies, the conclusion of the play does not result in a reshuffling of the combatants but rather substitutes Cleopatra’s legacy for Antony’s soul: in other words, the object over which Egypt and Rome now battle is how precisely Cleopatra will be remembered—and how the process of memorialization is set to transpire after the play concludes.

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Whereas an instructor cannot be certain that students have heard the name Shylock, there is little doubt that they are acquainted with Cleopatra and have some measure of familiarity with her fraught reputation. In this awareness, however basic it may be, lies an opportunity to draw on their pre-existing curiosity in order to help students connect Shakespeare’s Cleopatra to contemporary concerns about sexual slander, representational authority, and the construction of historical memory. This is why Cleopatra’s apprehension about how she will be remembered, best illustrated in her speech in which she envisions herself watching “Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness,” deserves extended analysis in the classroom (5.2.220). Once students are reminded of early modern theatrical conventions, they come to see that the character of Cleopatra is eerily aware of how male artists tend to represent the historical Cleopatra. And once this line of discussion is established, an instructor can begin to introduce the rich pictorial history of the Egyptian queen and, depending on time, move beyond the traditional arts to address references to Cleopatra in pop music and culture. At this point, rather than show students Joseph Mankiewicz’s film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (1963), an instructor can conclude a two- or three-class unit on Anthony and Cleopatra by introducing several of the sonnets in American sculptor, novelist, and poet Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (1987). Organized as a dialogue among Plutarch, Antony, and Cleopatra, this fascinating sonnet sequence is, according to the author, “a meditation on History as poetry,” and moves the story of Cleopatra into our contemporary era while retaining an impressive fidelity to the historical facts, such as we know them (18). But with its emphasis on one of the preeminent poetic forms of the Renaissance and its self-conscious use of intertexts, the work provides a female artist’s perspective on Cleopatra through the unlikely source of a Rembrandt drawing. Portrait does not directly invoke Shakespeare’s play but its dialogue, and its famous speakers’ foreknowledge of their representational status in that play, extends the question with which the playwright left his original seventeenth-century audience: How should Cleopatra be remembered? For Chase-Riboud, the question of historical perspective motivates her entire literary output, including her best-known work—her novel about Thomas Jefferson and his slave and mistress, Sally Hemings (1979). Fiction, Chase-Riboud writes,

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is a legitimate illumination of the ambiguities of historical reality. Written history is always interpreted through a writer’s sensibility and therefore inevitably fictionalized. One has only to read a biography of Napoleon written by a Frenchman, an Englishman, and a Russian to recognize that with the same acts, and with the same facts, a personage can differ so dramatically from one book to the other so as to be practically unrecognizable. A fact can be white in one book and black in another. (Spencer & Miranda, 2009, p. 713)6

This same sense of contingency, as negotiated by the writer, returns students in a powerful way to Shakespeare and his acknowledgment of his own role in creating a Cleopatra who can only ever be fictional and who will always remain, as popular culture has shown us over and over again, in the process of being fictionalized. The men who have written her story, beginning with Plutarch, rarely assume such a self-reflective stance. But the Cleopatra of Act 5 of Shakespeare’s play demands that we consider our own position, too, in the construction of her image—and her story. As Dusinberre (2011) has noted, “Cleopatra’s sense of her own fine performance, underwritten by her audience on stage as well as by the theatre audience” points to how “the question of upstaging—in theatrical terms, in military terms, and ultimately in sexual terms—dominates the play” (238). Cleopatra’s keen metatheatrical awareness of the value, even the necessity, of performance thus cannot help but encourage a parallel sense of referentiality in the minds of readers. By experiencing the play in excerpts and thinking about all of the Cleopatras they have encountered and will continue to encounter, students come to see Shakespeare, too, as one link in a chain that runs back to the first Roman accounts of Cleopatra and Egypt and forward through nineteenth-century paintings, twentieth-­ century Hollywood films, and the more recent poetry of Chase-Riboud. As an alternative to the conventional one- or two-week study of a Shakespeare play, guiding students through carefully selected excerpts from a play featuring personalities as memorable as Shylock or Cleopatra overturns established pedagogical custom. In promoting this approach, I run the risk of finding myself marooned between two extreme positions sketched out by Cunningham (1998) in her analysis of Shakespeare’s shifting position in the curriculum: “to change Shakespeare’s position is to act 6  Spencer and Miranda’s essay, “A Brading Boundaries: Reconsidering Barbara ChaseRiboud’s Sculpture, Fiction, and Poetry,” serves as the introduction to a special issue devoted to the works of Chase-Riboud.

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irrationality and to precipitate anarchy. Conversely, to maintain his position is to bring about the triumph of order and reason” (295). But in my experience teaching the drama through a few crucial scenes allows me to retain my commitment to the Shakespearean text while offering so much more to students, particularly non-majors. Most crucially, privileging four or five excerpts rather than an entire play reduces the anxiety that often greets students when they face the prospect of reading a full five-act play— a genre, incidentally, they rarely encounter beyond the world of a highschool language arts class. There are certainly many other ways to dispel such fears. But if, as Leinwald has proposed, we present students with truncated readings, then perhaps we also offer them an uncommon opportunity to fill in and continue to develop, as it were, the stories on which Shakespeare’s reputation is built. If instructors need additional inspiration, consider that when we “work on various bits of the plays,” we do not necessarily have to limit ourselves to the Shakespeare professor’s customary “intention of finally reassembling the cleaned and refurbished parts into a more clearly expressive whole, as if we were reconditioning a typewriter” (Watson, 2007, p. 132). That is, we can empower students to reduce their reliance upon the interpretative expertise of their instructors and thus take greater account of their own experiences with Shakespeare and Shakespearean authorship. By privileging a limited number of passages over an entire play, we can also challenge students to organize the textual fragments for themselves, make sense of and ask questions about any gaps in plot, lavish generous attention on a speech or even a single line, and synthesize their own experience of coordinating the “various bits” of Shakespeare with his sources or with later adaptations. Ideally, as part of this confidence-building process, they can also revisit their long-held impressions of Shakespeare. No longer the solitary, revered genius whom they have been encouraged to esteem, perhaps Shakespeare will evolve, in their minds, into a participant within a dynamic, centuries-long dialogue of ideas that continues to shape the contours of our own era. In the examples outlined here, that dialogue may address the persistence of the anti-Semitic discrimination to which Shylock is subjected or the reputation-destroying slander that awaits Cleopatra after her death. But whatever play is taught in an excerpted fashion, especially in a course designed for non-majors, working with select passages allows for a more efficient presentation of the plays. This presentation, when linked to other texts, amplifies the bearing of Shakespeare’s texts on cultural categories and stereotypes still flourishing today.

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To some instructors, my examples of The Merchant of Venice and Antony and Cleopatra may seem to over-privilege the reception of the plays over their construction. But incorporating Shakespeare’s source material, when time allows, mitigates this concern—as do assignments that ask students to isolate a single word or line and, with the help of the Oxford English Dictionary, trace their usage through a number of texts. Working with the excerpts also allows for projects that challenge students to engage with concepts—intertextuality, adaptation, and historical context—crucial not only to the pedagogical philosophy I have outlined here but also to literature courses in general. Since Shakespeare “arrived on the pedagogical scene in pieces” as part of school readers, oratory handbooks, and college entrance exams, then perhaps the time has come to revisit and more actively embrace this historical narrative (Leinwald, 23). Perhaps asking students to try to succeed in the classroom with a little “less” Shakespeare can paradoxically increase their investment in the enduring cultural relevance of the plays. But this goal depends on instructors who must be willing to substitute a desire for coverage with a concomitant concern for addressing the full extent of Shakespeare’s legacy as it exists through, and beyond, the plays.

References Armstrong, G. (1999). Shylock. The Players’ Account. Burton, J. (2011). Lay on, McGuffey: Excerpting Shakespeare in Nineteenth-­ Century Schoolbooks. In C.  Khan, H.  S. Nathans, & M.  Godfrey (Eds.), Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance (pp. 95–111). University of Delaware Press. Chase-Riboud, B. (1987). Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra. Quill William Morrow. Cohen, R. A. (2007). ShakesFear and How to Cure It: A Handbook for Teaching Shakespeare. Prestwich House. Cunningham, K. (1998). Shakespeare, the Public, and Public Education. Shakespeare Quarterly, 49(3), 293–298. Daniel, D. (2006). William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Film Quarterly, 60(1), 52–56. Davidson, S. (2017). Trauma-Informed Practices for Postsecondary Education: A Guide. Education Northwest. Retrieved July 25, 2021, from https://educationnorthwest.org/sites/default/files/resources/trauma-­informed-­practices-­ postsecondary-­508.pdf

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Demeter, J.  M. (2021). African-American Shakespeares: Loving Blackness as Political Resistance. In H.  Eklund & W.  B. Hyman (Eds.), Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (pp. 67–75). Edinburgh University Press. Dusinberre, J. (2011). Squeaking Cleopatras: Gender and Performance in Antony and Cleopatra. In A.  Loomba (Ed.), Antony and Cleopatra (pp. 227–247). Norton. Johnson, N. (2011). Shakespeare in American Rhetorical Education, 1870–1920. In C. Kahn, H. S. Nathans, & M. Godfrey (Eds.), Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance (pp.  112–130). University of Delaware Press. Leinwald, T. (2011). Afterword. In C. Khan, H. S. Nathans, & M. Godfrey (Eds.), Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance (pp. 276–288). University of Delaware Press. Levine, L. W. (1988). Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Culture Hierarchy in America. Harvard University Press. Spencer, S. A., & Miranda, C. A. (2009). A Brading Boundaries: Reconsidering Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sculpture, Fiction, and Poetry. Callaloo, 32(3), 711–716. Watson, R. N. (2007). Teaching ‘Shakespeare’: Theory vs. Practice. In J. Engell & D. Perkins (Eds.), Teaching Literature: What Is Needed Now (pp. 121–150). Harvard University Press.

“To Double Business Bound”: Shakespeare and Gen Ed Heather Hirschfeld

Having been moved by the playlet in the third act of Hamlet, Claudius cedes to a moment of self-rebuke for the murder of his brother. He cannot pray, he admits: “Though inclination be as sharp as will, /My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent, /And like a man to double business bound, /I stand in pause where I shall first begin, /And both neglect” (Shakespeare, 3.3.39–43). Claudius’s “double business” pulls him in two incompatible directions: towards genuine penitence or towards a usurped crown. My paper’s double business pulls in a slightly different way, between two distinct but ultimately compatible goals: Teaching Shakespeare beyond the major and teaching Shakespeare towards the major. That is, teaching Shakespeare beyond the major, often done within the framework of a general education curriculum, is an opportunity to introduce students to the major—in many cases, though certainly not all, the English or Literature or Humanities major. My hunch is that this notion is implicit in several of the essays in this collection. My goal here is to make it explicit. I do this by looking at some

H. Hirschfeld (*) University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3_4

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contemporary approaches to general education, which rework for the twenty-first century what has traditionally been understood as a common core of courses or a set of distribution requirements “designed to help students develop the skills and range of interests that will enable them to take best advantage of their whole college experience” (Stearns, 2002, p.  44). I suggest that now, as English departments across the country face—for a variety of intensifying political and socio-cultural reasons—significant and persistent declines in their number of majors,1 is an especially apt time to evaluate and connect the work of both gen ed and the major, and to make those connections available to students in ways that may pique their interest in our discipline. I close by discussing one such assignment for my own introductory Shakespeare class, a time-honored editing exercise that becomes more meaningful when we ask students to consider it as an invitation into a specialized skill as part of general education’s mandate to “provide broad exposure to multiple disciplines and form the basis for developing essential intellectual, civic, and practical capacities” (Zai, 2015, p. 197).

Gen Ed The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen an upsurge in institutional focus on general education and general education reform in the United States. In a 2000 survey, “nearly all” of the chief academic officers at 278 baccalaureate-granting schools said that “their institution placed a higher priority on general education [at that time] than it did ten years earlier” (Johnson et al., 2004, p. 10). Similar rates were recorded in 2009 (Zai, 2015, p.  202). In 2011, Thomas Patterson and Jonathan Leonard identified a “national trend to upgrade general education throughout higher education in America,” the result of universities and colleges responding to a “more mutually dependent society in the center of massive social, political, economic, and cultural changes” (Patterson & Leonard, 2011, p.  67). In the last few years of the 2010s, motives for schools to evaluate and reform their general education programs have become more urgent, the result of demands for assessment by regional accrediting bodies as the result of “the very value of higher education 1  Data from the National Center for Education Studies records a drop between 2005 and 2020 from roughly 55,000 to 38,000 majors. See https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/ d21/tables/dt21_322.10.asp.

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[being] regularly called into question” (Long & Laursen, 2017, p. v).2 General education serves as a flashpoint for this kind of questioning and its seemingly inevitable demand for assessment, since gen ed is meant to articulate as well as implement a school’s specific pedagogical, cultural, and socio-economic mission in all its aspirations, justifications, and internal contradictions. As Bruce Kimball has made clear, general education curricula, and the cultural and pedagogical philosophies to which they are attached, have long been the object of debate and controversy. Widely endorsed after World War II and based on a set of distribution or core requirements (as opposed to a major or area of concentration), general education has perennially had to juggle pedagogical principles of: delivering traditional content as well as promoting innovative skills; of preserving student choice as well as program consistency; and of providing a breadth of disciplinary coverage as well as intellectual coherence (1995, p. 212 and passim). But in our climate it is asked to do so in terms of specific, assessment-oriented learning outcomes, often for a student audience that views it as an obstacle to the major or for an administrative audience that views it as a generator of revenue. General education thus rests at an “intersection of an ever-­ shifting, often competing, and occasionally contradictory set of values and interests” (Zai, 2015, p. 196). One of the ways in which theorists and practitioners make sense of these complications today is by explicitly connecting general education learning outcomes with the major. Of course, general education has long been seen as a form of preparation, a way to enable students to “appreciate a variety of issues, to think independently and critically, and to learn independently, outside as well as within their ultimate area of specialization” (Stearns, 2002, p.  44). But in some recent formulations, the language makes the connection less a matter of discrete stages and more a matter of integration, application, and student intentionality. In terms of the latter, faculty are meant “to help students become highly intentional about the forms of learning and accomplishment that the degree should represent” (College Learning, 2).

2  The proliferation of assessment requires critique; see, for instance, Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). For the purposes of this essay, I take the proliferation as a condition of our work today and thus as a cause of the pressures on general education.

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Thus, the AAC&U’s College Learning for the New Global Century (2007) proposes the following goals for higher education: “knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world; intellectual and practical skills; personal and social responsibility; integrative learning.” These, it explains, “are important for all students and should be fostered and developed across the entire educational experience, [including] in the context of students’ major fields.” In other words, although they are “usually associated with general education,” these outcomes—“rich knowledge, higher-level skills and creativity, social responsibility, examined values, and the ability to apply learning to complex and unscripted problems”—are “concerns for the entire educational experience, and not just for the first two years” (pp.  3, 12, 14). Christopher Long offers a related, though distinct, approach in his proposal for a “new general education.” Unpacking various definitions of “general,” he stitches together the customarily separate strands of introductory courses and the major. As he writes, “general education is not general because it is the most universal or because it is abstracted from what is particular but because it teaches us to take on a holistic perspective so that we might understand how the special disciplines are integrated and woven into the fabric of a complex, textured world” (Long, 2016, p. vii). And Catherine Wehlburg is perhaps the most persuasive. She acknowledges and then laments that “a majority of faculty and students consider general education requirements to be something to get out of the way so that a student can concentrate on their major courses.” And this separation, she says, “does a disservice to the student and American higher education. General education does not exist in a vacuum. It is a part of every student’s baccalaureate education and should be viewed as a method of enhancing the overall level of learning for university graduates.” Instead, she proposes that “by integrating the general education experience with the major course work, it is possible to create a new and better understanding of the undergraduate education experience.” In this way, “transfer of learning may occur more easily; students may be able to bring critical-thinking or problem-solving skills gained from their general education core into their major courses. Content from the major may influence how a student views information in the general education courses” (Wehlburg, 2010, pp. 3, 10).

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Shakespeare and Gen Ed Long’s and Wehlburg’s sense of knowledge transfer informs my agenda in teaching Shakespeare beyond the major. I am fortunate to have been part of designing, in the mid-aughts, an introductory Shakespeare course for the general education curriculum (called VolCore since Fall 2022) at the University of Tennessee, where I teach in the English Department. We proposed it, in fact, to meet two distribution requirements: a “Written Communication” requirement (an additional writing-intensive course beyond first-year composition) and an Arts and Humanities requirement within our “Expanded Perspectives” category.3 Students can use this single course to satisfy both requirements. Of course, it is a luxury for a teacher to have a whole course based on Shakespeare at the introductory 3  My University’s specific language is as follows. For “Communicating through Writing”: “Good writing skills enable students to create and share ideas, investigate and describe values, and record and explain discoveries—all skills that are necessary not only for professional success but also for personal fulfillment. Students must be able to write correctly, and they must be able to locate relevant information, evaluate its usefulness and quality, and incorporate it logically and ethically to support ideas and claims. Courses in this area are expected to produce the following outcomes for students: (1) Students will demonstrate the ability to write clearly and correctly, employing the conventions of standard American English; (2) Students will demonstrate the ability to write effectively for different audiences and purposes, shaping content, organization, and style to correspond with appropriate disciplinary expectations and rhetorical contexts; (3) Students will demonstrate the ability to locate and use relevant, credible evidence to support ideas; (4) Students will demonstrate the ability to cite and document sources in keeping with appropriate disciplinary conventions.” For “Arts and Humanities”: “‘What does it mean to be human?’ In attempting to answer this question, people have produced—and continue to produce—culturally and historically significant works. The study and critical interpretation of such works and their creators not only enriches students’ lives but also helps students understand their own and others’ answers to this enduring question. Courses in this area are expected to produce the following outcomes for students: (1) Students will demonstrate the ability to identify and describe prominent works, figures, and/ or schools of thought in the arts and humanities; (2) Students will demonstrate the ability to describe the cultural and historical significance of prominent works, figures, and/or schools of thought in the arts and humanities; (3) Students will demonstrate the ability to critically interpret prominent works or accomplishments in artistic and humanistic fields.” Available at: https://catalog.utk.edu/preview_program.php?catoid=29&poid=12813.

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level. To justify its inclusion in general education—since the department had never had a single author course in the general education roster and was wary of the various hazards of Shakespearean universalism and Bardolatry—we emphasized the ways in which the course would introduce students to the plural “worlds of Shakespeare”: to the fictions of his plays, certainly, but also to their diverse and contested historical contexts, to the geographic locales and national identities they embrace or call into question, to the models of inclusion and exclusion they encode, and to the aesthetically and politically charged performances they have occasioned around the globe. Since we debuted the course in 2007, I have become more deliberate about talking with my non-major students about the meaning of general education, the requirements the Shakespeare class satisfies, and the relationship between what we do in it, the English major, and their own disciplines. A substantial part of this kind of discussion happens in the opening weeks of class. I start the semester by asking the class, whose demographic make-up reflects a student body that is roughly 80 percent white, 6 percent Hispanic, 5 percent Black or African American, and 4 percent Asian or Pacific Islander, with 73 percent from the state of Tennessee,4 to write down and then share with the class (and hand in) why they’ve enrolled in the course. I tell them not to hesitate to say that they are taking it to fulfill a requirement—that I anticipate this will be their perspective and that in fact I want to look with them at those requirements and their learning outcomes, which must be included on the syllabus. We do close readings of the university’s “Written Communication” and “Expanded Perspectives—Arts and Humanities” criteria, remarking on what resonates with—and what seems antithetical to—their experience or expectations for their degree and for the class. I encourage them to think critically about the assumptions embedded in the outcomes, and how they might be reinforced or undermined by a class devoted to Shakespeare. I then suggest that I’ve designed the semester with these criteria—and some of their assumptions and tensions—in mind, taking care to connect them with our readings, assignments, video materials, and my hopes for class conversation. I affirm what Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi have emphasized as a central goal in teaching Shakespeare in this kind of 4

 See https://oira.utk.edu/reporting/fact-book/.

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framework: “to increase a student’s independent facility with complex texts” (Thompson and Turchi, 2016, passim). I also acknowledge the balancing act—the “double business”—that the two sets of requirements demand of both them and me. Those sets come together in the design of the syllabus and assignments. I introduce, each week, a specific rhetorical trope or figure found in the plays (including apostrophe, hendiadys, anaphora/epiphora, praeteritio, and metaphor). I explain to students what we have known for a long time about Shakespeare’s “small Latin and lesse Greeke”: that training in classical rhetoric and rhetorical performance in grammar school was the educational foundation or “world” of Shakespeare’s age (Newstok, 2019, passim), uniting the “writing” and “humanities” now separated into two requirements. Each week as we take up or continue with a play, we explore definitions and examples of rhetorical tropes and practice inventing them ourselves in brief, ungraded in-class exercises. As we watch for moments of that trope in action in the drama, we also address the important conclusions of recent work by Lynn Enterline and Ian Smith about the role of such rhetoric in early modern ideologies of race, class, and gender. I introduce them to Enterline’s key observation that “rather than strengthen the stability of masculine identity, the grammar school’s daily demand for verbal and bodily mimicry performed in public under the threat of punishment would produce rhetorically capable ‘gentlemen’ only by keeping such identity at a distance” (2012, p. 8). I also stress Smith’s critical recognitions that the rhetorical tradition Shakespeare inherited—indeed, an ancestor of some of the ideas about the humanities that inform the gen ed requirement—provided a “powerful conceptual template … for imagining the outsider, one that was ready-made for racial exploitation” and that “a preset history of attitudes, inferences, and conclusions about language difference is adopted and translated into an early modern idiom of race” (2009,  pp.  2, 22). This background trains students to recognize Shakespeare’s verbal power not only in terms of character psychology but also in terms of its long-term social and cultural foundations and effects. It also insists that they, along with their instructors, attend to our own relationships to language and its broader effects, and to our own implication in the linguistic endeavors that ground the humanities. If the rhetorical dimension of the plays is the hinge between two gen ed designations, it is also the point of contact between teaching Shakespeare

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towards as well as beyond the major. That is, the close reading we model as part of our attention to rhetoric is fundamental to the skills required by and learned in the English major. This anticipation of the skills of the major is precisely what a general education curriculum is designed to teach: disciplinary practices as well as content. I make the move explicit with an editing exercise during our two weeks on Hamlet, whose textual situation—three distinct early texts—is especially complicated. The assignment demands that they reflect on what they are learning as a non-­major about the kinds of close reading and analysis demanded in the English major. Textual editing assignments, especially for multi-text plays of Shakespeare, have been promoted for surveys as well as upper-division classes for many years. In their versions, David Bevington, Randall Anderson, and Frank Clary all emphasize the potential of such assignments to “enlighten and enliven” the classroom, whether by promoting a special “intimacy with the drama” akin to that of actors and directors (Bevington, 2009,  p.  44), by “challeng[ing] the students’ assumptions that today we read the same text that was available four centuries ago” (Anderson, 2001, p. 57), or by stressing the “implications of … textual multiplicity, not only in [students’] reading of Hamlet criticism but in their own practices as interpreters of the play” (Clary, 2002, p. 32). But the stakes of such exercises have been heightened by recent scholarship on editorial theory and history, since this scholarship has called attention not only to the consequences of textual choices but also to the embedded assumptions and overdetermined vocabularies—particularly around gender, race, sexuality, and status hierarchies—that have governed those choices. That scholarly literature is beyond the scope of this essay, but Jeffrey Masten’s remarks on bibliography offer an excellent snapshot: “there is rarely an analysis of language and textual transmission, contamination, and correction that does not draw upon or intersect with terms from the lexicons of sex, gender, reproduction, the body, and the family” (Masten, 2016, p. 20).5 5  Gabriel Egan surveys the theoretical and political investments of twentieth-century editorial practice in The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Texts: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For the gendered vocabulary of Shakespearean editing and the gendered nature of editorial work on Shakespeare, see Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, “On Editing,” Shakespeare 15.3 (2019): 293–309.

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Such scholarship confirms the fresh relevance of the editing assignment, particularly if we adopt Hillary Eklund’s wise reframing of relevance in terms of “critical reflection on students’ responses to their encounters with texts” (Eklund, 2019, p. 188). Part of the mandate of general education, as we have noted, is to “provide broad exposure to multiple disciplines and ways of knowing” (Humphreys, 2006, n.p.). An essential “way of knowing” in our field includes our comprehension that “to edit a text is to undertake a series of acts of critical interpretation which are always limited by the perspective of the editor,” and this is a principle we can actively share with our students (Maguire & Smith, 2019, p. 299). So, I spend time in class introducing students to the basic contours of the situation: the existence of Q1(1603), Q2 (1604/5), and F (1623); the general shape of the differences between the texts, including the presence of significant passages in Q2 that are not in F (and vice versa); the brevity of Q1 as well as its influential stage directions and more generous treatment of Gertrude; and some of the options for a path of textual transmission (stemma). We talk about the implications of the textual situation and the grounds upon which an editor might make choices big and small. The assignment itself rehearses this information and then asks them to answer a specific prompt. It omits the issues around Q1 and focuses instead on a very precise distinction between Q2 and F in Hamlet’s interview with the Ghost in the fifth scene of the first act. In Q2, the Ghost tells Hamlet, “I find thee apt, / And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed / That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf …” The Folio edition reads rots: “I find thee apt, / And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed / That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf …” My directions for the students are focused on this difference of a vowel. I ask: “In your essay, discuss the difference that the choice of ‘roots’ or ‘rots’ makes to your understanding of these lines, your understanding of Hamlet’s relationship to the Ghost, and to the play as a whole. If you were editing this text, which would you choose for your edition and why?” The finiteness of my approach is different than Clary’s, Anderson’s, or T.H.H. Hill’s from some years ago. Clary required his students to read the introductory materials from Jenkins’s Second Arden (64 pages!). Then, using that edition, they were asked to compare several pre-selected Q2-only or F1-only passages and “assess the interpretive implications that derive from the deviations” (Clary, 2002, p.  30). Similarly, Anderson’s

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students evaluated sustained passages from parallel scenes in Q1 and Q2 in order to assess a host of questions.6 And Hill asked students to locate a textual crux of their own choosing, to study its presentation in the Furness New Variorum, to find other discussions of the crux, and to discuss the reading they prefer and the ones they would reject (Hill, 2001, pp. 52–56). All of these options have strengths, but they are too diffuse in their mandates, and they neglect what seems to me the core component: asking students themselves to play the editor. I invite students to intervene actively in the situation, to put themselves in a new role, rather than to observe and interpret differences. It is a “student-centered approach to editing,” as Claire M.L. Bourne explains as part of her remarkable “Digital Beaumont & Fletcher” which “is predicated on the belief that students are capable of determining what they need from the texts they use in their studies”.7 My assignment is a much smaller endeavor than such a digital environment, but what I am seeking to do here is to invite students beyond the major into the promise of the major and some of its techniques. It is also a move that my last set of introductory students and I agreed to keep optional. While discussing the assignment in class, I raised with them the issue of training in general education and training in the major. The editorial exercise, I told them, was a version of something I’d done before, and I was hoping that they might be interested in tackling it. We discussed the expectations of a class for majors and a class for non-majors, and why and how an editing assignment might or might not be appropriate at their level. I then asked them to write me a quick note to explain whether or not they wanted to tackle the assignment. Out of fourteen responses, eight wanted to do the assignment and six did not. All of the answers were intriguing. One of the “cons” suggested that the assignment was “too technical,” another said that they were afraid they wouldn’t have 6  The questions were as follows: “Could we present Hamlet without the scene? How does it connect with earlier scenes or prepare us for later scenes? What do we learn about the characters involved? Do any particular words, images, or themes from the passage resonate elsewhere in the play… What do the words mean? What else might they have meant in 1603? Are there any puns? Are any crucial words changed from one version of the passage to another? If so, do all variant readings make sense? What validates one alternative more than the other? In terms of dramatic effects, think about what action or what gestures might be appropriate to the scene… To whom—or about whom—are lines spoken? Can we always determine the referent of pronouns? In terms of poetic effects, does it make a difference whether the passage is in prose or verse?” (Anderson, 2001, p. 58). 7  See https://beaumontandfletcher.libraries.psu.edu/digital-beaumont-fletcher-pedagogybehind-project.

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enough to say about a single word. One of the “pros” said that they would find the assignment “fascinating,” noting that “attention to key details is important to learn and is very transferable to other areas of study.” Two others liked the novelty of the exercise, saying “It’s different, and I really like that.” So, as a class, we decided that the assignment would be for extra credit, an effective resolution. But the real accomplishment was that, in the context of learning about the play’s textual issues and considering some of the questions it raised, students reflected upon themselves as learners in the process of general education and about their peers in the major. This accomplishment was crystallized in a response from a student who said that they would “hate” this assignment but also predicted that majors would enjoy it. A version of double business, certainly. My interest in bringing to the surface this double business, this link between teaching beyond the major and teaching towards the major, is partly the result of my role as Director of Undergraduate Studies in my own English department. It is a role many of us (although under different departmental formations) will inhabit at some point, and one which demands attention to courses designed for non-majors and for majors at the same time. It also involves attention to major recruitment, a concern born out of declining enrollments over the past decades8 and now amplified by the pedagogical uncertainties that have followed in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. Departments will, of course, continue to address this issue in myriad ways, particularly by redesigning the curriculum with increased diversity, inclusivity, and flexibility as well as career applicability in mind.9 But faculty can also address it when they teach Shakespeare beyond the major, specifically in the context of a general education program. We can certainly design assignments that ask them to bring their expertise to the study of Shakespeare (see chapter). But here I am suggesting that we reinforce for students the specific disciplinary challenges of the major, that we invite them to see English skills on a continuum with their own majors. We thus invite them to recognize English as more than just a way of fulfilling a gen ed requirement but rather a structure of knowledge 8  The July 2018 Report of the 2016–17 ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the English Major notes a “precipitous decline in undergraduate English majors across North America that began in 2009” (1). 9   Ibid., 1–3. For the desirability of English majors, see https://www.nytimes. com/2019/09/20/business/liberal-arts-stem-salaries.html or George Anders, You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Education (New York: Back Bay Books, 2017), esp. 85–6, 259–61.

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and action that they can pursue. It’s a recruitment tool or advertisement, for sure, but one that works by inviting reflection on students’ experience with gen ed and their own expectations for their education. Such a gesture respects our students’ choices beyond the major while making available to them the possibility for further study.

References Anderson, R. (2001). An Editing Exercise for Students. In B. W. Kliman (Ed.), Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Hamlet (pp.  57–61). The Modern Language Association. Bevington, D. (2009). The Words: Teacher as Editor, Editor as Teacher. In G.  B. Shand (Ed.), Teaching Shakespeare: Passing It On (pp.  43–60). Wiley-Blackwell. Clary, F. N. (2002). “Whether ‘tis Nobler in the Mind”: Multiple-Text Hamlet in the Undergraduate Classroom. Shakespeare and the Classroom, 10(1–2), 28–35. College Learning for the New Global Century. (2007). Association of American Colleges & Universities. https://nsee.memberclicks.net/assets/docs/KnowledgeCenter/ IntegratingExpEduc/BooksReports/82.2.%20college%20learning%20for%20 the%20new%20global%20century.pdf Eklund, H. (2019). Shakespeare, Service Learning, and the Embattled Humanities. In H.  Eklund & W.  B. Hyman (Eds.), Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now. Edinburgh University Press. Enterline, L. (2012). Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion. University of Pennsylvania Press. Hill, T. H. H. (2001). “The Play’s the Thing”: Constructing the Text of Hamlet. In B. W. Kliman (Ed.), Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Hamlet (pp. 52–56). The Modern Language Association. Humphreys, D. (2006). Making the Case for Liberal Education: Responding to Challenges. Association of American Colleges & Universities. https://secure. aacu.org/AACU/PDF/LEAP_MakingtheCase_Final.pdf#:~:text=In%20 2005%20and%202006%2C%20AAC%26U%20commissioned%20a%20 series,and%20responds%20to%20common%20challenges%20to%20liberal%20 education Johnson, D.  K., Ratcliff, J.  L., & Gaff, J.  G. (2004). A Decade of Change in General Education. New Directions for Higher Education, 125, 9–28. Kimball, B. (1995). Orators & Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (2nd ed.). College Entrance Examination Board. Long, C. P. (2016). The Liberal Arts Endeavor. Journal of General Education: A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences, 65(3–4), 5–9.

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Long, C. P., & Laursen, B. K. (2017). The Liberal Arts Endeavor: Enacting Values in General Education Reform. Journal of General Education: A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences, 66(3–4), 5–9. Maguire, L., & Smith, E. (2019). On Editing. Shakespeare, 15(3), 293–309. Masten, J. (2016). Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time. University of Pennsylvania Press. Muller, J. Z. (2018). The Tyranny of Metrics. Princeton University Press. Newstok, S. (2019). How to Think Like Shakespeare. Princeton University Press. Patterson, T. F., & Leonard, J. G. (2011). Ten Years into the 21st Century Core Curriculum: Our Experience, Insight, and Future. North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture Journal (NACTA), 55(2), 61–70. Shakespeare, W. (2019). Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (P. Edwards, Ed., 3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Smith, I. (2009). Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors. Palgrave Macmillan. Stearns, P. (2002). General Education Revisited, Again. Liberal Education, 88(1), 1–7. Thompson, A., & Turchi, L. (2016). Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-­ Centred Approach. Bloomsbury Publishing. Wehlburg, C. M. (2010). Integrated General Education: A Brief Look Back. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 121 (Spring), 3, 10. Wiley Online Library. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.383 Zai, R.  I. I.  I. (2015). Reframing General Education. The Journal of General Education, 64(3), 196–217.

“The Refusal of Compassion”: Teaching The Merchant of Venice in a General Education Course Joanne Diaz

Every time I teach The Merchant of Venice, I am certain that it will be the last time. Shakespeare characterization of Shylock as the play’s villain is troubling not only on the page, but also in the play’s long history of performance, adaptation, and manipulation for political ends. As Gross (1993) has observed, Shylock “belongs, inescapably, to the history of anti-­ Semitism,” and even a cursory look at the play’s appropriation among directors, scholars, and educators would give anyone pause as they prepare to teach this text. These challenges are significant in an advanced literature course that focuses entirely on Shakespeare’s texts, but what to do in a general education course, in which this is the only text by Shakespeare that we read? And of course, this brings me to larger ethical questions: Who am I as a professor? What kind of environment do I want to create for my students? What do I want them to ultimately experience and understand?

J. Diaz (*) Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3_5

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As ambivalent as I am, though, I continue to teach The Merchant of Venice in my 100-level literature course called “Crime and Punishment: Representations of Justice in Law and Literature.” When The Merchant of Venice is situated in a class that focuses on the interaction between literature and the law, and when all of our texts focus on the ways in which the law—and thereby the state—can use language to assault, criminalize, and thus dehumanize characters, the Merchant of Venice becomes central to our work. Over the course of a semester, we read novels, poems, and plays that feature representations of violent crimes, the legal professionals who prosecute cases, legal forms and documents, the confessions, testimonies, and punishment of the accused, and the pervasiveness of legal culture that literature both helps to constitute and critique. By the end of the semester, my hope is that students develop an understanding of why stories about the law are such productive sites of creativity for writers, readers, and viewers. In addition, though, I hope that students acquire frameworks for understanding how writers and filmmakers explore and critique bias and suspicion, especially as it relates to race and ethnicity, from antiquity to the present. With these frameworks, we investigate how texts challenge us to imagine and perhaps even empathize with the experiences of others outside of ourselves. Through our close readings, use of cultural context, and rigorous philological inquiry, students acquire an appreciation for the unique properties of literary texts. When The Merchant of Venice is assigned with other texts that raise these problems of bias, suspicion, and bigotry, students can see that literature—even literature as difficult and as upsetting as The Merchant of Venice—is capable of helping us to explore “compassion and mercy, the role of the emotions in public judgment, [and] what is involved in imagining the situation of someone different from oneself” (Nussbaum, 1995, p. xiv). In what follows, I provide some context for how The Merchant of Venice is situated my class and then describe a series of activities that I regularly incorporate into my classes. As you will see, the exercises begin with the smallest building blocks of language, then, with each new exercise, students build upon what came before in order to develop a range of approaches to Shakespeare’s most challenging passages. Along the way, students acquire basic skills in deictics and performance, philological research, and textual studies, all of which provide them with ways to read closely long after the semester is over.

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The Merchant of Venice in My Law and Literature Course I teach at Illinois Wesleyan University, a small liberal arts college in Central Illinois. The vast majority of my students will eventually major in Business and Nursing, and almost all of them enroll in my course in order to fulfill a general education credit for Literature. Many of them enroll in the course because they are fans of true crime podcasts or have grown up watching syndicated crime shows like Law and Order: SVU or Criminal Minds. While some of them love literature and reading, others are apprehensive about literary study, and still others dismiss the study of literature as something superfluous or ornamental to their education. With these things in mind, I take pains to describe the objectives of the course on the first day of class, emphasizing the potential for literature to foster empathy and understanding in readers. Early on the first day, I share the following quote from Sarat, Anderson, and Frank’s Law and the Humanities: An Introduction (2009), a book that foregrounds this potential: […] literature can raise consciousness about the effects of power and historical patterns of oppression, exploitation, and marginalization. We must develop and integrate a sensitive understanding of the ways in which language can shape our perception of others and, thus, the way we treat each other. In short, literature can help us see, understand, and identify with those whose lives and experiences are often illegible before the law. (7)

It is this illegibility—the way in which the dominant culture refuses to recognize the humanity of the accused—that gives our course a sense of momentum and purpose. But can the study of The Merchant of Venice help us better understand the ethical implications of our relationships with one another and to the law? Of course, what we find in literary texts frequently subverts our desire for that compassion. As Nussbaum (1995) has observed, “our society is full of refusals to imagine one another with empathy and compassion, refusals from which none of us is free. Many of the stories we tell one another encourage the refusal of compassion, so not even the literary imagination itself is free from blame” (xvii). Even so, when students grapple with scenes in which characters refuse to recognize the humanity of others, the texts, when read over the course of the semester, sensitize

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students to these failures and provide them with frameworks that allow them to critique those failures. When we read Antigone, our first text of the semester, students are at first baffled by Creon’s harsh edict and its effects on Antigone. They are shocked when Polyneices’ body is left to rot in the open air, “a corpse for the birds and dogs to eat,” which demonstrates the power of the state of dehumanize its own subjects with the rule of law (Sophocles, 2003, line 192, first episode, p.  17). When we view Antigone in Ferguson, Brian Doerries’ adaptation of Sophocles’s play, students can see how the abandonment of a body that has been murdered by state forces—in the case of Doerries’ adaptation, the body is Michael Brown’s—could traumatize the community, and the nation, that witness it. Students read about microaggressions in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and see how even the title of that collection foregrounds the rights and liberties that a citizen ought to have, even as Black Americans are regularly denied those rights, and how public and private spaces are often informed by the long history of racism. Students see, too, how Rankine’s collection speaks back to Shylock’s “alien” status among the citizens of Venice. In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, students try to understand how Josef K could possibly be arrested for a crime that is never named, and then see how the story functions as a kind of “blueprint” for revolutionary thinking against the proto-fascist state (Arendt, 1994, p. 76); and in Just Mercy, students consider how the suspicion of an innocent Black man nearly leads to his unjust execution, and how the carceral state regularly violates the constitutional rights of the most marginalized American citizens. By the time we read, view, and discuss Just Mercy, students are contributing to course content: one student suggested that we view John Oliver’s “Juries” episode from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which succinctly introduces the key problems surrounding bias and outright racism in the American jury selection system. After reading and viewing Just Mercy, another student suggested that we watch Bryan Stevenson’s TED Talk about his Equal Justice Initiative and his commitment to human rights and prison reform. In their final course evaluations, many students say that they see the connections between the literary texts of our course to what they are seeing in the news, and I regularly marvel at the ease with which many of them speak of these injustices and possible remedies for them.

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Pedagogical Approach Any one of the texts in our course has the potential to cause harm to those students who have had direct experiences with bias, bigotry, legal proceedings, or incarceration, and the texts can be troubling even for those students who have had none of those personal experience, We know, too, that The Merchant of Venice has a particularly troubling performance history. More than once, the play was deployed as a propagandistic tool in Nazi Germany: in 1938, German radio broadcast a production of the play right after the Kristallnacht pogrom, and in 1943, the Burgtheater staged a production of the play that was meant to celebrate the deportation of Jews from Vienna (Heschel, 2006, p. 409). The long history of this play, and the harm that it has caused, necessitates that we have frameworks for understanding how to navigate controversial moments in the text. Thankfully, much of what we do as literature professors at Illinois Wesleyan University already aligns with best practices in trauma-informed teaching and learning pedagogy: we offer a variety of high- and low-stakes writing projects that give students a sense of choice; we offer transparency for what we do as instructors so that students understand our objectives and plans for the course; and we aim to create a sense of community and trust by encouraging students to share their work-in-progress and contribute to meaningful dialogue in our class meetings. I try to design a syllabus that is as specific and detailed as possible, and when I need to make changes, I do so quickly and notify students of the changes. Any student who occasionally falls behind or needs to miss a class will always know what they have missed in a class meeting and how to find the resources for that class meeting on our course management site (CMS). While there is a great deal of controversy surrounding content warnings in higher education, I do include the following content warning on my syllabus: Content Warning. The materials that we read and discuss in this seminar will challenge your value system, not just once, but many times. They are difficult, often upsetting texts that examine racism, antisemitism, violence, wrongful convictions, and death. Please browse through our readings at the beginning of the semester. If you are willing to grapple with these challenging, complex issues, I promise that I will do my best to moderate our discussions with tact, honesty, sensitivity, and a desire to carefully listen. If you are willing to try this experiment with me, then let’s begin. (“Crime and Punishment” Syllabus)

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In addition, I provide a great deal of historical and cultural context before we read or view each text so that students feel prepared for the content that we will address. I have found that these forms of preparation do not hinder or prevent students from engaging in the course material; if anything, they open up possibilities for frank discussion and make students feel like they have my support. Research in the field of trauma-informed teaching and learning indicates that such warnings actually help students to “manage their mental health and better prepare to engage with potentially triggering materials” (Colbert, 2017, p. 15). In a world where students are grappling with racism, sexism, a variety of mental health issues, and pandemic-related stress, I hope that this is an ethical approach that can help students prepare for the range of feelings that these texts can elicit. Once the semester begins, I try to create a sense of community while also helping students develop confidence in their critical thinking skills, and our CMS provides us with a way to do that. Every week, I ask students to write a brief response to each required text. Even a brief, 250-word response to The Merchant of Venice might feel daunting to students who aren’t entirely confident with Shakespeare’s language. With that in mind, I try to narrow their focus by asking them to address some of the keywords of the play, including bond, kind, gentle, and fair. With the help of this focused prompt, some students recognize Shylock’s desire to assert his complexity as a human, even as every character tries to reduce him; others are able to see the hypocrisy of the Christians who claim to value mercy and kindness; and others offer incisive critiques of the courtroom as a biased space. I respond to each of these posts with constructive feedback and suggestions for how they might transform their observations into “how” or “why” questions that could lead them to a thesis statement for their papers. My approach lets students know I am paying attention to their work, and it also helps them see that even low-stakes writing can be generative. I also use CMS responses in class so that I can foreground their authority and insight as learners. By bringing quotes from our CMS forum into our class discussion (always with their permission), I can help students to quickly develop more confidence in their responses to difficult topics; in addition, they see this low-stakes writing as generative for their paper writing, rather than just busy work. As Mendoza (2019) has observed, these uses of student insight “validate their participation and get them into the mindset that they are […] active engagers who share responsibility for the

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learning produced in the classroom” (101). It also establishes a sense of confidence and trust as we prepare to discuss the most controversial and upsetting aspects of Shakespeare’s play.

Cultural Context Providing cultural context—not just for Shakespeare’s moment but for the afterlives of the play as well—is essential to my work as a professor, not just because it can deepen student understanding of the intersections between the law and literature, but because it can also help students see the deep origins of the bigotry that undergirds the text. Shylock’s bond, Antonio’s inability to pay his debt, and the court proceedings that are manipulated by Portia would have been of keen interest to Shakespeare’s audiences. Shakespeare wrote the play at a moment when the English audiences were becoming increasingly aware of the power of forensic reasoning in the legal sphere. As Hutson (2006) and other scholars have observed, this had a significant bearing upon early modern playwrights: play texts from the period consistently demanded that spectators perform the “judicatory act” of interpreting and judging the likelihood, or improbability, of events onstage (87). While spectators often watched events unfold, they also had to regularly judge and interpret narratives of past events as they were recounted in dialogue. Early modern spectators adopted a “skeptical inquiry into likelihood” (87) as they watched the forensic reasoning of the characters, grasping together pieces of evidence right alongside the characters—a kind of reasoning that we continue to perform as readers and viewers today. The problem, of course, was that the most marginalized members of early modern society—including Jews, in the case of The Merchant of Venice—bore the brunt of this skepticism and suspicion. Indeed, the word suspect comes from the Latin suspicere and suggests look upon and assume. In the sixteenth century, the word would have suggested “to imagine something evil, wrong, or undesirable in (a person or thing) on slight or no evidence; to believe or fancy to be guilty or faulty, with insufficient proof or knowledge; to have suspicions or doubts about, be suspicious of” (“suspect,” 1a). In fact, one of the earliest appearances of the word “suspect” in English appears in The Merchant of Venice, when Shylock marvels at the brusqueness and hubris of Antonio, saying “O father Abram, what these Christians are, /Whose own hard dealings teaches them suspect/ The thoughts of others!” (1.3.154–155). That deep-seated suspicion is at

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the heart of the play and prepares us for our readings of the more contemporary texts on our syllabus as well. One of the many problems embedded in The Merchant of Venice is that Shylock ultimately participates in an emergent form of capitalism that both requires his services and reviles him for providing them. In a casual conversation with Solanio, Antonio suggests just how important Shylock and his fellow “strangers” are to the economic well-being of all of Venice: ANTONIO: The Duke cannot deny the course of law; For the commodity that strangers have With us in Venice, if it be denied, Will much impeach the justice of the state, Since that the trade and profit of the city Consisteth of all nations. (3.3.26–31)

Antonio suggests that contesting Shylock’s bond would cause problems for the “trade and profit of the city” which depends on venture capitalism and moneylending. The antisemitism that Shylock endures in this play has its foundations in the birth of Christianity itself. Numerous passages in the New Testament—including Paul’s letters to the Galatians, Thessalonians, and Romans—establish a dichotomy between the Jews’ commitment to the law and to Christian belief while also characterizing Jews as irredeemable because of their refusal to convert to Christianity (Freinkel). This long-­ standing suspicion of Jews was perpetuated and exacerbated throughout the medieval and early modern periods, when Jews found themselves, with increasing frequency, perceived as “strangers,” “foreigners,” and “vagabonds” in cosmopolitan centers like Venice (Shapiro, 1996, pp. 167–194). Jews were frequently relegated to moneylending, a practice that was essential to the workings of venture capitalism but was also reviled by theologians like Martin Luther, who described Jews as “devils” and “thieves” because of their “accursed usury.” Luther’s “sharp mercy” for Jews— “sharp mercy” seems entirely relevant for what happens to Shylock at the end of the play—includes the razing of their houses and synagogues, the confiscation of their prayer books, and the prohibition of rabbinical teaching (Luther, 1971, pp. 268–269). Luther’s hateful rhetoric, and that of many other European theologians, contributed to a hostility toward Jews

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that led to their expulsion from several countries in Europe in the medieval and early modern periods. For centuries, then, Jews lived in exile alongside, but never with, Christian communities, and as such were objects of suspicion. Between 1100–1500, Jews were accused of kidnapping and murdering one hundred children, allegedly to use their blood for ritual sacrifice. I describe how this blood libel conspiracy flared up during panics that spread through Europe in times of financial, moral, religious, and epidemiological crises. Of course, no evidence ever supported these claims, but it is important to discuss them, however briefly, with students who might otherwise be unaware of the historical context for these ideas. Shylock’s obsession with Antonio’s pound of flesh has deep roots in a Christian culture that would have perceived his character as the villain of the story. This context is useful for understanding the ways in which Shylock is dehumanized in Merchant, but there is a more contemporary relevance to these discussions as well. Little did I know how relevant this context would be when I taught this course in 2021, just days after the January 6 insurrection at the White House, when images of Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and QAnon members flooded my students’ news feeds. The QAnon conspiracy theory has, at its foundations, several threads of antisemitism that resonate with various tropes from across the centuries—in particular, the notion that top government officials who support globalization are actually a secret group of pedophiles that harvest children’s blood and engage in sex trafficking; that Jewish financiers are at the center of this conspiracy; and the sense that this is a moral catastrophe that must be crushed at all costs. When students see the long history of this kind of conspiratorial thinking, and the dangers that it poses in the past and the present, they are better equipped to see the relevance of reading and discussing Shakespeare’s play. But to get there, we have to engage in very small, language-centered exercises that focus students’ attention on these choices.

Deictics and Performance A general education course is meant to expose students to close reading practices, and it can often be useful to start with the smallest units of sentence construction. Doing so is by no means remedial or basic; in fact, the work that we do with each word or phrase in a dramatic line can provide essential clues to understanding the text as a whole. As Elam (2001) has observed, deictics—words that indicate direction, and attachment, such as

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I/you, here/now, and this/that—are the building blocks of all syntax in dramatic performance. When we closely read the I/you, here/there relationships in the opening lines of any play, we can better understand what the drama enacts in its relationships among and between characters. Deictics allow bodies and things to become more than just themselves on the stage and can instantly activate the imagination of audience members, even without elaborate props, sets, or special effects (21). Guiding students to deictics at the beginning of a play trains them to learn how to quickly infer what is happening in medias res. Consider the opening lines of the Merchant of Venice, in which Antonio instantly establishes himself and his melancholy as central to the tensions of the play: ANTONIO: In sooth, I know not why I am so sad: It wearies me; you say it wearies you; But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn; and such a want-wit sadness makes of me, That I have much ado to know myself. (1.1.1-6)

The adverbial phrase “in sooth” reveals a disclosure or concession; the subject of the sentence—I—focuses the viewer’s attention on Antonio; by the second line, the use of the personal pronoun “you” tells us that another person is wearied by the “I’s” sadness as well, and that the speaker knows this because the “you” has already said so; the verb tense suggests that this is a current concern that must be resolved, at least in the mind of the speaker; and the multiple references to the “it” of the sadness—seven uses of “it” in three lines—suggests that the sadness is its own object, unknowable and yet completely present in the mind of Antonio. Deictics, in their most elemental form, create distances, attachments, and identities that are essential to the play; in addition, patterns of repetition—in language, in sound, in rhythm and image—can foreground and complicate the obsessions and attachments of characters. Consider Shylock’s first appearance in 1.3, when Bassanio and Antonio ask Shylock if he will lend them 3000 ducats. By the time readers and audience members see this encounter, they already understand that every personal relationship in Venice is dictated by monetary worth: we know that Portia is a lady “richly left” (1.1.161) in Belmont; that Antonio’s “purse” and “person” (1.1.145) are open to Bassanio so that he can afford to court Portia;

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and when Antonio suggests that he’s sad and doesn’t know why, his friends assume that it is because he has so many ventures out at sea (1.1.8–41). It comes as no surprise, then, that Shylock’s first utterance alludes to the value of a bond that he will secure with Antonio, and that he is measuring its worth. SHYLOCK: Three thousand ducats, well. BASSANIO: Ay, sir, for three months. SHYLOCK: For three months, well. BASSANIO. For the which, as I told you, Antonio shall be bound. SHYLOCK: Antonio shall become bound, well. BASSANIO: May you stead me? Will you pleasure me? Shall I know your answer? SHYLOCK: Three thousand ducats for three months, and Antonio bound. (1.3.1–6)

Notice that Shylock uses the word “well” as an epiphoric interjection three times in this brief passage. “Well” is a way for Shylock to indicate that the conversation started before the scene did, and that he is responding to the conditions for the bond. That single word does so much more than that, though. “Well” might also indicate that Shylock is expressing some doubts about the contract, as in “well, I’m not sure…,” or he could be using “well” as a way to punctuate, and emphasize, each of the conditions of the bond. He could also be indicating surprise, as in “well, well, well,” perhaps with delight or bemusement. Any one, or all, of these are possibilities, and this seems to explain why Bassanio seems so impatient with Shylock’s string of questions (“May you stead me? Will you pleasure me? Shall I know your answer?”). But why is Bassanio so impatient? Surely, he knows, as anyone in Venice would have known, that he is asking for an enormous sum: 3000 ducats is roughly $165,000  in today’s money (National Archives, 2021; Shakespeare, 2010, 202n). Perhaps Shylock is meditating upon the enormity of the request, but Bassanio (and then Antonio later in the same scene) is treating it more like a demand. He does not see Shylock as an individual, but as a type—a moneylender who will automatically perform Bassanio’s transaction. Already, through the

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reading of deictics and repetition in the opening lines of this scene, we can see how Christian characters—and the financial systems of Venice—reduce Shylock to an archetype obsessed with money. A close reading of deictics can occur at any point in the play and will necessarily deepen and complicate students’ understanding of dramatic action. Consider the moment when Portia enters the courtroom and sees Antonio and Shylock for the first time. Portia has been “informed” of the cause—Shylock’s desire for the payment of his bond—and yet she cannot determine which character is which. PORTIA: I am informed thoroughly of the cause. Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew? (4.1.168–169)

Perhaps Portia’s question is a way for her to invite others to participate in the juridical procedure—that is, perhaps she is asking for others to confirm, with certainty, which character is which, so that there can be no doubt in the eyes of the law. But in a play that insists on Shylock’s difference, why can’t Portia see it? If Portia cannot “stabilize [his] identity, fix [his] essence, and so distinguish [him] from the Christian protagonist” (Freinkel, 2000, p.  126), then what is going on here? This confusion might demonstrate the fact that the men are really not so different in bearing or disposition, which thus suggests that it is mere bigotry among Venetian citizens that creates this suspicion and distrust. Perhaps Shylock needs to be named because he seems like he could be any other person in the court; perhaps his Jewishness is not so immediately obvious, even as every Christian character in the play seems to think it is; perhaps, as Heschel (2006) has suggested, there is a real problem with identifying what is essentially Jewish in Shylock after all (410). Consider this next moment in the text, when Portia addresses Shylock: PORTIA: Is your name Shylock? SHYLOCK:           Shylock is my name. (4.1.172)

This chiastic line of iambic pentameter reinforces Shylock’s name, not once, but twice. Why, then, does Portia insist on referring to Shylock in the lines that follow as “Jew” a total of sixteen times? Why not refer to him by his name, which demarcates him as an individual, rather than “Jew,” an epithet which reduces him to a religious category? I will address this

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question in some detail in the pages that follow, but for now, I just want to demonstrate how this activity can help students see the nuances inherent in Shakespeare’s language, and how the language of his Christian characters challenges Shylock’s humanity, even as Shylock insists on asserting it.

Deformance We continue this work with what Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels refer to as “deformance.” In their creative readings of literary works, McGann and Samuels call for playful experimentation, rearrangement, isolation, and substitutions of syntactical units in order to understand how poets constitute their lines. They read poems backwards, they read for one part of speech at a time (for example, isolating verbs first, then nouns, etc.), and they experiment with the typography and lineation of poems (McGann & Samuels, 1999, pp. 36–37). This “deformance” foregrounds the importance of active reading. In the interest of time and space, I will highlight just a few examples of how this exercise might work. Consider Shakespeare’s use of nouns in the following passage from 1.3. In these lines, Shylock is providing ample evidence of the various ways in which Antonio has caused him harm. If we isolate just the nouns, we see Shylock’s preoccupation with “moneys” and “ducats” and “usances,” his concerns with his “sufferance” and the “rheum” that Antonio has spat upon his beard, and his multiple allusions to “dog” and “cur.” When I guide students through this passage, I isolate the nouns on a PowerPoint slide; sometimes, too, I share a Google document that features the text of the play and ask students to work in small groups so that they can help each other isolate the nouns. SHYLOCK:    moneys   usances               shrug  sufferance   badge     tribe    misbeliever cut-throat dog       gaberdine     use                  help     moneysyou say so;        rheum       beard           cur

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  threshold moneys       suit   dog moneys  cur       ducats      abondman       key      breath      humbleness, Say this;            sir         Wednesday last;         time                           dog         moneys            (1.3.102-124)

Even before students look for ways to paraphrase Shylock’s language, they start to notice his concerns. In large part, Shylock is reminding Antonio that he has mistreated him multiple times in an attempt to dehumanize him and reduce him to his status as a moneylender. Shylock provides evidence of the verbal and physical assaults that he has endured, and insists that Antonio treat him as a full human, rather than a dog, as he has in the past. Once we have isolated this cluster of words, we can begin to focus on each one in order to understand its value to Shylock. For example, if we attend to the multiple iterations of “dog” and “cur,” students see how Shylock has been assaulted with dehumanizing language in the past, and that prepares them for Gratiano’s epithets of “dog” and “cur” in the courtroom scene in 4.1 (While the members of the court await the arrival of Portia, Gratiano interjects whenever Shylock speaks, referring to him as a “damned, inexecrable dog” whose desires are “wolvish, bloody, starved and ravenous” [4.1.127, 137]). This work also prepares them for the other means by which Shylock is reduced and metamorphosed into the nonhuman. For example, students have a heightened awareness of the Duke’s metaphors when the Duke refers to Shylock as a “stony adversary,” an “inhuman wretch” who is “obdurate” in his desire for revenge—even though Antonio is the one who, with great hubris, insists on the conditions of the bond (4.1.2, 7). With this “stoniness” the court characterizes Shylock as the stubborn one who is relentless in his desire to honor the terms of the bond. These epithets, which figure Shylock as stubborn as a stone, as an animal, as an alien, and as inhuman, all appear before the Portia-as-Balthazar has entered the courtroom. Even before the official proceedings have begun, the bias against Shylock has been established by the Christian court. When the students see this treatment of Shylock, they wonder: is the dehumanization of Shylock—the stripping of his wealth, his

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daughter Jessica’s abandonment, the enriching of Antonio and Jessica, and his forced conversion to Christianity—all a foregone conclusion, even before we get to the courtroom scene? Could there even be an alternative in a court as biased as this?

Archaeological Digs into the Language Deformance can give students the cognitive preparation for Shakespeare’s linguistic leaps, even before they’ve been asked to paraphrase or summarize a passage. Instead of fretting about the “right” way to read Shakespeare, they can “see their roles as makers of poetic meaning in the act of reading” (McGann and Samuels, 22). Philology, too, can provide context for the richness and complexity of Shakespeare’s language; as Masten (2016) has suggested, “the etymology, circulation, transformation, and constitutive power of language” can help us understand “the continuities of early modern language with our own, and its alterities” (15). Toward the end of the same scene, the “bond” that Shylock proposes and the “kindness” that Bassanio and Antonio perceive—or at least try to point to—are yoked together to suggest that by providing this bond, Shylock is “kind,” or closer in “kin” or “nature,” to the Christians for whom he provides this service. Shylock, Bassanio, and Antonio alternately use “bond” seven times and “kind” or “kindness” five times in just thirty lines of dramatic text. Shakespeare deepens this connection throughout the scene, and especially in the final lines of the scene, when Antonio refers to Shylock as a “gentle Jew” (3.1.190). In what follows, we deepen the work that students initiated on our CMS in order to explore how the history of language can complicate our understanding of the text. To help students see the connections between bond, kind, kindness, and gentle, I once again isolate the words on PowerPoint slides and ask them to do the same in their books. Once we’ve identified these words, we consult the Oxford English Dictionary in order to see how the use of these simple words underscore the push and pull between and among Antonio, Bassanio, and Shylock. As we search for the long histories of these words, especially as they were used during Shakespeare’s time, students learn that “kind” could mean “natural, native, fitting, appropriate, naturally existing, lawful, rightful, of one’s country or kin, a person who is native to a region, related by kinship” (“kind,” adj.). Interesting, then, that Antonio and Bassanio use “kind” multiple times to draw Shylock into a contract that binds them, even as

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Shylock is categorized as an “alien” in Venice (4.1.345). The contract, too, which is referred to as a “bond,” warrants some scrutiny. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “bond” can refer to binding, being bound with restraints, confinement or imprisonment, being tied down, promising an obligation or duty, or an agreement or covenant between persons (“bond,” n. 1). This bond might initially seem like a connection or financial/legal contract, but embedded in the word is the connotation of bondage and confinement. Initially, it’s Antonio who seems “bound” by the contract, and yet Shylock is the one who is ultimately punished by it. “Gentle,” too, results in a productive OED search, because when Antonio refers to Shylock as a “gentle Jew,” it becomes clear to students that this is a contradiction in terms, as “gentle” has its roots in “gentile” (“gentle,” adj., n, and adv.). At first, “gentle” seems to mean kind and generous; however, the OED guides us toward connotations of nobility and high social rank as well as the suggestion of Christian religious identity. When “gentle” is yoked with “Jew” in this passage, in points to an impossible status for Shylock as a marginal figure in Christian Venice.

The Power of Print Culture By examining, however briefly, the way in which texts are transmitted across time periods and technologies, students can attain some familiarity with a play’s reception, early modern printing conventions, archives, and the instability of printed material in the Renaissance and beyond. Early in my teaching career, I reserved bibliographical studies for my more advanced literature courses for English majors, assuming that general education students would be less interested in such a pursuit, but that was my error. In fact, in the case of The Merchant of Venice, the material conditions of the printed text are as important as the drama itself. It only takes a few minutes for me to show students a couple of pages, usually via PowerPoint, from the 1600 Quarto in which some speech tags refer to “Shylock” or “Shy,” but many refer to him as simply “Iewe” (Fig. 1). This is not a one-time occurrence for a compositor who did not have enough letter tiles to complete the 1600 quarto; in fact, this speech tag of “Iewe” occurs in the 1619  second quarto, the 1623 folio, the second quarto from 1632, and the third quarto from 1637. In these print versions, Shylock is conceived more as a type than as a character with complexity. After I show students this slide, I mention that the 1598 title that was entered into the Stationers’ Register was “a booke of the Marchaunt

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Fig. 1  Image 60 of The most excellent historie of the merchant of Venice. Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed 21 June 2021

of Venyce or otherwise called the Iewe of Venyce.” If we know that language can function as a kind of assault in Shakespeare’s plays, then the assault on Shylock’s humanity occurs not just in the play but around it as well. This is a really useful point for our course, which focuses so heavily on—and attempts to provide a vocabulary for understanding—how language shapes biases in our policing, our methods of incarceration, and the authoritarian movements of the twenty-first century. The discussion also allows students to consider “who has control over the conditions for the production of knowledge” whether that be an author, a compositor, a professor, or the state (Eklund and Hyman, 55).

Conclusion For now, I have made peace with keeping The Merchant of Venice on the syllabus for this course. I am regularly heartened by students who respond to this play with honesty, tact, and often outrage, and how often their emotionally intense responses result in some of their best writing of the semester. I am interested, too, in how easily some of the students are able to connect Shakespeare’s text with contemporary events. As one student wrote in his CMS response: “Unfortunately, the alienation we see in this play is not something outdated. We see biased decisions like this occurring every day. One example of this can be seen in the stark contrast between consequences of those in minority groups and those in the majority. We can see this when we look at race and the role it plays on judicial decisions. BIPOCs are vilified by majority groups and punished harsher than white people. We must learn from the mistakes seen in this play, and in everyday law in order to make the justice system less biased.” A student evaluation from the end of the semester also suggested that while Merchant and other texts were challenging, they led us on a productive journey:

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We had so many tough discussions that often don’t have a place in daily conversation, as they can easily become emotional/topics of heated debate. However, this class provided a safe space for all students to ask questions, give feedback, and share insights about so many factors within the concept of crime and punishment as well as the weaknesses and pitfalls of our own nation’s systems of justice. (Student course evaluation, Spring 2021)

As difficult as it might be, reading The Merchant of Venice has become part of a larger project in which students learn how to investigate what we believe, value, and imagine. If our goal in a general education course is to help students see how literature investigates these questions in unique ways, then Merchant will most likely appear on my syllabus for years to come. The lessons it provides in how intolerance is reified through language are valuable, uncomfortable, and disturbingly relevant.

References Arendt, H. (1994). Franz Kafka: A Revaluation” in Jerome Kohn (ed). Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, Harcourt Brace, 1994. pp. 69–80. ‘bond,’ n. Oxford University Press. Retrieved June 30, 2021, from www.oed. com/view/Entry/57475 Colbert, S. (2017). Like Trapdoors: A History of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and the Trigger Warning. In E. J. M. Knox (Ed.), Trigger Warnings: History, Theory, Content (pp. 3–21). Rowman & Littlefield. Elam, K. (2001). The Semiotics of Theater and Drama. Routledge. Freinkel, L. (2000). Merchant of Venice: ‘Modern’ Anti-Semitism and the Veil of Allegory. In H.  Grady (Ed.), Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millenium (pp. 122–141). Routledge. ‘gentle,’ adj. Oxford University Press. Retrieved June 30, 2021, from www.oed. com/view/Entry/57475 Gross, J. (1993). Shylock and Nazi Propaganda. New York Times, April 4. Heschel, S. (2006). From Jesus to Shylock: Christian Supersessionism and The Merchant of Venice. Harvard Theological Review, 99(4), 407–431. Hutson, L. (2006). Forensic Aspects of Renaissance Mimesis. Representations, 94(1), 80–109. ‘kind,’ adj. Oxford University Press. Retrieved June 30, 2021, from www.oed. com/view/Entry/57475 Luther, M. (1971). On the Jews and Their Lies. In H. T. Lehmann & M. H. Bertram (Eds.), Luther’s Work (Vol. 47). Fortress Press. McGann, J., & Samuels, L. (1999). Deformance and Interpretation. New Literary History, 30(1), 25–56.

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Mendoza, K. N. (2019). Sexual Violence, Trigger Warnings, and the Early Modern Classroom. In H.  Eklund & W.  B. Hyman (Eds.), Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now. Edinburgh University Press. National Archives. National Archives Currency Converter, 1270–2017. Retrieved June 21, 2021, from https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency­converter/ Nussbaum, M. (1995). Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Beacon Press. Sarat, A., Anderson, M., & Frank, C. O. (2009). Law and the Humanities: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, W. (2010). In J. Drakakis (Ed.), The Merchant of Venice. Bloomsbury. Shakespeare, W. The Most Excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice, printed by James Roberts, 1600. Folger Library website. Retrieved June 21, 2021, from https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/view/search?q=MFHD_Repository_ Number%3D%22STC+22296+Copy+1%22&pgs=250&res=2&cic=FOLGER CM1%7E6%7E6&sort=MPSORTORDER1%2CAuthor%2CCD_Title%2 CImprint Shapiro, J. (1996). Shakespeare and the Jews. Columbia University Press. Sophocles. (2003). Antigone (D. Franklin, Trans. and J. Harrison and J. Affleck, Eds.). Cambridge University Press. “suspect,” 1a. Oxford University Press. Retrieved June 30, 2021, from www.oed. com/view/Entry/57475

Getting a Return on Investment in Shakespeare Gregory M. Schnitzspahn

Let’s face it, few of us want to engage in demanding work unless it provides some kind of reward, and many people who are not already interested in literature or performance see little value in studying Shakespeare, especially as part of their own professional training. Indeed, I frequently encounter this outlook in my literature courses at Fisher College, a small, urban institution where I work primarily with undergraduates planning to earn degrees that will yield a return on their investments of time, effort, and (of course) money. But while Fisher boasts a richly diverse student body, in a typical year, more than half of our students demonstrate enough financial need to receive a Federal Pell Grant as part of their aid packages. And perhaps from families at the other end of the economic spectrum, somewhere between 15% to 20% of our students bear the significant expense of coming to our Boston campus from overseas. Of course, many of us might argue that such students will, like modern versions of Philip Sidney, benefit in all of their pursuits from a well-rounded education that

G. M. Schnitzspahn (*) Fisher College, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3_6

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includes poetry and drama, but my students often do not seem so convinced—even if they acknowledge the artistic greatness of Shakespeare. One approach to such skepticism among students fulfilling their degree requirements might be to gently rethink general education courses on literature, and Shakespeare in particular, as something more like “skills-­based” courses. Most college students, that is, accept that they must take classes in English composition so that they can more effectively communicate ideas and arguments in their future coursework and careers. They also understand that their required lower-level math courses will eventually help them with everything from running a group lab project to a profitable business venture. But studying Shakespeare might help develop skills that are even more useful because reading the plays and poems requires working out countless interpretive problems ranging from the level of unraveling nuanced wordplay all the way to considering profound questions of character, politics, and morality. How, for example, should we take Katherine’s long speech on wifely duty at the end of The Taming of the Shrew, and does that affect our understanding of the entire play? Or what exactly does it mean for Hamlet to be “a little more than kin, and less than kind” or “too much in the sun” (Shakespeare, 1997, 1.2.65; 67)? While these might seem distinctly literary questions, the critical thinking skills needed to provide answers to them do not really differ from those used by professionals in other fields. And while the answers we arrive at when weighing literary evidence might be inherently subjective, are they really any more so than those arrived at by people working to interpret, say, sagging sales numbers or rising crime rates? Indeed, my guiding principle for teaching Shakespeare in the general education classroom is to stress that the plays and poems do not provide us with examples of great literary genius that can only be appreciated through painstaking study and highly refined tastes  … but rather just another set of complex “data” that requires subjective interpretation by human beings. Of course, this likely sounds reductive to just about anyone who will ever read this essay, and Shakespeare, like all art, surely transcends anything that we would normally refer to as “data.” But I put this in a supportive, compassionate tone for students who are often intimidated by such transcendence and very much prefer to work with more concrete information and ideas. Most importantly, when we frame the task of working with Shakespeare in this way, we can get to the serious work of crafting an objective analysis supported by our subjective interpretations of the evidence in front of us. And this, I tell my non-majors, is the same basic skill demanded in all of their chosen fields.

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But why Shakespeare? Indeed, many non-majors find Shakespeare to be the most difficult reading they encounter in their studies, especially if English is not their first language. And countless other works can provide excellent platforms for exercising our interpretive and analytic skills. But if we remain firmly focused on practicing those skills, then students can begin to see the challenge of working with Shakespeare’s 400-year-old poetic language as part of what makes reading it so very worthwhile… rather than an impediment to following a more important “story” that lurks somewhere beyond that language. Most often, that is, students struggle with reading Shakespeare because they attempt to follow and digest a play (and perhaps its thematic concerns) as quickly and accurately as possible. But mastering and retaining the “content” of the plays, might matter far less than developing the intellectual tools required to truly handle works of art that do far more than proceed from opening to conclusion. For that matter, I actually encourage students to learn the plot of a play from SparkNotes, Wikipedia, or some other summary, so long as they then go on to read the carefully crafted words that Shakespeare uses to unfold that story. I even point out that Shakespeare himself would likely approve of this approach because he often summarizes a story before telling it—as with the Prologue from Romeo and Juliet or the argument that opens The Rape of Lucrece—and that the editors of the inexpensive Folger paperbacks (which I often adopt in classes for non-majors) follow suit and routinely provide concise plot summaries before each act. Considering that he rarely invented plots, I tell students, we might even begin to think of Shakespeare’s plays as something like the “reboots” of well-known films that are ubiquitous in our digital culture. And much as studios can update their remake of a classic movie with the latest special effects, Shakespeare enhanced the material he found in his sources with the richly nuanced, poetic writing that we often find to be so difficult. If non-majors come to recognize the transferrable skills that this complex writing demands of them, then they can also begin to see the tremendous value of fulfilling their general education requirements by studying Shakespeare’s plays and poetry. But even when students come to see that reading Shakespeare requires interpretive and analytic skills closely related to those employed in, say, marketing or health services, coaching them through Shakespeare’s language can still present a challenge. A moment from Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard has long informed my own approach to helping students with Shakespeare’s language. In the 1996 pseudo-documentary, one of Pacino’s

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producers, Michael Hadge, complains that “Shakespeare used a lot of fancy words” that are difficult to understand. But Pacino responds with both insight and mild irritation: “Excuse me. They’re not fancy words. That’s where we get confused. But they’re poetry. It’s hard to grab hold of some rap slang too. It’s hard to get hold of it until your ear gets tuned. You have to tune up.” As someone who grew up with my copy of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back right next to my copy of The Riverside Shakespeare, Pacino’s comparison has always resonated with me.1 And certainly, most undergraduates know song lyrics that might have seemed unfamiliar, even impenetrable, in their first few encounters with them. So for many years, I have told my students who recoil at Shakespeare’s language that they likely carry around their own beloved “fancy words” that might have required some time to “tune up” to. And of course, I also caution that translating their favorite song lyrics might make them easier to follow but would most certainly miss the point. “If you only use No Fear Shakespeare to do your reading,” I explain, “then that makes about as much sense as using No Fear Taylor Swift or No Fear Lizzo.” I once bragged to officemates about this particular stroke of my pedagogical wit and was immediately exhorted to put the principle into practice. So I now have students bring some of their favorite song lyrics to class and then ask them to create “no fear” versions. They routinely agree that the ostensibly more straightforward translation of the lyrics contains inherent flaws and that the process ruins textures and nuances that have great meaning for them. Getting students to embrace, rather than run from, the difficulty they find in Shakespeare can also help them to appreciate the artistic ambiguity they will find in his works. Indeed, I often tell my general education students that Shakespeare is “obsessed with ambiguity,” be it in language, in character, in situations. Wordplay, especially erotic puns and double entendres, can make a good place to start working on this notion for students who expect prudishness in “great works of literature” or simply have sophomoric senses of humor (like their professor). Surely, an instructor can provoke both giggles and gasps with Sampson’s quibbles on a “pretty piece of flesh” and his “naked weapon” in the opening of Romeo and Juliet. And even though most students are amused, I strive to make sure 1  The appreciation that Pacino and I apparently share for both rap and Shakespeare also suggests teaching with British rapper and writer Akala’s excellent TED talk on “Hip Hop and Shakespeare.”

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that others do not feel uncomfortable when Hamlet thinks of “country matters” upon resting his head in Ophelia’s lap. Such quips can be instructive and possibly fun, but when Mercutio finds himself becoming a “grave man,” he shows us that a pun can be quite serious. Similarly, when Egypt’s queen calls the asp that she will use to kill herself “thou mortal wretch” in Antony and Cleopatra, we find double entendre shifting from the bawdy and playful to the profound.2 And far beyond such linguistic ambiguity, Shakespeare obviously presents students with much bigger problems and ambiguities to contemplate. Are Henry V’s threats of rape and infanticide at the gates of Harfleur justifiable? Which of Iago’s claimed motives, if any, do we believe? Does Duke Vincentio’s marital seizure of Isabella at the end of Measure for Measure amount to just another act of male aggression? After coming to see that Shakespeare’s language rewards those who can be comfortable accepting multiple meanings at once, students discover that we cannot provide definitive answers to such interpretive questions, but only offer our best argument in any particular moment—a tentative answer that says as much about the analyst as it says about the problem. I take these principles mostly from decades of experience teaching Shakespeare and other literature to undergraduates who have surely taught me far more than I have taught them, but my approach has also been guided and confirmed by many published colleagues. Simon Palfrey, for instance, agrees that “it is only by acknowledging Shakespeare’s difficulty and unpredictability – dwelling within it, grappling with it – that we can begin to recover the particular energies of his plays” (2005, p. 5). As the title of Alexander Leggatt’s “Questions That Have No Answers” should make clear, I find further agreement in this essay that the Shakespeare classroom should be a place “to ask open-ended questions, to explore possibilities, and to refuse to give definitive answers” (2009, p. 61). And like most instructors of Shakespeare, I have recently found my pedagogical impulses refined and articulated by Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi, who argue for teaching “Shakespeare’s plays in student-centered 2  M.H. Abrams long ago explained that we can simultaneously take “mortal” to mean that the asp will be fatal to Cleopatra and that it is a merely mortal thing in comparison to her and that “wretch” expresses both contempt and pity for the asp (1999, p. 11). Ironically, what Abrams and I hold up as an example of fine linguistic ambiguity might remind us of Samuel Johnson’s disapproving grumble about Shakespearean wordplay, “A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire […] A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it” (1908, p. 24).

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classrooms” where learners can “recognize that there are many authorities (especially for literary interpretation) and multiple contesting truths” (2016, p.  11). Indeed, Shakespeare’s plays and poems resist definitive answers and open up a space for endless intellectual grappling where even the instructor’s authority and expertise can only go so far. Now, this sounds lovely in an anecdotal essay on pedagogy, but for the student who enters my “space for intellectual grappling” because they need to fulfill the general education requirements for a degree in, say, criminal justice, wrestling with ambiguity might not seem so lovely, or useful. It might even seem annoying and pointless. Of course, I tell students that they should see literature, especially Shakespeare, as a platform where they can practice the interpretive and problem-solving skills that will be useful, if not essential, throughout their careers. And I tell them that the basic process of analysis and argument that we perform in literary studies is the same process used in their primary fields. But I am also quite sure that I end up sounding like an aging pedant who likes to read by the fire and go to too many Renaissance festivals. What works better, in my experience, is to incorporate these principles into some of the major projects I assign to the class. The remainder of this essay will therefore describe some of these assignments. I will begin by discussing a sequence of writing assignments from a lit survey class required of some non-majors; I have designed the sequence to underscore the similarities of the analytic methods employed in all fields. From there, I will sketch out a specific assignment, created with business management majors in mind, that takes a specific method of open-ended inquiry used in the field and applies it to questions about leadership and language in Shakespeare. These assignments, and much of my current pedagogical approach has developed through teaching courses that advance critical thinking and writing skills by introducing students to serious literary studies. In my years at Lesley University in Cambridge, I taught many sections of one such course titled “Writing and the Literary Arts.” At Fisher College, a nearly identical course goes by the name “Intermediate Writing: Literature and Research,” and it is a prerequisite for all Bachelor of Arts degrees. Currently, then, I spend a good deal of my career teaching short stories, poetry, and drama to students pursuing majors as diverse as psychology, communication and media studies, sociology, management, and even biology (which is indeed designated as a BA at Fisher). Furthermore, advisors at Fisher frequently recommend “Intermediate Writing” to fulfill the humanities and English prerequisites in other programs precisely because

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it contains an explicit writing skills element—as one colleague puts it, “they can always use more writing.” But unlike versions of the course I have taught elsewhere, Fisher’s writing and literature course also mandates that students apply at least some established literary theory. How, I thought when first encountering the master outline for this course, can I possibly make Derrida, Barthes, or Foucault feel relevant to a biology major? What value will a student getting their English prerequisite out of the way for a degree in sport management or human resource management see in even the scantiest overview of Saussurean linguistics? I began to find one possible answer while working on a Writing Across the Curriculum committee that included the director of our biology program at the time. We quickly came to realize that, despite the vast differences in our fields, we were still operating through the same basic method: gather data, analyze that data using established vocabularies and principles, and then present an argument based on our analysis of the available evidence. So when it comes to a bio major writing a paper on, say, Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” they might gather “data” by performing a close reading  of the story and noticing some language that gently suggests homoerotic tensions. From there, they might decide to learn more about queer theory with a rough hypothesis that they will write a paper that “outs” the narrator. But upon simply reading an introduction to the critical approach from The Norton Introduction to Literature and checking out a Wikipedia page, this hypothetical biology student instead develops an argument about how the narrator’s unexpectedly intimate moments with his blind houseguest lead him to realize that he is both formed and trapped by normative culture and the life choices it demands of him. Indeed, one student wrote just such a paper, and while I will not dare attempt to quickly describe the process of writing a biology lab report, the student agreed that seeing the parallel method—in broad strokes, at least—proved useful. And of course, students majoring in other fields find the same parallel. The progression of writing assignments hopefully establishes the core methods of literary analysis, demonstrating such parallels with other fields, and finally culminates in a research paper on Hamlet. Papers in the course begin with a simple close reading of a short text and try to conceive of literature as material, evidence, or data for serious analysis rather than a springboard for personal writing (as far too many undergrads seem to have been previously trained to do). From there, students begin writing papers that lightly apply critical or theoretical approaches to their analysis—first

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through the meaningful use of vocabulary such as “lacunae” or “superego” in thesis statements and later by actually applying citations from passages of Derrida or Barthes that we have discussed carefully in class. When we come to read Hamlet at the end of the course, I have usually succeeded in convincing most non-majors that literary study employs a method similar to those used in their own fields. Hamlet, I try to explain to my students, presents us with an extremely difficult and ambiguous set of literary data for our observation, analysis, and argumentation, but we can view it as a set of data all the same. Just as their sport management, psychology, or communications classes build to projects with increasingly complicated data to work from, in this course we build to a similarly challenging final project. I also stress that we work with Shakespeare, in particular, because I am a professional in the field of early modern literature. Granted, there is plenty of opportunity for self-deprecating jokes here since there’s not much gainful employment in this particular profession other than teaching, but the classroom conversation does help students realize that they are no longer simply “going to school,” but studying under the tutelage of experts and professionals. And for some students, the research paper on Hamlet changes from educational drudgery to a beginner’s attempt at the serious, professional work of literary criticism. Indeed, I deliberately use the word “professional” in reference to the work we do in this course— partly because it evokes academic rigor and polish, and partly because it suggests gainful employment, especially for our many students enrolled in business management programs. In fact, the study of business leadership provides inspiration for an assignment in my 100-level “Introduction to Shakespeare” course, which management majors often take to fulfill their required English elective. In its simplest form, this assignment shows up as one among many prompts for a final paper, asking students to analyze the merits and shortcomings of Richard’s and Bolingbroke’s leadership styles. But more adventurous students have the option to approach Richard II as if it were a case study in business leadership and write a paper that builds to a specific recommendation chosen from among several alternatives. What course of action, students might decide to ask, should Bolingbroke pursue upon capturing Bushy and Green, including the executions that take place in the play? Or how should Richard have handled the opening dispute between Bolingbroke and Mowbray, including the awkward path he followed? For those management majors already familiar with MBA-style case studies, the assignment can provide an invigorating chance to transpose the method into a

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new field. And when English or liberal arts majors decide to try the assignment—which, admittedly and unfortunately, has not happened yet—they can begin to see more of the marketable value inherent to their own developing knowledge and skills. I am constantly rewriting and adjusting the assignment, and I often tailor it to the specific interests of a student who has chosen to take it on, but here is what a recent general version looks like, stripped of its technical components: Richard II Case Study Analysis Please treat all of Richard II as an MBA-style case study and write a case analysis paper. Your only directive is to focus on a problem related to leadership in the play. Recall that we spent time in class discussing the differences between Richard’s and Bolingbroke’s language and that Richard seems, in some ways, to be more powerful when he is deposed and Bolingbroke seems to only find more and more problems as he is elevated to the throne. But your analysis could also focus on problems faced by other figures in the play such as Gaunt, York, or the Queen. If you are already familiar with a format for writing a case study analysis, then you may use it. If not, you can find a short explanation at THIS LINK3 and elsewhere online. Just make sure that you begin by defining the situation at hand and the problems the analysis will focus on. After that, your paper should bring up several reasonable alternatives to address the situation before settling on a final recommendation for a specific course of action. In other words, the paper should contain sections roughly equivalent to what many case paper formats label “the situation,” “alternatives,” “hypothesis/ proof,” and most importantly your final “recommendation” or “action plan.”

Although this paper assignment distinguishes itself from others as a “case study analysis,” submissions propose a debatable argument supported by carefully organized evidence and reasoning—just like the thesis-driven writing we expect from English majors. Indeed, at their core, these case study analysis papers really only differ from standard English papers in that they recommend a course of action entirely within the fiction of the play. While that might seem to restrain some critical thinking, case study analysis papers also propose equally valid “alternatives” before arriving at a final recommendation, freeing an argument from the burden of appearing 3  At the time of writing, the link in the assignment points to: https://apus.libanswers. com/course_specific/faq/272074.

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utterly certain of itself and leaving open the possibility for ongoing thought and discussion. Before going further, I must confess that my inspiration for this assignment and its approach comes directly from “The Moral Leader,” a course that has been offered to MBA candidates at Harvard Business School for decades. This course, now largely taught by Joseph Badaracco and Sandra Sucher, applies HBS’s case study method to the complicated, often conflicted, characters and situations that appear in well-regarded works of literature. In a standard case study at HBS, that is, students read a case about a business or non-profit organization, typically facing some kind of problem. The details presented in the case may be from an actual situation faced by a real organization or entirely fabricated. When students meet in the classroom to discuss the case and the alternatives they have prepared, their instructors do not intervene with a correct or best response to the problem, but rather only facilitate debate on a multitude of equally valid student recommendations. For students enrolled in “The Moral Leader,” however, literary works such as The Death of a Salesman or “The Secret Sharer” provide the material and nuances of a complicated case focused on leadership, character, or some other qualitative and very necessary element of business management. For those of us, like Alexander Leggatt, who teach Shakespeare by asking questions that have no answers and create a classroom or rehearsal space “where choices are open, and free exploration takes place” (2009, p. 72) the move might seem obvious, even laughably so. “For students,” as William Ellet puts it in HBS’s The Case Study Handbook, the open-­ ended format “can be a monumental shift in the educational experience, from the comfort of authority and the officially sanctioned truth to the hard work of personal responsibility and the unease of ambiguity and multiple meanings” (2007, p.  12). Well, not if the students have studied Shakespeare or other literature in what Thompson and Turchi call the student-centered classroom, where students find confidence in their own voice amongst competing authorities, uncertainties, conflicts, and perils. On one hand, I am making a bit of a joke here, pointing out that Harvard Business School seems to have embraced the value of general education courses in English and the humanities without entirely admitting to it. But on the other hand, I think that teachers and scholars of Shakespeare and other literature should both embrace and advertise the value that experts in business management have “discovered” in the methods, skills, and

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texts that we teach, particularly when it comes to navigating the ambiguity and uncertainty that will come up in any line of work. Furthermore, over a decade ago, the National Research Council convened a workshop where both educators and corporate consultants agreed that “the kinds of competencies and skills that would be required in the future” include “creative problem solving, complex communication skills, adaptability, self-management, personal development, and systems thinking” (Hilton, 2008, p. 64). We need to be more vocal about the fact that students will take steps toward developing such competencies and skills when they study Shakespeare, and many other subjects in the humanities, as part of their general education requirements. And considering the looming threat of mechanical and digital automation to those of us trying to make a living in the world, this perspective can help some otherwise disinterested students find value in studying Shakespeare. In closing, I should say that I most certainly believe that art has value in itself, and that an education with scope and variety, including the arts, can improve the quality of our lives and make us more well-rounded and adaptable human beings. My point is absolutely not that we should recast art, philosophy, music, or literature as vocational subjects. But particularly when I find myself standing in front of students who often turn out to be facing serious financial and personal challenges as they push determinedly on to the completion of their degrees, I think it is both a worthwhile and decent thing to show them that they just might see some tangible return if they make an investment in Shakespeare.

References Abrams, M. H. (1999). A Glossary of Literary Terms (7th ed.). Heinle & Heinle. Ellet, W. (2007). The Case Study Handbook. Harvard Business School Press. Hilton, M. (2008). Research on Future Skill Demands: A Workshop Summary. National Academies Press. Johnson, S. (1908). Johnson on Shakespeare. Henry Frowde. Leggatt, A. (2009). Questions That Have No Answers. In G.  B. Shand (Ed.), Teaching Shakespeare: Passing It On (pp. 61–72). Wiley-Blackwell. Palfrey, S. (2005). Doing Shakespeare. Arden. Shakespeare, W. (1997). The Riverside Shakespeare (G. B. Evans et al., Eds., 2nd ed.). Houghton Mifflin. Thompson, A., & Turchi, L. (2016). Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-­ Centered Approach. Bloomsbury.

Green Shakespeare and the Environmental Studies Classroom Emma K. Atwood

As early modern scholars and teachers, we often find ourselves defending our field of study in a good-faith effort to make Shakespeare relevant to our students and immediate to the contemporary concerns of our society. Though Shakespeare has been a consistent mainstay of higher education for over a century, this very prominence often prompts defensiveness. In This Is Shakespeare, Emma Smith acknowledges the troubling paradox of using the cultural capital of Shakespeare to both uphold the status quo and simultaneously challenge it: “On the one hand his work is revered: quoted, performed, graded, subsidized, parodied. Shakespeare! On the other hand—cue yawns and eye rolls, or fear of personal intellectual failure” (Smith, 2020).1 As an antidote, Smith contends that the plays’ 1

 Smith, 4.

E. K. Atwood (*) University of Montevallo, Montevallo, AL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3_7

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gaps—their lacunae, their ambiguities—offer exciting opportunities for contemporary engagement with Shakespeare. But arguing that what’s not in the plays is the thing that makes them great can be a hard sell to a general audience! So the challenges keep coming, and the call is often coming from inside the house—from students, from administrators, from fellow faculty, from op-eds like “Kill Bill: Why we must take Shakespeare out of the classroom” from The Guardian (Powell, 2014) and “Why I don’t want to assign Shakespeare anymore” from The Washington Post (Strauss, 2015). The challengers ask pointed questions: Why should we continue to teach Shakespeare? Shouldn’t room be made in our limited classroom hours for new works, voices, and perspectives? Is Shakespeare enshrining stale ways of thinking? Are we reproducing colonial, racial, or gendered violence in our classrooms when we teach Shakespeare, the paragon of canonical dead white men? Where can we locate the relevance? Of course, this ethical anxiety is not new. In his 1984 article “Teaching Shakespeare in America,” Charles Frey recounts longstanding tensions surrounding the teaching of Shakespeare that date back over a century (Frey, 1984). “In the 1930s,” Frey tells us, “whether or not to teach Shakespeare was much discussed, and much of the counsel had to do with ways of making Shakespeare livelier for students.”2 Part of “making Shakespeare livelier” means meeting the challenge of relevancy head on. Recent publications like Liam Semler’s Shakespeare Now! Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning Versus the System (2013), Brian Lighthill’s teaching handbook Making Shakespeare Relevant (2017), Sharon O’Dair and Timothy Francisco’s essay collection Shakespeare and the 99% (2019), and Hillary Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman’s essay collection Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (2019) respond directly to this commendable goal as they aim to bring the study of Shakespeare into conversation with pressing contemporary issues (O’Dair, 2011). Calls for Shakespeareans to comment as public intellectuals on such topics as the #metoo movement by way of Measure for Measure or the 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar that depicted a Trump-like Caesar in a gold bathtub certainly reinforce the ever-present opportunities to connect Shakespeare to contemporary life. Rather than placing Shakespeare on an even higher pedestal, this flurry of contemporary relevancy shows us that teachers and students alike are asking how Shakespeare—as text, history, 2

 Frey, 547.

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aesthetic, performance, tradition, institution—can help us think through our own contemporary moment in new ways. All of this is to say that the debate surrounding whether Shakespeare should be taught, and how to teach Shakespeare responsibly, has been raging for over a century. Whether we take a more traditional approach that emphasizes the value of trading in cultural capital, a more progressive approach that insists on de-centering Shakespeare, or a more humanitarian approach that privileges the cultivation of empathy, early modernists are fairly practiced at defending our field and our preferred critical lenses. We can explain these positions to various audiences, from non-majors to administrators to university donors. We do it all the time, and we do it fairly well. But here’s the rub: when working with English majors in our classrooms, the need for an explicit defense of our field often falls by the wayside. We assume we don’t need to preach to the choir. This, we might rationalize, affords us more time to explore the nuances of the OED, to examine textual differences between quartos and folios, or to dissect the theses of recent critical articles. They’re English majors, we rationalize, we don’t need to explain why it matters. But why do we expect our students to absorb such invisible imperatives through osmosis? Upper-level majors courses allow us to operate from an assumption of shared value, but in these environments, we often lose the cornerstone of relevancy. We assume that our majors come to us with the same foundational understanding that foregrounds our own commitment to the field, while our non-majors come to us needing to be convinced that Shakespeare can still speak to them. However, neither of these assumptions are necessarily true. So how can we keep the rigor of an upper-level majors course, but still infuse it with the appealing relevancy and immediate application that we strive to infuse into our introductory or general education courses? My solution: take an upper-level Shakespeare course replete with theory and criticism, cross-list it with another department, and insist that we make Shakespeare speak to some of the more pressing social and ethical issues of today. As Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe convincingly implore, “as we are forced to face the potential for planetary peril, it is especially important that we ask students to consider how such issues bear out not only today, but also in the past, and how literature might be an ideal medium for understanding them” (Laroche & Munroe, 2019).3 3

 Laroche and Munroe, 124.

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And here’s how I did it: In the summer of 2017, I participated in a week-long workshop at my university that helped faculty develop new cross-listed courses with the Environmental Studies department. At my university, this department consists of only one full-time faculty member, so it largely depends on cross-listed, interdisciplinary courses to sustain its major. As the only Shakespearean in our university’s English department, I was cautiously optimistic that this workshop could speak to me and my students. How could I teach the principles of twenty-first century sustainability, I wondered, and simultaneously manage to teach the crisis of legitimacy in King Lear or the performance of power in The Tempest? Moreover, I was not an environmental scholar; I knew the basic principles of sustainability from my time living in an environmental co-op as an idealistic undergrad, but my research now tends to focus on gender, staging, and architecture, not environmental issues. Putting these hesitations aside, I committed to design and teach a “Green Shakespeare” course that would unite English majors and Environmental Studies majors in an upper-level interdisciplinary experiment. Over the course of the workshop, I worked alongside eight fellow faculty members from departments across the university, including English, Biology, Theater, Political Science, Marketing, Sociology, and Art History. Together, we read and discussed articles such as David Orr’s “Four Challenges for Sustainability” and Alan Atkisson’s “Sustainability is for Everyone.” These readings helped give our interdisciplinary group a common theoretical vocabulary for bringing the ethic of sustainability into our varied classrooms (Orr, 2002; Atkisson, 2017). Orr’s contention, that “a spiritually impoverished world is not sustainable because meaninglessness, anomie, and despair will corrode our desire to sustain it and the belief that humanity is worth sustaining,” became a significant touchstone for the members of our workshop.4 Orr’s “belief that humanity is worth sustaining” stitched our varied specialties to one another through an ethos of the public liberal arts. Though higher education professionals are largely familiar with the liberal arts, the public liberal arts are a specific sub-category that warrant a brief explication. Public liberal arts colleges are a distinct grouping of higher education institutions that are modeled after their elite liberal arts counterparts (the Amhersts and Oberlins) but are part of their larger state university systems. Not every state has one; some (like California) have a 4

 Orr, 1457.

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few. I teach at the University of Montevallo, which is Alabama’s only public liberal arts university. We serve a largely regional student population, one-third of whom are first-generation. Many of our students are directly involved in the arts—our most popular annual student activity is an intensely competitive week of rival musical theater performances. So public liberal arts institutions are quirky but endearing, offering the benefits of a small liberal arts “experience”—with its small class sizes, intensive student-faculty interaction, and tight-knit residential campus community—to students who might otherwise be priced out or regionally excluded from more elite schools. The Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC) is the formal collection of 28 small- to mid-sized college campuses throughout North America that share this mission. According to COPLAC, the public liberal arts should “emphasize active learning, ethical reasoning, interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge, community engagement, critical and reflective skills, and connections between liberal learning and informed, active citizenship.” This is quite a wish list! My approach to teaching Shakespeare highlights the interdisciplinary element of this mission, but also shows that when we embrace interdisciplinarity, these other benefits naturally follow. In the essay collection Roads Taken: The Professorial Life, Scholarship in Place, and the Public Good, the climate at a public liberal arts institution is described as one “where disciplinary boundaries are crossed every day; where the mutual isolations of specialist knowledge do not prevail” (Epp & Spellman, 2014).5 In short, being a professor of Shakespeare at a public liberal arts university means covering a lot more than Shakespeare. But this is not to say I am a generalist. Rather, the nature of my university culture and its embrace of creative interdisciplinarity encourages subject matter experts (like Shakespeareans) to collaborate with other subject matter experts in vastly different fields in order to make the liberal arts coalesce in as many places as possible. The University of Montevallo embraces interdisciplinarity—from our Peace and Justice Studies program that pulls its core course offerings from disciplines across campus, to our insistence that all English majors also carry a separate minor in order to graduate, to our co-taught offerings in Political Science, Philosophy, English, Business, and more. This makes for a culture that encourages the kind of cross pollination touted by Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne (n.d.): “the

5

 Epp and Spellman, 14.

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bees pillage flowers here and there, but then make honey of them, which is their own.”6 One of the ways that the summer environmental studies teaching workshop put the public liberal arts into practice was through this model of interdisciplinary collaboration and community interaction. During the workshop, we heard from a number of guest speakers who discussed issues ranging from local ecology to social sustainability, including representatives from the Cahaba Environmental Center, the director of the Southern Environmental Center at Birmingham Southern College, and a coordinator for the county’s Emergency Assistance outreach. While none of these guests appeared to be directly relevant to the typical work of an English classroom, the variety of perspectives helped to inspire a number of outside-­the-box approaches to pedagogy. For the remainder of this essay, I will highlight two of the pedagogical approaches that grew out of this workshop that I integrated into my “Green Shakespeare” course. The first is a classroom activity that can be used to kick off a semester or unit by introducing early modern maps through a theoretical framework informed by contemporary environmental theory. The second is a way of integrating project-based learning throughout the semester into a final assignment and collaborative service-­ learning opportunity.

Classroom Activity: Mapping and the Early Modern Environment The range of mapping and topography models we examined with the environmental center directors during our summer workshop helped me think about ways to integrate a more robust interrogation of early modern maps into my classroom. The digital mapping techniques used by the Southern Environmental Center in their new Geodome combines terrain cartography, geovisualization, and pictography to present a dynamic landscape and showcases the interaction between natural topography and the built environment in Birmingham, Alabama (Birmingham-Southern College Debuts New ‘Geodome’ in Former Planetarium, 2018). I had used maps in my English classes before to show the proximity between public theaters in early modern London. However, I had used them primarily as lecture material, not as environmental artifacts up for interpretation. Attending to the narrative 6

 Montaigne trans. Atwood, 154.

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effects of different contemporary mapping techniques helped my students to think about the way early modern people were articulating the complex relationships between natural and built environments. Instead of merely showing a single image of early modern London to illustrate the boundaries of the liberties or the location of the Thames, I presented my students with a number of sixteenth-century maps of London. These included sections from the 1561 Civitas Londinum (better known as the Agas map, used by the Map of Early Modern London) (Map 1); the 1559 Copperplate Map of London providing a “bird’s flight view” of the city (Map 2); and the 1570 Civitates Orbis Terrarum map featuring wildly skewed figural perspectives (Map 3). Rather than take these maps at face value, we considered the particular mapping techniques that these artists employed. I began by asking my students to examine the way the built environment was being represented in relation to the natural environment. As we examined these maps in further detail, we discussed the relationship between pictorial mapping and topographic mapping, finding places of overlap and contradiction in these techniques. In a study of twentieth-century environmental imaging techniques, Denis Cosgrove argues that “Pictorial images are less prone to dualistic interpretation than scientific and theoretical argument, and the affective responses they generate are complex” (Cosgrove, 2008).7 Applying this lens further back to the early modern period, we can see the way a visual narrative emerges that resists a man vs. nature duality. This approach to environmental mapping can offer new strategies to teaching plays like King Lear—from Lear’s division of a literal map in act one, to Gloucester’s and Edgar’s debate about the disorienting terrain in act four (Marlowe, 1999). The representation of the heath and the cliffs of Dover in King Lear are productively complimented by an understanding of these converging mapping techniques. When the blind Gloucester is led around the stage, Edgar insists that he is climbing, but Gloucester doubts the truth of it: Gloucester: When shall we come to the top of that same hill? Edgar: You do climb up it now: look, how we labour. Gloucester: Methinks the ground is even. Edgar: Horrible steep. (4.6.1–4)

7

 Cosgrove, 1862.

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Map 1  Section from Civitas Londinum (the Agas Map) (Jenstad et al., 2018)

Here, the audience is asked to hold two competing imaginative spaces in tension with one another. Should we imagine that Gloucester and Edgar are climbing? Or should we imagine them walking around flat land? The performance space would not change regardless of whether a hill was part of the representational space’s topography or not. As Tom Bishop argues, “It is possible, if we do not know the play, that we may be confused. And even if we do know the riddle, we still register the competing pretenses of the actors as very different descriptions of their space” (Bishop, 2010).8 In a previous article, I have argued that this moment allows the audience to achieve spatial subjectivity as they hold plural imaginative spaces in simultaneous tension (Atwood, 2013).9 However, with this foundational mapping framework in place, this complicated dramaturgical moment in King Lear seems to speak directly to the subjective experience of land and a layered environmental consciousness. One map may model topography; 8 9

 Bishop, 80.  Atwood, 56–7.

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Map 2  Section from the Copperplate Map of London (Franken, n.d.)

another map may model distance; yet another map may model political boundaries. These co-exist simultaneously, each offering a different take, but none more or less “accurate” than the others. This approach to environmental mapping can help us understand the triumphant visual rhetoric in Queen Elizabeth I’s Ditchley portrait in which she literally stands upon a map of England, or the bombastic brutality of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, whose sense of political dominion and cultural domination converge in his physical manipulation of a map:

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Map 3  Section from the Civitates Orbis Terrarum Map (Braun & Hogenberg, n.d.) I will confute those blind geographers That make a triple region of the world Excluding regions which I mean to trace, And with this pen reduce them to a map. (4.4.73–6)

In Jeffrey Foss’s Beyond Environmentalism, he reminds us that maps are neither true nor false, but are merely models that serve a purpose for a distinct audience: “what information is contained in a map—and what is left out—depends on what bit of the world we want to navigate (Foss,

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2009). The water department’s map of the same streets as those shown in the driver’s road map will show where the water mains are located, whereas the politician’s map will show the electoral districts instead.”10 Approaching early modern maps from this contemporary environmental perspective, my students began to think more critically about what was being represented, what was missing, and how these maps expressed particular attitudes towards the environment. While we still noted the location of the public theaters, the bear gardens, and the boundaries of the liberties, we also paid attention to more artistic representative details like the waves drawn into the Thames, the coloration of the trees and woods, the furrows depicted in the rural fields, the direction of the wind in the sails on the boats, and the materials shown in building construction. Why were these particular details included? We thought about the way pictorial maps distort distances and perspective but do so in order to emphasize the cultural importance of specific features. My students in rural Alabama were particularly struck by the rurality immediately surrounding early modern London, and a productive discussion about gentrification and urban sprawl ensued. By paying attention to the subjective aesthetic qualities of these early modern maps, the cultural values of these early modern map-making artists came into clearer relief. Starting from this careful attention to representative cartographic detail, students began to ask thoughtful questions about such environmental issues as water transportation, water quality, deforestation, farming practices, the convergence of rurality and urbanity, and the sourcing of common building materials. Approaching early modern maps in this new way, as inspired by contemporary environmental mapping and modeling techniques, resulted in the organic integration of a number of ecological and environmental issues into our discussion. This approach to teaching early modern maps in a joint English/ Environmental Studies classroom helped to get our semester off on strong interdisciplinary footing. My syllabus featured five Shakespeare plays—As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, King Lear, and The Tempest—and made extensive use of the edited collection Ecocritical Shakespeare, Randall Martin’s Shakespeare and Ecology, and Gabriel Egan’s Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (Egan, 2006; Martin, 2015). More recent volumes such as Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche’s Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory would complement  Foss, 96.

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future iterations of the course. Most class meetings combined close readings with early modern environmental issues—for instance, exploring moon or stag symbolism in the plays and then connecting these environmental concepts out to other social issues like gender roles, fertility anxiety, or sexual expression. For instance, when we read Midsummer, we also read historical accounts of the “Little Ice Age” and discussed the way this lived experience affected the description of the disruption of natural seasons in Midsummer: The human mortals want their winter here; No night is now with hymn or carol blest: Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, Pale in her anger, washes all the air, That rheumatic diseases do abound: And thorough this distemperature we see The seasons alter… …and the mazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which. (2.1.104–117)

While my English majors were primarily interested in literary devices like metaphor and figurative language (what does winter represent here? why is the moon personified as a “governess”?), my Environmental Studies majors connected this passage to contemporary issues such as the way climate change has recently influenced the migration patterns of monarch butterflies. In contrast to my English majors, my Environmental Studies majors did not read the reference to “rheumatic disease” as a metaphor, but rather saw this as a commentary on the relationship between clean air, clean water, and environmental justice. As we discussed the various causes and effects of the “mazed world” that Titania describes, we connected this feeling back to our own present moment. In what way do we live in a “mazed world”? Is the world simply like a maze, or it is somehow also sentient, feeling, itself “amazed”? Reading in this way, we can see Shakespeare commenting on the relationship between environmental crisis and human society in ways that are relevant to our own contemporary concerns. This pedagogical approach has been termed “strategic presentism.” According to David Sweeney Coombs and Danielle Coriale, “Strategic presentism requires that we think of the past as something other than an object of knowledge that is sealed off, separated from the present by the

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onrush of sequential time (Coombs & Coriale, 2016). To make presentism a strategy means asking how presentism might help us better understand and address the ways the past is at work in the exigencies of the present.”11 “Presentism” as a catch-­all lens has recently drawn criticism from some critical standard bearers such as American Historical Association president James Sweet, who argued (to much consternation, debate, and resulting apology) that “doing history with integrity requires us to interpret elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors” (Sweet, 2022). While historical accuracy and good faith analysis is certainly a cornerstone of effective scholarship, I tend to agree with Kevin Gannon that “all history is presentism.” Gannon explains: “The very act of selecting a topic, arranging evidence…and presenting one interpretation of all that as more legitimate than the others— this scholarly ritual is absolutely shaped by the concerns of our present” (Gannon, 2022).12 Specifically, environmental studies is rooted in presentist concerns, just as Sharon O’Dair has rather rhetorically asked, “is it Shakespearean ecocriticism if it isn’t presentist?” (O’Dair, 2011).13 If the “concerns of our present” are necessarily shaped by environmental crisis, then a “Green Shakespeare” course is undoubtedly presentist in its very design. Laroche and Munroe tout a “shift to the present” in their own ecofeminist approach to Shakespeare, arguing that this practice “breaks down walls” and “dissolves the echo chambers” of academia.14 Through strategic presentism, we can find ways to make the study of Shakespeare relevant to contemporary social issues without sacrificing the academic rigor that the study of sixteenth and seventeenth century texts often requires. In fact, it sometimes adds more rigor—this map exercise, for instance, forced us to look at more primary documents than I would have otherwise thought to introduce. Because this “Green Shakespeare” course was offered at the upper-level for majors in either English or Environmental Studies, students brought intrinsic interest and background knowledge to the classroom. They often ended up teaching each other about their respective disciplines. They would routinely make connections between such texts as Henry VIII’s “1543 Act for the Preservation of Woods” (which I assigned) and the  Coombs and Coriale, 87.  Gannon. 13  O’Dair, 71–85. 14  Laroche and Munroe, 130–1. 11 12

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recent federal shrinking of Bear’s Ears National Park (which my students introduced as a contemporary parallel). While I provided many “ways in” for my students through the early modern material, this was made easier by the fact that they had self-selected into this experiment with prior knowledge of current environmental issues and readily came prepared to make these connections to other coursework, from Biology to Sociology to Social Work, in the spirit of the liberal arts. In reading Henry’s Act, for instance, students were immediately struck by the way sustainability was deployed as a means for enhancing capitalist economic imperatives in ways that mirror current advertising campaigns that tout sustainability largely  because it sells and “consumers are voting with their dollars” (Whelan & Kronthal-Sacco, 2019).15 Throughout the semester, Shakespeare provided an opportunity to analyze a range of pressing contemporary issues, from the connection between early modern enclosure practices and the contemporary politics of eminent domain, to questions of land stewardship in As You Like It’s Forest of Arden and environmentally ethical community responsibilities. Allowing “strategic presentism” to permeate the ethos of the class means that students can find points of connection while still attending to historical nuance.

Service-Learning Project: Collaboration and Community As my students became accustomed to “strategic presentism,” they began triangulating between Shakespearean close-readings, historically specific touchstones, and relevant contemporary environmental concerns. Then they were tasked with a final challenge: propose a collaborative campus project that would either bring awareness to an environmental issue common to both modern and early modern people, provide a solution to a problem experienced by early modern people that we still experience today, or offer appreciation for natural elements familiar to both modern and early modern people. Students began this project individually, and each devised a one-page project proposal. Then they combined forces with similarly-minded students and broke themselves into groups. From their groups, students chose their favorite proposal or combined some of the elements of their individual proposals to create a more detailed plan. One group created a plan for a small “Fairy Garden” using herbs  Whelan and Kronthal-Sacco.

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mentioned in Shakespeare that could be gathered by students and would double as a bee sanctuary. Going in a very different direction, another group devised a creative campus recycling initiative that incentivized recycling with the use of Shakespearean insults. In their groups, they followed stricter grant-application guidelines provided by our university’s Green Grant program to devise a full proposal that considered materials, costs, timelines, and the benefit to the campus and community. Putting their literary and theoretical work into action, the students were able to make a small yet material difference for their immediate community. The class ultimately decided to plant and tend  a small pollinator garden and install accompanying bee houses at the Organic Community Garden, decorated with witty “to bee or not to bee” artwork. By offering an imaginative, creative response to a crisis, we can celebrate human ingenuity and offer small solutions to a “spiritually impoverished world” with actionable, practical, and student-devised projects that can improve our connection to one another. So if you are looking for ways to engage non-majors with Shakespeare, I hope this essay encourages you to think beyond lower-level introductory courses. Without sacrificing rigor, we can expand our English-major centric classrooms and reach a larger community with a “strategically presentist” treatment of Shakespeare. In this particular case study, allowing upper-level Environmental Studies students to bring their own developed disciplinary expertise to the English classroom benefited everyone: these students got to be subject matter experts while exposing themselves to something new, and they gained a sense of ownership over Shakespeare and an appreciation for a longer arc of environmental social movements along the way. It likewise gave our English majors an opportunity to apply their strong close-reading and critical thinking skills to practical and appreciable ends. By learning from each other, both the English majors and the Environmental Studies majors expanded their horizons; one English major even anonymously commented that the course “made an ecologically-minded student out of me.” Likewise, the Environmental Studies majors could learn to communicate their ontological worldview across disciplinary boundaries. While it is invigorating to reframe the study of Shakespeare as a sustainable panacea—an antidote to spiritual impoverishment, a solution to despair, a meaning-making strategy in its own right—Shakespeare is just one part of this equation. In this context, the question is less “why Shakespeare?” and rather “why not Shakespeare?” If environmental

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stewardship is one of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century, we should be looking for more ways to integrate this philosophical lens and its practical application into even our most traditional mainstays in the course catalogue. By harnessing the cultural capital of “Shakespeare,” “Shakespeare” can become a tool for evidence-based inquiry into historical environmental crises and project-based activism that can help our students learn to address contemporary challenges. In her chapter “Occupy Shakespeare,” Marjorie Garber argues, “The time has never been better for Shakespeare and the humanities than it is now (Garber, 2017). If we take this opportunity seriously, and I think we should, ‘Shakespeare’ (the institution, the Association, the Congress, the brand, the author, and the works) can take the lead in trying to bring about much-needed changes, both in how and what we teach, and in understanding why ‘the humanities’–the Big Humanities—are a necessity rather than a luxury, in hard times, in good times, in troubled times—in revolutionary times—and, most especially, in these times.”16 This process is not always easy. Frey’s observation from over three decades ago still rings true: “Shakespeare disturbs more dust than he settles.”17 So when we kick up this dust storm, it can feel as if we are also calling on Lear’s storm—the crisis of mind that “crack[s] nature’s molds” (3.2.10). And, like Lear, we may not always be sure of the purpose, methods, or result before we begin to conjure the storm: “That all the world shall—I will do such things—/What they are yet I know not” (2.3.321–2). In the play, Lear’s questions invite nature to answer in thunder cracks and howling winds. With any luck, we might do the same.

References Atkisson, A. (2017). Sustainability Is for Everyone. Sustainability Transformation Publications. Atwood, E. K. (2013). “All Places Are Alike”: Marlowe’s Edward II and English Spatial Imagination. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 43(1), 49–70. Birmingham-Southern College Debuts New ‘Geodome’ in Former Planetarium. Birmingham-Southern College. 16 April 2018. https://www.bsc.edu/communications/news/2018/04/Birmingham-­Southern%20College%20debuts%20 new%20Geodome%20in%20former%20planetarium.html  Garber, 126.  Frey, 557.

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Bishop, T. (2010). Shakespeare’s Theater Games. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40(1), 65–88. Braun, G., & Hogenberg, G. (n.d.). Civitates Orbis Terrarum. 1572–1617. Coombs, D.  S., & Coriale, D. (2016). Introduction. Victorian Studies, 59(1), 87–89. Cosgrove, D. (2008). Images and Imagination in 20th-Century Environmentalism: from the Sierras to the Poles. Environment and Planning, 40, 1862–1880. de Montaigne, M. (n.d.). Essais de Michel de Montaigne avec les notes de tous les commentateurs. Paris, 1575, https://archive.org/stream/essaisdemichel­ d00montgoog/essaisdemicheld00montgoog_djvu.txt Ecocritical Shakespeare. (2011). D. Brayton and L. Bruckner, Eds. Ashgate Publishing. Egan, G. (2006). Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism. Routledge. Epp, R., & Spellman, B. (2014). Introduction. In R. Epp & B. Spellman (Eds.), Roads Taken: The Professorial Life, Scholarship in Place, and the Public Good. Truman State University Press. Foss, J. (2009). Beyond Environmentalism: A Philosophy of Nature. Wiley. Franken, F. (n.d.). The Copperplate Map, 1559. Trace by Tracey Wellman, Detail. Original plate held by the Dessau Art Gallery. Frey, C. (1984). Teaching Shakespeare in America. Shakespeare Quarterly, 35(5), 541–559. Gannon, K.  (2022, August 19). On Presentism and History; Or, We’re Doing This Again, Are We?. The Tattooed Professor: History, Teaching, and Technology with a Custom Paint Job. https://thetattooedprof.com/2022/08/19/on­presentism-­and-­history-­or-­were-­doing-­this-­again-­are-­we/ Garber, M. (2017). The Muses on Their Lunch Hour. Fordham University Press. Jenstad, J., Newton, G., & McLean-Fiander, K. (Eds.). (2018) The agas map of early modern London. University of Victoria, 2013-present. http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/agas.htm Laroche, R., & Munroe, J. (2019). Teaching Environmental Justice and Early Modern Texts: Collaboration and Connected Classrooms. In H.  Eklund & W.  B. Hyman (Eds.), Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now. Edinburgh University Press. Lighthill, B. (2017). Making Shakespeare Relevant. Troubador Publishing. Marlowe, C. (1999). The Complete Plays. (M. T. Burnett, Ed.). Everyman. Martin, R. (2015). Shakespeare and Ecology. Oxford University Press. “Mission.” Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges. Retrieved July 20, 2020, from Coplac.org O’Dair, S. (2011). Is It Shakespearean Ecocriticism If It Isn’t Presentist? In D. Brayton & L. Bruckner (Eds.), Ecocritical Shakespeare (pp. 71–85). Ashgate Publishing.

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O’Dair, S., & Francisco, T. (Eds.). (2019). Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity. Palgrave Macmillan. Orr, D. (2002). Four Challenges of Sustainability. Conservation Biology, 16(6), 1457–1460. Powell, M. (2014). Kill Bill: Why We Must Take Shakespeare Out of the Classroom. The Guardian, March 17. https://www.theguardian.com/culture-­ professionals-­n etwork/culture-­p rofessionals-­b log/2014/mar/17/ kill-­bill-­shakespeare-­classroom-­theatre Semler, L. (2013). Shakespeare Now! Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning Versus the System. Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. (1997). The Riverside Shakespeare (G. B. Evans et al., Ed., 2nd ed.). Houghton Mifflin. Smith, E. (2020). This Is Shakespeare. Pantheon Books. Strauss, V. (2015). Why I Don’t Want to Assign Shakespeare Anymore. The Washington Post, June 13. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-­ sheet/wp/2015/06/13/teacher-­why-­i-­dont-­want-­to-­assign-­shakespeare-­anymoreeven-­though-­hes-­in-­the-­common-­core/ Sweet, J. H. (2022). Is History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present. Perspectives on History, August 17. https://www.historians.org/ publications-­a nd-­d irectories/perspectives-­o n-­h istory/september-­2 022/ is-­history-­history-­identity-­politics-­and-­teleologies-­of-­the-­present Whelan, T., & Kronthal-Sacco, R. (2019). Research: Actally, Consumers Do Buy Sustainable Products. Harvard Business Review, June 19. https://hbr. org/2019/06/research-­actually-­consumers-­do-­buy-­sustainable-­products

Shakespeare Pedagogy and Twenty-First Century Multicultural Sensibilities Andani Kholinar

In an essay for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s “Teaching Shakespeare: A Folger Education Blog” (2016a), Ayanna Thompson observes peoples’ surprise when she tells them that she, a Black woman, teaches and writes about Shakespeare and race. According to Thompson, in the current climate, these topics–Shakespeare and race–are usually viewed as mutually exclusive: you are either interested in Shakespeare OR race… And yet, Shakespeare provides us with incredibly rich plays that are filled with incredibly complex characters who frequently make references to racial differences. (2016a, para. 1)

This surprise, whether expressed by laypeople on the streets or scholars in the university, dominates the teaching of Shakespeare to children in the United States. As a Black Muslim immigrant, I get similar reactions when I mention that I study Shakespeare. Shakespeare pedagogy, in order to respond to the needs of twenty-first century multicultural classrooms,

A. Kholinar (*) University of Education, Winneba, Ghana e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3_8

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must cease to see teachers like Ayanna Thompson and myself as aberrations, wielding Shakespeare in positions of authority. Thus, if we extend the theory of “personnel is policy,” popular in governance and regulatory discourse to education, teachers must reflect, in their person and pedagogical ideas, the changes happening in the broader education setting and in the Shakespeare classroom in particular to meet the challenges and possibilities of Shakespeare pedagogy today (Newman, 2019). In this chapter, I explore the need for inclusive pedagogy as well as new and emerging teaching methodologies in Shakespeare’s rich and complex body of dramatic texts. I discuss an experimental Shakespeare course I designed and taught at Texas A&M University in 2018. I turn my attention in the final part of this essay to student attitudes to this experimental approach to teaching Shakespeare. Like former President Obama said to the New York Times at the end of his historic presidency, Shakespeare continues to be a touchstone and understanding Shakespeare’s works might help us, as it helped President Obama, see how certain patterns repeat themselves between human beings (Obama 2017). I nominally share this concern about disappearing Shakespeare but for different reasons, and this experimental course was designed to offer alternative ways we can keep the Bard alive in rapidly changing multicultural classrooms.

The Need for Inclusive Pedagogy Students and teachers, especially in white-centric classrooms, find it easy to discuss Shakespearean texts such as Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, and Macbeth because of what I call the veil of anonymity that these plays appear to convey.1 In other words, discussions of Shakespearean plays that center on apparently universal ideas like love, ambition, and greed among others allow students and teachers to assume a dispassionate and objective posture in relation to the text and topic under discussion. For instance, in the discussion of “inaction” in Hamlet Student A, who might be timid and indecisive in his real life, is not outed by the text. As far as the audience (the teacher and the rest of student A’s classmates) are concerned, inaction is not written on the forehead of Student A.  So even if Student A has major antipathy about discussing something that defines his person, he is plain and anonymous in the classroom’s discussion of inaction. 1  By white-centric I mean classrooms where white bodies and sensibilities take center-stage in classroom dynamics including what teachers are sensitive to and cater to. This is borrowed from Michael Morris’ 2016 article “Standard White: Dismantling White Normativity.”

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However, race as a concept is naked and defining. In an especially multicultural classroom discourse on race, students do not easily have the luxury to hide behind anonymity. Their race is written on their faces, and as a result, the pitfalls are numerous for students and teachers. Even though inaction is just as innate to human relationships and merits discussion in much the same way that race does, race presents a more challenging problem than does inaction because teachers and students’ anonymity is taken away. To this end, discussing race is more likely to seem to students as though they are discussing themselves. The intellectualization of Student A’s inaction in Hamlet as discussed above cannot easily be transferred to whiteness or blackness. And especially given the historical and contemporary polarization of American society along color lines, it becomes harder to intellectualize blackness and whiteness in the classroom. Thus, in the American and other multiethnic classrooms, you find students and teachers alike unwilling or unable to distinguish between textual blackness and Black people. And with various critical discourse on race, the issue of critical race theory (CRT) in particular, being a target of political operatives in the conservative movement recently, discourse on blackness in Shakespeare is even more touchy than usual. I think this issue of textual blackness and Black people is a course for serious inquiry. It is worthwhile asking this question: Should students and teachers find it easy to distinguish between textual blackness and Black people? At least to me, they cannot and perhaps should not. They cannot because stories have a big impact on how groups of people are perceived and social relationships are constructed. As Ken Baskin argues, stories are “the basic building [blocks] by which we human beings experience and then construct our worlds” (2004). Baskin’s emphasis on experience and especially the construction of our worlds being dependent on stories is crucial in arguing that textual blackness is impossible to extricate from Black people in the gaze and imagination of other communities. Students and teachers in some sense should understand that attempting to discuss white depictions of Black people in literature as if these depictions have no impact on real Black people elides the impact of these depictions. Shakespeare may have met some Black people in England.2 However, given that Shakespeare borrowed so much of the plot and characters from 2   Emily Bartels’s (2006) seminal essay “Too Many Blackamoors: Deportation, Discrimination, and Elizabeth I” discusses the presence of Black people in Britain during the Elizabethan/Early Modern period. Shakespeare would have had the opportunity to meet Black people if he was adventurous enough to move in the circles they moved in.

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existing sources for Othello and Titus Andronicus, he more likely constructed blackness from the figment of his imagination.3 Shakespeare’s conception of non-European  races, as seen in characters such as  Aaron, Othello, Cleopatra, and Caliban, would have come from what he imagined Black people to be more  than from  real-life Black people.4 Like Shakespeare, much of white society’s conception of blackness or Black people is textual and not based on familiarity with actual Black people. Textual blackness then mediates the real-world relationships between Black and white people. In many instances, these two planes of blackness (the textual and the corporeal) become inseparable. Many English speakers, from Shakespeare’s late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to today, have had their first and sometimes most dominant interaction with blackness through texts, and these texts become so influential that it becomes difficult to separate them from actual experiences with Black people. Yet in the Shakespeare classroom, teachers often attempt such a separation for pedagogical purposes to protect students with the veil of anonymity as well as for easy hagiographic discussions of Shakespeare’s safer classics as communicating timeless universal truths. Shakespeare and his dominant positioning in the Western canon make categorically claiming his works as communicating timeless ‘truths’ even more complicated. For instance, according to so-called “Bardolators” and “Shakespeare Stans”5 of the Western tradition, Shakespeare is supposed to be the most adept communicator of the human condition. What happens when students think they have identified an undercurrent of racial prejudice in his plays? That would 3  See Maurianne S. Adams’ (1964) “‘Occular Proof’ in Othello and Its Source” for discussion of Shakespeare’s fidelity to Giraldi Cinthio for the plot of Othello. Also see Andrea Bernadette’s (2001) “‘Assimilation or Dissimulation?: Leo Africanus’s Geographical Historie of Africa’ and the Parable of Amphibia” for a discussion of the influence of Leo Africanus on Shakespeare’s construction of Othello as a character. 4  Ayanna Thompson elaborates on the various sources from which Shakespeare borrowed Othello’s storyline and characters in her introduction to the Arden Shakespeare Othello Revised Edition (2016b), 13–25. 5  The term stan is slang in popular culture. It refers to the obsessive fanatical worship of an artist. It is an allusion to the American rapper Eminem’s song of the same name where an obsessive fan commits murder-suicide after he doesn’t get a response from the artist after writing him fan mail. Harold Bloom best exemplifies the Shakespeare stans in recent years. His defense of the Western canon in his massively influential book The Western Canon gives much accolades to Shakespeare. He followed it with the standalone defense of Shakespeare in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

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certainly account for the animosity felt by many Black students when studying the Bard’s othered characters, particularly Othello, Caliban, Aaron, Cleopatra, and the Prince of Morocco, among others. These students are engaged in the internal resistance that is constitutive of the Black experience in the West. This resistance or tension is best encapsulated in W.  E. B.  Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness. Black students are defined by the Western intellectual tradition because they are the products of it, and yet because of their subaltern position within it, Black students are also often resistant to it. Practicing resistance is a necessary part of Black subjectivity even if in their act of resistance, they are reifying the intellectual structure that produced both their subjectivity and canonical texts like Othello or The Tempest. When Black life, as it is constructed in the West, is devoted to resisting white constructions, it allows for discourses that privilege the white gaze. These discourses may then reinforce the concept of blackness created by the white gaze. Perhaps one means of bypassing the white gaze is by building discourse communities outside the ambit of the Western intellectual tradition. Like their Black classmates, white students are equally held captive by this Western intellectual tradition. For many of them, to acknowledge the racist tendencies of Shakespeare’s Othello is to agree that they are complicit in his racism. Despite the New Critics’ exhortation to ignore the author and rather look at the “timeless” text, Shakespeare assumes a larger-than-life persona in the Western mind. Othello, just like Hamlet, cannot be considered without considering Shakespeare. English and to some extent Europe’s assertion of cultural superiority has been bolstered by an association with Shakespeare. This issue is not mere speculation. The most virulent manifestation of white supremacy on a mass scale in the past hundred years came in the form of the Nazis in Germany, who took Shakespeare as one of their national poets. To many Nazis, Germany was the heir to Shakespeare. To that effect, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, with its denigrating characterization of Shylock the thrifty Jew, became a popular play for the Nazis and was performed with government support. But outside of Othello and The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare himself was championed by the Nazi regime to the extent that in 1937 “a special Shakespeare festival was put on for the Hitler youth in the presence of Rudolf Hess,” Hitler’s second in command from 1933 to 1941 (Strobl, 1999). Even German dramatists during the Third Reich, when bemoaning foreign influence on the German stage, excluded Shakespeare even as

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they named other English authors because Shakespeare was integral to their white (Aryan) supremacy (Heinrich, 2012). The employment of Shakespeare for white purposes as discussed above is why I teach his problematic and or Black plays even when other teachers may be shying away from doing so for the same or myriad reasons. As the experience with my class will show, Shakespeare’s Black plays in the multicultural classroom, if handled with care, may present Early Modernists and especially Shakespeareans the best avenue to critically engage the widest audiences on the issue of race and literature. I am not the first or only Black Shakespearean to attempt this teaching praxis. However, I particularly aim to achieve through my teaching of Shakespeare what John E.  Bruce termed “intelligently organized resistance” in the usage of Shakespeare by Black people and educators “especially as it could be used for the project of racial uplift” (Bruce, 1971, as cited in Hall, 2019). Like Hall and John E.  Bruce, I believe that radical Black politics and social justice and Shakespeare can be in the same bed. And like Thompson (2019), I see Shakespeare as an effective unlikely weapon to wielded “in the service of dialogues about equality, justice, and progress” (235). Taking cognizance of the fraught nature of engaging texts that can be a trigger for trauma for especially African American students as I have indicated above (deGravelles, 2010), I employ a few strategies to mitigate potential harm to my African American students. First, my syllabus design (which all students have access to before choosing the course) include explicit trigger warnings for my students. I also repeat this warning on the first day of class to show respect for my students and encourage their independent decision making (Mendoza, 2019). My position as a Black man in the classroom provided a boost of confidence for my BIPOC students who have surprisingly kept in contact over the years. My two Black students in particular went on to complete college and along the line one went on a year abroad to Spain and then went to graduate school with recommendation letters from me. This influence is unsurprising given that research shows the impact of Black teachers on Black student successes (Lindsay, 2020). And unlike Demeter (2019) who structured his Shakespeare course juxtaposing Shakespeare against African  American writers, my experiment teaching Shakespeare as a continuum worked. It generated the rich conversations I knew could come from Shakespeare on race and justice as I discuss further.

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Surrounding Shakespeare: The Bard, His Sources, and Afterlives When I was given a Shakespeare course to teach at Texas A&M University as part of my doctoral training, foremost on my mind was that I did not want to teach the course the way most teachers teach the Bard. When I searched syllabi for Shakespeare survey courses for American universities as part of my preparation for the course, I realized that among college Shakespeare professors like Christopher Grobe (2014), Rebecca Lemon (2017), Edward Kermode (2004), and Stefan Flores (2003) just to name a few, the teaching of five to eight Shakespeare plays in addition to some selected sonnets was the norm. My own PhD supervisor Nandra Perry has occasionally taught A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Othello, Hamlet, and The Tempest when teaching the same course at Texas A&M that I was preparing to teach (Perry 2008). What I found interesting is that as far back as the 1980s, scholars like Berkowitz (1984) bemoaned the loading of Shakespeare survey courses with a lot of plays and instead recommended a half a dozen plays treated in-depth. These kinds of recommendations led to today’s routine teaching of anywhere between five to eight plays. But my college experience and perhaps the waning interest in Shakespeare among college students speaks to the fact that these methods may no longer be effective and thus need revamping. In my Shakespeare class, I therefore took a bold decision to teach just one of Shakespeare’s plays. At first, it might sound counterintuitive to teach just one Shakespeare play in a Shakespeare survey class, but my students’ reactions to the course at the end of the semester proved that it might do students much good if we teach just one of his plays and teach it well. Right now, teaching six to eight plays in twelve to fourteen weeks means that we have about two weeks at most and in many situations less than two full weeks to devote to each play. Many of us teaching the Bard are doing so because we love his work and will talk endlessly about our favorite Shakespeare play when afforded the time and opportunity. Yet we compress and rush through these texts in a wishy-washy manner for students and expect them to fall in love with Shakespeare like we did. Thus, instead of six plays, I selected one: Othello. I organized the class under three banners: Shakespeare’s Sources or Literary Antecedents, Primary Source Shakespeare, and Afterlives. For the first ten meetings of the class, I took my students through an introduction to early modern drama, the language of Shakespeare, and early modern

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grammar. With support from the Cushing Memorial Library and Archive’s Special Collections Section, we explored how Shakespeare’s works got published. We also explored Leo Africanus’ A Geographical History of Africa, George Peel’s The Battle of Alcazar, and Cinthio Giraldi’s The Moor of Venice to help us understand Shakespeare’s sources. These texts and topics served to give my students a foundation for getting into Shakespeare’s Othello and gave them a better appreciation for the cultural milieu in which the bard produced his spectacular works. Crucially for me though, covering texts like Cinthio’s and Africanus’ demystified Shakespeare for my students who saw that Shakespeare also leaned on others for his plots and characters and this made him more relatable to my students. The next five class meetings each focused on one act of Shakespeare’s Othello and allowed us to have a more in-depth analysis of each act and scene. I made sure to pair each discussion of an act with a secondary reading that helped guide our discussion. For instance, we discussed Vitkus’ (1997) great work on the anxieties around religious conversion in early modern England alongside Act II.  This pairing was necessitated by the following passage from Othello: Why, how now, ho? From whence ariseth this? Are we turned Turks, and to ourselves do that Which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites? For Christian shame, put by this barbarous brawl. (2.3.147–50)

Vitkus’ article allowed us to interrogate the anxieties surrounding national and religious identities during the period. Even though not every secondary reading had something to say regarding identities and othering, which was the overarching theme in which I organized the class, I allowed student discussions to go where they would, inevitably returning to the discourse on identity. Instead of being worried about student anxiety about discussing sensitive issues like race and identity, I leaned into it and that obviously came up in the survey at the end of the course. After we finished reading Shakespeare’s play itself, we then turned our attention to the section I called the Afterlives of Shakespeare’s Othello. I gave my students two Othello movie adaptations to watch at home for our class discussions: Oliver Parker’s 1995 Othello and Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2006 Omkara. They then had to read Richard Appignanesi’s 2009 Manga adaptation of Othello. The vastly contrasting mediums provided some of the most fascinating

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discussions I have ever had in a Shakespeare class, and it solidified my belief that there is a future for Shakespeare in our schools only if we change with the times in terms of how we engage the teaching of the Bard.

Students and New Pedagogies I designed a survey to assess student attitudes to this kind of experimental pedagogy. Further, since I was engaged in experimental design and linked the class discussion to issues of identity, race, and othering, I aimed to capture students’ general background in Shakespeare, especially with Shakespeare and race before coming to my class. I also aimed to get my students to assess my course structure and discussion of race. To that end, twelve (mainly open-ended) questions were asked in a Google Forms survey administered at the end of the semester. Questions one to eight attempted to spruce out their experience with Shakespeare in general and with Shakespeare and race in particular prior to coming to my class. The second part, questions nine to thirteen sought to get them to evaluate the course structure and focus. Overall, the students surprised me in a good way in terms of their response to my experimental approach even though many had issues with what one argued was the class’ “too much focus on race when other topics could be discussed.” I was surprised that as many as half of my students had never taken a Shakespeare class before, and those who did mainly read Romeo and Juliet and none read or have been taught The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, or Anthony and Cleopatra, the group of plays Andreas (2001) calls Shakespeare’s African plays. I was under the mistaken impression that all high school students were required to take a Shakespeare course, but as we have discussed above, many teachers are increasingly choosing not to teach the Bard because of administrative and cultural pressures. Of the fourteen student responses to prior engagement with Shakespeare, only four had ever noticed race or thought of Shakespeare’s characters in racial terms. None of them encountered the discussion of race in their previous Shakespeare classes. I found it a bit shocking but not unexpected that of all fourteen respondents, none encountered the discussion of race in the Shakespeare classroom. If teachers are mainly teaching plays like Romeo and Juliet, it stands to reason that racial discourse will appear as little as possible compared to the teaching of Shakespeare’s African plays, though as Arthur L. Little Jr.’s collection White People in

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Shakespeare  (2023)  makes clear, all of  Shakespeare’s plays are invested in race. I asked my students to evaluate my text selection and how discussion heavy my class was structured. This question was one of the questions I had most apprehensions about because it spoke to the heart of my method and experiment. Fortunately for me, it appeared students had an overwhelmingly positive response to the format. The general sentiment of students was the fact they really warmed up to the discussion-centered structure of the classroom. My take-away from their response to this structure is that in the eyes of my students, I seemed to have disappeared from the class, and they credited their enjoyment of the class to their peers instead. This feeling I believe is testament to the success of the class structure. Learning happens mostly when the teacher takes the backstage and allows students to explore the ideas they encounter in these texts. I often interjected to push students to think deeper on the issues they were discussing by asking open-ended questions. This decision allowed students to think through a lot of the issues together without feeling that I was pushing my thoughts on the texts on them. On the issue of texts selection, I noticed some fatigue among two white students in particular when it came to the discussion of race in Othello and that fatigue surfaced in the survey results. Some of them felt we had discussed race too much instead of other issues in the play which I found fascinating, given that only five of the nineteen secondary readings were explicitly about race. We discussed race a lot because students often returned to the topic on their own. Furthermore, many students approvingly mentioned manga and the active role it helped them to play in the class. Manga is a matured genre today with young adult and adult reader classes of manga ranging from Shonen to Seinen selling in the hundreds of millions of copies (Wood, 2004) in an age where traditional book sales and readership appear to be on a downward trend (Milliot, 2022). Many students who had not engaged as much in the previous class discussions lit up when we started discussing Appignanesi’s manga adaptation of Othello. Hitherto quiet students became the centerpiece of that stretch of our discussions because they had more experience with the manga format. Issues of the color pallets and the androgynous characters were areas where they offered the class more insight than some of us who were more adept at discussing either the text or film versions of Othello.

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I also asked my students to review how we discussed race/othering in the course and to suggest ways to improve that discourse. In general, there were two main takeaways from students regarding our engagement with race in the class. First, a strong minority in the class felt our discourse on race was overdone. The fascinating thing about this outcome is that the class discussions were organic and open-ended but often gravitated back to the question of race and othering. This pattern confirms my hypothesis that students are generally interested in these fraught topics, and the academy provides the best place for them to engage them, given that we have the ability and training to provide an intellectual environment for these discussions to take place. Even though I did not mandate these discussions, once students saw the links, they were more than happy to engage these issues. As we can see from the preceding discussion, Shakespeare’s place in the academy is as secure as we classroom practitioners will make the Bard to be. How we engage his works be it with the way we organize our classroom, the texts we select, or how we engage the issues in Shakespeare, will determine whether students in our classrooms continue to enjoy the bard. Unlike the so-called “woke” teachers purportedly ditching the Bard for newer authors (Alexander, 2021), Shakespeare enthusiasts and academics can make Shakespeare as exciting and valid for students’ experiences today as any other literary work. Unlike other teachers who think Shakespeare’s characters are unrelatable, Shakespeare enthusiasts know the bard has a wealth of relatable characters be they the insecure and easily persuaded Othello or the indecisive, grief-stricken and traumatized Prince Hamlet. Further, I would like to note that the experimental approach used in this course can be very beneficial to students outside the Shakespeare classroom or even the English major. The prevailing practice of overwhelming students with so many books to read in the classroom may not be as beneficial compared to in-depth exploration of fewer texts that students more fully explore. Finally, as my class and student reactions indicate, tackling the question of race does not necessarily have to be combative and unenjoyable for students even if students become uncomfortable in the class sometimes. In fact, the fact that they become uncomfortable speaks to the possibility for intellectual growth. Although some of my white students feel targeted by such discussions, those feelings of discomfort must not deter Shakespeare teachers from such engagements. Even in their discomfort, most of them reported enjoying the class structure and experience and learning a lot from it.

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References Adams, M.  S. (1964). Ocular Proof’ in Othello and Its Source. PMLA, 79(3), 234–241. Alexander, H. (2021). REVEALED: How ‘Woke’ English Teachers Have Cancelled Shakespeare Because of His ‘White Supremacy, Misogyny, Racism and Classism’-and Are Instead Using His Plays to Lecture in ‘Toxic Masculinity and Marxism’. The Daily Mail, February 16. Andrea, B. (2001). Assimilation Or Dissimulation?: Leo Africanus’s’ Geographical Historie of Africa’ and the Parable of Amphibia. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 32(3), 7–29. Andreas, J. R. (2001). Rewriting Race Through Literature: Teaching Shakespeare’s African Plays. Shakespeare Yearbook, 12, 215–236. Appignanesi, R. (2009). Manga Shakespeare: Othello. Illustrated by Ryuta Osada. Harry N. Abrams. Self Made Hero. Arthur L. Little, Jr. (Ed.). (2023). White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture and the Elite. In The Arden Shakespeare. Bloomsbury. Bartels, E. (2006). Too Many Blackamoors: Deportation, Discrimination, and Elizabeth I. Studies in English Literature, 46(2), 305–322. Baskin, K. (2004). Complexity, Stories, and Knowing. International Workshop on Complexity and Philosophy; 18–19 November, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Berkowitz, G. M. (1984). Teaching Shakespeare to Today’s College Students – Some Heresies. Shakespeare Quarterly, 35(5), 560–562. Bhardwaj, V. (director). (2006). Omkara [Film]. Shemaroo Entertainment. Branagh, K. (actor). (1995). Othello. [Film]. Castle Rock Entertainment. deGravelles, K.  H. (2010). You Be Othello. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 11(1), 153–175. Demeter, J.  M. (2019). African-American Shakespeares: Loving Blackness as Political Resistance. In H.  Eklund & W.  B. Hyman (Eds.), Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (pp. 67–75). Edinburgh University Press. Du Bois, W.E.B.  The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Ed. by Brent Hayes Edward. Oxford University Press, 2009. Flores, S. (2003). Syllabus for Shakespeare Survey. English Department, University of Idaho, Moscow, Spring. Grobe, C. (2014). Syllabus for Shakespeare Survey. English Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, Spring. Hall, K.  F. (2019). ‘Intelligently Organized Resistance’: Shakespeare in the Diasporic Politics of John E.  Bruce. In H.  Eklund & W.  B. Hyman (Eds.), Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (pp. 85–94). Edinburgh University Press.

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Heinrich, A. (2012). ‘It Is Germany Where He Truly Lives’: Nazi Claims on Shakespearean Drama. New Theatre Quarterly, 28(3), 230–242. Kermode, E. (2004). Syllabus for Shakespeare Survey. English Department, California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, Long Beach, Spring. Lemon, R. (2017). Syllabus for Shakespeare Survey. English Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Spring. Lindsay, C. A. (2020). Race Matter: New Book Explores Impact of Black Teachers. Edge: Carolina Education Review, 4(1), 27. Mendoza, K. N. (2019). Sexual Violence, Tigger Warnings, and the Early Modern Classroom. In H.  Eklund & W.  B. Hyman (Eds.), Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (pp. 97–105). Edinburgh University Press. Milliot, J. (2022) The Book Sales Boom Is Over. Publishers Weekly, April 8. Newman, P. (2019). Personnel Is Policy: Regulatory Capture at the Federal Trade Commission, 1914–1929. Journal of Institutional Economics, 15(6), 1–17. Obama, B. (2017). Transcript: President Obama on What Books Mean to Him. Interviewed by Mimiko Kakutani. The New York Times, January 16. Perry, N. (2008). Syllabus for Shakespeare Survey. Department of English, Texas A&M University, College Station, Fall. Shakespeare, W. (2016). Othello. In G.  Taylor et  al. (Eds.), The New Oxford Shakespeare. Critical Reference Edition. Oxford University Press. Strobl, G. (1999). The Bard of Eugenics: Shakespeare and Racial Activism in the Third Reich. Journal of Contemporary History, 34(3), 323–336. Thompson, A. (2016a). An Invitation from a Black Shakespearean. Teaching Shakespeare: A Folger Education Blog. Folger Shakespeare Library, June 15. Thompson, A. (2016b). Introduction. In E. A. J. Honigmann (Ed.), The Arden Shakespeare: Othello (pp. 13–25). Bloomsbury. Thompson, A. (2019). An Afterword About Self/Communal Care. In H. Eklund & W.  B. Hyman (Eds.), Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (pp. 235–238). Edinburgh University Press. Vitkus, D. J. (1997). Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor. Shakespeare Quarterly, 48(2), 145–176. Wood, G.  V. (2004). Heir to the Fathers: John Quincy Adams and the Spirit of Constitutional Government. Lexington Books.

Enhancing Creative Engagement with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, and Othello and Gen-Z Culture Patricia Marchesi

I have taught Shakespeare to non-majors for over a decade now, and although it has become somewhat of a cliché to say so, I am always amazed at how much I learn from students. No matter how many times I may have read certain plays, there are always students who raise a question or offer an interpretation that hadn’t occurred to me. Often, these students start the semester not seeing the relevance Shakespeare to their lives. Many take a Shakespeare course because of a major or general education requirement. Sometimes they are curious—sometimes not—about all the hype around Shakespeare. Whatever the case may be, educators have to negotiate a variety of student assumptions, prejudices, and baggage, all with the ultimate goal of demonstrating that Shakespeare is still relevant today and that his language is worth pouring over. In order to achieve such goals, instructors first might consider establishing parallels with today’s world that resonate with students’ experiences. As Christopher Schaberg

P. Marchesi (*) Holy Family High School, Broomfield, CO, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3_9

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suggests in The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth, literature professors should help students develop critical understanding of the world around them, “a comportment toward the world as it is, with a mind changing it for the better” (72; original emphasis). In other words, once students “get” the concerns of the play by making connections to today’s world, they are much more motivated to delve into the language of the plays. In this brief chapter, I want to share and explain the ways in which I introduce students to plays by focusing on specific parallels we can draw to contemporary life. Near the end of the article, I provide a link to a selection of creative projects done by students, to illustrate the depth of learning and enthusiasm that such an approach produces. Such assignments take seriously the scholarly notion, as articulated by Veronica J. Austen, that creative assignments “dispel the awe of literature and create actives learners” while also inspiring a “deeper commitment to excellence” that “dismantles the classroom hierarchy” (138). Ultimately, Shakespeare is still relevant today. Times have changed, technology has changed, but human nature has remained the same. Our tendencies, insecurities, emotions—those we can still “get” when we read Shakespeare. Wherever we are in history, chances are Shakespeare’s carefully constructed human beings—and the dilemmas hey find themselves in—will continue to resonate.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Forces Beyond Our Control Students are quite wary of parallels that either seem like “too much of a stretch” or too obvious (for example, Helena as the lovesick teenager). What they want are parallels they might not have thought about but that are nevertheless pressing and relevant to their lives. Recently, while teaching A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I started thinking about the forces beyond our control—the ones that shape our behavior whether or not we are aware of them. I had just been reading about surveillance capitalism and the impact of the internet and social media on human behavior and

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mental health.1 I was disturbed to find out that more hours on social media led to feelings of unhappiness, and shocked to learn that targeted ads on social media sites could influence our behavior and choices even after we log out. I started thinking about what it meant not to realize that there were at the mercy of such forces—and it struck me that such blindness is one of the most important themes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the play, the fairies represent the greater, unseen forces shaping human behavior. The lovers are not in control of their own actions, because they do not understand or see how they are being manipulated. They are us when we don’t know (or underestimate) the power of subliminal advertising, social pressure, and continuous psychological manipulation. Like Lysander, we can stop loving the right person and turn to the wrong one. Like Demetrius, we can change course without understanding how or why. No wonder Helena and Hermia are confused: who wouldn’t be, when there’s no logical reason for the change? That love is irrational, students know. But most people tend not to see themselves as the playthings of unseen forces—and for good reason (it is depressing). Yet if 2020 has taught us anything, it is that we are not always in control of those greater forces, and that such forces have the potential to affect everyone. It is not the lovers who are lost in the forest—it’s us. For students to see themselves in the shoes of Lysander and Demetrius, however, they need to do some preliminary thinking as we discuss the confusion the Athenian lovers experience in the forest. Such preliminary thinking involves brainstorming about the ways in which we, today, are influenced by forces beyond our control. Here are some possible questions for discussion in small groups: • What forces shape the way we view the world, interpret events, and decide what’s beautiful or desirable? Make a list of all your thoughts. • Might there be forces influencing you of which you are not aware? Why? Why not? What forces might these be? • Think of situations in which it was clear someone else was being influenced by  forces they  might not have noticed. What did that experience feel like to you? Why could you identify the source of influence, but not the other person? 1  Maria Konnikova’s article, aptly titled “How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy,” concludes that “[d]emands on our attention lead us to use Facebook more passively than actively, and passive experiences, no matter the medium, translate to feelings of disconnection and boredom” (2013, 296).

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These types of questions force students to consider the world they live in as well as the possibility that there could be unseen forces working on them. Students usually identify forces such as advertising, social class, upbringing, and religious affiliation, but are less prompt to think of cosmic forces (electromagnetic fields, for example, or lunar cycles), pollution, climate change, and quality of food as factors that influence behavior. After Covid-19, however, students at least understand well the idea of being blindsided by something beyond their control. In A  Midsummer Night’s Dream, that something is love. The fairies dramatize the unseen forces that work on our affections—without our consent and often without our awareness. Once students have examined some of the seen and unseen forces at work in their world, they are less likely to judge the Athenian lovers and more likely to see themselves in the characters. From then on, it’s much easier to ask students to find lines that relate to the forces that shape behavior and to discuss references to eyesight, perception, and emotion. The following are lines that students often pick when asked to do this exercise: “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind” (Helena, 1.2.234). “The will of man is by his reason sway’d” (Lysander, 2.2.114). “[M]ine eye is enthralled to thy shape” (Titania, 3.1.134). “The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye” (Titania, 3.2.191). “When they next wake, all this derision/ Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision” (Oberon, 3.2.370–371). “How came these things to pass?/O how mine eyes do loathe his visage now!” (Titania, 4.1.77–78). But, my good lord, I wot not by what power— But my some power it is—my love to Hermia, Melted as the snow, seems to me now As the remembrance of an idle gaud Which in my childhood I did dote upon; And all the faith, the virtue of my heart, The object and pleasure of mine eye, Is only Helena… (Demetrius, 4.1.163–170)

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“Methinks I see these things with parted eye,/When everything seems double” (Hermia, 4.1.188–89). “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was” (Bottom, 4.1.203–204). But all the story of the night told over, All their minds transfigur’d so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But, howsoever, strange and admirable” (Titania, 5.1.23–27).

Shakespeare’s play leaves it quite clear that not just our vision, but our very perception of reality, can be clouded. It may be worth allowing students some time to tease out the difference between vision and perception. Ultimately, however, Shakespeare’s play suggests, through the magic potion administered to the eyes, that vision is the gateway to perception and as thus is subject to manipulation and alteration. In A  Midsummer Night’s Dream, everything starts with and in the eyes. Here are a few creative exercises to give students once they have a good understanding of these themes: • Pick a particular scene and create a Facebook or X (formerly Twitter) feed that includes the characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. • Midsummer Night’s News: include weather, lunar phase, and news from the play (or a particular scene) • Write a prologue for the play, foreshadowing its plot and themes. What character would you pick to deliver the prologue? Depending on your intentions, you can use blank verse or imitate the meter/ rhyme-scheme of the epilogue. • Write a visitor’s forest guide/pamphlet that includes the “attractions” of the forest. Include fairy, plant, and animal identification, some descriptions from the play, and possibly even a little map.

Much Ado About Nothing: The “Unfriend” Button Although the eyes also play an important part in Much Ado About Nothing, vision works in a slightly different way. Characters perceive through sight what they are already likely to believe, and believe what they have heard from others’ lies. Much, indeed, comes from not(h)ing, the act of

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overhearing (mostly staged with the intent to trick). Once characters have heard a particular interpretation, they tend to interpret what they see accordingly. The play consists of a dizzying number of such instances: Claudio believes that Don Pedro woos Hero for himself; Benedick believes Beatrice pines for him; Beatrice believes Benedick secretly loves her; Claudio believes that Hero is unfaithful; Leonato believes Hero is unfaithful; Claudio and Don Pedro believe Hero is dead, and finally Claudio believes that he will marry “another Hero” (possibly the stupidest reaction, ever, by a character in a Shakespearean play). The play is less about the unseen forces working behind the curtain, and more about the way perception (through vision) is generally clouded by (false) expectation based on (false) rumor. As in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, treasured friendships and relationships break easily. Much Ado About Nothing invites us to consider the notion of “unfriending”—popularized through the Facebook “unfriend” button—and its implications in Shakespeare’s play. Is “unfriending” different in Shakespeare’s time? How is it accomplished? By comparing how people today “unfriend” to how the characters in Shakespeare’s play do, students should notice striking differences. In order to “unfriend” Hero, Claudio humiliates her publicly—the exact opposite of the “unfriend” button. Similarly, Benedick “unfriends” Claudio and challenges him to a duel. In Shakespeare’s play, severing ties is public, has direct implications to one’s reputation, and is potentially dangerous. The possibility of discreetly unfriending someone is not a possibility (thankfully, “refriending” is). What does this reveal about relationships in Shakespeare’s time? In our time? Here are some questions for small group discussion: • Find some recent studies about social media and happiness. What do such studies reveal? How do your findings relate to Shakespeare’s play? • On a piece of paper, come up with a diagram that illustrates the number of times characters “unfriend” and then “refriend” each other in Much Ado About Nothing. Are there instances in which the “refriend” does not happen? What message do you think the play tries to ­convey through all these instances? Are there lines in the play that reflect such a message? • Write a one-act play, setting Much Ado About Nothing in a high school (afterwards, discuss what you learned from this exercise. What did you gain by changing the setting? What did you lose?) • Since scandal plays an important role in the play, create a tabloid covering the action of Much Ado About Nothing (this activity works well for Twelfth Night also).

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More student projects can be found at https://www.pinterest.com/ scifilovr/student-­projects/.

Othello: Conspiracy Theories Othello is a play about stories. It starts with Iago telling Roderigo a story, then Brabantio, then the audience (Iago’s soliloquies are all stories). Othello then tells the Venetian senate the story of his involvement with Desdemona—and, ironically, we find out that Desdemona fell in love with

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him over storytelling. Little wonder, then, that the play shows us instance after instance of characters telling each other stories (some true, others not). In any case, the power of storytelling is one of the central themes of the play. Even at the end of the play, right before he kills himself, Othello attempts to shape a narrative and redeem his story for posterity. When I was in high school and read Othello, I found it difficult to believe that the main character would believe Iago over his wife. I wrote off Othello as gullible and insecure (the insecure part had more merit than the gullibility one). As I matured and began to teach the play, I acquired a more sophisticated understanding of Shakespeare’s character. Othello is the central character of the play—not Iago, as students have often tried to convince me. The play is, at heart, a study on psychological vulnerability to conspiracy theories, as well as the shattering consequences of believing certain types of stories. And it is Othello, not Iago, whose vulnerability is exploited and who (with Desdemona) suffers the consequences of misplaced belief. When I start discussing the play with my students, I ask them to note every instance in which a character tells a story, as well as the type of language the character uses. Is the language formal and poetic, or crude and full of swearing? Does the character use language to dehumanize people or ennoble them? Ultimately, does the language promote hate or tolerance? What is it about certain words that reflects a worldview full of hate? It’s relatively easy to go through Iago’s initial language and pick instances of dehumanizing language. Very quickly, we establish Iago as a “hater”—this is one thing he excels at. The other, of course, is storytelling. Our students are more than aware of the impact of haters on their world, so it’s easy for them to understand what Iago is doing. What’s not so easy for them (or for younger me) is to understand why Othello buys into a narrative that is often obviously fabricated to anyone not emotionally involved. This is where 2020, the first, major year of Covid-19 and conspiracy theories, comes into play.2 Conspiracy theories are, in essence, compelling stories. They are fictional and contain a clear villain with nefarious motivations. In Iago’s story, Desdemona is the clear villain. As a woman, she is bound to be fickle and eventually false, regretting her “exotic” choice and finding sexual fulfillment with someone who, 2  For more information on addressing conspiracy theories and the college classroom, see Daniel S. Berman and Jeremy D. Stoddard’s essay, “‘It’s a Growing and Serious Problem’: Teaching 9/11 to Combat Misinformation and Conspiracy Theories” (2021).

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according to Iago, is “of her own clime, complexion, and degree” (3.3.230). By the end of the play, Desdemona—and perhaps all the women characters—have become the scapegoats of the male characters’ anxieties. In light of the compelling potential of stories, here are some questions for students to consider in small groups: • Look up the definition of “conspiracy theory.” Who creates them? How do they circulate? Do some research into recent conspiracy theories. Do you know anyone who believes some of these theories? • Why do you think people buy into conspiracy theories even when there is evidence to the contrary? What do psychologists say? Do a little research and discuss with your group. • What “conspiracy theories” do you see in Othello? Make a list. Once you’re done with the list, discuss who believes these theories and why. Of course, Othello may be Shakespeare’s most difficult play to teach, knowing that the racism of the play might understandably trigger students in the classroom. As discussed throughout this collection, however, ignoring how racism is built into our canonical texts is also problematic. Thankfully, there exists a growing body of research focused on teaching racially sensitive texts that can help teachers at all levels of experience consider how or even whether to discuss texts such as Othello.3 Ultimately for my classroom, the play provides ample opportunity to discuss how people  come to believe certain things  about others, and about themselves. It also encourages us to ponder whether belief is a choice: can Othello choose to believe something else, for example? What happens when our ability to analyze is compromised without us realizing? These are questions that students today are keenly interested in. Shakespeare’s play can act as a mirror for the workings of society, human behavior, and the self.

3  Open source resources for teaching race and racism in the classroom include the following: www.teachinginterventions.com, https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/ teaching-­race/, and https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/resources/anti-­ racist-­pedagogy/, among many others.

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Hamlet: Isolation and Mental Health After 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic, it has become commonplace to discuss the effects of isolation on the human psyche. Out of all Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet is the one that most clearly shows the pain of feeling isolated. Although it’s certainly not the only Shakespeare play to dramatize mental health issues, the idea of a “something rotten” (in the psyche as well as in the realm) is so pervasive that one could claim it is a play about dis-ease. In its emphasis on madness (staged and real), the play also invites us to consider the psychological effects of sudden/unexpected separation (most prominently between Hamlet and his father, and between Ophelia and hers). Students today face more pressure than ever before, and therefore understand well the paralyzing stress Hamlet faces. Although the play is a tragedy, we can view Hamlet’s transformation from paralysis to action in a positive light. Hamlet succeeds in overcoming his inability to act, and by act five relinquishes the need for control. He dies in peace, having apologized to those he could and accomplished his mission. From such a perspective, the play showcases Hamlet’s increasing mental fortitude and ability to cope (in contrast to Ophelia’s unraveling). Hamlet, unlike Ophelia, has time to make sense of his loss and goes from wishing that he could disappear (“O that this too too sullied flesh would melt” (1.2.129) to accepting his predicament as “scourge and minister” (3.4.176) and later to surrendering himself to the “special providence” (5.2.215) that governs events. He concludes that “the readiness is all” (5.2.218) and shortly thereafter succeeds in avenging his father. Hamlet’s last words, “the rest is silence” (5.2.363) suggest that peace is about to replace his mental anguish and restlessness (expressed through his seven soliloquies). In order to track the trajectory of Hamlet’s development, a useful exercise is to put all soliloquies side-by-side and attempt to outline the psychological state Hamlet is in. In his first soliloquy, for example, the predominant emotion is despair. In the second, determination; in the third, frustration, and so on. Here are some useful guidelines and tips for students as they embark on this exercise: • Circle any exclamation marks, outbursts (“O!”), dashes, and question marks. • Look up any allusions you don’t know and words you don’t understand. • Underline any phrases and imagery that express or reflect Hamlet’s sense of isolation. Do some research on isolation and depression, and

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then relate your findings to Hamlet’s situation and that of other characters in the play. • Do some research on the four humors behavioral theory that most people in Shakespeare’s time still subscribed to. For fun, take a four-­ humors personality test at https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/ O4TS/. Do you think the results are accurate? What humor would you categorize Hamlet as having? What about other characters? Divide the characters according to the four humors. • Hamlet goes to the therapist: write that script in modern English (but weave bits and pieces of Hamlet’s language in). Hamlet is, of course, a play about much more than mental health, but tackling the play from that angle gives students a way of engaging with it that is relevant and timely. They can analyze, diagnose, and propose solutions to his dilemma. While few students are likely to be the heirs of murdered monarchs, most will sympathize (or even empathize) with Hamlet’s psychological struggles. Shakespeare is interesting, ultimately, because we can see ourselves in his plays. If we give students the opportunity to look in the mirror, they can bring Shakespeare into their modern experience, and discover how the concerns of Shakespeare’s plays resonate with their own. As Emily Esfahani Smith argues (2013), “[w]hat sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans.” Through creative engagement, students can pursue—and find—the relevance of Shakespeare to today’s life.

References Konnikova, Maria. (2013). How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy. The New Yorker, The New  Yorker, September 10. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-­ of-­technology/how-­facebook-­makes-­us-­unhappy Shakespeare, W. (1979). In H. F. Brooks (Ed.), A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare, W. (1981). In A. R. Humphreys & A. Shakespeare (Eds.), Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare, W. (1982). In H. Jenkins & A. Shakespeare (Eds.), Hamlet. Shakespeare, W. (1997). In E. A. J. Honigmann & A. Shakespeare (Eds.), Othello. Smith, Emily Esfahani. (2013). There’s more to life than being happy. The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Group, January 9. https://www.theatlantic.com/ health/archive/2013/01/theres-­more-­to-­life-­than-­being-­happy/266805/

“Some Enchanted Trifle”: Shakespeare and Popular Culture in the Community College Cordelia Ross

What does it mean to teach Shakespeare at a community college? For me, it means dodging nerf gun ammunition as I watch Antonio’s men drag Prospero, who is awkwardly holding baby Miranda—a bag of flour with bow atop—to a remote location in the desert outside of early twentieth-­ century Milan, TX, because he chose to go to college and left his brother as interim mayor. I teach Shakespeare using popular culture at a community college in Texas. In fact, many Shakespeare scholars teach at community colleges because these institutions still offer tenure, good pay, some geographic mobility, and most importantly, have job openings. Teaching Shakespeare at a community college, though rewarding, and clearly fun, can also be challenging. They generally do not offer upper division courses, and, like my institution, may not even have an English major. Furthermore, while Shakespeare has always been taught at community colleges, though generally not as a single author course, the shift towards rhetoric and composition courses that arose out of community colleges in the 1990s has

C. Ross (*) St. Stephen’s Episcopal School, Austin, TX, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3_10

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also altered Shakespeare’s presence in the community college English course. Essentially, because community colleges typically offer lower division courses that focus more on the mechanics of writing, community college students do not have many opportunities to engage with Shakespeare, at least in the courses offered through English departments. This constraint combined with preconceived notions about who should, or even can, read or watch his plays has contributed to the misconception that Shakespeare is inaccessible, and even worse, irrelevant. This misconception is not exclusive to community colleges which is why, while a graduate student at the University of California, Davis (UCD), I started teaching Shakespeare with and as popular culture. Popular culture, as Douglas Lanier (2002, p. 58) writes, places immense importance on “relevance and use-value,” thus immediately dispelling misconceptions that Shakespeare has none. After graduation, I took this pedagogy with me to the University of Alabama (UA) for several years and now use it at Brazosport College, a community college outside of Houston, TX. Overall, teaching Shakespeare with and as popular culture has been wildly successful; it often appears in my course evaluations as my students’ favorite part of the course, and—to my immense relief—is easily adaptable to whatever student demographics and expectations that I encounter. For the purposes of this essay, I will focus on how I use popular culture to teach Shakespeare in the community college classroom, which, for me, means composition courses with the occasional literature survey course. Teaching Shakespeare with and as popular culture allows my students to engage with Shakespeare in ways that enables them to think critically about their own experiences and frame them within the context of a Shakespearean play. We meet course objectives while also dismantling the divide between so-called high and low culture that can make Shakespeare intimidating, particularly for students who feel disenfranchised in their own academic community because of systemic inequities. Though community colleges are not the only institutions to enroll students who have been historically underrepresented, they do see a greater number of these students. According to the Community College Research Center (CCRC), in the 2015–2016 academic year, 37% of dependent undergraduates whose families earned less than $20,000 a year enrolled in community colleges. In 2018, 55% of Latino undergraduates and 44% of Black undergraduates enrolled in community colleges as opposed to 41%

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of white undergraduates (2022,  “Community College FAQs”).1 Furthermore, nearly 50% of community college students are 24 or older, and 28% have children or other dependents; many of these students are returning students and/or are attending college part-time. About 47% of full-time community college students work while earning their degree or certificate compared to 40% of full-time students at public 4-year institutions (2021,  “An Introduction to Community Colleges and Their Students”). Sixty percent of community college students enroll in remedial courses compared to 32% at 4-year colleges (2022,  “Community College FAQs”).2 Overall, many of these students do not have strong support systems, nor generational experience within the American higher education system, further complicating their college experience, and/or readiness, which can make Shakespeare more challenging. On the other hand, community colleges also enroll many college-ready dual credit students as well as honors students. According to Christopher M. Mullin (2012, p. 5), the former program director for policy analysis at the American Association of Community Colleges, in the 2003–2004 academic year, 10% of community college students earned SAT scores between 1140 and 1600 (out of 1600). While these students may not find Shakespeare as difficult to read as those who enter needing remedial instruction, if they are dual credit students, they may find themselves disadvantaged in other ways. Dual-credit students are younger, sometimes much younger, than their classmates. In fact, in Texas, students can opt-­ out of high school English altogether if they can demonstrate college readiness, which means that community college instructors can see students as young as 13 in their courses alongside students in their 30s and 40s. According to the CCRC, in 2009, 34% of 9th-graders enrolled in a dual credit course, and these numbers can only have risen as more states cover the cost of these courses and make them available at the high school rather than community college campus.3 It is also worth noting that the increased cost of 4-year institutions compared to the still affordable cost of 1  This data has been adjusted to take into account students who enroll at community colleges that award some 4-year degrees. 2  This data represents students who enrolled in math and/or English remedial courses, not just remedial writing courses. 3  In my experience, some dual-credit students are home-school students, who elect to finish their high school requirements at community college.

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2-year institutions combined with the availability of dual-credit courses has led to increased community college enrollment. In the 2017–2018 academic year, 44% of undergraduates were enrolled at community colleges, and in 2015–2016, 49% of students who completed a 4-year degree had enrolled at a 2-year college sometime in the previous 10  years (2022, “Community College FAQs”).4 In Texas, which leads the nation in community college enrollment, 75% of students who earned a bachelor’s degree attended a community college at some point, often while still in high school (2017, “Two-Year Contributions to Four-Year Completions”). The above data presents a snapshot of the diverse experiences, ages, identities, and expectations of community college students, which is why it is essential for community college instructors to create flexible lesson plans that accommodate such widely varying class demographics. Thus, it is no surprise that I find myself teaching students who have a far greater spread of experience at the community college than at university. While the diversity of community college students can prove challenging when many struggle with reading comprehension, it can also be incredibly enjoyable, enlightening, and humorous during class discussion because of the varied interpretations this diverse body of experience brings to Shakespeare. For example, a student in their 30s who is also a parent generally has a very different opinion of The Tempest’s teen romance than a 17-year-old dual-credit student. They also tend to have strongly diverging opinions of the play’s father-daughter relationship as well. While some students may roll their eyes at Prospero’s controlling behaviors, others may sigh in solidarity. Ultimately, this diverse student body requires a flexible lesson plan when teaching Shakespeare (or any text) so that the community college instructor avoids alienating any student who feels that they cannot or should not be reading Shakespeare in the community college classroom. Which  brings me to what might be the most profound difference between teaching Shakespeare at a 4-year institution and a 2-year one: students at community colleges often have significantly limited opportunities to engage with Shakespeare in their English courses. Discounting the Bachelor of Applied Technology degree and certificates, 2-year 4  I have chosen to use data compiled prior to the coronavirus pandemic because it remains to be seen if the subsequent lower enrollment numbers at community colleges will persist once the pandemic has concluded.

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institutions generally offer associate degrees and pathways to transfer to a 4-year institution. In respect to the associate degree, this may be a student’s terminal degree should they choose to finish their education at this point. Pathways to transfer focus on what my institution calls “core completion.” A student who is core complete has met state standards for coursework determined essential for a secondary degree outside their major, and in the state of Texas, a community college student who is core complete cannot be made to retake any of these courses at a Texas public 4-year institution unless the courses are a major requirement, and the 4-year institution deems the community college course insufficient. In other words, undergraduates majoring in degrees outside the humanities are often not expected to take another literature course outside of those offered at the community college. Furthermore, because some states, including Texas, merely require a humanities credit rather than a specific literature credit to be core complete, degree seeking community college students might only complete required composition courses. English 1301 is a composition course that focuses on the mechanics of writing, generally to the exclusion of reading fiction. That leaves English 1302, which at my institution, until recently, was an introduction to literature course divided into three sections: poetry, prose, and drama. While writing this essay, however, my college has revised our objectives to align with state expectations more closely, and we now teach English 1302 as a research-based composition course with the option to include some literature. For students who wish to complete their humanities credit with a literature course, my community college offers sophomore level survey courses as well as some genre-themed courses. If applicable to the period or genre taught, Shakespeare may appear in these 2000 level courses, but for students who only take composition, English 1302 may be the only class in which they experience a Shakespeare text should their instructor choose to retain their drama module and select one of his plays. Many students and even some faculty and administration, however, do not expect English 1302 to cover any Shakespeare because it is a freshman composition course. As Richard Fulkerson (2017, p.  117) writes in his study on the purpose of composition courses in literature-based composition courses, “the writing is essentially a display of valued intellectual interactions with the relevant texts and judged accordingly…it isn’t clear whether the feedback is mainly about writing,” or about how to read the text instead. He aligns himself with Gary Tate (1995, quoted in Fulkerson,

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2017, p. 119), who states, “if we are serious about teaching writing rather than literature or politics or religion, we can —should—make the writing of our students the focus (content) of the course.” Thus, the very course offerings at community colleges can leave some to believe that community college students will not, and even should not, encounter any Shakespeare in their required English courses because they are primarily composition courses that are meant to focus more on the mechanics of writing than reading fiction. This idea is a misconception, but this pedagogical approach combined with the realities of teaching the number of remedial and other otherwise disadvantaged students that community colleges serve, does exist. In addition to institutional misconceptions, those teaching Shakespeare must also dismantle cultural ones that arose with the commodification of print culture. Ironically, as Lanier explains, the publication of the First Folio made Shakespeare a commodity of the elite even though he and his works often circulated in less affluent  spaces. Basically, unlike performances of Shakespeare’s plays, which were accessible to the working class and nobility alike, the First Folio and subsequent publications were not. Referencing sociologist Pierre Boudieu’s work, Douglas Lanier (2002, p. 22) explains “the circularity of this process: economic privilege provides access to education, which in turn provides one with cultural credentials that warrant and perpetuate privilege.” Other factors, like British imperialism, the rise of Shakespeare studies in the twentieth century, and continuing evolution of the English language facilitated Shakespeare’s association with high culture. Thus, students who do not identify as consumers of high culture might  approach Shakespeare with some suspicion. Popular culture, on the other hand, often critiques elitism, setting itself apart in its opposition to privilege in ways that appeal to many. Thus, teaching Shakespeare with and as popular culture can dispel misconceptions about who should or can read his works because popular culture appeals to people of diverse ages, experiences, and identities, and quickly makes inert any preconceived notions that only people who appreciate high culture should, can, or want to read Shakespeare. In the classroom, this can be as simple as asking “who has seen or knows someone who has seen a cockfight?” Invariably, at a community college so close to the U.S./Mexican border, where cockfighting is still legal, some admit as much. Explaining that Shakespeare’s primary audience also witnessed and even bet on the fights as well as bear-baiting next door to his theater is often my first move to destabilize preconceived notions about Shakespeare’s audience.

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Teaching Shakespeare texts as popular culture helps students understand the cultural conditions that influenced their production. As Diana Henderson (2007, p. 9) argues, “Both as performance scripts and within their dramatic fictions, Shakespeare’s plays are infused with signs of popular culture.” Macbeth’s witches, for example, allow the play to dramatize early modern anti-Catholic sentiment in much the same manner fantasy does today when it imagines a perceived social threat as a type of unreal but culturally recognizable monster. The Tempest takes inspiration from popular premodern texts that described shipwrecks and their aftermath in the age of exploration—like William Strachey’s description of the wrecked Sea Venture off Bermuda (1610)—comparable to space disaster/exploration films, like Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015), do today. I often have students read excerpts of these popular texts in tandem with The Tempest so that students understand that these concerns provided fodder for everyday conversation and were even sensationalized because of real and imagined dangers and scandal. I stress that Shakespeare’s plays were performed to audiences that ranged from the working class “groundlings” to the upper class in the balcony seats, in  locations proximate to activities like bear baiting. Also, Shakespeare did not publish his texts, which Lanier (2002, p. 58) argues suggests that he focused on providing material he understood as “ephemeral and immediately relevant,” qualities associated with popular culture. Thus, like using Seamus Heaney’s poetic translation of Beowulf (1999) so that students engage with the story as poetry as did early medieval audiences, teaching Shakespeare texts with and as popular culture acknowledges the conditions of their production. This method also challenges preconceived notions about who should or can enjoy Shakespeare, which, for many students, can feel empowering. Shakespeare as popular culture, or “Shakespop” focuses more on the social and cultural themes present in the plays, themes that oftentimes can also illuminate moral corruption within elite circles, or society in general.5 Identifying friction between characters in a play and translating how that friction might appear in contemporary society facilitates the type of critical thinking that should occur in a college classroom. This process is precisely why teaching Shakespeare with and as popular culture is so effective in a diverse environment like a community college classroom. As a type of popular culture, Shakespop “provides a shared means of expression and 5  “Shakespop” is Lanier’s preferred term in his monograph, Shakespeare and Popular Culture.

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pleasure for those who stand outside positions of authority,” which given popular culture’s mass appeal, most people believe that they do (Lanier, 2002, p.  51). How people understand where their “position outside of authority” falls differs vastly depending on social, cultural, economic, and other conditions. In a classroom that might contain people whose ages range from 15 to 45, who identify anywhere from extremely economically disadvantaged to wealthy, or who began their college career anywhere from needing remedial support to enrolling in an honors program, pedagogies that engage with popular culture help foster the sense of community necessary for a productive learning environment. When I say that I teach Shakespeare plays with and as popular culture, I mean that we read a Shakespeare play, watch a Shakespop production of it, and then produce our own Shakespop productions. This strategy deconstructs authorial hierarchy so that students understand those who translate a Shakespeare play into a contemporary production are as worthy of consideration as Shakespeare himself. For example, when we read The Tempest, we watch Fred Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956); when we read Macbeth, we watch William Morrissette’s Scotland, PA (2001). This pattern is easily replicable with many of Shakespeare’s plays, and versatile should the course wish to explore other Shakespop media like web series, podcasts, radio shows, art, music, etc. For a class that can handle larger reading loads, or seeks coverage of many texts, as in a survey, we also read texts that Shakespeare adapted from, like Michel de Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals,” which we then compare to Gonzalo’s speech in The Tempest. As mentioned above, I emphasize that Montaigne’s essay engages with sensational and popular topics—travel, cannibalism, cultural relativity, etc.—and that the translation and wide reach of his essays is much like that of a best seller today. As a scholar of premodern texts, I am sensitive to misconceptions about a text’s relevance that many undergraduates hold, and understand that unless we, as a class, can illuminate why a text written centuries previously is still worthy of consideration, students may disengage. Analyzing how Shakespeare’s works are in dialogue with other texts and events of his day highlights his relevance then, but more importantly, demonstrating how his works continue to be in dialogue with contemporary texts and events as they are adapted and reimagined highlights his relevance now. Asking students to work in small groups to write and perform a Shakespop of their own using the Shakespeare play that we have just watched, and a modern Shakespop film of it, places them within this

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continuing literary tradition, which subverts the authorial hierarchy that some students can find so alienating. It also creates a micro-anti-structure, a liminal space anthropologist Victor Turner explores in his work on religious rituals, and later theater. In this liminal space, students’ diverse social statuses as well as their own temporality (to a degree because popular culture depends on current events) lose meaning, further facilitating a communal bond that draws them together as a class, but also with anyone else who has participated in Shakespop in the last few centuries (Turner, 1982, p. 45). Lanier (2002, pp. 19–20) argues that Shakespop is worthy of study because they prompt “us to turn out attention towards broad questions about Shakespeare’s place, past, present, and future, in the politics of culture” because it asks us to consider what Shakespeare “might mean to various cultural constituencies” not only now, but then, and in the future. For example, in the age of the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, Caliban’s enslavement as well as his sexual violence inspire lively debate that often twists and evolves as we consider why Shakespeare would choose to include Montaigne’s nuanced and circumspect perspective on imperialism through Gonzalo. These debates become significant close-reading opportunities because the students realize their varying interpretations often depend on a single word or phrase, and thus, they turn back to the text. And they discover that to communicate what Shakespeare might mean within whatever cultural niche that they identify as belonging to, they must first decipher what he meant within his own cultural moment, which means they must study his language, not just his plot. Beginning this project with Shakespeare means that we spend about four 75-minute class sessions reading and discussing one of his plays. At the community college, this approach might mean that I spend a bit more time explaining what has happened in the play before opening the class to discussion. I also find it helpful to have the students read an excerpt from something like Emma Smith’s recent work, This Is Shakespeare (2020), that helps students understand major themes in the play in light of the conditions of its production. This decision helps frame the project as an investigation into how Shakespeare writes about situations and relationships that do not need to be pigeon-holed as only relevant to the Elizabethan era, academics, and those who enjoy so-called high culture. I enjoy using tools like the Oxford English Dictionary so that we learn that “weird” has etymological connections to both “strange” and “fate.” This helps facilitate discussion about Macbeth’s actions: are they the result of fate or free-will? Exploring the plethora of definitions of “tempest” not

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only reveals what the word meant to Shakespeare’s audience and readers of the First Folio, but also shows students the constant evolution of language. I like to think that these discussions and exercises encourage students to read footnotes that may explain a double entendre or a “false friend,” a word still in use that means something completely different. I may be overly optimistic, but I can confirm that after we watch and discuss a Shakespop film and students start drafting their own Shakespop, most students begin with a paraphrase. They translate Shakespeare’s language into their own, which very clearly demonstrates how well they have understood what he says, and then they further translate their paraphrase into the language they want their Shakespop to use. Oftentimes, this means there are lively and even heated discussions as they argue about words that convey more than one meaning and whether both are imperative to Shakespeare and/or their Shakespop. Having students engage closely with Shakespeare’s language as they translate the play into a production that reflects their interests requires significant critical reading skills, thus meeting a major course objective, but also requires evaluation. Evaluation can be tricky with such creative projects, particularly when students choose to reimagine the play into a performance about sensitive and personal topics. Also, in a composition course, like English 1302, in which we spend a great deal of time on the mechanics of writing and how to close-read, I need to make sure that my projects align with other lesson plans and course objectives, which a script and performance may not always accomplish on their own. So, students also write an analytical paper about their creative adaptations. This analytical paper has taken various forms depending on student demographics, career expectations, and institutional as well as course objectives. For example, at the UCD, I used this project in English  3, a writing about literature course that met one of the composition requirements for the institution. In this class, we wrote a compare and contrast analysis in the same student groups that developed their Shakespop. I chose a group paper because most students expressed interest in earning an MBA, and UCD’s MBA program requires many group papers. At UA, where students are active in the Greek system and participate in many extracurricular activities, time constraints made a group paper impractical, so each student wrote their own compare and contrast analysis. At the community college, I give more time to the project, more closely guiding students through language as mentioned above as well as providing much more structured writing time. As Marilyn S. Sternglass (2017,

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pp. 466, 480) argues in her study on the “extended years of matriculation” at open access colleges, community college students who enter at the remedial level “need to be given the requisite time” to succeed, and by “requisite,” she means more time than they would be given at a 4-year institution. This means that my Shakespeare project takes place predominantly in the classroom and extends a week for writing the analytical paper. While I expect students to work together in their groups, I understand that their lives outside of school offer fewer opportunities for unstructured time in which to complete coursework. Thus, we write our analytical papers as in-class papers, and I circulate through the room offering feedback and encouragement as they sort through their arguments and new relationship with Shakespeare. For those students who do not enter at the remedial level, I find that they sharpen their own analytical skills as they help their group mates articulate what they as a group discussed. While each paper submission should be an original and independent production, I encourage students to ask each other for help, which given the camaraderie this project fosters, they do. This expectation also satisfies course objectives requiring that they learn how to work within groups and effectively manage different personalities and skillsets. In addition to creating more time within the classroom, I also tweak the analytical paper so that it becomes an analytical reflection paper. At the community college, which has such a diverse student body with a wide range of career goals, students more acutely feel an initial disconnect to Shakespeare and their classmates, and so we write a reflection paper or thank you letter to Shakespeare. These reflections contain at least two paragraphs of close-reading, one for Shakespeare and one for their Shakespop, while reflecting on their experiences working together, the purpose of adaptation, what they learned from their peers’ adaptations, and anything else they feel pertinent. For students who feel most comfortable writing essays, the reflection paper works well, but for students who feel adventurous, the thank you letter works best. When writing a letter directly to Shakespeare, students less frequently mistake summary for analysis than they do in an essay because they understand that Shakespeare knows what he wrote, and instead, they spend more time examining the scene, plot line, theme, or characters that they developed and how their Shakespop version honors what he wrote while also feeling fresh and relevant. Many students take some time to say that they are sure he would approve because he was also writing about popular events during his time and then explain a situation in their Shakespop

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that they feel he might find humorous or particularly clever. One difference that I have noticed at the community college when teaching The Tempest is that many of the students create a Shakespop about the relationship between Prospero and Miranda, and then write a thank you letter to Shakespeare as one parent to another. I do not spend much time discussing Shakespeare’s personal life, so this experience sparks some curiosity about Shakespeare himself, and leads to some independent research as well as a sense of intimacy that contrasts greatly to many students’ tentative approach to Shakespeare at the project’s start. Often, I find these papers funny as well as insightful; some are poignant, and they give students one more chance to demonstrate their understanding of Shakespeare if their performance fell flat. I also provide a few smaller evaluative components to help scaffold and distribute the work while encouraging analysis and familiarity with other genres related to theater. For a class with a course objective to read and write a variety of genres, we read a film review of a Shakespeare film, one that I used to show clips in comparison to other performances, like Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010) or Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth (2015). As a class, we discuss how performances can differ in meaning based on blocking, cutting, and acting even when they use the same words. I also offer full versions of these films and filmed stage productions as optional viewing. Since the students are familiar with these films, they understand what The New York Times’s A.O. Scott (2010) means when he critiques Taymor’s splashiness or Manohla Dargis’s review (2015) of Kurzel’s “gorgeous carnage.” After dissecting the parts of a review, students produce their own about another group’s performance. This smaller assignment once again asks them to demonstrate their understanding of Shakespeare and adaptation and keeps them engaged in the class beyond their own performance. Should I need to spend extra time on a section of the project, or feel the class needs to focus on their reflection paper, I turn the review part into an in-class assignment in which they write a few sentences about the funniest, most dramatic, most faithful, and best class performance. Other smaller assignments include a worksheet in which they identify what scene, plot line, or theme they have chosen to creatively adapt and a worksheet about the Shakespop film we watched. This latter worksheet works well with The Forbidden Planet (1956) because we discuss how Prospero’s racism inspires Caliban to plot Prospero’s murder much like

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Morbius’s elitism creates his id monster that succeeds in destroying him. I also pair this worksheet with a scholarly article on the Shakespop film to help prepare students for our discussion about the film and its engagement with Shakespeare’s play. Finally, I include an assignment that asks students to evaluate each group members’ contribution. This last part helps alleviate any tensions students may have about underperforming classmates and helps me determine their individual participation grades, which I calculate based on attendance, class participation, and their evaluations. Nearly all the components of this project are flexible so I can meet different course objectives or, more importantly, can pivot in response to class needs. Overall, the project works well and gets students to interact with Shakespeare in a fun and informative manner. For the most part, students tend to choose amusing or comedic re-interpretations, but on occasion, and more frequently at the community college, they delve into darker themes as well. For example, one group placed Macbeth in a mental hospital for veterans suffering from PTSD.  Through visits with his doctor, his ambitious politically inclined wife, a nurse/witch, and fellow patients, they pulled together a heartbreaking story of a once sane man awarded the highest military honors for committing the most heinous of acts. Grappling with his humanity and sense of reality, Macbeth chooses to return to war, winning more medals until he is killed in what seems an inevitable self-­ sacrifice and possible attempt at redemption. In their analyses, students wrote about struggles with mental health, the war in Iraq, Russian hostilities in Ukraine, and the insidious nature of legalized violence that destroys soldiers indiscriminately. Other groups reimagined The Tempest’s Prospero and royal party as a Shane-like character against an outlaw gang in the nineteenth-century American West. They explored how power and isolation could corrupt familial bonds, whereas another group sought to expand upon Caliban’s attempted rape of Miranda, arguing that the scene was given too little space in the play, and deserved further consideration. Another performance reimagined Ferdinand as a suitor to Miranda’s bachelorette with Prospero as a manipulative producer. These were all insightful Shakespop productions that students enjoyed crafting. Teaching Shakespeare with and as popular culture is an immersive and challenging project, but in my experience, students rise to the occasion and have fun  in the process. During this project, we work through Shakespeare’s language carefully, investigate the larger thematic issues in

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the play, and then consider how those themes are still relevant and worthy of analysis centuries later. This is perhaps one of the more difficult aspects of teaching pre- and early modern literature: helping students understand why a text written centuries previously matters, and confronting misconceptions about whether they can or should be reading it. Popular culture is one way to tackle these issues, and one that I have found extremely effective. Besides, who wouldn’t enjoy watching Miranda as our next bachelorette? Particularly, when she declines to give Ferdinand—whom I’ve never liked—a rose?

Shakespop Project Components: 1. Script and Performance 2. Analytical Paper, Reflection Paper, or Thank You Letter 3. Project Proposal 4. Shakespop Worksheet 5. Performance Review or Response 6. Reflection or Process Memo

One Version of the Project Prompt: Working in a group of 4–5 students, you will create your own version of Macbeth, a mashup of plays/scenes/characters, a retelling from another character’s perspective, a modern version of a scene/plotline, or a sequel. Set your version in a different place and time and rewrite the script accordingly. You will then perform your creative adaptation in class. Past adaptations have included the Wild West, the LA ghetto, a cooking show, nineteenth-century Mississippi, the Bachelorette, and a classroom. (No double adaptations. In other words, do not rewrite a scene from Macbeth within an established story like Family Guy, etc. You may, however, adapt the play using reality TV premises if the reality show has rotating and non-specific characters). Previous performances have found inspiration in the #metoo, #yesallwomen, or #blacklivesmatters movements, but this is not required. This project will include an initial group component, and several subsequent individual ones:

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1. Group Performance (8% of final grade: 5% script/performance and 2% individual grade) a. Each group member will receive the same grade for the script/ performance. I reserve the right to give a group member a 0 if I find out that he or she did not participate. Your performance should last about 10–15 minutes and include a brief introduction. Everyone in the group must participate in the performance somehow; I leave those choices up to you. b. Dress the part—wearing costumes, if necessary,—block the scene (knowing where each person/character stands, moves, etc.), and provide props or scenery (if desired). Individual requirements will vary depending on what you decide to do, but you should adapt your original work to whatever medium you choose as fully as possible. You do not need to memorize your lines; you may read from a script. c. Each group will submit a script to D2L, but I suggest using a GoogleDoc to collaborate. The script should include all major dialogue and stage directions. Small amounts of improv are fine and do not need to be included. d. Label the script with a title, the act and scene or plotline that you chose to rewrite, your names and your character, and your troupe’s name in the left-hand corner. Basically, you are writing in a particular genre, a script, so use the formatting specific to that genre (see template). 2. Reflection Paper (13% of final grade) The paper should be 1000–1250 words long; 12 pt. font, left justified, and double-spaced. a. Each person should write an essay reflecting on the adaptation process and what you learned about the play as you adapted it; no one should have the same essay as his/her group members. b. This is a standard essay and should have an introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion with strong transitions and proper grammar. c. The reflection paper should make an argument about Macbeth and how the adaptation process helped you come to that conclusion. At least two paragraphs should perform a close reading of

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Macbeth and your production, quoting from relevant lines and analyzing correspondingly. Other parts of the paper might consider the following: i. Why did you choose the scene, characters, plotline to adapt? What thematic issue was present that you thought was crucial to understanding the play as a whole? ii. How did creatively adapting Shakespeare make you think about the play differently? How did viewing other creative adaptations make you think differently about the play? What insights did you gain? iii. What did you learn about Shakespeare, yourself, your classmates, etc., during this process? iv. What did you enjoy about the process? What did you least like? v. Would you do anything differently? vi. How did this project help you understand Shakespeare’s relevance to your life and/or the modern world? Why keep reading Shakespeare? What will we learn? …OR… a. Individually write a thank you letter to Shakespeare in which you reflect on what his play taught you. At least two paragraphs should perform a close reading of Macbeth and your production, quoting relevant lines and analyzing correspondingly. It should begin: “Dear William Shakespeare,” and end “Sincerely, name of student.” In addition to the above suggestions, consider the following questions as well: i. How did adapting his play for a modern audience help you understand his play? ii. What did you have to change for the modern audience? Why? iii. Why does his play still work for the modern audience? iv. Consider thanking Shakespeare specifically for the character that you played in your adaptation and what you learned about that character, their motivations, etc. 3. Shakespop Worksheet, Project Proposal, and Performance Responses (count as assignments).

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References An Introduction to Community Colleges and Their Students. (2021). Community College Research Center. Retrieved Jan 2, 2020, from https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/publications/introduction-­community-­colleges-­students.html. Beowulf. (1999). (S. Heaney, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Community College FAQs. (2022). Community College Research Center. Retrieved January 2, 2022, from https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/community-­college-­ faqs.html Dargis, M. (2015). ‘Macbeth,’ Starring Michael Fassbender, Awash in Gorgeous Carnage. The New York Times. Retrieved January 2, 2022, from https://www. nytimes.com/2015/12/04/movies/review-­m acbeth-­s tarring-­m ichael-­ fassbender-­awash-­in-­gorgeous-­carnage.html Fulkerson, R. (2017). Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. In Teaching Composition at the Two-Year College (pp. 109–137). Bedford. Henderson, D.  E. (2007). From Popular Entertainment to Literature. In R. Shaughnessy (Ed.), Shakespeare and Popular Culture (pp. 6–25). Cambridge University Press. Kurzel, J. (2015). Macbeth. StudioCanal. Lanier, D. (2002). Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford University Press. Morrissette, W. (2001). Scotland, PA, Lot 47 Films, DVD. Mullin, C. M. (2012). Transfer: An Indispensable Part of the Community College Mission (Policy Brief 2012-03PBL). American Association of Community Colleges. Scott, A. O. (2010). Dread Rattling Thunder! Yes, It’s Shakespeare. The New York Times. Retrieved January 2, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/ 2010/12/10/movies/10tempest.html Smith, E. (2020). This Is Shakespeare. Vintage Books. Sternglass, M. S. (2017). Students Deserve Enough Time to Prove that They Can Succeed. In Teaching Composition at the Two-Year College (pp.  464–481). Bedford. Taymor, J. (2010). Tempest. Touchstone Pictures, DVD. Turner, V. (1982). From Ritual to Theater: The Seriousness of Play. Performing Arts Journal Publication. Two-Year Contributions to Four-Year Completions  – 2017. (2017). National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Retrieved January 2, 2022, from https://nscresearchcenter.org/snapshotreport-­twoyearcontributionfouryearc ompletions26/ Wilcox, F. (1956). Forbidden Planet. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, DVD.

Choose Your Own Adventure: Embracing Student-Selected Readings in the General Education Shakespeare Course Rebecca Olson

Many students at my university—a land grant institution known for its programs in Forestry, Oceanography, and Robotics—take my introductory Shakespeare course to fulfill general education requirements. I feel it imperative that the course meet students where they are, regardless of their prior exposure to the subject or to academic conventions and, guided by advocates of a trauma-informed approach, I encourage students to take agency over their own learning, specifically by offering “choices for participation” that “help students feel some control over their lives” (Davidson, 2017, p. 14). This is especially important given that Shakespeare is an author many students have felt forced to read, typically in ways that centered whiteness. This chapter describes one of my favorite ways to center and empower learners in the general education Shakespeare course: a two-week “choose your own adventure” unit in which students select their own course content. Taking advantage of Shakespeare’s iconic status

R. Olson (*) Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3_11

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and dominant position in North American education, the unit invites students across the university to recognize the potential “real-world” impact of both individual and collective responses to literature. Collaborating with students on a course’s overall design, including its reading list, can be challenging, not only because of institutional constraints (such as requisition policies), but also because many instructors were once successful students in a different educational model. Yet the benefits of incorporating student choice can be profound, for students and instructors alike. Because student-selected readings play an integral role in my Shakespeare course, it finds momentum in students’ own personal experiences and preferences and foregrounds discovery and surprise. As a result, it feels more intimate than its relatively large size of forty and more effectively introduces students to methods central to literary studies and the humanities in general. At many institutions, the general education Shakespeare course tends to share the literature survey’s commitment to chronology and diversity of genre; at my university, for example, we offer ENG 201 (the Elizabethan plays) and ENG 202 (the Jacobean) and generally ensure that students experience both tragedy and comedy in each. Effectively a single-author survey, the Shakespeare course thus lends itself to the same kind of collaborative syllabus-making strategies that instructors of literature surveys have found productive. Chris Walsh, for example, writes about the “blank syllabus,” which has American literature survey students fill in empty spaces on the course syllabus with texts of their own selection (2018, p. 103). My own approach in the Shakespeare course is a little different: our syllabus is not collaboratively produced, but it does contain placeholders for student-selected reading. In the first three units of the ten-week course, students vote to determine which passages of the assigned play will be discussed in class. In the final unit, each student chooses for themselves the play that they will read. In what follows, I explain how the course’s attention to scenes selected by students in units 1–3 lay the foundation for the final two weeks of the class, when learning activities in the “choose your own adventure” unit reorient our focus away from close reading and toward larger conversations about Shakespeare’s canonical status. Finally, I reflect on the extent to which I have found asynchronous online instruction to be inherently supportive of these student-centered practices and the cultural examinations they promote.

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Reading Practice Over time, I have reduced instructor-led lecture and discussion in my general education Shakespeare course by two thirds; instead, I now prioritize the kind of confidence-building, “validating” activities that first-­generation advocates have identified as particularly effective at engaging and retaining underrepresented students (Kuh, 2006, pp.  66–67). Specifically, most classroom time in the first eight weeks of my face-to-face course is now devoted to peer writing workshops and to “reading practice”—sessions in which we collectively work through whichever scene received the highest number of votes. Students cast their vote by completing a multiple-choice quiz question on our learning management system course site (Canvas). The quiz closes just before the class session begins, and students earn a little credit for participating. At the start of each session of reading practice, I reveal the quiz results on the classroom’s projector screen and ask a few students to share why they voted the way they did. These conversations helpfully frame our imminent analysis by establishing a key set of questions, concerns, or enthusiasms. I then ask for volunteers to read particular characters, and we move slowly through the scene, stopping frequently at my “Pause!” or because at least one student has indicated there is something they need to clarify or want to talk about. Some students choose to act out the scene while reading (engineering majors are historically the most eager), and that gives us an opportunity to discuss blocking and other performance decisions as well. Although students have selected the scene we read together, my role in reading practice is prominent. I frequently stop the action to circle back to questions or issues already raised in class, for example (“Where else have we seen this kind of rhetoric?”), or to gauge comprehension (“That’s a fancy Shakespearean way of saying what?”). But I also make it a point to offer my scholarly expertise as a potential resource to be consulted, along with other sources of information, as we seek answers to the mysteries students themselves identify. As Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi write: “A Shakespeare classroom should be built on the expectation that students’ ideas matter, that the ideas that a group collectively generates are valuable and that searching for plausible explanations or illuminating details always leads to new questions as well as new insights to a text” (2016, p. 5). These sessions in my course are called “reading practice” and

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not “Shakespeare practice” precisely because the aim is to become better readers of complexity in all of its forms. Students consistently select scenes for reading practice that I would not have chosen as subjects for lecture. This means that we ultimately “cover” fewer of the canonical scenes and speeches that I (and many other Shakespeareans) like to talk about and instead discuss the passages that were most confusing or interesting to the majority of students in the class. At first, I felt uneasy about abandoning some of my favorite lectures, and it felt uncomfortable to be the one coming to class with only a basic idea of what we were going to talk about or why. But I have come to love puzzling through passages that I and other critics have long neglected. To that end, the course now more effectively models for students what a literary scholar actually does. Instead of taking in a polished presentation my students watch me struggle as I repeat a clause aloud, count iambs on my fingers to determine how to pronounce a name, look words up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and seek additional context by appealing to their knowledge of various subjects (one horse-loving student, for example, was able to act out and explain Prince Hal’s reported mount in Henry IV, Part 1). We argue about what lines could mean, we discuss how early modern staging techniques might impact an audience’s interpretation, and we almost always leave the classroom with a sense of shared discovery.

Choose Your Own Adventure To further encourage students to take ownership of course material, I developed the course’s final “choose your own adventure” unit. While the syllabus specifies which textbooks are required for the course’s first three units, in the final weeks of the term students are asked to procure a copy of any additional play attributed to Shakespeare and first performed in the years covered by the course; the relevant plays are listed on our course website. Because the students are reading different plays and we do not go over specific passages in class, they can choose any edition that has footnotes. I encourage them to find free texts: I offer personal copies of plays for their use and can recommend scholarly editions available as e-books from our university library. Some students know immediately what they want to read—a brother might be performing in an upcoming production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, and they want to become familiar with the play in preparation. Other students have no idea, and I

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invite them to come to my office for a quick chat or, alternately, send me an email in which they describe the kind of issues they feel drawn to and/ or the narrative genres they prefer. These exchanges are a lot of fun; I get to know students better and also gain insight about changing trends, which in turn informs my future syllabi. Students often request certain elements, battle scenes and strong female characters being the most common. They also tend to have strong opinions about the Shakespeare plays they read in high school, which helps me steer them toward a particular genre. Occasionally a student will make a powerful claim for why they should read a play that falls outside the specified date range, as was the case of an economics major in ENG 201 who was self-conscious about the fact that he did not understand references to Othello. This was not just about checking off an item on a canonical bucket list; as a Black student navigating a predominantly white campus in a predominantly white state, he wanted to be able to respond to these allusions with authority. Indeed, before I introduced this unit I had no idea how many students are disappointed—even heartbroken—when a Shakespeare class fails to include a particular play. For two weeks, then, my forty students are reading about ten—sometimes more—different plays. This means I cannot include specific multiple-­ choice questions about the plots or characters of these plays in quizzes and exams, as I do the plays we read in common. Although I sometimes include an essay question that asks students to compare a moment in their chosen play with one from an earlier course text, for the most part students demonstrate their knowledge of their chosen play through activities designed for the unit. The fact that students are reading different plays also means that I cannot rely on traditional text-based lecture and discussion when planning lessons. Our classroom activities are thus very different from those in the early weeks of the term, when, by contrast, “getting on the same page” is not a metaphor—that we will read specific passages together in class is a foregone conclusion. Initially, I thought I might continue reading practice in the choose your own adventure unit; I imagined that individual students could come prepared to share tricky passages in their chosen plays. In fact we did very little of this, mostly because I discovered there is a great deal that can be done—and arguably, should be done—when one looks up from the page. Instead of attending to specific passages, our class time in the final unit of the course is now fully devoted to more general interrogations of Shakespeare’s place in Western culture. It is important to me that students

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in this requirement-fulfilling course consider canon formation through the lens of their own experience; to consider, that is, the myriad systems that resulted in our collective analysis of works written by a white man who has been dead for 400 years. As Cassie Miura (2019) articulates, one way to better serve students (and especially first-generation students) in the Shakespeare survey is to “make visible the process of canon formation alongside our teaching of canonical works,” thereby “empowering students to vocalize and interrogate their own assumptions about Shakespeare within larger educational, cultural, and arts institutions that have shaped them” (46). In line with this thinking, I want to both validate the perception shared by so many of my students that studying Shakespeare will help prepare them for a society that privileges certain educational experiences, and, at the same time, challenge them to imagine a society in which reading Shakespeare could serve an altogether different purpose. The in-class assignments in my choose your own adventure unit provide opportunities for students to share more personal opinions and narratives than are typically articulated in the earlier units. One assignment, for example, asks students to represent their chosen play in a brief and simple comic strip in the style of Mya Lixian Gosling’s Three-Panel Shakespeare series published on the Good Tickle Brain website (Gosling, 2022). We look at their stick-figure creations in class: students are always amused by their classmates’ creativity and humor, but they also enjoy seeing patterns between the different plays they have read. It is also fun to recognize and discuss variations in the way two students reading the same play represent its plot. In small groups, students then share how they plan to respond to that week’s essay prompt: What is one element (a plot point, a character, a conversation, etc.) that you had to leave out of your three-panel representation, and how does the omission of that element change our perception of the play?

Because we take the time in class to review the work of many of their classmates, which gives them texts with which to compare their own comics, students tend to make especially self-aware insights about the decisions they made in their adaptation, even if (by their own admission) they were not cognizant of its significance at the time of creation. The three-panel comic activity and lesson, with its focus on abridgement and adaptation, sets us up well for the subsequent lesson’s collective investigation of modern theater documents. In class, I have students divide

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themselves into groups based on the play they chose to read; groups of one are encouraged to find another with which to work. I then pass out playbills featuring their plays from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival going back to the 1960s (gifted to me by emeritus theater professor Charlotte Headrick) and ask them to describe the evolution of the festival’s representation of their chosen play. In this activity, students again demonstrate expertise of their chosen plays as they explain to classmates why something about their play’s particular representation—a costume, say, or even lift-­ out quote—in the program is unusual or interesting. We often speculate about what a specific creative decision could suggest about the production’s historical moment; what, I ask, might someone who knew nothing about American history at the time of this production assume was happening? We also deconstruct the playbills for evidence of the festivals’ anticipated audience and trace how it has changed over time (advertisements for local restaurants, shops, and services are particularly rich with content to discuss). Having spent time in the first units of the class close reading Shakespearean language, students are now challenged to apply that methodology to other kinds of texts. The playbill activity helps us transition to more global conversations about Shakespeare; in the final week of the unit and course, we engage with a portfolio of readings and podcasts that address Shakespeare’s colonial legacy and ongoing prominence in the American educational system. My selections for the portfolio change to reflect recent discourse, but have often included a Folger Shakespeare Library (2015, 2016) podcast (typically “Shakespeare in the Caribbean” or “Shakespeare in India”) and a pair of Washington Post (Strauss, 2015a, 2015b) pieces debating Shakespeare’s place in the American curriculum. When I designed this unit, students could use the course to fulfill either the Literature and Arts or the Western Culture category requirements of our Baccalaureate Core, and I wanted the course to do a better job meeting one of the learning outcomes mandated by the latter category: “Interpret the influence of philosophical, historical, and/or artistic phenomena in relation to contemporary Western culture” (emphasis mine). In the past, my commitment to reading specific passages in historical context could hold me back from facilitating important conversations about the way Shakespeare’s plays continue to shape our society today. The shared language and key questions developed in this unit prove especially helpful when, at the end of the term, students reveal what they

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learned by interviewing someone whose education was different from theirs. Here is how they are asked to prepare: Find someone to interview whose high school (or equivalent) experience with Shakespeare was different from yours. For example, if you went to a large public school in a city in the United States, you might find someone who went to school in another country (or even a different part of the same country), or a private and/or small school, or who was homeschooled, or who is of a different generation. This works best if you find someone who is not in our class. In your interview, I suggest that you ask, at minimum, the following questions:

1. Did you read Shakespeare in school? 2. If so, what kind of activities associated with Shakespeare do you remember? 3. If not, what did you read? 4. What were your takeaways from the experience?

The class period in which students discuss their interviews is one of the most lively and insightful of the term, not least because the classroom seems to open up to include entirely new voices, many of them older family members. The discussion requires students to acknowledge their own positionality and consider how it may have factored into their introduction to Shakespearean drama. Building on earlier conversations, I ask how many interviews explicitly addressed race; in the past, few have, which provides an opening for an even deeper conversation about why it seems possible to take whiteness for granted when we talk about Shakespeare. Students often share specific examples of grade school assignments that made an impression, and I ask what they would do differently if asked to teach the same material. Especially because the class always includes education majors, the question is not entirely hypothetical: I want all of my students to recognize that they have much to teach me—and future instructors—about best practices. Although I find the choose your own adventure unit both effective and rewarding, there are potential downsides to having individual students select their own play. One is that the instructor would ideally be familiar with all options, so as to be able to adequately assess each student’s work and respond substantively. Frankly, the prospect would have terrified me early in my career, when my grasp of Shakespeare’s complete works was tenuous. Now a seasoned instructor who has continued to read and publish on the subject, I am more comfortable discussing plays I do not know

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well and more comfortable owning the gaps in my knowledge. That hard-­ won confidence has been useful in my efforts to center learners in the classroom; it behooves us, I think, to recognize that what we offer students changes over time, and adjust our pedagogy accordingly. That said, not all Shakespeare instructors can afford to wear their expertise so lightly; for many instructors whose identities do not align with some students’ expectations of their English professors, the need to maintain perceived authority by students who challenge it is an ongoing—and exhausting— task. One workaround to this problem would be to offer a limited number of plays for students to choose from; this would allow an instructor to maintain an element of student choice while also drawing boundaries that respect their own resources. Another potential downside to the choose your own adventure unit is that it could leave students unprepared for problematic and even triggering content: when the entire class is reading the same play, as is traditional, the instructor can more easily foreground its specific problems in class discussion and/or on the course website. This is one reason why I conclude the course with student-selected readings; I see our first three units as an opportunity to lay groundwork in the form of framing questions and problems that will help support students as they work through whichever play they ultimately choose. Like Thompson and Turchi, I find that “approaching Shakespeare’s plays through clearly articulated frames” helps prevent the class from devolving into chaos, and this is never more true than when multiple texts are in play (Thompson & Turchi, 2016, p.  11). And because students inform me of their chosen play weeks in advance, I do have the opportunity to flag content. Students choosing to read plays famous for their violence and violent representations, such as Othello and The Merchant of Venice, are typically aware of what they will encounter. However, a student choosing a more obscure comedy can be caught off guard; if I know a student is reading The Two Noble Kinsmen, for example, I will make it a point to alert them to the play’s bed trick (a device we discuss in an all-class conversation about consent in Measure for Measure). Once they have chosen their plays, I remain flexible: I ask that they let me know if they change their play (so that I can procure necessary materials for class, such as the afore-mentioned playbills), but do not require them to tell me why. After all, incorporating student-selected readings is not about giving our students something (i.e., a privilege that rightfully belongs to us); rather, it is about honoring the fact that our students are the experts when it comes to their own learning.

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Student Selected Readings and Online Education Because the choose your own adventure unit is the most overtly outcomes-­ driven in the course—it does not even attempt to “cover” content in the form of a play, but instead foregrounds the development of specific skills— I found it the easiest unit to develop for effective asynchronous online education. This speaks to the opportunities inherent in online pedagogy to successfully incorporate student choice and consequently activate student knowledge in ways that, as I now explain, better reveal Shakespeare’s role in shaping specific educational communities. Especially when compared to the many instructors who quickly adapted face-to-face classes for remote instruction at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had a lot of support when I redesigned my Shakespeare course for Oregon State’s highly-ranked Ecampus program in early 2019: I was compensated for my participation in the online pedagogy course required for new Ecampus course developers, and I built the course together with my assigned instructional designer, Lydia Shatkin, whose technical and pedagogical expertise proved invaluable, especially when it came to formatting online materials for students with disabilities. The formal training program emphasized the importance of designing accessible learning activities around course outcomes, and Shatkin held me accountable for articulating why each assignment, video lecture, quiz, discussion post, and external link prepared students to demonstrate the measurable learning objectives announced on our syllabus. Making the learning outcomes of each online class activity explicit, as required by Ecampus, was itself a way of reorienting the course to center students. For one, my Ecampus students juggle a number of responsibilities, including full-time jobs and caregiving roles; being clear about how each activity supports their learning, and thus their success in the course, respects their limited time. Furthermore, by creating a “course map” (required by Ecampus) where I could see, at a glance, each of the learning activities and resources, along with their outcomes, I was better able to ensure that the course appropriately scaffolded more complex skills, which in turn increases student confidence and success. And because all learning content—including quizzes and exams—had to be submitted to the Ecampus team months before the course began, during the term itself I was able to focus on responding to students, rather than trying to stay one step ahead of them. In short, developing the course for Ecampus forced me to more fully embrace best practices.

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Even though I completely redesigned many aspects of the course for asynchronous Ecampus instruction in order to best take advantage of that modality’s unique benefits, I made relatively few adjustments to the choose your own adventure unit. I kept, for example, the three-panel Shakespeare assignment and the educational interview; each is now the subject of an online, as opposed to in-person, discussion. Students still engage with resources that attend to Shakespeare’s colonial legacy and challenge the literary canon he epitomizes. But in the online version of the course I added an essay assignment that asks them to enter that conversation via consideration of an international production of their chosen play. Students first use the MIT Global Shakespeares video and performance archive to find a production of their chosen play (MIT Global Shakespeares Video & Archive, 2022). As with the face-to-face course’s playbill assignment, they are challenged to use the evidence at hand—which varies on the site but typically includes photographs and a synopsis—to advance hypotheses about Shakespeare’s status in a very particular cultural context. The prompt for this three-page essay currently reads as follows: To what extent do the creative decisions made by this production (from what you can tell) help us rethink Shakespeare’s status as an “export” of Western culture? The answer to that question will be your thesis. To support your thesis, you will need to answer the following questions: • How might a particular line in the script resonate differently in the context of this production? (Even if you aren’t able to watch the production, use your familiarity with the script to identify a phrase that you think would be especially significant or interesting in this production, given what you know about it.) • To what extent does one of the readings from this module either reinforce or provide a counterargument to your thesis? In your essay, make sure to tell us the name of your production and where and when it was produced. Be as specific as possible when it comes to providing an example and/or citing the play. Be sure to also cite any secondary reading or listening from this unit that influences your response.

The essay takes advantage of the student’s already established familiarity with their chosen play—it essentially asks them to locate a line indicative of the play’s original cultural and historical context so that they can anticipate its effect in a different place and time and thus put pressure on the

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idea that Shakespeare’s plays are inherently “universal.” It also asks students to demonstrate skills developed over the course of the term, including close reading, making an argument, and incorporating secondary sources. The assignment works especially well in this modality because it takes advantage of two distinguishing features of our Ecampus program: first, students’ comfort with and ready access to digital resources like the online archive; and second, the diverse interests and life experiences of the students themselves. Much to my surprise, many of my Ecampus students have chosen to prepare for this essay by watching recordings of entire productions, even though it is not required. It is possible that they would have done this even if I had assigned the play and the production, but the sense of discovery that permeates the week’s online discussion and subsequent essays feels intimately linked to their personal motivations. A few students have even used the comment section of the essay submission function to tell me a little more about why they chose or enjoyed their selected production, filling me in on details not mentioned in the essay itself. This suggests they (rightly) assumed I would not have seen all of the productions before the end of the term, and thus understood “the reader” of their essay to be someone genuinely interested in but entirely new to their topic: not, in other words, a professor performing that role. While asking them to combine skills developed throughout the term, the assignment introduced layers of student choice—they selected the play, the production, the specific passage of interest, and the secondary source most relevant to their argument. As in the Choose Your Own Adventure children’s books for which the unit is named, each decision led to another fork in the road, and the result was an entirely unique intellectual contribution. My institution is in the process of rethinking our Baccalaureate Core curriculum, which was developed in the 1990s. I will be surprised if the “Western Culture” category survives the revision, as it has few champions and much competition in the form of proposed new categories. In anticipation of this change, and also because I have never been comfortable with the fact that a single-author course could be interpreted as representing “Western Culture,” I opted this year to keep the Shakespeare courses only in the “Literature and Arts” category. That said, I am grateful that I developed the course—and developed it again for Ecampus—while held accountable for addressing the Western Culture category’s specific mandate that students interpret the influence of a historical subject on “contemporary Western culture.” The breakthrough, for me, was when I

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mentally replaced the phrase “contemporary Western culture” with “student’s own lives,” a decision that in turn led to my increasing integration of student-selected readings and other student-centered practices, all of which have contributed to a more engaging, affirming, and rigorous course, both online and face-to-face. Building more opportunities for student choice within the Shakespeare course has also felt like a way for me to honor the reasons why we are there in the first place: students at my university choose to fulfill their general education requirement with Shakespeare, as opposed to dozens of other options, because they have already had meaningful personal experiences with his plays (in high school or at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival) or because they have been led to believe that an understanding of Shakespeare will improve their futures in some way. The choose your own adventure unit allows them to earn credit for revisiting and/or exploring Shakespeare’s place in their own lives, but its activities also challenge them to recognize the ways that contemporary lives continue to be shaped by policies and ideologies that developed in the early modern period and are woven throughout his plays. Many of my students pursuing STEM majors come to the class expecting it to be a welcome break from the kind of work they do in their science or engineering courses, but because it is Shakespeare, they do not expect it to be easy. I believe those expectations make them especially receptive to thinking differently about intellectual rigor and analysis. Assuming the “Literature and the Arts” category of our general education program is retained and that Shakespeare continues to fulfill its requirement—and I have every reason to believe this will be true—I will maintain the choose your own adventure unit in both modalities, not only because of its potential to center and empower students, but also because it generates the kind of passion-led inquiries and self-aware discussions that characterize Shakespeare studies at its best.

References Davidson, S. (2017). Trauma-Informed Practices for Postsecondary Education: A Guide. Education Northwest. Retrieved June 29, 2022, from https://educationnorthwest.org/sites/default/files/resources/trauma-­informed-­practices-­ postsecondary-­508.pdf Folger Shakespeare Library. (2015). Shakespeare in the Caribbean. Shakespeare Unlimited, Episode 35, 4 November. https://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-­ unlimited/caribbean

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Folger Shakespeare Library. (2016). Shakespeare in India. Shakespeare Unlimited, Episode 40, 27 January. https://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-­unlimited/india Gosling, M. L. Good Tickle Brain. Retrieved June 28, 2022, from https://goodticklebrain.com/three-­panel-­plays Kuh, G., et al. (2006). What Matters to Student Success: A Review of the Literature. Commissioned Report for the National Symposium on Postsecondary Student Success, National Postsecondary Education Cooperative, July. Retrieved June 29, 2022, from https://nces.ed.gov/npec/pdf/kuh_team_report.pdf MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive, directed by P. Donaldson and A.  Joubin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved June 29, 2022, from https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu Miura, C. (2019). Empowering First-Generation Students: Bardolatry and the Shakespeare Survey. Early Modern Culture, 14, 44–56. Strauss, V. (2015a). Teacher: Why I Don’t Want to Assign Shakespeare Anymore (Even Though He’s in the Common Core). The Washington Post, June 13. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-­sheet/wp/2015/06/13/ teacher-­why-­i-­dont-­want-­to-­assign-­shakespeare-­anymore-­even-­though-­hes-­in-­ the-­common-­core/ Strauss, V. (2015b). Teacher: Why It Is Ridiculous Not to Teach Shakespeare in School. The Washington Post, June 13. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/answer-­sheet/wp/2015/06/13/teacher-­why-­it-­is-­ridiculous-­not-­to-­ teach-­shakespeare-­in-­school/?arc404=true Thompson, A., & Turchi, L. (2016). Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-­ Centred Approach. Bloomsbury. Walsh, C. (2018). The Blank Survey Syllabus. In G.  Dujardin, J.  Lang, & J.  Staunton (Eds.), Teaching the Literature Survey Course: New Strategies for College Faculty (pp. 102–119). West Virginia University Press.

Online Shakespeare: Beneficial Learning Experiences for Non-Majors  Loreen L. Giese

When studying Shakespeare’s plays, most undergraduates struggle with close reading, textual analysis, and interpretation. Engaging with and interpreting characterization, language, themes, imagery, dramatic devices, etc., are far outside the range of many students’ preparedness. Asynchronous online courses can exacerbate these declining levels of preparedness, can increase the intimidation students feel when studying Shakespeare, and can hinder close reading since students work individually, in different locations, and almost always at different times of the day. This exacerbation in an online course can intensify further for non-majors, who usually have less practice reading Shakespeare’s plays, reading closely, and thinking and writing critically. Thus, the lack of an immediate, collaborative, audible, and visual academic community with its weekly meetings of individualized attention and robust discussions can be more problematic for non-majors. Despite these challenges, online Shakespeare courses can offer beneficial learning experiences to non-majors. While several chapters in this volume

L. L. Giese (*) Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3_12

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discuss specific assignments for teaching Shakespeare beyond the major, this chapter is a pedagogical reflection on how the “online-ness” of an asynchronous Shakespeare course can help non-majors build confidence, overcome intimidation, and take ownership of their learning. In 2023, such a discussion is timely. While many Shakespeare teachers and students have long benefited from the plethora of digital Shakespeare texts and resources instantly available via multiple different kinds of devices, these same individuals may not have been so eager to embrace this technology with respect to Shakespeare pedagogy, whether teaching or taking a Shakespeare course. The pandemic, of course, made digital Shakespeare pedagogy a widespread practice, and, given ongoing budget shortfalls, staffing shortages, and student need for digital literacy and preferences for more flexible course schedules, this instructional change is or will be permanent for some faculty. Because of the pedagogical changes that the pandemic quickly forced on so many teachers and students, this chapter highlights some of the critical benefits I have seen over the last 24 years of teaching Shakespeare online to non-majors, especially in making students more active learners, building connections and fostering engagement of students to content, and creating communities among students and among faculty and students. Non-majors greatly influenced the design and content of my online, upper-division Shakespeare course. From the start to several years after I taught it at my American midwestern, medium-sized public university, my English department stipulated that only non-majors could take the course. The restriction they thrust upon this online course allowed me to develop my pedagogy in unanticipated ways and to see much more clearly how advantageous this kind of Shakespeare course could be for non-majors. One major benefit of online teaching, regardless of the subject, is how it lays strikingly bare one’s pedagogical goals, processes, and practices. My original plan to transfer my student-centered on-campus course of close reading—in which I thrive on vibrant and free-flowing classroom discussions and on being able to provide students with immediate attention—to an online one was more problematic than I thought. I soon realized then and still find accurate today that designing a new online course requires what I identify as a translation of content, approach, and instructor’s role. Since an awareness of audience is crucial, I believe, to effective pedagogy, designing an online Shakespeare course for non-majors made me consider more deeply than I had in a face-to-face course what exactly I was hoping students would gain by taking the course and how they would gain it,

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especially since, in 1999, Learning Management Systems like Blackboard, Moodle, or Canvas did not exist; instead, my course had to be hand coded. In this case, the pedagogy took priority over the technology rather than the technology dictating the pedagogy. These questions about learning experiences became more pressing since the upper-division Shakespeare course my home institution most often offers is likely non-majors’ first exposure to Shakespeare and sometimes their first exposure to close reading and critical thinking and writing. This lack of exposure combined with the drastic decline in students’ preparedness for college and the isolation of students working individually and almost always at different times of the day in different locations in an online course only compounds feelings of intimidation with Shakespeare’s plays. My course goals in 1999 largely remain the same in 2023: to help students overcome feelings of intimidation as they approach a play and to foster student engagement with the material through course and resource design by requiring them to be more active learners and focus on the course content (the plays, cultural and historical resources, and written student assignments). While other publications discuss specific internet and digitized sources,1 for the purposes of this chapter, I focus on the benefits that result from my online course design, resources, and practices for non-majors. In all my courses, whether in-person, hybrid, or online, I want—in the words of Marjorie Garber—to “slow down the move to context” by “redirecting attention to the language of the plays, scene by scene, act by act, moment by moment, word by word” (2010, p. 151). In line with this goal, the course design and tools are to help students focus first on the language of the plays. Since technology can be both overwhelming and distracting for students, I limit other resources to one or two a week or one or two per drama depending on the assigned play. In terms of course design, I assign a pre-specified amount of reading for each week, which averages to either two acts or ten scenes per week, and advise them to read this material in sections manageable for them. Students often report that the pre-set reading amounts help them stay current with the reading, avoid feeling overwhelmed, and allow them to process what they were reading. Though, at first, in the online course, I assigned too much 1  A few examples include H.B.  Hackel and I.F.  Moulton (eds), Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives (New York: Modern Language Association, 2015); D.E. Henderson and K.S. Vitale (eds), Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy: Case Studies and Strategies (London: Bloomsbury, 2022); and the Folger Shakespeare Library (2022).

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written work to make up for the missed face-to-face classes, I soon found that students using the course resources more than replaced this class time. As a result, I revised the number and kind of written assignments to allow for more community and exploratory thinking. The online course allows me to provide more frequent, shorter (usually weekly) assignments of one 250-word response and one 250-word reply to a student of their choosing. These writing-based discussions in asynchronous Shakespeare courses offer non-majors many benefits: students have more time to develop their ideas before responding to the prompt or replying to each other, to construct more evidence-based discussions, to slow down and write on their own schedules at their own pace, and to edit and revise before posting. Additional benefits include students seeing what their comments look like before posting them, articulating their own ideas before entering into the conversation on the platform, and trying out and receiving feedback on ideas that they can use for their final papers. A further benefit of written conversation, which often contains a more conversational tone, is that it allows for more active, customized, and student-centered learning. To be fair, writing-based discussions do have some drawbacks, such as students not having to think on their feet and sometimes writing independently of each other, which some instructors feel fall short of worthwhile conversation. Such discussions also require a lot of work of the students (since, if one requires single-authored responses and replies, they are writing two pages a week for 15 weeks in addition to the final paper) and from me (since I am grading two pages a week for 25–35 students for 15  weeks).2 However, the advantages that students point to in their course evaluations and that I can see in their work outnumber the disadvantages. Students usually point to three positive outcomes from these discussions: they mention how much they enjoy reading other students’ postings and commenting on them throughout the course; how these assignments helped them overcome their fear of Shakespeare; and how they gained more skills in time management and self-motivation. The benefit I see is the more thoughtful, substantive, and reflective work I almost always receive from non-majors in the online Shakespeare course compared to in the face-to-face course, which indicates that the online 2  E.  Sullivan identifies some shortcomings of written conversation in her discussion of distance-learning seminars at the Shakespeare Institute (2014, p.  71). Also see J.  Black (2021), who discusses the benefits of student-centered video assignments in her online Shakespeare courses.

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course can foster student engagement with the primary texts on a deeper level.3 In terms of tools, asynchronous courses can further benefit non-majors by allowing instructors to make more pedagogical resources available immediately and be more responsive to student needs and interests, thus allowing instructors to personalize course content. When I started teaching Shakespeare online 24  years ago, the very limited available digital resources made me create two of my own to increase student comprehension, close reading, and critical thinking and writing and to help students build a connection to the content of the plays: narrative summaries (detailed scene-by-scene accounts of what happens in a play) and study questions (about specific events, speeches, interpretative issues in scenes). While I discuss below in fuller detail the benefits of using these resources to help create a more democratic community of active learners in an asynchronous course, I would like to highlight here that requiring students to review these two resources helps increase student inclusiveness. Providing a scene-by-scene narrative overview helps students struggling to understand plot become more engaged with the content, class discussions, and assignments. Rather than students having staggered amounts of understanding from their own reading or from various sources they access with differing amounts of detail, the narrative summaries provide a more solid foundation on which to build our discussions since students read the same source with the same amount of detail. In addition, assigning students specific study questions further helps create community, since we begin our discussion of a play focusing on shared textual, historical, and performative issues and topics. Even if students have not formulated their own answers, starting with shared questions helps them feel part of the discussion. The level of detail for these resources varies with the complexity of a play’s scene. I ask students first to read the narrative summary before they start reading the assigned section so they can focus less on comprehending plot and more on character development, language, staging issues, etc. When I first designed the online course, digital summaries were not easily available. Although now many are available in print or online, the existing summaries or synopses differ substantially in their usefulness due to their 3  For another discussion of the benefits of written assignments in online Shakespeare courses, see T.A. Turner’s, “Shakespeare Online: Contextually and Collaboratively,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 34 (2021): 182–93.

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form or sparse content. In addition, the diversity of content in and easier accessibility to digital summaries on the web means that students often use them without the obvious and necessary need to evaluate them critically. Some provide a summary of the entire play in one long paragraph or Act by Act; neither form helps students easily understand the action in a particular scene. By contrast, others greatly reduce the action to a few sentences, which can result in struggling students missing key aspects of a scene. For instance, David Crystal and Ben Crystal’s (2022) popular online site ShakespearesWords.com provides an overall summary of The Taming of the Shrew without marking acts or scenes and offers the following summary of Act 2, scene 1: “At his [Petruchio’s] first meeting with her [Katherina], he takes no argument from her and insists on marrying her despite her angry protestations. Baptista willingly agrees, leaving Bianca’s suitors to argue their respective cases among themselves.”4 By contrast, my more detailed precis of this scene aids students’ understanding of the plot and key points in the scene regarding the relationship among the dramatic figures: Katherina’s behavior toward Bianca, Baptista and Katherina’s subsequent interaction, Baptista’s negotiation with Petruchio about his wooing and her dowry, Petruchio’s wooing strategy and Katherina’s reaction, Baptista’s choosing of Tranio/Lucentio, and the resulting need for another disguise.5 While I require students to purchase printed texts,6 with access to scholarly apparatus such as footnotes and introductions, students often do not purchase the edition I assign so that, even if I assign a text that contains a printed narrative summary (such as a Folger edition that includes one before each scene), I cannot rely on students having the required text. After students read the narrative summary I provide, they then can read the scene focusing on the words, actions, dramatic devices, characterizations, costuming, etc., that strike them and answer the study questions either as they read or after they finish a scene to help them process the content. 4  The Taming of the Shrew, “Synopsis,” https://www.shakespeareswords.com/, accessed 6 January 2022. 5  All references to The Taming of the Shrew in the narrative summary and study questions are from the Signet edition (Penguin, 1999). 6  For a discussion of the negative consequences of digital texts and devices on effective teaching and student learning, see J. Casey (2019) “Digital Shakespeare is neither Good nor Bad, But Teaching Makes it so,” Humanities 8 (2): 12, https://doi.org/10.3390/ h8020112.

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2.1 Katherina, having tied Bianca’s hands, “charges” (8) her to identify which suitor she “lov’st best” (9), striking her when Bianca says she cannot. Baptista intervenes, asking Katherina what is wrong; she claims he loves Bianca more. Gremio, Petruchio, and Tranio/Lucentio arrive. The former two bring tutors with them, and the latter brings Greek and Latin books and a lute. Petruchio immediately enquires about the hand of Baptista’s “fair and virtuous” (43) daughter, Katherina, assuring Baptista he is from a good family and presents Hortensio, now posing as Litio, to tutor Katherina in music and math. Baptista says Katherina is not for him but welcomes him for his father’s sake. After Gremio interrupts and offers the language tutor, Lucentio/Cambio, Baptista asks who Tranio/Lucentio is; Tranio/ Lucentio’s response impresses Baptista. Baptista welcomes the tutors and sends them to meet their pupils while Tranio/Lucentio officially becomes a candidate for Bianca’s hand. While Baptista wishes to walk before dinner, Petruchio wants to discuss what dowry Katherina will bring him if he can “get” Katherina’s “love” (119). Baptista offers “twenty thousand crowns” when they marry and “one half of … [his] lands” (121–22) after his death, and Petruchio then promises Katherina “all … [his] lands and leases” in her widowhood (125). Baptista decides Petruchio’s offer of marriage is a good one, and he agrees with Petruchio’s said condition that he must “well obtain” Katherina’s love first “for that is all in all” (128–29). Although he warns Petruchio to be “armed for some unhappy words” (139), Petruchio is unphased. After he brags that her words will have little effect on him, an injured Hortensio appears after Katherina beat him with his lute. To Petruchio, her behavior is proof she is “a lusty wench” (160), and he awaits her arrival. In a soliloquy, Petruchio outlines his wooing strategy, planning to contradict her and rename her according to his—not her—wishes as “Kate.” The two engage in rough-and-tumble, quick-paced verbal sparring, which leads to Katherina “trying” (217) him by hitting him and his threatening to strike her. He ignores her insults and tells her that he has her father’s consent, they have made the financial arrangements, and “will you, nill you” (264) he will marry her. Although Katherina complains of her father’s lack of regard for her to marry her to “one half lunatic” (280), Petruchio sets Sunday for the wedding day. Baptista and Petruchio ignore her preference to see him “hanged on Sunday first” (292). Since Katherina now seems to be spoken for, Gremio and Tranio/Lucentio face off to negotiate for Bianca’s hand. Since, according to Baptista, wealth will “win” Bianca’s hand (335), Tranio/Lucentio’s promise of wealth impresses him, but, to be on the safe side, Baptista wants Tranio/Lucentio’s father, Vincentio, to confirm his son’s offer. Tranio realizes the “supposed Lucentio” must now find a “‘supposed Vincentio’” to pose as his father. (401)

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Study questions have many benefits for non-majors studying Shakespeare in an asynchronous course. By assisting their comprehension, the questions encourage student engagement and strengthen their textual and visual analysis and critical reading, thinking, and writing skills, thus helping them overcome their feelings of intimidation. Additional benefits are that they help students prepare for discussions and assignments and encourage them to take ownership of their learning by close-reading content on their own. While many of my upper-division students have seen Ten Things I Hate about You, most of them have neither read The Taming of the Shrew nor seen a production of the play. As a result, my study questions encourage them to read the text closely; interpret the dramatic figures’ language, actions, and relationships; and make connections between this scene and others in the play. Act 2, scene 1 1. Please note the opening stage direction. Based on your reading of the opening exchange between Katherina and Bianca, how does she tie her hands? Behind her back? Her arms at her sides? In front of her? What would each possibility convey about their relationship? Which way would you choose to stage it, and why? 2. Katherina also strikes Bianca. How does this behavior further influence your reading of these characters and their relationship? How does this act relate to Petruchio’s treatment of Grumio in the previous scene? Do these behaviors indicate Katherina and Petruchio’s suitability? Why, or why not? 3. When Baptista intervenes, please look closely at to whom he speaks and what he says. How do you read his treatment of each of his daughters? 4. What are the advantages or disadvantages of Petruchio’s wooing strategy pleasantly to contradict Katherina? Please keep this soliloquy in mind when reading Petruchio’s subsequent taming-strategy soliloquy at the end of Act 4, scene 1. 5. Again, as in the Induction with the Lord and his companions and the servants to Sly, Petruchio gives Katherina a new identity by denying what others told her she is. He redefines her and tries to make her accept his concept of her. What is this new identity? How successful is he in convincing her?

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6. When Petruchio encounters Katherina for the first time, actors have played the scene with him carrying a whip or belt. Consider what prop/s, if any, you would have him carry. 7. As the speed of the dialogue and line lengths indicate, they are well-matched intellectually. What does the content of their lines indicate about their suitability? 8. As Petruchio exits, he says “kiss me, Kate” (317). Is this a bravado gesture? Does he kiss her against her will? Does she willingly kiss him? Once again, how would you stage this moment, and what would your staging mean? Please keep this moment in mind when reading the end of Act 5, scenes 1 and 2. 9. Before Petruchio meets Katherina, he asks her father what dowry he shall have if he “gets” her “love” (119), a condition with which Baptista agrees: “Ay, when the special thing is well obtained, / That is, her love, for that is all in all” (128–29). Yet, after Katherina and Petruchio’s verbal sparring and her wish to see him hanged rather than to marry him on Sunday (292), Baptista and Petruchio ignore her wishes. In light of their disregard, how do you interpret their earlier agreement that Petruchio needs first to win her love? In addition, she, surprisingly, remains silent while Baptista and Petruchio confirm the marriage. Given her verbal wit earlier in the play, how do you interpret her silence? 10. Katherina strikes three people in this scene. How do you interpret her doing so? Evidence of the frustration of a woman in a materialistic patriarchy? Part of the farce of the elaborate hoax to distract Sly? Evidence of the nuisance of an unruly woman? 11. Not ending the scene with Katherina and Petruchio’s departure reveals more about Baptista’s attitudes and treatment of his daughters, the monetary aspects of marriage, and definitions of gender in the play. Please compare the basis of the negotiation Baptista sets for Katherina’s hand versus for Bianca’s. How do you interpret this pattern? While I do not require students to submit their answers to the assigned questions, I encourage them to write out their responses to help develop their critical reading, writing, and thinking skills and record their reflections as they engage with a scene.

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While I have discussed the designs and the benefits of these digital tools elsewhere more fully,7 here I would like to highlight a few of their multiple advantages, especially for non-majors studying Shakespeare at a distance. Such tools allow me to be more responsive to students’ needs and course content since I can quickly add clarifications in the narrative summaries and queries in the study questions as needed, scaffold assignments as the course and student interests progress, and offer different design formats regarding the placement of the narrative summaries and study questions so that students can find the form that best suits their abilities and needs, all the while providing students with more support and individualized attention. Being able to focus and expand questions based on student interest and need helps the instructor create a community among students and between the instructor and the student. In addition, having digital resources in various formats that students literally have at their fingertips through their phones, laptops, and desktops is also environmentally friendly, economical, and inclusive; the digital forms allow students with visual impairments access through assistive technology like screen reader. A further benefit of making my own sources digitally available is that they do not become suddenly unavailable as is possible with other web resources. The very positive feedback from non-majors in the online Shakespeare course as to the helpfulness of these tools caused me to use them in all my classes for non-majors and majors alike, especially since my students struggle even more in recent years with comprehension when reading on their own. In addition to helping non-majors build connections to the plays and take ownership of their learning, online Shakespeare courses can create a more democratic community of active learners, which can be especially beneficial for non-majors. Classroom constraints and students feeling intimidated and uncomfortable can contribute to a less than democratic environment in an in-person class. For example, in my face-to-face classes, English majors, who often have more practice with close reading and critical thinking, especially when it comes to Shakespeare, usually speak first and more frequently. Their initiative can result in non-majors taking a passive role by not volunteering, by waiting for others to contribute first, and, especially for shy or intimated non-majors, being less willing to contribute 7  L.L.  Giese, “Translating Shakespeare from Scene to Screen, and Back Again: Digital Tools for Teaching Richard III,” in D.E. Henderson and K.S. Vitale (eds), Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy: Case Studies and Strategies, London: Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 159–71.

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because of the fear, as one student put it, “to look stupid in front of her classmates.” Time constraints of larger, in-person classes can foster this inequality further since they may prevent an instructor from calling on every student every class or even every week or cause an instructor to move to the next student if one is reluctant to answer. These constraints can encourage students, who know the instructor will call on someone else to keep class moving within its allotted time, to mumble an “I don’t know” response or assume the opossum position—playing “dead” by slumping in a chair and avoiding eye contact in hope that an instructor calls on someone else. The resulting silence from this student passivity contributes even more to an unbalanced number of voices, since more confident students, who are uncomfortable with silence, may blurt out responses simply to break it. Contrastingly, asynchronous Shakespeare courses—which are free from blocked time schedules and certain student experiences and participation behavior—can make for a much more democratic and active community for non-majors. In an online course, instructors can require all students to voice their opinions and perspectives, so that one has a chorus, even if each member is singing a different song, and not a few soloists. Here, students, regardless of major, think and write critically, synthesize opinions, and interpret texts collaboratively as part of a community of learners. The fact that their written coursework in an online course can more easily become part of the course’s texts to be read and considered by everyone makes the course more of an equally shared event and their participation vital to the learning of their classmates. Because students in an online course cannot as easily sit back and wait for others to speak as they remain silent, an asynchronous Shakespeare course makes students more accountable to themselves and to others. If they have not thought through the content prior to posting a response or reply, their classmates see the lack of preparation and reflection. This added awareness further contributes to the class being more of a community experience. A LMS like Blackboard can further enable non-majors’ more active participation and individual voices. Since this LMS can be set up to require students to post their own responses before viewing others, non-majors have the chance to voice their own opinions before seeing that of their classmates without being influenced by others or feeling intimated that an English or Theatre major has the “right” answer. A couple benefits of this practice is that it makes all voices of equal weight and requires students to think more critically and independently since they must articulate their

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own opinions and interpretations rather than simply agreeing with what was said before. In terms of building confidence, the physical invisibility of students—remote on their computers rather than visible in class—while forming their responses to Shakespeare’s plays helps them avoid the pressure they may feel in a face-to-face class of having to answer on the spot, overcome the fear of other students’ judgments to their immediate answers, and take more interpretative risks. For some students, the writing-­ based discussions representing them in an online course give them confidence as well; it can be freeing for students who may have personal or cultural concerns and fear that their appearances, speech patterns, race, ethnicities, or gender identifications may trigger prejudices or judgments.8 Moreover, the digital space helps break down the perceived power dynamics in a face-to-face course, resulting in the need for more student participation. Like many instructors, in face-to-face courses, I shirk the authority-bearing role regarding interpretation; my role, instead, is to highlight textual complications, raise questions if needed, and keep the conversation flowing. Yet class discussions still mainly go through me. In an online course, the digital space changes this dynamic. My role in an online Shakespeare course is more of a guide or mentor, who provides a short context introduction, resources and tools, and open-ended interpretative study and discussion board questions, monitors discussions, manages student interactions, and supports students’ creative work. Rather than my keeping class moving within an allotted time of 55 or 80 minutes twice or thrice weekly, students have to take more control of the discussion, thus further fostering non-majors’ connections to content and other students. As a result, asynchronous classes encourage them to take the initiative in starting discussions, a skill some students now lack. A few years earlier in my face-to-face courses, students would often sit and chat with each other before the class began. More recently, students often have their heads over their phones in rapt attention on their individual screens. In the online Shakespeare course, though I require students to respond to a certain number of their classmates each week, I have found that, as the course 8  K. Marciniak explores how “‘The geographical non-specificity of the online environment explodes the physical space of the classroom across borders, thus making it transborder in a new way” (2016, p. 274). For a discussion of the politics of invisibility, see her chapter, “The Disappearing Classroom: Streaming Foreigners and a Politics of Invisibility,” in K. Marciniak and B.  Bennett (eds), Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy, New  York: Routledge, 2016, pp. 268–84.

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progressed, students responded more often and more substantially to each other and initiated new avenues of exploration and topics of conversation with each other and with me. Thus, I have more student-student dialogue in my online Shakespeare courses which further fosters engagement with the content and forms connections among students. Yet another advantage for non-majors in an online Shakespeare course is the ongoing assessment which helps both foster student engagement to content and build instructor-student and student-student community. Students can have a variety of difficulties that prevent or hinder their success in an online Shakespeare course: technical problems, feeling disconnected from the instructor or students, lack of comprehension, personal problems, or falling behind. Since most LMSs allow instructors the ability to monitor which students are accessing the course materials and when, I identify in the first 2 weeks who is falling behind and reach out to them. In addition, written records of conversations allow me to gauge more easily a student’s understanding of and engagement with a speech, character, concept, or theme and intervene more quickly if a student is struggling or needs more individualized attention. Yet another benefit of online Shakespeare courses is how easily they allow for scaffolded assignments and for non-majors to receive feedback from both their instructor and classmates more frequently, more quickly, and at every stage of a multi-­ phased project or paper. This learner-learner feedback importantly makes for a collaborative learning experience rather than a correspondence course. This feedback additionally strengthens their critical reading, thinking, and writing skills as they work collaboratively on interpretation and writing. Non-majors feeling intimidated by Shakespeare especially benefit from this ongoing and timely feedback of their work. The beneficial learning experiences for non-majors in online Shakespeare courses vary, of course, depending on individual student commitment, course design, course resources, and the kinds of assignments. For instructors who, prior to 2020, saw few to no advantages in online Shakespeare courses, considered them a necessary evil, or both, teaching experiences during COVID-19—in virtual synchronous courses via Zoom or Microsoft Teams, in hybrid courses (synchronous and asynchronous), or in asynchronous courses—may reaffirm their preferences for on-campus, face-to-­ face, synchronous classes. Yet as departments reexamine course offerings and adjust to ongoing budget shortfalls, more instructors may be asked to teach Shakespeare asynchronously after the pandemic, and, if they do, I

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hope they will explore the many ways in which an online Shakespeare course can offer non-majors a supportive, integrated, and interactive community of discussion and learning.9

References Black, J. (2021). Creating Presence through Video in Teaching Shakespeare Online. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 34, 166–81. Blair, K. L. (2010). Delivering Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century: The Relevance of Online Pedagogies. In T. Kayalis & A. Natsina (Eds.), Teaching Literature at a Distance: Open, Online and Blended Learning,  (pp. 67–78). Continuum. Carson, C., & Kirwan, P. (Eds.). (2014). Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice. Cambridge University Press. Casey, J. (2019). Digital Shakespeare Is Neither Good Nor Bad, But Teaching Makes It So. Humanities, 8(2), 12. https://doi.org/10.3390/h8020112 Crystal, D., & Crystal, B. (2022). ShakespearesWords.com. Accessed January 6, 2022, from https://www.shakespeareswords.com/ Drew-Bear, A. (2021). Reflections on Reaching Shakespeare Online.  Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 34, 194–201. Folger Shakespeare Library. (2022). Accessed January 6, 2022, from https:// www.folger.edu Garber, M. (2010). Shakespeare in Slow Motion. Profession, 151–64. Giese, L. L. (2021). Teaching Shakespeare Online: Challenges, Advantages, and Strategies. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 34, 157–65.

9  For chapters on teaching literature online, see K.L. Blair, “Delivering Literary Studies in the Twenty-first Century: The Relevance of Online Pedagogies,” in T. Kayalis and A. Natsina (eds), Teaching Literature at a Distance: Open, Online and Blended Learning, London: Continuum, 2010, pp. 67–78, and I. Lancashire, “Digital Pedagogy: Taming the Palantiri,” in T.  Kayalis and A.  Natsina (eds), Teaching Literature at a Distance: Open, Online and Blended Learning, London: Continuum, 2010, pp. 79–86.  For a list of resources on teaching Shakespeare digitally whether asynchronously or synchronously, see L.L.  Giese, “Teaching Shakespeare Online: Challenges, Advantages, and Strategies,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 34 (2021): 157–65. See also, C.  Carson and P.  Kirwan (eds), Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, and D.E.  Henderson and K.S.  Vitale (eds), Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy: Case Studies and Strategies, London: Bloomsbury, 2022, which contain helpful essays discussing pedagogy in different kinds of digital Shakespeare courses and units. For a discussion of teaching Shakespeare in a blended course, see A.  Drew-Bear, “Reflections on Teaching Shakespeare Online,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 34 (2021): 194–201.

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Giese, L. L. (2022). Translating Shakespeare from Scene to Screen, and Back Again: Digital Tools for Teaching Richard III. In  D.  E. Henderson & K.  S. Vitale (Eds.), Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy: Case Studies and Strategies (p. 15971). Bloomsbury. Hackel, H. B., & Moulton, I. F. (Eds.). (2015). Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives. Modern Language Association. Henderson, D.  E., & Vitale, K.  S. (Eds.). (2022). Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy: Case Studies and Strategies. Bloomsbury. Lancashire, I. (2010). Digital Pedagogy: Taming the Palantiri. In T.  Kayalis & A. Natsina (Eds.), Teaching Literature at a Distance: Open, Online and Blended Learning (pp. 79–86). Continuum. Marciniak, K. (2016). The Disappearing Classroom: Streaming Foreigners and a Politics of Invisibility. In K.  Marciniak & B.  Bennett (Eds.), Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy (pp. 268–84). Routledge. Shakespeare, W. (1999). The Taming of the Shrew (R. B. Heilman, Ed.). Penguin. Sullivan, E. (2014). Internal and External Shakespeare: Constructing the Twenty-­ First-­Century Classroom. In C. Carson & P. Kirwan (Eds.), Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice (pp. 63–74). Cambridge University Press. Turner, T. A. (2021). Shakespeare Online: Contextually and Collaboratively. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 34, 182–93.

Online Shakespearean Role Playing Jennifer Black

Introduction and Rationale “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” (As You Like It, II.vii.145–156). Jaques’ famous lines, written in 1599, draw a powerful comparison between the theater and daily life in early modern England. The different roles that he describes in the rest of the “seven ages of man” monologue—from infant to lover to old man—are not only parts that actors portray on the stage, but also semi-scripted roles that men like Shakespeare and his contemporaries would play throughout their normal lives. This blurring between deliberate performance and unconscious role-playing is part of what has made Jaques’ speech so memorable throughout the centuries: looking at our own lives through the lens of theater helps us recognize and revise the roles we are asked (or choose) to play. Even with his legendary powers of imagination, Shakespeare could never have envisioned all the different kinds of “stages” that have been invented in the centuries since his death. Students living in the twenty-first century can see his plays performed on stage, but also on television, the

J. Black (*) Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3_13

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movie screen, their computers, their smartphones, and even their watches. Moreover, they can play a dizzying variety of roles in the physical world, but also in the virtual world through video games, social media, and technology-­enabled interaction of every kind. Modern college students might read or hear Jaques’ words with an even greater understanding of how complex and demanding the stage of life might be than Shakespeare’s audience did, and their awareness of the roles they play can make them primed to benefit from approaches to studying Shakespeare that allow them to explore ways to play different parts. Regardless of their major, students who engage in Shakespearean role-playing can gain insights into their own personal and professional lives, as well as empathy for the situations and experiences of others. Current Shakespeare pedagogy for the face-to-face classroom often embraces performance and role-playing of many kinds. Ralph Alan Cohen’s ShakesFear and How to Cure It (2007, 2018) offer performance activities for face-to-face classes related to every Shakespeare play and stresses the importance of staging scenes: “The best way to remind students of the stage origins of Shakespeare’s works and to let them enjoy the dynamics of an Elizabeth stage is to turn your classroom into a theatre” (37). Cohen urges instructors to let students play with Shakespeare through different performance choices through short scenes, often the same scene performed in several different ways. He encourages the use of costumes and props to help students see the interpretive possibilities inherent in Shakespeare’s texts. For example, he offers the suggestion to bring clothing into class and let students experiment with “making twins” for A Comedy of Errors using students who look alike and then students who don’t (126–127). Perhaps the fiercest champion for the kind of performance-based approach to teaching Shakespeare that Cohen advocates is the Folger Shakespeare Library, which holds workshops, provides lesson plans, publishes resources, and encourages collaboration among teachers around the country in their efforts to get students “speaking the language of the text” and “collaborating and creating with one another” (Folger Shakespeare Library, n.d.-b). Most of the nine “essential practices” of the Folger Method of teaching Shakespeare are heavily based on performance, including students acting out scenes ranging from two lines to 20 minutes and more (Folger Shakespeare Library, n.d.-a). Edward Rocklin’s scholarship, including his excellent book Performance Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare (2005), also offers detailed suggestions

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for getting students on their feet and into Shakespearean roles through physical actions, the use of props and gestures, and dramatic reading of the plays. Rocklin focuses on an “inclusive idea of ‘performance,’” that goes beyond planning and acting out scenes by “transforming concepts and practices originally developed for the literary study of plays into tools for illuminating that play’s performance potentials” (Rocklin, 2009, p. 79). The exercises and activities he suggests emphasize the importance of helping students explore different performance choices, using “actor-like engagement” to translate small details of the text into visible actions on the classroom stage (Rocklin, 2009, p. 80). Rocklin’s approach encourages students to “read as experimenters, asking not only ‘What do these words mean?’ but also ‘What do these words do?’ and “What can these words be made to do?’” (Rocklin, 2005, xvi). By “reading the playtext as script” and then trying out “multiple, conflicting, and even contradictory performances,” Rocklin argues that students are able to see and evaluate the different possibilities inherent in Shakespeare’s words and therefore come to deeper understanding of the texts (Rocklin, 2005, pp. 73–75). The consensus among these scholars and groups seems to be that performance-­based and role-playing approaches to Shakespeare are essential, whether those approaches include physically acting out lines and scenes, reading out loud, or experimenting with different performance options. By helping students bring the text to life in their minds and bodies, performance-based pedagogy lets students have more fun, engage more deeply with the Shakespearean text, and understand more of the possibilities inherent in the lines and characters on the printed page. The research about using performance-based teaching in the physical classroom is rich and abundant, but resources and training about how to use these methods online are very limited, partly because many college instructors prior to 2020 had very little online teaching experience. This became an obstacle when most colleges and universities abruptly pivoted to online course delivery because of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Marsicano et  al. (2020), nearly 1400  US colleges and universities shifted to fully online instruction during the month of March 2020. Many faculty were unprepared for this move due to lack of technology access, limited experience with online tools, unfamiliarity with learning management systems, and minimal interaction with technology support services at their institutions (Brooks & Grajek, 2020). Perhaps more importantly, many faculty (over 40–50% in a survey conducted by Brooks and Grajeck in 2020) did not believe that online teaching could be effective in helping

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students learn. This lack of preparation and skepticism about online learning made it a very difficult transition for many teachers and students. In a study of over 700 college and university teachers’ experiences during the pandemic, Scherer et  al. (2021) found that teachers with limited or no online teaching experience were much more likely to lack confidence in their ability to teach online or create effective online presence, while those who had a strong sense of self-efficacy and felt they created effective online presence almost all had some online teaching experience prior to the pandemic (9). The pandemic’s effects on higher education highlight the need for instructors to have flexibility in their teaching methods and to be able to use effective pedagogical approaches in different modalities. So how might all this performance-based pedagogy apply to the online Shakespeare classroom? How can an online course foster the kind of meaningful role playing and performance that the Folger Library and others advocate? Using the same face-to-face approaches in synchronous video meetings—through Zoom or other technology—is one viable option, especially since it requires fewer adaptations for novice online instructors. But the current limitations of video meetings make it difficult for students to effectively interact in many kinds of activities, such as choral readings or on-their-feet performances. Reading through scenes on Zoom does not replace the experience of exploring and polishing performance for others. So simply getting students online at the same time doesn’t solve the problem. Moreover, synchronous video often isn’t the best option for students with limited access to fast internet, complicated living arrangements, caregiving responsibilities, or variable schedules. Many students need the flexibility that asynchronous online courses offer, and many others appreciate having time to collect their thoughts instead of being “on the spot” in synchronous discussions. The popularity of asynchronous online learning suggests that many students want to have that option available to them. However, asynchronous learning doesn’t seem to easily lend itself to the kind of active and collaborative learning that Rocklin and Cohen prescribe. The stereotype of an asynchronous online literature class has students passively watching videos or taking multiple-choice quizzes over assigned readings, with little meaningful interaction. The discussions that do exist might follow a predictable post and response format that bears only a slight resemblance to meaningful conversation, with students answering questions about the text and then congratulating each other on their answers. Not only can this style of online learning be lonely and

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isolating, but it also deprives students of the chance to engage in the kinds of performance and role-playing activities that can greatly enhance their understanding and enjoyment of literature. How, then, do we translate the suggestions that Rocklin and Cohen give to the online classroom? How can students collaborate and create with each other if they are not even online at the same time? Fortunately, asynchronous online learning offers other ways to get students on their feet, trying on different roles and seeing the range of possibilities that Shakespeare’s texts can offer. The goal of this essay is to share some ideas for performance and role-playing specifically tailored to the asynchronous online classroom. These activities can be successful with a broad range of students, but were specifically designed for my online general education Shakespeare class at a large public university, a freshman-level seminar focused on critical thinking and oral communication. Students come into the class from many different majors, with a broad range of experience with Shakespeare, ranging from a few with years of experience acting in plays to the vast majority who read a play or two in high school. Most have seen maybe one or two film versions of Shakespeare, but few have seen— much less engaged in—live performances. Students in my online Shakespeare class engage in some typical online course activities, such as reading quizzes, analytical discussion boards, and reflective writing, but they also get the opportunity to “try on” and explore the different characters they are studying in through a variety of different role-playing activities. Through video role-playing with Macbeth, imaginative text and video role-playing with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and workplace-focused role-playing with The Winter’s Tale, students learn how to “play” with Shakespeare’s characters, but also how to work together to explore some of the myriad possibilities for interpretation that the plays contain. This essay describes these different approaches to role-­ playing in the online Shakespeare classroom, connects them to pedagogical theory, and explains the benefits that students and I have seen as they have engaged with the texts and each other through the various activities.

Video Role-Playing with Macbeth The first play we tackle in the class is Macbeth, partly because it is easily accessible to novice Shakespeareans, with its single plot and defined characters, but also because, as Emma Smith (2019) explains, the play demonstrates “the distinctly Renaissance project to investigate the human mind,

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and a curiosity about the causes and explanations for feelings and behaviors” (239). In short, Macbeth presents students with complex characters engaging in actions that lend themselves to deep exploration. To this end, students familiarize themselves with the plot and characters by watching a film version of the play and taking a quiz on the basics, then spend the next part of the unit in close reading and analysis of the play’s themes and events. Once they start to feel comfortable with their understanding of the play, they are ready to start on the performance assignment: creating their own translation and video of one of the play’s scenes (See Assignment 1). This assignment comes in three parts: (1) translation, (2) performance, and (3) response. Having all three is essential, since students have to understand Shakespeare’s text in order to effectively perform it, and performances work best when there is a real and responsive audience. The three-part structure allows for feedback but also encourages students to think carefully about their audience and how others will experience their performances. I realize that the choice to have students rewrite the scene in their own words is a controversial one, as it violates the rule that the Folger Library (among others) has of getting students “speaking the language of the text” by performing Shakespeare’s plays in the original language. But my assignment asks them to interact closely with that language in the way that actors would in preparation for a role: reading and re-reading to understand the meaning of each line and translating that meaning through word and action. Performing the scene in their own language allows them to focus on that meaning and even improvise if they want to as they try to communicate it to their classmates. As Randal Robinson (1989) explains, “students can communicate with one another by sharing the original compositions that they produce in their study of Shakespeare’s language” (6). In the online classroom, using translation assignments like this helps to ensure that students really wrestle with the text but also gives them confidence in their own understanding of its meaning. The biggest challenge I’ve seen with the script is that students often stay too close to the original language—which is often a sign that they don’t understand it—or they create translations that don’t sound natural or original. To address these, I often have students practice translation using some of the exercises from Robinson’s Unlocking Shakespeare’s Language (1989) before they take on a whole scene. I also share excellent samples from previous students with them, using translations from a different play so that they don’t preclude them choosing any Macbeth scene

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for their own assignment. At first, I worried a lot about students copying from No Fear Shakespeare or other online translations, but the requirement for the scene to be in a specific setting and situation seems to discourage that kind of copying. Instead, students have surprised me with their creativity and humor as they have translated scenes into language appropriate for settings like sorority houses, mobster meetings, elementary school classrooms, and corporate boardrooms. Their work in writing the script helps them start making thoughtful decisions that end up enhancing their videos in the next part of the assignment. Video performances offer online students the chance to embody Shakespeare’s characters in much the same way they would do in class, but with the freedom not only to re-do a scene if they don’t like how it turns out, but also to take advantage of the resources they have at home, especially friends and family. This assignment turns students not only into actors, but also into directors as they have to decide where and when the scene will take place, who will play which roles, and how the scene will be staged. It allows them a range of options depending on their preferences and the resources available to them. They get real-life experience dealing with the constraints of space and resources that accompany performance and developing innovative solutions within those constraints. As Rocklin (2005) explains in support of his performance-centered approach, “the model offers students the opportunity to learn how the script of a Shakespeare play is a cue for invention and how they can accept the invitation it offers them to collaborate in reinventing the play” (350). The collaboration that takes place for my online students is often not just with their classmates, but also with those in their lives outside of school. Some students choose to play all the roles themselves, using costumes and voices to differentiate the characters; some use dolls or stuffed animals to represent other figures in the scene as they fill in the voices or actions; most involve parents, siblings, roommates, partners, or friends in filling the other roles. They are able to blur the sometimes-sharp distinction between school life and the rest of life by sharing their learning with the people and spaces around them. In doing so, they engage in what Paulo Freire (1970) calls “authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, [which] does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication” (77). In communicating with their friends and family in real-life settings, students get the chance to create connections between the scenes they are studying and the world around them.

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Many times students will choose the same scene that their classmates have chosen, but this ends up being a benefit to the class, since the performances allow them to see some of the different performance options inherent in the same scene, which Cohen and Rocklin both emphasize. The response element of the assignment helps students to articulate the differences they see and how the performances enhance their own understanding. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, the video exchanges help create “social presence” in the online classroom, allowing students to be part of a community of Shakespeare learners who use their performances to connect with each other and with the literature they are studying (Black, 2021, p. 173).

Imaginative Text and Video Role-Playing with A Midsummer Night’s Dream After our foray into Shakespearean tragedy with Macbeth, we move into the world of comedy with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With its multiple plots and supernatural characters, this play offers new challenges for students, so our role-playing activities try to help them sort through the complex elements of the play and make sense of them. Again, students watch a complete film (or listen to a complete audio performance) of the play and explore the text through close reading and reflective writing before they tackle the next role-playing assignments. As valuable as scene performances are, they are only one way that students can use role-playing to get inside the heads of Shakespeare’s characters, to experience what philosopher Martha Nussbaum (1997) calls “narrative imagination,” which she describes as “the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so place might have” (11). Nussbaum explains that this capacity is “essential to any responsible act of judgment” for students in the modern world. So the second major assignment in our class asks students to move from the director’s role into the author’s role by rewriting some of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in an original short story, then performing that story on video for the class (See Assignment 2). Rewriting the play as a short story asks for a different kind of role-­ playing from the previous translations and videos. It is in the same spirit as the Hogarth Shakespeare novel series, like Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl

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(2016)—a modern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew—and Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016)—a re-imagining of The Tempest, which borrow liberally from Shakespeare while creating clever and original literary works. Like these novels, the students’ short stories ask them to internalize Shakespeare’s plot and characters and make them their own. They have to go beyond just understanding the events of the play to really explore the psychology of the characters and the choices that they make. Like Shakespeare, who drew on existing texts as inspiration for his own creative writing, students in the online class use A Midsummer Night’s Dream as their starting place, but also pull on their own culture and experiences to re-imagine the text. They transpose Hermia and Helena into a high school basketball team, describe Puck as a mad scientist or class clown, recast Demetrius and Lysander as hopeful dogs in a pet store, or tell new episodes of Batman or X-men stories using Shakespearean plots. They wrestle with the ethics of a permanent drug on Demetrius’ eyes, of Titania losing her beloved boy, or of Hippolyta accepting her fate as Theseus’ wife, and they often choose to change those events in their own versions of the stories. Students get to modernize relationships, swap characters’ genders, or even imagine how parts of the story might play out in an interplanetary world of the future. The biggest challenge in these short stories is usually scope: some students try to tell too much of the plot and end up summarizing instead of telling a fully-formed short story. Again, seeing examples from former students helps a lot, as does a reminder to focus on a single character or moment as the basis for their story. Knowing that they will be turning these written stories into oral performances also seems to help many students revise for conciseness, as well as for dialogue and description that will help them bring their stories to life. Taking on the role of storyteller in their video performances requires a different kind of acting from students than their previous performances. As with the first project, they have to work within the constraints of their own resources, finding props and costumes and furnishings for the scene that reinforce the mood and message they are trying to convey. Some of the storyteller characters in Shakespeare—like the Chorus in Henry V or Time in The Winter’s Tale—can serve as a model for them, but students also find inspiration in their favorite YouTube and TikTok videos as they think about how to effectively tell their stories. While some are tempted to merely read the story they wrote, many use different voices for different characters and dramatize their performances to bring their stories to life.

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Again, the responses are an important element of the assignment, since students know they will have an audience for their performances and will be that audience for each other. In watching each other’s performances, they recognize the strengths and weaknesses of their own videos but also see that there are many effective ways to tell a good story. They again see the range of possibilities inherent in Shakespeare’s characters and plots, and they feel connected to their classmates through their shared vulnerability in performing for each other.

Workplace Role-Playing with The Winter’s Tale The third play we tackle in the class—The Winter’s Tale—is the most challenging for students, since it is usually unfamiliar to them and blends elements from tragedy and comedy in ways that are sometimes hard for them to follow. Moreover, the court setting and emphasis on monarchy often makes the play seem very far from their lived experience. So our third role-­ playing assignment attempts to help them focus on elements of the play that might transfer to their own lives, especially as workers who are exposed to a range of different leaders in their workplaces. (See Assignment 3). Randal Robinson (1989) argues that studying Shakespeare can have personal benefits for students: High school and college students alike are eager to find their places in society–to know where, exactly, they fit in–and they want to interact dramatically with one another, to express and clarify their own motives, to learn about the motives of others, and to analyze the major problems that commonly arise in human relationships. Through a number of activities, students can make the study of Shakespeare's language a means, a prologue, or an accompaniment to their pursuit of immediate social goals. (6)

Similarly, Laura Turchi and Ayanna Thompson (2013) have urged educators to make sure that Shakespeare is “read with purpose, spoken, embodied, and made relevant” in the literature classroom (34). Instead of having students repeat the teacher’s opinions about the plays or—even worse—fill out worksheets with “one clear and correct answer,” they argue that a “teacher’s one goal [might] be to create students who find pleasure in wrangling a complex text — students who may not necessarily be enthusiastic about Shakespeare but who enjoy working through a difficult (and perhaps distant) text” (35). This role-playing activity takes a very different form from the other two, but it is often one of the students’ favorites,

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since, as Robinson suggests, it makes the play feel very relevant to their own lives. Moreover, it does what Turchi and Thompson advocate: the assignment asks them to wrestle with the text by evaluating Shakespeare’s literary leaders through a modern-day lens. Most of the students have some experience with performance reviews or workplace evaluations, and almost all of them know what it’s like to have a boss that is hard or easy to work with. My concern in planning this assignment was that they would all choose the same characters to focus on, but instead they tend to bring a wide variety of different characters into the discussion and use lots of specifics from the play to support their judgments. Many of them mention their own experiences with (or as) leaders at work, and they have strong opinions about the leaders they are evaluating. After deciding which leader from The Winter’s Tale to evaluate for the first part of the discussion, the real role-playing part of the discussion comes in the second part, where students have to take on the role of a leadership coach working with each of the characters their classmates have identified as leaders. While their first posts are more descriptive of the characters as they are, their second posts allow them to think about how they might interact with these characters and try to influence them. Their perspectives as “coaches” helps them move beyond a simple binary of good or bad characters to see the room for improvement and growth in all of the leaders they explore. As Sir John Whitmore (2017), a pioneer in the field of performance coaching explains it, “coaching is unlocking people’s potential to maximize their own performance” (12–13). It requires seeing the possibilities in each leader, not just criticizing their mistakes. Students therefore have to look at the characters in the play with empathy and confidence in their ability to change for the better. The third part of the discussion brings the play even more directly into students’ own lives as they think about how to apply the lessons it teaches about leadership to their roles as leaders or as followers of specific leaders. This enables them to do what Robinson (1989) encourages: “place [Shakespeare’s] language within the context of their own lives and use it to make discoveries about themselves” (6).

Conclusion The online “stages” where many of today’s students act out their roles as learners are different in obvious ways from the stages where Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. They are also different from the face-to-face

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classrooms for which much contemporary Shakespeare pedagogy was developed. But these are not differences of “less than”: the online Shakespeare classroom does not have to be a poor substitute for in-person interaction or a lonely space for isolated study of texts. Instead, it can offer vibrant opportunities for students to try on Shakespeare’s characters, explore his stories, apply ideas from his plays, and engage in productive play as members of a community of learners. By taking advantage of the role-playing opportunities that asynchronous technology allows, students can engage with Shakespeare and with each other in productive and enjoyable ways.

Assignment 1: Macbeth Scene Translation and Video Purpose This assignment addresses the following course learning outcomes: • Apply a range of critical reading strategies to understand and interpret Shakespeare’s plays. • Share your interpretations of the content and style of Shakespeare’s texts with others through writing, speech, and performance. Description In this project you will adapt a scene from Macbeth into contemporary language and a specific place and time. You will script, perform, and video your chosen scene. Requirements • Script should be for a video that will be 3–5  minutes long and uploaded to the internet (e.g., Panopto, Vimeo, or YouTube). • You should have a major speaking role and should appear in the video. • Your scene must contain the same general plot and characters as the original scene. • The translation must be your own, not borrowed from any other source: It should sound like you. • The language must be clear and easy to understand and should be appropriate to the situation you have chosen. • The video must demonstrate that you have thought carefully about the scene and its meaning.

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Part 1: Script (See Samples in Course Site) 1. Decide which section of which scene you will focus on (probably only a small part of a scene—enough to create a 3–5 minute video). 2. Decide the specific time and/or place you will set your scene. 3. Decide whether you will play one role or multiple roles and whether you will ask friends or family members to help you. 4. Rewrite your scene into your own language by looking up unfamiliar words, summarizing the meaning of each line, then adapting it to fit the setting you have chosen. 5. Submit your script for feedback, along with an explanation of the setting and actors you will use. Part 2: Video and Responses . Block (plan each character’s movement) the scene. 1 2. Practice, practice, practice. 3. Record using your smartphone, laptop, or digital video camera. 4. Edit as necessary. 5. Upload to the internet (using a repository like YouTube or Panopto that allows for captions). Make sure to check the closed captions to be sure they accurately reflect the audio. 6. Submit link to discussion forum. Watch your own video. 7. Respond to at least two classmates’ videos by letting them know what you liked best about their scripts/videos, what their videos taught you about the play, and what you learned about effective performance from watching.

Assignment 2: A Midsummer Night’s Dream Story and Video Part 1: Written Short Story Tell a story that uses some of the plot and characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as inspiration for your own creative reinterpretation. Your story should bear a noticeable resemblance to the plot and characters of Shakespeare’s play. But your version of the story should be unique and different; it should help us see new possibilities in the play. You can change as many details of the plot as necessary to fit your vision of the story. For

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instance, you can change the age, gender, race, ethnicity, etc., of the characters, as well as the order of plot events or even the ending. You can leave out parts or change them significantly to communicate the message you see in the play. Requirements 1. Story must contain at least one character and some easily identifiable plot elements from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 2. Must be at least 750 words and include a clear conflict, well-defined characters, and a plot with a beginning, middle, and end. 3. Must demonstrate that you have thought carefully about the Dream character(s) and their motivations and perspectives. 4. Should show creativity as well as careful reading of the play. 5. Should be a story with narration, description, and dialogue (NOT a script). 6. Must show awareness of your audience (your classmates and instructor). 7. Submit your story for feedback.

Part 2: Short Story Video and Responses



1. Prepare a 4–7 minute video of you telling your revised story to your classmates. It can be a video of you speaking directly to the camera or can be a voice-over with visuals. Think about what might make your story most effective and interesting for your listeners. In addition to the elements of conflict, characters, and plot, oral storytelling relies on the delivery methods of the storyteller: (a) Voice: Intonation, pitch, and volume help define characters and create tension. (b) Visual elements: Gestures, eye contact, facial expressions, posture, etc. (c) Pacing: Speeding up or slowing down helps to control dramatic tension. Effective pauses can emphasize a line, a transition, or an emotion. (d) Staging: Use costumes, props, sound effects, graphics, or other tools.

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2. Upload your video to YouTube or Panopto and make sure that the closed captions accurately reflect the audio. 3. Then post the link in the discussion forum. Remember to watch your own performance. 4. Respond to at least two classmates’ videos by letting them know what you liked best about their scripts/videos, what their videos taught you about the play, and what you learned about effective oral communication from watching.

Assignment 3: Evaluating Leaders in The Winter’s Tale Part 1: Leadership Analysis The Winter’s Tale is full of characters who are leaders by virtue of their rank and status or because of their skills in influencing other people. Each leader uses his or her own unique style, which comes with its own strengths and weaknesses. For your first post in this discussion forum, you should follow these steps to evaluate one leader in the play. Imagine that the character is applying for a job or being evaluated for a promotion and explain why you think they should or should not be selected. 1. Choose one character from the play that you think is a leader (whether a good one or a bad one) and explain why you think so. 2. Share at least two quotes or specific moments from the play that illustrate the character’s leadership style and how it affects others. 3. Do you think the character is an effective leader? Should they be hired or promoted? Why or why not? Part 2: Leadership Coaching Reply to three classmates’ posts by Thursday at 11:59 PM (100+ words for each response): Imagine that you have been hired as a leadership coach to work with the character that your classmate wrote about. Write a letter to the character with your analysis of their leadership style. What would you identify as the strengths and weaknesses of this character’s leadership

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style? (And yes, you must point out at least one strength and one weakness). What recommendations would you make for how the character can become a better leader? Part 3: Application Reply to at least two people who responded to your post by sharing your thoughts about their advice and what these characters teach you about leadership in your own life. What does the character’s leadership approach suggest to you about the kinds of leaders you should support, about how you would like to respond to leaders’ actions, or about the kind of leader you want to be.

References Atwood, M. (2016). Hag-Seed: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest Retold: A Novel. Hogarth. Black, J. (2021). Creating Presence through Video in Teaching Shakespeare Online. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 34, 166–181. Brooks, D.  C., & Grajek, S. (2020). Faculty Readiness to Begin Fully Remote Teaching. Educause Research Notes. Retrieved July 9, 2022, from https://er. educause.edu/blogs/2020/3/faculty-­r eadiness-­t o-­b egin-­f ully-­r emote-­ teaching Cohen, R.  A. (2007, 2018). ShakesFear and How to Cure It: The Complete Handbook for Teaching Shakespeare. Bloomsbury. Folger Shakespeare Library. (n.d.-a). The Folger Method: A Revolutionary Way to Teach and Learn Complex Texts. Folger Teaching. Retrieved July 9 2022, from https://teaching.folger.edu/the-­folger-­method/ Folger Shakespeare Library. (n.d.-b). Teaching Modules. Folger Teaching. Retrieved July 9, 2022, from https://www.folger.edu/teaching-­modules Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Seabury Press. Marsicano, C., Felten, K., Toledo, L., & Buitendorp, M. (2020). Tracking Campus Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic. APSA Preprints. Cambridge Open Engage. https://doi.org/10.33774/apsa-­2020-­3wvrl Nussbaum, M. (1997). Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Harvard University Press. Robinson, R. (1989). Unlocking Shakespeare’s Language: Help for the Teacher and Students. National Council of Teachers of English. Retrieved July 9, 2022, from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED297324 Rocklin, E. L. (2005). Performance Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare. National Council of Teachers of English.

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Rocklin, E. L. (2009). Stand And Unfold Your Self’: New Moves for Exploring Hamlet. English Journal, 99(1), 79–84. Scherer, R., Howard, S. K., Tondeur, J., & Siddiq, F. (2021). ‘Profiling Teachers’ Readiness for Online Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Who’s Ready? Computers in Human Behavior, 118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. chb.2020.106675 Smith, E. (2019). This Is Shakespeare. Penguin Random House. Turchi, L., & Thompson, A. (2013). Shakespeare and the Common Core: An Opportunity to Reboot. Phi Delta Kappan, 95(1), 32–37. Tyler, A. (2016). Vinegar Girl: A Novel. Hogarth.

“We Must Follow the Leaders”: Shakespeare Beyond the Classroom Sarah Enloe

Community is a catchphrase at the American Shakespeare Center. It comes up in the tours we offer to the public, pre-show announcements, and in our study guides and education programs. We even added it to our recently updated mission statement: American Shakespeare Center illuminates the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, classic and new, refreshing the individual, fostering civil discourse, and creating community in the Blackfriars Playhouse and beyond,

demonstrating the value we place on coming together as one to see and celebrate theatre and Shakespeare. Many of the materials we produce in support of our programs touch on this element, the choice to emphasize it is directly related to the evidence of our historical experience as we developed, promoted, and enhanced our relationship with our audiences—those who are in the Blackfriars Playhouse to see a production and those who arrive to engage in educational programs. More than Shakespeare

S. Enloe (*) Harrisonburg City Schools, Harrisonburg, VA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3_14

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beyond the major,  we are committed to engaging with  Shakespeare beyond the traditional classroom. We’ve found that our approach to performing Shakespeare’s plays, in shared light, in which “the actors can see you, you can see them, and we can all see one another,” creates short-lived communities, and an experience of each play that is unique to each particular audience on a given night and to each audience member, whose reactions are enhanced by the responses of those around them. Anecdotally, we find that they are almost as likely to make a comment about a fellow audience member as an actor’s performance. Beyond these immediate and short-lived communities, we’ve found that bringing any group of adults together for an extended time (longer than a weekend) tends to create a lasting community,1 and that such communities offer our participants a valuable support system for increasing confidence in their understanding of their own abilities to communicate and interact with others. We’ve noted that the sense of community will gel more quickly and firmly when we challenge the participants and take them out of their comfort zone. Further, we’ve discovered that a schedule that encourages the creation of alliances only increases the chances that the group of individuals will coalesce and begin sharing characteristics, encouraging them to stay in touch with one another and with the ASC beyond the length of the program. Most recently and convincingly, our Shakespeare and Leadership programs have brought together people from a range of cultures and given them a touchstone for connection, and given the participants a common basis for creating persuasive communication in their daily lives. Shakespeare and Leadership was not unique to ASC when we ran our first program with The Federal Executive Institute in 2003. The story we tell about the advent of our Leadership Training Program reveals more about our skepticism regarding using Shakespeare to teach it—and the challenges of non-profit ventures—than they do about the communities 1  Our 2008 NEH sponsored institute “Shakespeare, The Stage, and The Classroom” stands as an example of this phenomenon. That program and UVA’s Summer on the Lawn Shakespeare programs, as well as our 19 years strong College Prep residential camp, inspired us to create a weeklong experience for adults which we call the No Kidding Shakespeare Camp, the participants in each of these have created communities within our community. In my personal experience, a brief stint in the corporate world took me to Milwaukee for a week to “train,” and another NEH grant took me to Lenox, MA for 3  weeks to study with Shakespeare & Company, at which I noted the development of community as shown by the creation of distinct languages, including in jokes, and identifiable characters becoming part of the exchange within a few days of their formation.

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that have ultimately formed. In almost every session we do, one of our first tasks is to tell participants how we ended up teaching leadership using characters from Shakespeare’s plays and the tools our actors bring to their work, establishing our own ethos. It follows this pattern: Shortly after we opened the Blackfriars, we were still figuring out how to market to single ticket buyers2 and too quickly discovering the challenges inherent in building ownership and corporate mortgages. A faithful patron who happened to be a faculty member at the Federal Executive Institute just 45 minutes away in Charlottesville, approached us. He had noticed a number of books and subsequent media mentions touting Shakespeare and Leadership methodologies, such as Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard’s Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage, The Bard & Co.: Shakespeare’s Role in Modern Business,  and Power Plays. He suggested that we might develop a module to include in his Leadership for a Democratic Society (LDS) programs.3 At first we balked, what could we offer these bureaucrats, and why would we want to?4 Peter Ronayne, our contact, was persistent and convincing. Persistent in that he kept asking after several gentle “no’s” and convincing in that he offered us more than we could make for a well-sold, fully cast, costumed, and rehearsed show in our 300 seat playhouse. We were not selling out every night of every week and Leadership, it appeared, could bring in a lot of money. To our surprise, once we began to build and deliver the program we so skeptically started, we saw that our crasser instincts were allayed by the connection such programs gave us. Connections that have taken us on an unexpected journey, placing our mission front and center. We’ve learned that our art could be strengthened as we forged ties to new audiences and applied our practices in innovative ways.

Our organization, American Shakespeare Center, began as a touring company in 1988. Our co-founders, Ralph Cohen and Jim Warren, found value in considering the staging conditions for which Shakespeare would have written. The ones we engage with include playing choices like continuous action (no scene/act breaks), doubling, gender-cross casting, and 2  As a touring company from 1988–2001, with minor exceptions, we had the luxury of selling our shows to the venue and letting them figure out how to sell them to sell tickets to individuals. 3  Once a class session, the 70–80 participants have the option of choosing from out of the box examples of leadership training, such as fishing, theatrical improvisation, music, horseback riding, and, if we agreed, Shakespeare. 4  See Slings and Arrows, Season 1, Episode 3 for approximately the trajectory of our feelings about leadership.

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shared light; rehearsal options such as limited rehearsal time, cue scripts (or parts), and self-direction; and the thing Shakespeare is more famous for than either of those: his use of words. We’ve seen evidence of the impact of engaging with these conditions on our general audience, in our work with students—including English language learners—and teachers, and, since 2003, with our leadership trainees. When we started leadership training, I didn’t expect to find much in the way of connection to our participants with the work we do day in and day out, but, in fact, anyone looking closely can identify how each of the items listed above have a connection to the dynamics of business and leadership. For those with a degree of doubt: Continuous Action: Scheduling in many of the institutions we work with is continuous and often must happen 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even when one team member exits, the business must make accommodation to continue the work or story of the work in order to serve their clients and/or product line. Doubling: Our participants relate to the wearing of multiple “hats,” the people in positions nominated for this course rarely have the luxury of focusing on just one task or objective. They are often cross-training in multiple departments, serving on several teams, and, of course, balancing work and home. Gender-cross casting: Within the organizations we have worked with an increased emphasis on diversity and equity has grown. This means that we often work with women who may be the first of their sex placed in a particular role at their work-site or within their business. They are, along with their counterparts, direct reports, and supervisors, required to cope with stereotypes and shifting expectations. Shared light: It is the rare manager who goes into a meeting with her team and turns the lights off on the staff and a spotlight on herself, thus, the shared light in which the actors at the ASC work is a good metaphor for the world our participants come from. Our mantra includes being responsive to the cues audience members give us throughout a performance, so, too, must a manager respond to the reactions s/he see day in and day out in order to address the needs of the team. Limited rehearsal time: Everyone who has worked on a project knows that a hallmark of said project is the due date or deadline. In the community in which we work, one person or group’s tardiness immediately impacts many others, this holds true, and with potentially higher stakes, in the world of international business and government.

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Cue scripts: In almost no area of work, does anyone hold all of the information. Thus, it is imperative that teams develop efficient modes of communication and work to share the information and apply it to the tasks at hand. Cue scripts serve as a conduit to create a laboratory workspace and explore the impulses and techniques our participants rely on. Once they recognize their habits, they can take steps to address any that do not serve their objectives. Self-direction: The trainees we work with have achieved middle to high-­ level management status in their industry and are in a position that requires them to consider the moving parts in their area and make decisions that will achieve the best outcome for their team in the shortest time frame. This responsibility has the additional onus of finding ways to communicate with equals and direct reports that inspire them to embrace the plan that will take all to achieve the goal at hand. Shakespeare’s use of language: Most of our participants arrive knowing that Shakespeare is well known for his writing, they don’t, however, necessarily identify some of the specific reasons they can both recognize his techniques and begin to deploy them. We spend the largest chunk of time helping participants to identify the rhetorical structures in speeches from Shakespeare’s plays and then guiding them as they shape their own communication using both the macro rhetoric of Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, and the micro-rhetoric5 with which our actors work daily. Finally, an Actor’s Toolkit also figures into the work we bring to the leadership trainees with whom we work. Through hands-on activities, they develop control of the vocal and physical choices they make, gaining presence and confidence, as well as awareness of the messages they send non-verbally. As with many of our programs, we have gone back in time to move forward. When the work began in 2003, the curriculum focused on examining the leadership exhibited by characters in Shakespeare in a lecture and then put participants through their paces with staging a scene using twentieth-­ century rehearsal techniques. Each session began with ASC actors performing speeches from selected plays focusing on kings and 5  Our Masters program offers a class on verse and rhetoric in which the students work with approximately 40 figures, of the several hundred Shakespeare employed. As the class has developed, our Director of Mission, the Gondor Professor of Shakespeare and Performance, Ralph Alan Cohen, has begun introducing these figures into rehearsals at ASC. Thus, our actors and education participants are picking up and working with the information that patterns of speech create to reveal character and support arguments.

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leadership while participants heard explications about what was and wasn’t persuasive in each delivered by a facilitator. If we were set for a 4-hour program, the class would evolve into a voice/body and status workshop and in the 8-hour program, into rehearsal of a scene. These modules challenged the participants but were difficult to tie back to the work they engaged with on a regular basis. We were working at a surface level at best; at worst, we were pushing participants further from an understanding how Shakespeare might inform their daily lives. We were talking at them, not a very good model for business leaders and not the best framework for us, either. Importantly, we were missing the chance to hear from anyone— especially anyone uncomfortable with Shakespeare’s language regarding how they were doing and what they were learning. After working with Federal Executive Institute (FEI) for a few years, we shifted our pedagogy to improve our connection to the participants and give them something to work on and with. We realized that showing the trainees the way our company works and the factors driving Shakespeare as he wrote the speeches would better support our mission. We recognized a need to provide something concrete for participants to identify and then engage with. By starting the day with a consideration of the rhetorical patterns of persuasion Shakespeare deploys and giving participants three concepts they could pick out in the language of Shakespeare’s characters and develop in their own communication, our sessions became more interactive and successful. Ethos, Pathos, and Logos6 became the mantra, and by the end of the first segment, participants were identifying them in the speeches our actors (who would become their communication coaches) performed. Taking it a step further and with an effort to tie our work to the work the Leadership for a Democratic Society (LDS) groups complete by the end of their full course, we encouraged them to start bringing a rough draft of the “Challenge Statements”7 they present at the conclusion of their training. After the first session, we gave them a few moments to rework their statements to include more of the rhetoric we discussed, before we moved on to the actors’ toolbox of voice and movement. As the day went on, participants would present their statements and 6  While, these persuasive appeals are commonplace in many composition classes and have been making strides on the AP exams and in Common Core Curricula, for most of those with whom we work, they are long forgotten, if ever learned. 7  By the end of their 4 weeks at FEI, each person must present a challenge s/he faces to the group as if to their own team, these drafts are the birth of the final presentation.

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receive feedback from facilitators and their colleagues on their success in incorporating the lessons learned. We then gave each participant a cue script for one character in a short scene, together with a few objectives8 they needed to accomplish as a group in a short time frame. The focus switched from performance to process, as facilitators pulled participants’ attention to their tendencies or habits in new situations that require them to accomplish a task. In the first outing of this module, my intent was that the process and subsequent discussion would end the day, but that first group insisted on showing each other their scenes, which in turn taught us something else. Because we had learned that the “final” count of participants is a nebulous concept, we needed a scene that would allow casting to be flexible. Every group, therefore, had the same scene (Hamlet 1.1, to Horatio’s Tis Strange), because it could easily be played with four or five people (four if Francisco and the Ghost double), which means it can accommodate almost any size of group. I feared that seeing iteration after iteration of the same scene would prove quite dull; instead, it proved illuminating. Each group, working with the same material, and the same objectives, ended up making wildly different (and often entertaining9) choices. This repetition of scenes has become a bedrock for discussion amongst our leaders. We use the variety in their performances to discuss a number of factors they relate to from their day-today experiences. The conversations we’ve heard after these gatherings indicate that the groups, even after just 4 to 8 hours of playing with us, have a shared experience that impacts their feeling of kinship towards one another. They arrive as a percentage of a larger group and leave as a community. We built on this model with FEI to create our week-long program for the multinational corporation International Paper. By happenstance or fortune, the mantra we embraced for our communication and demonstration 8  Each group member must, in turn, cross the entire stage, touch one other character, and, as a whole, the group must mind that one character is always on a different level than the others. These objectives not only raise the stakes for finding a “solution” in a compressed time frame, they also make the scenes much more watchable—before instituting them, we had a lot of scenes that resembled nothing so much as a chorus line. 9  Our January FEI featured one iteration in which the Ghost, all in black, entered before any of the other characters and began a slow circle of the stage starting at the edge, drawing ever closer to center and his group mates who were playing as if around a fire. Even though he was moving, attention to the rest of the scene eventually rendered him invisible so that the moment the Ghost “appears,” at which time he began an amazing robotic dance, drew an audible gasp from the audience.

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sessions aligned beautifully with our partners’ in the Leadership Development department. When we began our discussions about working together, the department’s Director Ed Garrison and I were gratified to see the immediate connections and then worked together to build a program that would gradually increase in challenge and connection for the week we would spend together annually. We started with the modules ASC had developed for our other clients and refined a couple of features. For instance, while we had included a “team building” session for several years, the value Ed places in the participants’ familiarity with other members of their class, pointed that work in a structural shift that allowed us to build each day’s work on the previous days’ discoveries. So, we structured the module with participants in groups of three. On the following day, they join another group to form groups made up of six participants and two coaches and double once more on the third day. An actor-coach works through the participants’ short statements on the initial day, focusing on improving the composition and delivery throughout the week. As the coaches model constructive criticism, the participants begin to emulate it, thereby learning how to gently instruct and create an atmosphere of safety and support. The objective is that they return to their workplaces—whether in Brussels, China, or Memphis—and create those same environments based on what they have learned about communication in these little labs. I draw the coaches we hire to lead these sessions from the experienced members of our acting troupes. The training that we give them empowers them to coach the “challenge statements” by modeling what they will do with their “team.” They begin the process by writing their own short composition and the education staff then reshapes both the structure and delivery using the examples they have provided. They review macro and micro rhetoric so that they can point out strengths and weaknesses in the communication styles their participants present, and they bring their experience with cue scripts to bear on the work in our team-building activities. For the 20%–30% of participants who are non-native speakers, we find that the rhetoric we present is a common language we can all learn together and that it forms a framework for the work moving forward.10 Because our 10  We have developed a system of five categories to assist participants in identifying speech patterns in Shakespeare and other compelling speeches. The acronym we use, ROADS, stands for repetition, omission, addition, direction, and substitution. By the end of our week together, all of our participants are deploying these to create more compelling communication.

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partner, IP, has set English as the language of their business, we ground our work with them in that tongue (something made easier by our playwright of choice, of course). While the shaping of personal communication is often the scariest part of these extended workshops for our foreign participants (and, often the achievement they take the most pride in), we have found that for these students in particular, the less stressful tool of cue script scene work provides balance. Gone is the pressure to choose the perfect words, because they are provided. Absent is the inherent fear of looking at a Shakespeare text, because it is broken up into digestible chunks. The puzzling required to put a scene together, then, becomes a game for the participants in which their personal communication style reveals itself for study in the moment. As they work together, with limited information, in a limited timeframe, doing something new to all of them, they reinforce one another’s efforts using the support techniques explored in the personal communication section. The leadership programs offer us a chance to improve on the reach of our mission. Until we began to work with Shakespeare and Leadership, we hadn’t had to test our ability to make Shakespeare foster civil discourse, especially not to audience members who would not willfully choose to darken the door of a Shakespeare theatre without being forced to do so— as many of our participants have acknowledged over the years. With these programs, the participant’s employer is making the study Shakespeare related to promotion and success at work. Therefore, some who might not ever experience Shakespeare beyond the classroom, learn and benefit from the guidance that careful and specific study of what clues he offers for all communicators and gain confidence (and even appreciation) for an artist they might never have considered consulting previously. IP made it possible for us to measure the outcome with a simple device at the beginning of each program. Acknowledging the unspoken “why are we at a Shakespeare theatre?,” in the opening session, Ed asks the participants to rank their feelings about Shakespeare on a scale of 1 (I’d rather eat glass) to 10, without fail, 20–25% of the respondents fall below 3  in the first round, about 60% fall into the middle and 10–15% will claim deep and abiding love for the playwright—frequently citing some personal playing experience. At a de-brief, or final meeting we hold at the end of the week, we then ask them to rank their feelings for Shakespeare once more. In a recent program, one participant stuck to his original low rating but said that the program had changed his life, every other participant in that program and in our previous outings moved their ranking up by 2–7 points.

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The comments in participants’ evaluations reveal the impact this program has had on their approaches to their work and personal communication. The visits of our past participants to the theatre, contact they maintain with one another and their coaches, and the visits we make to them, testify to the community we have formed. Occasionally, participants reach out to us, wanting to hear how the coaches are, or to communicate a challenge that they faced, or to come for a visit, even to join our work through service on a committee or board. We know that they keep in touch with their teammates and accomplish one of the goals IP has set for the week together—networking across the company. We admire the value that IP places on promoting from within and training their current staff to be their future leaders. It seems an extension of what we know of how The King’s Men and the ASC work, and we have as much learned much from them about methods to demonstrate that value, as they have from us about Shakespeare and rhetoric—and, of course, how to apply it, across multiple cultures and a variety of languages.

References Augustine, N., & Adelman, K. (1999). Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard’s Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage. TMB. Print. Davies, J., Simmons, J., & Williams, R. (Eds.). (2007). The Bard & Co.: Shakespeare's Role in Modern Business. Cyan Communications. Print. International Paper Leadership Training. (2014). International Paper. January 9, 2016. http://www.internationalpaper.com/apps/sustainabilityreport2013/ aboutour-­company/leadershiptraining.html Whitney, J. O., & Packer, T. (2002). Power Plays. Touchstone Books. Print.

Existential Shakespeare: Citizenship in the International Service-Learning Classroom Sujata Iyengar, Mikaela LaFave, and Hayden M. Kelley

Introduction From 2013–2018, “Shakespeare in the Classroom” fostered regular, sustained engagement among English and Education MA, PhD, and undergraduate students from the University of Georgia (UGA) and local schoolteachers and eighth-grade learners at what we will call, pseudonymously, “Oberon Middle School,” a Title 1 school (where a large percentage of students live below poverty-level and are thus eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and breakfast). Undergraduate and graduate students divided their time equally between classroom instruction from the faculty

S. Iyengar (*) • M. LaFave University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] H. M. Kelley University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA Athens Technical College, Athens, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3_15

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member on Shakespeare’s world and on literary analysis and service-­ learning in a local elementary or middle school, being mentored by the classroom schoolteacher and mentoring the eighth-grade students in turn. Faculty from UGA’s College of Education, stationed permanently in Oberon Middle as part of a “Professional Development School District” (PDSD) facilitated this mutual learning. Until May 2018, Oberon participated in the Middle Years International Baccalaureate Program, offering French and Spanish language to its students and the possibility of an integrated curriculum. In 2016, Iyengar and Professor Natalie Vienne-Guerrin won a three-year Partner University Fund grant to support visits and research collaboration among students and faculty at Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III (UPVM3) and UGA, with a view to bringing native French speakers and Shakespeareans to Oberon Middle and to develop long-term partnerships (Iyengar “Scene-­ stealing”, 2019). In Fall 2018, our French counterparts were scheduled to visit Oberon Middle and to join us in teaching a lesson on Shakespeare, with our research group returning the visit by teaching a lesson to a collège (middle school) with many students from “underprivileged” backgrounds in the South of France in Spring 2019. Organizing an international service-learning project requires not only administrative commitment, time, skill, and money, however, but also luck. Our luck ran dry over the summer of 2018, during which Oberon Middle lost: its school building; its PDSD status and faculty; our primary eighth-grade teacher-collaborator; the Middle Years International Baccalaureate Program; its French language instruction; and its Shakespeare unit. In what follows, we explain how, thanks to the deep prior relationships we had forged with teachers and students at the school, we were able rapidly to “make lemonade” by transforming our planned semester-long collaborative unit with three classes into a single morning’s grade-wide activities. We conclude that, although the deeper, active immersion we had planned (and that our French counterparts were able to provide to their own students) would have animated students more effectively, nonetheless our one session was able to engage students, including those who have typically been underserved by Shakespeareans (such as students with communication disorders or cognitive disabilities). Such interventions foreground getting students “on their feet” to learn, encouraging them to think of themselves as a collective, and acknowledging the dramatic impact of co-presence and movement upon student learning. As Susan Hrach has recently demonstrated, playful, “embodied design”

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enlivens lessons, and “any activity that gives students a chance to move in coordinated ways can improve their shared sense of identity, and willingness to work toward a collective goal” (2021, p. 145). We couldn’t get all our students moving in a single session, but we could get them to come together as a co-present audience. In this sense we deployed an “existential” or even a “survivalist” frame of mind, strategies may prove useful now that we have a post-pandemic context and are keener than ever to profit most from the gift of embodied co-presence whenever we have it.

Background to the Course The service-learning course “Shakespeare in the Classroom” drew UGA undergraduate and graduate students in English, English Education, Creative Writing, and Middle Grades Education to work with a local middle school and its eighth-grade Language Arts students and teacher on their Shakespeare unit, the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream (MND). Classes met in Oberon Middle School in the dedicated PDSD Learning classroom, and university students also learned from the experienced eighth-grade teachers in additional class periods every week in their own time. Where teachers and scheduling permitted, Iyengar and her students also joined planning periods. Working individually and in groups, university students reflected upon their in-school learning, intensively investigated Shakespeare’s words, historical context, and performances of the play and planned lessons with each other and with the eighth-grade Oberon Middle English Language Arts teachers. While our UGA students read, researched, and reflected upon a selection of plays by Shakespeare (as in a conventional Shakespeare class at UGA), at Oberon Middle we subordinated Shakespearean elements to broader Language Arts, Theatre, or Writing skills. In other words, our students deployed their skills as Shakespeareans in order to be available as “language mentors” in the classroom. We worked closely with the Language Arts and Social Studies teachers (including, in 2016, the Special Education teachers) in order to allow students’ intervention to be genuinely helpful to the classroom teacher and her eighth-graders and for the classroom teacher to serve as an expert mentor for students (Todd 2016; Iyengar and Desmet). Until 2018, we were fortunate to have an entrée of sorts with the PDSD schools (schools where UGA “clinical faculty” in education are placed year-round to mentor student teachers, to facilitate relationships among

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new teachers and the dedicated, experienced, inspiring faculty of Oberon Middle; and to bring cutting-edge scholarly research into the K-12 classroom). The existence of these PDSD schools, the availability of public transport for UGA students to these schools, the community of engaged, committed UGA and outstanding, dedicated Oberon teachers, and the enthusiasm of students and parents on the K-12 campuses enabled this program to exist. Oberon teachers worked with us tirelessly to “set [Shakespeare] free,” in Peggy O’Brien’s phrase (1993 and 2006), for all students, not just those in “advanced” classes. The class developed from an earlier iteration created by the late Christy Desmet in the 1990s at the request of the College of Education, which was concerned that its student teachers lacked content-knowledge in Shakespeare (at that time a required part of the curriculum) when they entered the K-12 classroom. That earlier version of the class had remained for the most part on UGA’s campus, culminating in a one-off presentation to high school students (Iyengar & Desmet, 2017), usually a workshop based on Shakespeare Set Free (O’Brien, 1993 [2006]). The class had fallen into abeyance when Iyengar had a chance encounter with a curious eighth-­ grader at the doctor’s office. The student was curious about “college” but didn’t know where to find out what “college” was. The eighth-grader didn’t know anyone who had ever attended college or who had even set foot on the UGA campus for an event or to enjoy the foliage, still less what college students did (“Do they learn science?” she asked, hopefully.) Iyengar apologized for not being a scientist but promised that college was a place where, for the most part, you could indeed “learn science,” and approached UGA’s new service-learning office to find out how to help foster connections between university students and K-12 students, so that more curious eighth-graders would be able to talk to someone who worked in or learned in a “college.” Iyengar spent a year as a service-learning fellow, taking workshops on the principles of community engagement, reflection, and community partnership, and meeting constantly with the PDSD faculty at Oberon and with a self-selected group of eighth-grade Language Arts teachers at Oberon who were interested in having UGA students embedded in their courses for a semester. Together we had to square a circle: we had to generate outcomes that would satisfy the UGA Department of English; the College of Education; the Office of Service-Learning; and, most importantly, that would meet the expressed needs of our community partner.

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The English Department required upper-division students to demonstrate proficiency in literary history, close reading, and analytical writing. The College of Education and PDSD faculty wanted their trainee teachers to have learned from the teachers and students in a Title 1 public school in Athens before the UGA students had their final year’s placement in one of those schools. PDSD faculty were concerned that their (at that time) majority-white, majority-middle-class students had no experience of a Title 1 school prior to their committing to the program and certification and were unprepared for the issues they would encounter in local schools. Goals for service-learning included student reflection and deep collaboration with all our community partners. Oberon teachers who chose to participate, and the school administration, had varying wishes for their students. Two of the Oberon teachers (“Emilia” and “Nell”) told Iyengar that they were Shakespeare enthusiasts and wanted content expertise for their classes from UGA students as well as new learning methods and resources, such as filmographies, bibliographies, lesson plans, and open-access web resources. Emilia became our primary collaborator. Nell, a Special Education teacher, generously demonstrated how to transform “on-level” assignments into “collaborative” ones that students with disabilities (including neurodivergence) and non-­ disabled students could use together. The third, the Caribbean-born, charismatic, and disciplined “Artesius” was initially skeptical about the content but emphatic that he wanted UGA students to come into his classroom. He did not, in those first classes, want us to “teach”—but to observe his Afrocentric classroom, to be present, and to serve as what we agreed to call “role models and model learners,” an outcome that the then-school principal (“Gerrold”) likewise prioritized. Artesius, Gerrold, and the then-school superintendent told us firmly that the learning outcomes for each day’s state-mandated curriculum must also be met. Over the course of our collaboration, Artesius’s needs and wishes changed; Artesius moved from his initial skepticism about what Shakespeare might offer his majority-Black classes (Year 1) to duetting with her on a “Shakespeare Rap” (he is a talented African drummer) at Poetry Night in Year 2, to asking Iyengar and her students to run lessons based on her research into cross-racial casting and premodern critical race studies in Years 2–4, and finally to becoming the strongest and most passionate advocate for “Shakespeare in the Classroom” when a new district-wide Superintendent (“Theseus”) suddenly overhauled curriculum and removed Oberon from the Professional Development School District.

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We collaborated with Oberon teachers to adapt lessons from the indispensable SSF such as condensed scenes for eighth-graders to perform; “tableaux vivants,” updated in SSF to “living pictures” and by us to “Living Instagrams”; comparing multiple versions of a single filmed scene; looking at one filmed version of the play in depth and identifying changes between script and performance; weaving word-webs around imagery in the play; modernizing characters and language by exploring different rhetorical situations for them and drawing cartoons or diagrams of the play’s characters. For aspiring student-teachers, the class offered insight into the real-life operations of middle schools very different from those they themselves attended and into a world very different from UGA. Where fewer than 4% of UGA students came from families with the lowest 20% of median income, in Athens-Clarke County over 45% of students were “economically disadvantaged,” with 92% eligible for free or reduced-price school lunch. Where about 69% of UGA’s undergraduate student body was White, 11% African American, 6.4% Latinx, 4% Multi-racial, 10% Asian, and 2% Pacific Islander, Unreported, or Native American, in the public school district about 21% were White, 48% African American, 25% Latinx, 4% Multi-racial, and 2% Asian and Pacific Islander. Where all students at UGA were proficient in English (although many use English as a Second Language), in Clarke County public schools about 16% of students were English-language learners. About 25% of public-school students in the district had disabilities, and up to 16% may have been homeless (UGA Fact Book; Clarke County: School Grades; Harris et al., 2019). (UGA does not seem to make available comparable data about students with disabilities or students experiencing homelessness.) UGA students prepared for this different learning environment by watching and learning from their Oberon teacher-mentors and, in our final year, by joining parents and teachers in reading a text assigned to all stakeholders at Oberon Middle as part of a school-wide discussion: Richard Milner’s Rac(e)ing to Class (2015), which argues that educators in diverse and challenged neighborhoods should envision their students from an “asset-­based” rather than a “deficit” perspective. An asset-based approach might interpret children’s after-school labor caring for a younger sibling or working at a fast-food restaurant as evidence of their maturity, responsibility, and community-oriented outlook (assets), rather than as obstacles to academic success (deficits). We also read articles that frankly discussed the importance of schoolchildren seeing themselves represented in their teachers (Gershenson et al. 2017; Kamenetz, 2017).

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The Course as It Unfolded in Fall 2018 In Fall Semester 2018, the plan was to bring, after three years’ preparation, faculty and students from not only UGA but also from our partner university in France, UPVM, into Oberon Middle classrooms for a week of French conversation to enrich the Junior International Baccalaureate Program and the Language Arts curriculum. That semester, however, the terrain changed—literally, as the old school building was knocked down— and figuratively, as a new district school superintendent, “Theseus,” implemented a series of controversial, top-down, rapid-fire changes on policy, staffing, and curriculum. Theseus, himself Black, was particularly concerned by what he identified as a racialized “achievement gap” between the standardized test scores of Black and White students. That year, only White students met the “State and Subgroup Performance Standards” and almost 64% of ninth-graders in the district read below grade-level (College and Career Ready Performance Index). And both Theseus and a grass-­ roots group of Black parents were likewise concerned by what seemed to be a racialized “discipline gap.” As of 2017–2018, African American students, although comprising 49% of students in the school district, accounted for 79% of “behavior incidents,” a term that includes everything from truancy to in-school suspension to out-of-school suspension to expulsion (Soriano, 2018). Theseus acted quickly. He required that the district purchase and use the controversial commercial reading system and associated software AVID in all schools. He also felt that existing curricula were not “culturally responsive” to the diverse study body. The new curriculum jettisoned the Middle Years International Baccalaureate Program and the French language in favor of intensive English reading drills, social and emotional learning interventions, and non-fictional texts designated as culturally responsive by the Lucy Calkins reading program. Since “Shakespeare” itself had become a byword in the district for reading failure (Mayfield, 2016), a two-month long Shakespeare quarter would no longer be possible. Most controversially for many parents (including some members of the grass-­roots parent group), Theseus reconsidered UGA’s long-standing involvement in the local schools, removing Oberon Middle’s status as a PDSD school. Now that the PDSD had been discontinued at Oberon Middle, we were no longer permitted to enter the school nor to observe any classes

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without first clearing background checks and wearing official name badges issued by the institution (in previous years, we had been able to register as visitors with day passes). Two UGA students failed or refused the background check and could not participate in any activities at Oberon Middle. In addition, the new school building was not ready; classes were held in an old, cramped building whose temporary classrooms lacked not only space for us but also internet access and even air-conditioning (a necessity in the hot Georgia August). We could therefore neither lay any groundwork for our visit nor serve our usual role as “role models and model learners” at Oberon Middle before the occasion of the field trip. Moreover, Theseus’s changes, however well-meaning, had driven away experienced teachers and principals from the school district, including Emilia, the twenty-year public-school veteran and Shakespeare enthusiast with whom we usually collaborated and Oberon’s principal, Gerrold. Emilia offered her classrooms at “Hippolyta” Junior High (HJH) as new spaces for the work on MND that our UGA students had been preparing to teach. While we were relieved to be warmly welcomed at HJH, along with our regular Shakespeare curriculum, HJH was a forty-minute drive away and not served by public transportation. We wasted valuable time trouble-shooting carpools and schedules because students could not arrange to observe and teach class at the same times, especially the Education students, who were already serving as student-teachers elsewhere, and the UGA graduate students, who were teaching their own composition classes. At HJH, the course began to run on a delayed schedule. Our experienced colleague Emilia had leapt straight into MND, having just refreshed her curriculum using Shakespeare Set Free. She partnered our student groups with one advanced and two on-level classes, at different times of day, so that our UGA students could see for themselves the way that, for example, eighth-graders became physically restless in the late afternoon or before lunch. Back at Oberon Middle, Nell and Artesius urged us to bring students in for the Spring semester instead of the Fall, when they had managed to clear two weeks for a Shakespeare elective, but our UGA calendar had been set for more than a year; UGA students had long been registered for the course; our French visitors had already bought their tickets. Our class had to happen in Fall, and we needed rapidly to come up with a new plan or “intervention” that would win over the Superintendent and that conformed to the goals of his preferred reading curriculum.

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Artesius cannily advised us about the parameters. Curriculum needed explicitly to be marked as “culturally responsive,” a favorite phrase of Theseus. We would need to include an assessment of our intervention’s effectiveness, and we would have to include every student in the grade and to take account of students’ having preparation in neither Shakespeare nor in French culture. Any materials used would need to be available free, as usual, or donated by UGA or the instructors. To accommodate every student in the grade, we would have to work with a local high school (let’s call it Titania High) to use their auditorium. The week of our visit, eighth-graders were scheduled to read an excerpt from their Lucy Calkins program surrounding the plight of child refugees. We built upon the Globe’s powerful video, “The Stranger’s Case,” and planned to present five-minute talks from our French visitors about Shakespeare as a global language and international cultural resource; theatre as a community-building medium; citizenship in Othello; and multilingual Shakespeares (Appendix 1). The teachers were particularly excited about the planned visit of a French PhD student from Mali. Artesius commented: “It will be great for these kids to see a young Black man getting his PhD. Most of them won’t even know that there ARE Black people in France. That’s the kind of thing we want from you.” Our “assessment plan” involved distributing blank index cards to all students so that they could write questions for the presenters on one side (for those unable or unwilling to speak) and “one thing they learned” on the other. Theseus approved the planned visit and field trip. Although our Malian speaker was employed in France and married to a Frenchwoman, the remnants of the so-called “Muslim ban” on persons visiting the United States had placed Muslim-majority Mali on a blacklist. Our presenter’s request for a US visa was turned down despite letters from UGA, phone calls to the embassy, documentation of his French marital and work status, and so on. We had to trust Skype (the only permitted video-conferencing platform available to us at that time, pre-pandemic). French-accented English proved challenging enough to Oberon Middle students without the added barrier of video-conferencing technology. Students were notably less engaged than we had hoped, so we abridged every single talk. We worried that launching into Shakespeare could this way have hampered students’ understanding, especially of the sophisticated arguments our speakers were making about the role of theatre in general, and Shakespeare in particular, in forging local and international community and establishing ideals of citizenship.

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Fortunately, one of our French visitors enlivened the entire room and clarified these connections by abandoning the scheduled program. She asked the UGA students to participate in a “cold” reading of the balcony scene between Brabantio, Iago, and Rodrigo, with minimal staging, including putting the UGA student reading the part of Brabantio in the lighting/sound booth behind the middle school students. Despite their professed uninterest in Shakespearean language, and even with minimal staging, the eighth-graders responded to Brabantio’s racism and Iago’s innuendos with lively booing, hissing, cat-calling, cheering, and shouted questions. Recent research on reading suggests that mere exposure to reading (whether to Shakespeare or to dystopian fiction or literary non-fiction, under the Calkins model), cannot build skilled or expert readers; instead, we are teaching children “the habits of struggling learners” (Hanford; Adams et al., 2020). Although students in both countries appreciated the enlarged perspectives afforded by the partnership, we noticed, ironically, that the French students who learnt about citizenship through acting Shakespeare itself engaged more passionately and committedly with their learning environment (Franssen, 2019) than the US students, who were restricted by a curriculum (or, at least, to an interpretation of a curriculum) that discouraged “acting out” scenes from historical literature in favor of readings and discussions of current events. Even the limited amount we could present to students dramatically, however, animated their responses and their interest in active learning. “Acting out” gets students on their feet and looking line-by-line, word-by-word, at a text; it gets them thinking about the origins and uses and meanings of words, and who uses them; it makes them into readers, as well as actors, and injects curiosity and a global perspective into learning. Students asked, via their index cards, about Shakespeare’s biography, our careers and travels, adaptations of Shakespeare, and diversity in Shakespeare; they told us, via their index cards, that they had learnt that Shakespeare’s plays could teach us about citizenship, translation, and the importance of language (Appendix 2). Their reactions paralleled those of the students in Montpellier as they prepared their own multilingual public performance Othello for the Spring Actors’ festival or Printemps des Comédiens (Saurel et al. 2019). The French middle-school students were learning English as a second (in some cases, a third or fourth) language, but demonstrated a deep understanding of the stakes of the scene by highlighting the same elements of the scene—racist undertones, sexual

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overtones—to which the students at Oberon Middle were reacting. These aspects of the play were important not just to young teenagers in Athens, Georgia, but to their peers across the globe.

Conclusion The events that collapsed our Oberon Middle course and its collaboration presented a “perfect storm” of ongoing racial inequities, rapidly-changing assessment goals, and infrastructural barriers (transportation, course scheduling, classroom space). Nonetheless we feel that our sessions in 2018 were worth it. Students engaged with the ideals of citizenship and internationalism and understood that theatre can cross cultural and language barriers. This international and intercultural perspective injects curiosity and a global perspective into learning. This kind of approach can work as a vital antidote to the resurgence of nationalism in the United States and elsewhere (Fischer, 2019), reigniting the ideals of “global citizenship” and “democratic practice” (Battistoni et al., 2010). Thanks to the long-standing and deep relationships we had built with our community partners, we were able to change our original project to the smaller goals that our situation demanded, such as establishing relationships between individual students, teaching and learning about citizenship in particular fraught national contexts (Hauerwas & Creamer, 2018), or developing remote collaborations and new tools (Appendix 3). We learned that, despite its implication in systems of colonial domination, white supremacy, the destruction of indigenous cultures, and rapacious global markets (Joubin, 2020; Demeter, 2020; Plastow, 2020; Fischlin, 2020), Shakespeare can traverse linguistic and national boundaries as a lingua franca or communicative medium among cultures, as can folk-tale and television shows (what Wai-Chee Dimock has called “low-epic” 2013). Moreover, Shakespeare—when made playful—can provide a “protected space” from the daily challenges and vicissitudes of our students’ lived realities, which often, as detailed above, included experiencing poverty and other challenges. All children need the chance to play; all play is “serious play” for children, as Maria Montessori and D.W. Winnicott recognized long ago. As we reflect upon the educational upheaval of COVID-19, more than ever we see the need for existential, playful and play-filled Shakespeare—a Shakespeare that is constantly reinvented and recreated by students within their classrooms, on their feet, wherever they are in the world.

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Appendix 1 Proposal for an Eighth-Grade Field Trip on Tuesday, October 30, 2018 Activity: Program comprising screening of a very short film, The Strangers’ Case, about Shakespeare and refugees, before brief talks from professors and graduate students, followed by Q&A for Oberon Middle School eighth-graders and their teachers. Topics covered include Shakespeare’s theater as a locus for urgent and culturally responsive dramatizations of the time; diasporic theater in twenty-first-century France, the US, and the UK; and the role of theater and performance in discussions of citizenship, immigration, and civil rights. Materials: Film (2 min 20 s): The Stranger’s Case (Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and the International Rescue Fund): https://www.rescue-­uk.org/video/ strangers-­case-­shakespeares-­rallying-­cry-­humanity (FREE) Online resource (can be assigned and covered in class as ELT or as a regular reading assignment to accompany Lucy Calkins reading): “What is The Stranger’s Case? Shakespeare’s rallying cry for humanity”: https:// www.rescue-­uk.org/article/what-­strangers-­case (FREE) Index Cards and Golf Pencils for students to write down questions if they are reluctant to speak up in front of everyone (UGA/DR. IYENGAR WILL PROVIDE THESE). Portable Microphone for student questions from the audience (Already in Auditorium?) iPhone or Other Device for Recording: UGA students can bring these. Where: Titania High School Auditorium (pending permission) [Speakers’ biographies redacted] Standards Addressed: Research to Build and Address Knowledge: Talks from researchers can be recorded as well as heard live, and students will be able to use these as sources in their writing projects about civil rights, human rights, and citizenship this semester and to lay a foundation for their ELA work with Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream later in the year. Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: How a modern work of fiction draws on myth, traditional stories, or religious texts such as the Bible or Shakespeare (or in this case, how French and African actors and teachers adapt Shakespeare’s plays for different local settings).

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Speaking and Listening Standards: Students can write questions on index cards for the speakers or ask questions aloud during the talkback in order to evaluate the speakers’ arguments and motives behind the presentations. Program Details Screening (2  min 20 s): The Stranger’s Case (Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and the International Rescue Fund): https://www.rescue-­uk. org/video/strangers-­case-­shakespeares-­rallying-­cry-­humanity Short (5–8 minute) talks (titles and order may be changed) 1. Sujata Iyengar, “Shakespeare as a Global Language” 2. Florence March: “Why Theatre Matters, Now and in Shakespeare’s Time” 3. Nora Galland: “How Shakespeare Makes ‘The Stranger’s Case’ in Othello” 4. Gaoussou Fofana: “Why I Want to Found a Shakespeare Company in Mali” 5. Charlène Cruxent: “The Multilingual Shakespeare Project” 5-minute break to distribute index cards Talkback/question-and-answer (20 minutes) Facilitated by eighth-grade teachers, Dr. Iyengar, and UGA students Assessment (5 minutes) Assessment is integrated into reflection. Everybody gets another index card and is asked to write ONE SENTENCE about what they’ve just learned. The question cards and the sentences can be used to fuel students’ future research assignments or discussions. Follow-up: Reflective writing assignments and research on theater, refugees, citizenship, and languages, as the eighth-graders want, with UGA students over the next month.

Appendix 2 Questions from Athens, GA, Eighth-Graders (Standardized and Grouped Thematically) Shakespeare’s Biography: When and how did Shakespeare die? What did he look like? What inspired him? What did his father do? Wasn’t there a theory he didn’t write the plays? How many people did he collaborate with?

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Shakespeare’s Relevance: What is your favorite play or adaptation, and which is the most famous? Have you seen Gnomeo and Juliet? Why has Shakespeare remained relevant after 400 years? Why do (these plays) get people from across the world? Shakespeare in Performance: Have you been to The Globe? Will you put on a play here? Our Biographies and Careers: What made you interested in Shakespeare? When did you start? For how long have you been interested? How often do you travel? Why do you like your job? Do you think your job is important? How old are you (if you don’t mind)? Did you ever play in a play? Are there any tips you would give someone interested in theater? Shakespeare’s Diversity: Did you notice some Anti-semitism in a protagonist role (MND)? Which of his plays is the most diverse? Eighth-Grade Responses I learned that... ...we have to read a Shakespeare play (11%) ...Shakespeare is interesting/awesome/fun/important/cool (10%) ...Shakespeare had three children (6%) ...Shakespeare wrote 38 plays (6%) ...Shakespeare brings people together across the world through citizenship (5%) ...Shakespeare can be translated and interpreted many different ways and that is one of the things people like about him (5%) ...Shakespeare’s words and phrases appear in modern life/in Disney (5%) ...Shakespeare loved to write/wrote a lot (5%) ...Shakespeare was an actor (1%) ...Shakespeare was a businessman (1%) ...Shakespeare died (1%) (Spoiled, blank, or unique responses composed the remainder.)

Appendix 3: Inexpensive and Easy-to-Use Remote Instructional Design Tools By Hayden M. Kelley Poll Everywhere -> Online, interactive questioning. Resembles the clickers and the Top Hat platform that large lecture classes use for in-class activities, but can be accessed through a computer or mobile device. Poll Everywhere, https://www.polleverywhere.com/, accessed 2 March 2022.

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Mentimeter -> Online, interactive questioning. Allows polling, free response answers, word webs, rankings, and so on. Free version, however, only allows you to have two slides per Mentimeter document, which can be inconvenient. Mentimeter, https://www.mentimeter.com/, accessed 2 March 2022. Kahoot -> Online multiple choice or true/false quiz that large groups of students can play to bring gamification into instruction. More options are available depending on your payment plan. The free version allows users to ask questions and give students quizzes over course material in an interactive, enjoyable way. Kahoot!, https://kahoot.com/, accessed 2 March 2022. Webex -gt; An online meeting platform powered by Cisco. Free, secure network that allows you to share your screen, draw on a virtual whiteboard, and meet with 100+ other members in your system. As does Zoom, it includes a text-based chat feature and a way to record meetings. Webex, https://www.webex.com/, accessed 2 March 2022.

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Dimock, W. C. (2013). “Low Epic.” Critical Inquiry, 39 (3), 614–631. https:// doi.org/10.1086/670048 “Economic Diversity and Student Outcomes at the University of Georgia”. (2017). New York Times. Retrieved May 25, 2020, from https://www.nytimes. com/interactive/projects/college-­mobility/university-­of-­georgia Fischer, K. (2019, March 28). How International Education’s Golden Age Lost Its Sheen. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved June 10, 2019, from https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/2019-­03-­28-­golden-­age Fischlin, D. (2020). ‘Flipping the Turtle on Its Back’: Shakespeare, Decolonization, and First Peoples in Canada. In C. Desmet, S. Iyengar, & M. Jacobson (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (pp. 127–138). Routledge. Franssen, P. (2019). The Thane and the Scullery Maid: Making Shakespeare Address the Populist Crisis. HAL Open Science. Retrieved March 2, 2022, from halshs-02145011 Georgia Department of Education. (2017). College and Career Ready Performance Index. Retrieved May 25, 2020, from http://ccrpi.gadoe.org/2017/ Gershenson, S., et  al. (2017). The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers. IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, Discussion Paper 10630. Retrieved May 26, 2020, from http://ftp.iza.org/dp10630.pdf Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, State of Georgia. Clarke County: School Grades. Retrieved May 25, 2020, from https://schoolgrades.georgia. gov/clarke-­county Hanford, E. (2020, January 27). Experts Say Widely Used Reading Curriculum Is Failing Kids. American Public Media. Retrieved May 27, 2020, from https:// w w w. a p m r e p o r t s . o rg / s t o r y / 2 0 2 0 / 0 1 / 2 7 / l u c y -­c a l k i n s -­r e a d i n g -­ materials-­review Harris, L., et al. (2019). Athens Team for the Network for Southern Economic Mobility. Final Report: Pathways to Prosperity, Draft 4.0. Athens-Clarke County Unified Government. Retrieved March 2, 2022, from https://www. accgov.com/7380/Southern-­Network-­for-­Economic-­Mobility Hauerwas, L. B., & Creamer, M. (2018). Engaging with Host Schools to Establish the Reciprocity of an International Teacher Education Partnership. Journal of Higher Education and Engagement, 22(2), 157–188. Retrieved March 2, 2022, from https://openjournals.libs.uga.edu/jheoe/article/view/1390 Hrach, S. (2021). Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning. West Virginia University Press. Iyengar, S., & Desmet, C. (2017). Shakespeare in the Classroom: An Ongoing Service-Learning Project Between the University of Georgia and [Oberon] Middle School. NEH. Unpublished Micro-Grant Report.

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Iyengar, S. (2019). Scene-Stealing/Ravir la scène: An International Partnership. Department of English, University of Georgia. Retrieved March 2, 2022, from https://www.english.uga.edu/scene-­s tealingravir-­l a-­s cene-­i nternational-­ partnership Joubin, A. A. (2020). Others Within: Ethics in the Age of Global Shakespeare. In C. Desmet, S. Iyengar, & M. Jacobson (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation. (pp. 25–36). Routledge. Kamenetz, A. (2017, April 10). Having Just One Black Teacher Can Keep Black Kids in School. NPR. Retrieved March 2, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/ sections/ed/2017/04/10/522909090/having-­just-­one-­black-­teacher-­cankeep-­black-­kids-­in-­school Mayfield, K. (2016). If You Can’t Read This, It’s Too Late. Odyssey News Magazine, Clarke County Central High School, June 17. Retrieved May 25, 2020, from h t t p s : / / w w w. o d y s s e y n e w s m a g a z i n e . c o m / 2 0 1 6 / 0 5 / 1 7 / i f -­y o u cant-­read-­this-­its-­too-­late/ Milner, R. (2015). Rac(e)ing to Class. Harvard Education Press. Montessori, M. (1912). The Montessori Method (Trans. A. George). Heinemann. O’Brien, P., et  al. (1993). Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching a Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth. Washington Square Press; rev. ed. 2006. Plastow, J. (2020). The Politics of African Shakespeare. In C. Desmet, S. Iyengar, & M. Jacobson (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (pp. 171–180). Routledge. Printemps des Comédiens. (2019). Printemps des Collégiens. In P. Saurel, M. Kléber, & J.-C. Carrière (Eds.), Domaine d’O Programme (p. 58). Retrieved March 2, 2022, from https://en.calameo.com/read/0004180465b59 ff314ae7?page=1 Saurel, P., Kléber, M., & Carrière, J.-C. (Eds.). (2019). Printemps des Collégiens. Printemps des Comédiens, p. 58. Retrieved March 2, 2022, from https://en. calameo.com/read/0004180465b59ff314ae7?page=1 Shakespeare’s Globe. (2018). What Is the Stranger’s Case? Shakespeare’s Rallying Cry for Humanity. International Rescue Committee. Retrieved May 27, 2020, from https://www.rescue-­uk.org/article/what-­strangers-­case Soriano, A. (2018, August 7). Clarke County School District Discipline Data Released, Reveals Disparity. Red and Black. Retrieved May 25, 2020, from https://www.redandblack.com/athensnews/clarke-­county-­school-­district-­ discipline-­d ata-­r eleased-­r eveals-­d isparity/article_c5f9bcdc-­9 a59-­1 1e8-­ b184-­23c599495558.html Todd, D. (2016). ‘Oh, this learning, what a thing it is!’: Service-Learning Shakespeare and Community Partnerships. This Rough Magic. Retrieved May 25, 2020, from http://www.thisroughmagic.org/todd%20article.html University of Georgia. (2018). Office of Institutional Research. UGA Fact Book. Retrieved May 25, 2020, from https://oir.uga.edu/_resources/files/factbook/UGA_FactBook2018.pdf

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #MeToo, 157, 162 A Achievement gap, 231 Acting out, 234 Africanus, Leo, 124n3, 128 A Geographical History of Africa, 128 Akala, Hip Hop Shakespeare, 94n1 Al Pacino, 49, 93 American Shakespeare Center, 215, 217 Anti-feminist, 44 Anti-semitism, 46, 47 Antony and Cleopatra, 43, 44, 49–50, 54, 95 Appignanesi, Richard, 128, 130 Asset-based perspective, 230 Assignment design, 67

As You Like It, 197 Atwood, Margaret, 205 Hag-Seed, 205 B Bardolatry, 62 Barthes, Roland, 97, 98 Batman, 205 Bhardwaj, Visahl, 128 Omkara, 128 Blackfriars Playhouse, 215 BlackLivesMatter, 157 Blank syllabus, 168 Bloom’s taxonomy, 26, 26n7, 29 Burton, Richard, 41, 42, 46n3, 51 C Calkins model, 234 Cancel culture, 9

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. T. Sasser, E. K. Atwood (eds.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24224-3

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INDEX

Canon, 172, 177 Carver, Raymond, 97 The Chronicle of Higher Education, 23, 24n3 Cleopatra, 44, 49–53 Climate change, 114 A Comedy of Errors, 198 Community, 215, 216, 216n1, 218, 221, 224 Community college, 149–164 Conspiracy theories, 143–145 Contingent faculty, 5, 8, 11 The Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC), 107 Course map, 176 COVID-19, 138, 144, 146, 176 COVID-19 pandemic, 3 Critical race theory (CRT), 123 Cue scripts, 218, 219, 221–223 D The Death of a Salesman, 100 Deictics, 72, 79–83 Derrida, Jacques, 97, 98 Doerries, Brian, 74 Du Bois, W.E.B., 125 E Ecampus, 176–178 Ecofeminist, 115 Editing, 58, 64–66, 64n5 Elitism, 154, 161 Embodied design, 226 English major, 2–3, 6, 7, 14 Environmental studies, 103–118 F Federal Executive Institute (FEI), 216, 217, 220, 220n7, 221, 221n9

Federal Pell Grant, 91 First-year composition, 2 Folger Shakespeare Library, 121, 198 The Forbidden Planet, 160 Foucault, Michel, 97 French, 226, 231–234, 236 Freshman composition, 153 G General education, 2–4, 6, 11–13, 15, 16, 57–68, 59n2, 167–179 Giraldi, Cinthio, 124n3, 128 The Moor of Venice, 128 Good Tickle Brain, 172 H Hamlet, 57, 64, 97, 98, 131, 135–147 Harvard Business School, 100 Henry V, 205 hooks, bell, 28, 31 Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies, 22n1, 24 I Interdisciplinary, 106–108, 113 J January 6 United States Capital Attack, 79 Johnson, Samuel, 95n2 K Kafka, Franz, 74 The Trial, 74 Kristallnacht, 75

 INDEX 

L Labor, 2, 4, 5 Language arts, 227, 228 Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, 74 Leadership for a Democratic Society (LDS), 217, 220 Looking for Richard, 93 Luther, Martin, 78 M Macbeth, 27, 29, 122, 155, 156, 160, 162–164, 201–204, 208 Mali, 233, 237 Manga, 128, 130 Mapping, 108–116 MBA, 158 McGuffeys, 42 Measure for Measure, 95 The Merchant of Venice, 43–45, 47n4, 49, 54, 71–88, 125, 129, 175 Middle school, 226, 227, 230, 234 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 135–147, 201, 204–206, 209–211 Modern Language Association, 22, 23, 23n2 Job Information List, 22 Much Ado about Nothing, 29, 135–147 N New Faculty Majority, 5 No Fear Shakespeare, 94 Nostalgia, 4 O Obama, Barack, 122 Online education, 3, 8, 16 Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 173, 179

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Othello, 29, 124, 124n3, 125, 131, 135–147, 171, 175, 233, 234, 237 P Parker, Oliver, 128 Othello, 128, 130 Pedagogy, 2, 6, 7, 11, 14, 16, 17 Peel, George, 128 The Battle of Alcazar, 128 Playbills, 173, 175, 177 Popular culture, 149–164 Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra, 51 Print culture, 154 Public Enemy, 94 Public liberal arts, 106–108 R Racial justice, 2, 3 Racism, 234 Rankine, Claudia, 74 Citizen, 74 The Rape of Lucrece, 93 Relevance, 104 Relevancy, 43 Rhetoric, 219, 219n5, 220, 222, 224 Rhetorical tradition, 63 Richard II@, 98, 99 Richard III, 190n7 Rigor, 105, 115 Role models, 229, 232 Romeo and Juliet, 27, 29, 93, 94, 129 Rurality, 113 S Seinen, 130 Serious play, 235

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INDEX

Service-learning, 7, 14, 17, 18, 108, 116–118, 226–229 Shakespeare Association of America, 21 Shakespeare Set Free, 228, 232 Shakespeareswords.com, 186 Shakespop, 155–164, 155n5 Shonen, 130 Shylock, 71, 74, 76–87 Sidney, Philip, 91 Social justice, 3, 8, 11 Social unrest, 3 Sophocles, 74 Antigone, 74 Sparknotes, 93 Special education, 227, 229 Stevenson, Bryan, 74 Just Mercy, 74 The Stranger’s Case, 233, 236, 237 Strategic presentism, 114–116 Sustainability, 106, 108, 116 T The Taming of the Shrew, 27, 92, 186, 186n5, 188, 205 Taylor, Elizabeth, 51 Taymor, Julie, 27 Titus, 27 The Tempest, 27, 125, 127, 129, 152, 155, 156, 160, 161, 205

Ten Things I Hate about You, 188 Tenure-track, 5, 7, 12, 21–37 Textual transmission, 64, 65 TikTok, 205 Titus Andronicus, 27, 124, 129 Trauma, 4, 167 Twelfth Night, 127 Tyler, Anne, 204 Vinegar Girl, 204 U University of Georgia (UGA), 225–234, 236, 237 Upper-level courses, 2, 6, 12 W Weiman, Carl, 28 Western culture, 171, 173, 177–179 The Winter’s Tale, 201, 205–207, 211–212 X X-Men, 205 Z Zoom, 193