Tag: Shakespeare

Promoting Literature on Campus

This year, in teaching my Shakespeare course, I used the 450th birthday as an excuse to get students to bring Shakespeare awareness to campus. To that end, I created an assignment that I called “Pop-up Shakespeare,” which I described like this:

You will be developing some sort of experience for your fellow Heidelberg students, whether it’s through chalking Shakespearean sonnets onto the sidewalks, developing a Shakespeare film festival, performing flash mob scenes, or creating a Shakespeare-related volunteer project (just to suggest some ideas). For this assignment you can work with a group or alone. You must document the event through pictures; you will also write a brief analysis of your work, explaining why you chose to do what you did.

The object of the assignment was to encourage students to have some fun with Shakespeare and to exercise some creativity in doing so. It was ultimately a small part of the final grade, but I wanted something that would make Shakespeare just a bit less intimidating and would make literature a bit more visible on campus.

The results were fun — and I heard from a number of colleagues in other departments how much they were enjoying the different things that students were posting around campus. We had some sidewalk chalk, we had a movie night in one of the residence halls, and mostly we had a lot of great signs.

Teaching Shakespeare’s Contemporaries

Every other year I teach a course called “Shakespeare’s Contemporaries.” And therefore every other year I end up thinking that it’s the worst possible name for the course. For starters, when you consider that Great Britain boasted a population of 4,811,718 in 1600, the title alone would obligate me to entertain 4,811,717 thousand individuals, and though my strength is as the strength of ten, I am but one man. More seriously, if we were even to entertain only the dramatic entertainments of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, that still leaves an enormous number of plays.

Consider this: with enough time on his hands or money in her pocket, an industrious young man or woman of 21 in 1584 could have seen the premier of the plays of John Lyly, as well as plays by Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and Robert Greene before she or he hit 30.  In the next decade, my imaginary – though aging – playgoer could see plays by all of the Thomases (Heywood, Dekker, Middleton), the Johns (Marston, Webster, Fletcher), Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, Cyril Tourneur before he or she had passed his or her 40th.  Won’t they be tired?  Oh yeah, by the way, they could have also seen all the plays of Shakespeare, and about 1200 more for which we have records in the period.

But we don’t have world or time enough – in fact we only have fifteen weeks.  So I end up selected about 25 plays and, by selecting, doom each play to the status of sample.  Each play must be a sample of something about all of the other plays in the period not written by William Shakespeare, and there’s a surprisingly large number of them. This in turn seems to doom the class to an exercise in which whoever wrote the play they’re reading, they’re always reading a play not-by-Shakespeare, whereas when they’re reading a play by Shakespeare, they’re never reading a play, for instance, not-by-Marston. A former student in the course put it crudely but effectively when she said, there’s Shakespeare and there’s early modern drama. She’s right.

I’m not really complaining, and I’m certainly not diagnosing. At this point I’m merely describing the case that is the case. After all, what else would we want to call the class?

  • Tudor, Jacobean, and Carolinian Drama
  • Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Century Plays in English
  • Plays in English: 1580-1642
  • Non-Shakespearean Early Modern Entertainments
  • Early English Drama
  • Medieval and Renaissance Drama

I could write several hundred words, at least, on the problems of each title, but I’ll spare you for now. Suffice to say that all these course names are variously misleading.  For now, at least, “Shakespeare’s Contemporaries” will serve. Not least because it seems, of all the titles auditioned here, to be the most provocatively bad.  “Shakespeare’s Contemporaries” is the worst possible name for the course, except for all the others.

Shakespeare in Another Form

I am not a purist when it comes to film adaptations of Shakespeare.  I love Orson Welles’ truncated versions of plays; I love Akira Kurosawa’s loose adaptations of Macbeth and Lear; and I cannot recommend highly enough the dark comedy of Scotland, PA (four words: Christopher Walken as Macduff).  I’ve written before about my use of the president’s speech in Independence Day and Peter Sellers’ Richard III speaking “Hard Day’s Night.”  I think that it’s important to share some of these films with students – not just for the experience of seeing the work of great filmmakers, but also for the opportunity to discuss Shakespeare’s central role in much of our culture.

The last time I taught my Shakespeare course, I developed a movie night assignment for my students.  I offered six movie nights over the course of the semester, and students were required to attend one movie and write a commentary on it.  (They could earn extra credit for an additional movie – and several of the students enjoyed the films so much that they attended all of the screenings, which were also open to the whole student body.)

On the assignment sheet, I explained that the assignment had three primary objectives:

  1.  to encourage students to consider the implications of viewing a Shakespearean play, rather than reading it
  2. to encourage students to consider the assumptions underlying directors’ interpretations of plays, either through a fairly straightforward rendering of the text or a radical reinterpretation of the text
  3. to encourage students to appreciate that at the core of the study of drama is the need to recognize the role that performance plays in our interpretation of a play as an audience

Continue reading “Shakespeare in Another Form”

Pop Culture and Teaching Shakespeare

When I teach literature – any of it really, but Shakespeare in particular – I have a tendency to use references to popular culture to help my students make sense of the texts they read, and in particular, the characters that populate them.

For example, I’ve pointed out to students that there’s a certain Cartman (of South Park)-esque “Respect my authoritah” attitude in much of Richard III’s interactions with other characters (other Cartman catch-phrases work equally well with Richard II, incidentally).  I’ve also taken great advantage of YouTube clips to draw students into an understanding of the cultural relevance of Shakespeare: we’ve watched a video of Peter Sellers reciting The Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night” in the style of Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, and we’ve compared the President’s speech in Independence Day to Olivier’s rendition of the St. Crispin’s Day speech.

These aren’t simply gimmicks to encourage student interest; aside from my own appreciation for pop culture, I have a larger purpose in introducing these comparisons, a purpose based in my own educational training.  Taking its cues from cognitive psychology, constructivist educational philosophy* suggests that we organize all of our experiences and all of our knowledge in “cognitive schema.”  Essentially, we build information on already existing knowledge and attempt to make sense of new information based on those structures of understanding.  In order to facilitate significant learning and thinking, educators need to create a sense of cognitive dissonance – a point where the student must grapple with information that does not fit within his or her cognitive schemata.  From this point of dissonance, individuals construct their own understanding of information. Continue reading “Pop Culture and Teaching Shakespeare”

The Shakespeare Sonnet Slam

Poetry is an oral as well as written tradition, and we are only doing half the work—and having half the fun— if we silently read a poem on the page. Unfortunately, I don’t always have the chance to emphasize this enough in the classroom. As I struggle for both depth and breadth in my courses, I often run out of time before I can focus on the performance of poetry.

At least a few times during the semester, though, I create opportunities for students to engage with the performance of written texts. This might seem like an optional activity that doesn’t have the substance of a lecture or in-depth discussion, but I would disagree. In fact, in-class recitations can generate real excitement among students, in part because memorization requires a slow, attentive reading that we wish for every time we assign a new text.

With this in mind, I recommend the Shakespeare Sonnet Slam as a classroom activity. In an English literature survey we spend a couple of classes reading sonnets by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but because these sonnets represent one small unit out of many in a survey course, that’s about all the time we have for The Bard’s sequence. Even so, the memorization requires students to read their poem with a quality of attention that they wouldn’t ordinarily have. Even if our activity means that we get to spend less time discussing other poets, students quickly understand the power of a poetic sequence, and how it can convey a variety of emotional and intellectual struggles in innovative ways.

Here’s how it works:

  1. First, I ask students to memorize one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. If students are anxious about the process of memorizing a poem, I offer them several strategies: they can write the poem, longhand, several times until they get a sense of how the lines fit together; they can photocopy the poem and carry it with them, memorizing it throughout the week; or they can memorize the poem by reciting it once through, then hiding the final word of the poem and reading it through, then hiding the final two words of the poem and reading it through, and so on until they’re reciting the poem with no words exposed.
  2. Continue reading “The Shakespeare Sonnet Slam”

Approaching Valentine’s Day

What to do with poetry around Valentine’s Day? Assign students doggerel? Analyze Robert Burns? Recite Shakespeare?

Poets around the country have dealt with sentimentality in a few inventive ways.

In 2008, when Ted Kooser’s book Valentines had just been published, NPR’s All Things Considered recounted how the former poet laureate had been sending an original Valentine’s Day poem to women all over the country for the past 20 years.

In 1986, when the project began, his list contained a mere 50 women. In 2007, the number had grown to 2,700. According to the story, he spent almost $1,000 in postage that year.  Read the full piece and listen to Kooser’s valentines here.

But back to this year. Anticipating a sticky day of chocolates and roses, writer-provocateur Jonathan Ames, with poets Mark Halliday, Bob Hicok, Donna Masini, and “break-up expert” Jerry Williams, will host an anti-Valentine’s Day party in Brooklyn, NY (February 11). The poets are launching the compilation, It’s Not You, It’s Me: The Poetry of Breakup (powerHouse books) and celebrating, as the listing says, “the darker side of love.”

If you’re looking for well-loved poems as models for writing or for teaching, or even as gifts for friends, the videos on Favorite Poem Project’s Web site are quick and inspiring.

Finally, the Poetry Foundation has a fabulous resource page, organized by themes such as “funny love,” “classic love,” “teen love,” and “break up.” The page includes audio resources and feature essays such as “Love Lessons from High School Students,” by Brian Staveley, that should prove helpful for lesson planning, teaching, and getting through the day itself.

However you teach, ignore, deny, or celebrate Valentine’s Day in the classroom, drop us a line and let us know how you did it.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day—Daily?

If you find that even the liveliest poems sometimes feel dead on the page, if now and again you’d like to be at a reading rather than reading, or if you’re just trying to squeeze more poetry into your busy schedule, Our Daily Sonnet will be a treat. Dismayed by the dearth of recordings of Shakespeare’s sonnets available on the internet, Adam Tessier decided to record videos of friends and strangers reading the Bard’s poetry. Videos will appear once a day, every day, until all 154 sonnets have been read.

Today’s sonnet:

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.