INTRODUCTION:

Despite what we may pick up informally at conferences or what we can glean from the relatively small number of books and articles devoted to Shakespeare pedagogy, most of us know little about how our colleagues actually go about teaching the plays and poems. And yet such knowledge would undoubtedly be of benefit to us.

In an attempt to promote the sharing of information about what we do in our Shakespeare classrooms, I offer here the results of a questionnaire sent to over 850 members of the Shakespeare Association of America in the fall of 1995. In this report I try both to characterize the range of the seventy-six responses to my questions and to provide some perspective on the issues these responses may raise. In order to capture the sound of respondents' voices as well as to enable them to speak, at least implicitly, to each other, I quote extensively, but always anonymously, from the responses.

GOALS/PURPOSES:

My first question was, "What are the goals or purposes of your undergraduate Shakespeare course?" At first glance, respondents seem to vary widely, both in their emphases (from reading and critical thinking to enjoyment and appreciation) and level of abstraction (from very concrete to highly abstract statements). And yet for all their differences, many agree on a fundamental aim, which is, as one respondent emphatically puts it, to help our students "learn, finally, to READ." Another says much the same thing, though with more passion: "My first goal is to teach them the pleasures and rigor of reading well--to infect them with the stuff." Given the strength of these two statements, it should surprise no one to hear that references to reading occurred somewhere in the comments of over fifty percent (forty out of the seventy-seven) of the responses to my survey.

Furthermore, even when respondents talk about what it means to read a Shakespeare text, they seem to speak in nearly one voice. It is true that a few respondents, probably because of the range of their students' abilities, focus first on helping them simply to understand the words they read. Thus, one respondent, who teaches at a large, open-admissions urban university says:

But for all respondents, reading means a good deal more than just decoding the words of a text. "Close reading" is the term used by some to describe the process. Others describe it more specifically: One speaks of leading students to "understand that there is a difference between semantic meaning and critical meaning," while another teaches her students to "read between the lines of dialogue" and prepares them for a text that is

All respondents seem to agree, too, that learning to read a Shakespeare text is only the first step in a process that leads to other, more important goals. One of these goals, the one most frequently mentioned, involves developing students' critical and analytic abilities. In this regard, one respondent speaks of leading "students toward developing their own abilities to think critically," another aims to teach "skills for literary and cultural analysis," while still another tries to "develop skills in critical, skeptical, sensitive reading and thinking."

When one searches for the meanings of such terms as "critical thinking" or "critical analysis," differences in emphasis sometimes do appear. For a number of respondents, critical thinking seems to mean the ability to situate a text within a number of different contexts or perspectives and to recognize the relative value and validity of such perspectives. For some, these contexts are Elizabethan theatrical, social, political, and economic conditions. "We try hard to recreate the Tudor-Stuart period in our conceptualizations," as one puts it. For others, particularly teachers of advanced courses, these contexts are explicitly critical or theoretical, "new historicist, deconstructionist, feminist, and performance-oriented approaches," according to one teacher of an advanced undergraduate course.

A number of respondents, reflecting recent work in feminism and cultural materialism, lead their students to, in the words of one, "see the plays as active participants in two cultures, Shakespeare's and our own." Another's students learn "about historical Shakespeare, theater and publishing, and . . . about the canonization and institutionalization of Shakespeare today," while another teaches that the plays are "related to the culture from which they arose and which they helped to shape" and raises "questions about the use of Shakespeare in the current culture industry."

A slightly different spin is put on critical analysis by some, who emphasize its questioning aspect: They speak of encouraging their students to discover the "disturbing questions raised by each play," "to develop their own answers to disturbing questions raised by the plays," or to formulate "questions of interest and importance and to make up their own minds as to what might constitute responses, answers, solutions." But whether they stress situating plays within contexts or raising questions about them or both, I suspect that all respondents who emphasize critical analysis want to develop in their students the kind of flexibility of mind suggested by this one's comment:

Respondents' heavy emphasis on critical analysis suggests to me that although they, like most teachers of literature, speak of teaching reading, many are, in reality, teaching what a number of literary theorists now characterize as rereading, an activity that Vincent Leitch describes as interested, motivated, purposeful. Unlike first-time readers, rereaders go beyond plot and character to notice patterns of imagery and structure, ironies and subtleties of tone, etc., (Leitch 491-96); to rediscover "an already known text from a different vantage point" (Calinescu 8); to examine the text's rhetorical strategies and confront their own cultural biases (Cornis-Pope 265-75). Shakespeareans will know, of course, that contemporary theorists didn't invent the concept of rereading; Shakespeare's first editors put it this way: "Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe. . . ."

But by no means do all of my respondents postulate critical analysis and interpretation as the sole purpose for reading the plays; some, for example, also speak of more affective ends, such as "appreciation," "enjoyment," or helping students "get over their intimidation by Shakespeare." These respondents speak of encouraging "appreciation of literary and theatrical achievement" or of engendering "appreciation of Shakespeare's language, themes, and stagecraft." They speak also of getting their students to "like Shakespeare," "to feel and enjoy Shakespeare's language, intellect, psychological amity, staging," or of their desire "to convey and encourage pleasure in reading." One well-known teacher-scholar and teacher puts it well:

A few respondents have taken understanding and appreciating the plays in performance as their primary pedagogical goal. "My own goal is to develop an intelligent audience for Shakespeare," says one performance teacher. Unlike some of their colleagues who teach the plays primarily as literary and cultural texts, performance teachers treat them primarily as scripts, as blueprints for performance (one respondent speaks of "malleable scripts and not fixed texts" and another of "scripts, designed for performance"). Our task, this last respondent continues, involves

Many (more than a third) of the respondents attempt to combine an appreciation for the plays in performance with linguistic and cultural analysis. One of these mentions helping her students to "understand the plays both as historical documents and as works which can still be appreciated as plays," another provides a "context for understanding themes and issues . . . [with] opportunity to think about the plays in production," and another's "students learn to read Shakespeare's plays both as literary texts and as plays (works of art with a life beyond the printed page)." The comment of one respondent nicely sums up the impulse to combine text with performance: she wants "students to feel that they can approach any Shakespeare play and make sense of it

In their linking of reading and performance, these responses acknowledge, to my mind, the impact of performance criticism and pedagogy on the current teaching of Shakespeare. Rather than arguing about whether either literary or performance analysis should be privileged in the classroom, many respondents have simply found ways to join the two. One such respondent describes her basic goal in this way:

It may be that the impact of the last twenty-five years of performance criticism will be most deeply felt in college classrooms not so much in the use of particular performance methodologies as in a more subtle transformation in the way we teach students to read the plays: Rather than simply assuming that any readers can and will create the theatre in the mind, we seem to be more actively teaching them how to do it.

APPROACHES:

The second question on my survey, "What is your approach to teaching Shakespeare in undergraduate courses," was an attempt to ascertain how various teachers "go at" a play: Do they explicate scenes, elucidate issues or themes, make connections among plays or elements of plays, emphasize performance matters, etc.?

Respondents' most common pattern of approach (nearly one-half of the total) is what I call an "inside-out" pattern, in which one tends to work outward from specifics of the text to larger questions, problems, and issues. "I try to get my students 'drunk' with the poetry and the beauty of the language," says one respondent representative of this pattern; he continues thus:

Other inside-out respondents describe themselves as explicating the play "scene by scene, with summary generalizations," or as working from particular moments to encourage "students to tease out coherent perceptions of the play's interests and issues," or as directing "students to particular moments in a play's dialogue and action . . . in order to build up a sense of the larger structures and concerns of the work."

A few inside-out respondents approach their task in a highly systematic way. Thus, one spends the first month of each term teaching students

while another begins "with close analysis of several scenes of one play, focusing on line readings, character development, use of imagery and image patterns, development of themes," before moving on to structural patterns of scenes and whole plays. Then, through lecture and discussion exercises, this respondent folds in other concerns such as historical, cultural, and theatrical contexts as well as examining the plays in contemporary theatre and on film.

Another approximately one-third of my respondents prefers to work more from an outside-in perspective, contextualizing discussions of selected passages within a variety of issues and topics ("Historically contextualized close-reading and analysis," is the way one respondent describes this approach). Topics for discussion among these respondents range widely, though one favorite is genre--its nature, the comic and tragic perspectives it generates, and Shakespeare's complex treatment of the genres he chooses. Other topics used to generate discussion and analysis are the plays' treatment of women, issues of canonicity, questions of kinship and honor, political and social interests in the history plays, various critical perspectives on the plays, etc.

One particular strength of this outside-in approach is that it allows for flexibility in the topics chosen for discussion. Sometimes topics are prompted by outside readings and study guides; at other times, students are encouraged to choose topics. One respondent has developed an elaborate system of setting topics, in which students contribute some questions and he contributes others from what he calls the "official agenda," i.e., topics that scholars have considered to be important. The class then votes on the topics to be discussed. "My task," says the respondent, "is to invent pathways between the student-generated questions to the larger, abstract issues, theoretical and historical, inherent in the 'official agenda.'"

Another respondent, who combines the two approaches I have described so far, says, "My students and I work in two directions at once, and try to meet in the middle." Working from the text outward (what does this character mean when he or she says this, why would he or she say/do that?) and from the cultural context inward (does the play reflect elements of its culture, does it comment on elements of that culture?), this respondent finds that these two lines of discussion meet in an "understanding of how the play as a literary text (a member of a certain genre, making use of certain conventions and types of language) can have an active role in its cultural context." Other respondents employ similarly complementary approaches: One, for example, often begins with a "close reading of a passage which engages issues I want to discuss in the play as a whole," but might also "open the discussion with a question about a complex problem in the play and try to elicit a variety of responses to it. . . ." Another respondent works both from the outside in and from the inside out, but always stresses the "philosophic slipperiness of the in/out distinction when afloat in a textual sea."

While they may draw at times on either one of the two approaches I have described so far, the rest of my respondents seem to take other tacks in teaching the plays. A few spend a good deal of time making connections between and across plays: One, for example, "brings "the texts together (Hamlet and 1 Henry IV; Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus) to look at how Shakespeare experiments with raising questions and finding answers." Another, who published his thoughts in a 1990 SQ article and whom I quoted in my survey, helps his students discover what he calls an "intertextual Shakespeare," by tracing the evolution of such conventions as battling lovers or blocking fathers; even gags about suspect legitimacy and drinking habits of the English can be understood as conventions reworked regular by the playwright, he says. Tending to "remove the formalist bloom from Shakespeare," says this respondent, this approach leads students "to regard the plays as dramatic works and not as artifacts."

Whether they are insiders, outsiders, or something in between, many of the respondents I've discussed so far use in-class performance as a method for accomplishing their task (See the next section for details.). There is, however, a small group of respondents for whom in-class performance is not simply a method they employ; rather, it constitutes their very basic approach to teaching. "In my class we look at each play as if we were the company about to put that play on--and we ask questions accordingly," says one of this group of performance teachers. The teaching of another performance respondent, who supposes he is "what Harry Berger calls a New Histrionicist," is so suffused with this performance approach that he refuses to "deal with character since in scripts it does not exist," and he pokes fun "at what most of my teachers pointed to as foreshadowing and dramatic irony," since such recognitions depend on opportunities to turn back and to remember that are simply not available to theatre audiences.

Comments of at least two performance respondents suggest that this approach allows for a good deal of flexibility in the actual teaching of the plays. Thus, one respondent, who describes herself as "always using performance as a way of approaching the plays," also uses the OED to work closely with language, calls on Kenneth Burke's notions to work with genre and structure, has her students analyze blank verse, and, as a result of coming "out of Marxism and feminism, historicizes larger issues or questions in the plays in order to examine the cultural work the plays do." Another, who describes herself as "an inveterate experimenter," someone who tries "as many approaches as possible," says that the "most important thread connecting the things I do is to encourage students to think about the plays in performance." Although she no longer has students stage scenes in class, she has them read aloud, block movement at times, and examine the structure of a word, phrase, or sentence much as people in the theatre would.

Eschewing any of the approaches I have discussed so far, another small group of respondents tries, in the words of one, "anything and everything," in teaching the plays. One of these eclectic respondents opens the "conversation" in his class trying to "illuminate problematic areas of the text," thus establishing a "good give and take," a "comfort zone" between professor and students. Another, who describes her approach as "multi-faceted," begins by asking her students "to produce and act the first 70 lines of Hamlet." The class then use their experiences to raise questions about the process of producing the texts, acting practices today and in early modern England, audience experience and knowledge, and the process of reading and understanding the plays. As the class progresses through the term, this teacher introduces "theoretical, cultural and historical issues in lecture, which we discuss in groups."

Two other eclectics vary their approaches in different ways, but both often take their cues from interests and concerns of their students. One combines "looking at shape and structure with looking at particular theatrical moments with looking at character motivation." "In large part," she continues, "the questions that a given class asks will determine the discussion for any play, although there are always certain ideas/discussions which seem to recur." Another, who mediates between her own questions and those raised by her students, describes herself as "pretty much all over the map," using historical contexts with the history plays, exploring theme and character, discussing performance questions and contexts, looking for patterns, discussing language and differences in genres, etc.

Besides providing the flexibility to respond directly to the needs and interests of students, the eclectic approach I've been describing is also a way of allowing teachers to regenerate themselves. One such respondent says exactly this: "My approach varies because if I do the same all the time I bore myself and my class." "What is crucial about my approach is that I remain challenged and interested," she continues. "My classes respond strongly to my level of interest . . . what my students like about my course is having a professor who's excited to be there."

NEWER CRITICAL APPROACHES:

The third question on my survey was as follows: "How has your current teaching of undergraduates been influenced by some of the more recently developed critical approaches such as semiotics, deconstruction, feminism, object relations psychology, new historicism, cultural materialism, etc.?" Taken as a whole, responses to my questionnaire indicate that we teachers of Shakespeare are "ruthlessly eclectic," as one respondent put it; "desperately eclectic" in the words of another. But responses to this particular question suggest that another person is also on the mark when he says:

As one might imagine, a few respondents are deeply and resolutely negative about newer critical approaches: "I teach Shakespeare, not baloney," says one; "If it ends in -ics, -ion, or -ism I tend to approach it with skepticism bordering on scorn," says another, and "deconstruction less than worthless for studying Shakespeare," notes a third. But of the seventy-two people who responded to this question, sixty indicate that their teaching has been influenced, sometimes "deeply aerated" as one person puts it, by new critical approaches. "The influence is enormous," says another; "Who can ignore the front page?" asks still another.

Given the focuses of current critical work in Shakespeare, it will come as no surprise that the three new approaches most often cited by respondents are feminism (thirty times), new historicism (twenty-five), and cultural materialism (seventeen). But it is also testimony to the power of another approach which I did not specify in my question, the performance or theatrical approach, that it was the next most-cited approach (eight times). Other approaches mentioned more than once or twice were semiotics (six), deconstruction (five), materialism/Marxism (four), and psychoanalysis (four).

The influences of newer critical approaches have not been limited just to teachers who would have been trained in them recently in graduate school. Thus, one thirty-year veteran describes his teaching as having been "enlivened" by such approaches while another states his belief that they are important because they "suggest some of the intellectual quality of the zeitgeist into which a production emerges." Another older hand, this time a person who has been teaching Shakespeare for twenty years, notes that they have led her to bring into the classroom "a lot more social history and to dwell on the implications of courtship practices, political theory (and practice), mortality rates, literacy, etc."

As a result of the influence of newer approaches such as feminism, new historicism, and cultural materialism, teachers who responded to my questionnaire are more likely to lead their students to think "more critically about the historical conditions influencing and influenced by the plays," as one puts it, introducing a "Shakespeare who is less comfortable with & confident about cultural, political, national, religious values," in the words of another. One respondent describes the array of approaches she uses to teach Othello:

The effect of such teaching is, as another respondent suggests, to help students recognize that meaning is largely subjective and culturally constructed . . . whether or not we provide them with the names "deconstruction" or "feminism" or "race studies."

As this last comment suggests, one issue that arose as I studied responses to this question was whether teachers in undergraduate Shakespeare classes prefer to deal with newer critical approaches more implicitly or explicitly. Here respondents differ. Two split the difference, so to speak, preferring not to "highlight critical approaches" in lower level classes, while discussing them more explicitly in upper-level classes for majors. One, for example, tries to lead lower-level students to "use their own feminist lenses to look at characters like Desdemona and Isabella"; at the upper level, though, "if a student does a paper on feminist approaches to Desdemona, he or she will be expected to read the most important critical analyses--people like Neely, Dash, Wayne, etc."

Other respondents avoid direct presentations of critical frameworks at the undergraduate level. In lieu of spending time on issues raised by feminism, new historicism and cultural materialism (though she had been influenced by them), one chooses to address her students' more "basic need: to learn how to read dramatic texts." Two others also eschew direct discussion of such matters, though one says that ideas drawn from deconstruction and new historicism "permeate what we do in class," while the other, whose "critical interests are mildly feminist," admits that "gender relations are always an important element in our discussion."

On the other side of the issue are seven respondents who prefer to make their students more conscious of the variety of critical perspectives available to them. Thus, at least three actually introduce newer critical materials into their classrooms (one mentions using articles by Janet Adelman, Stephen Greenblatt, Jean Howard, Marianne Novy and others; a second has students annotate five-ten essays of contemporary scholarship; and a third has students read and discuss essays relating to particular plays, a feminist and a literary-inheritance essay on AYLI, for example.) Another respondent presents "mini-lectures on various critical viewpoints," while still another trains her students to "write or speak about what they think a critic coming from each perspective might have to say about the work being studied."

Two other respondents are even more ambitious in the presentation of critical approaches. One, whose purpose is to build up the "interpretive repertoires" of her students, structures her entire course around various perspectives, sequencing them in levels of increasing complexity, with each exemplified through a new text. She describes the course as follows:

The other respondent teaches the plays through an annual Shakespeare Festival held at his university, "which features five or six full-scale productions of the plays annually, with a film festival, lecture series, workshops with the actors and scholars, and computer demonstrations." Each festival has its "own special theme that draws heavily on contemporary critical theory--feminism, historical materialism, etc. Typical themes have included:

Earlier in this section, I mentioned that, in spite of the fact that my question did not cite it, the approach that received the largest number of mentions after feminism, new historicism, and cultural materialism was the performance or theatrical approach (eight times). I suspect that because performance pedagogy (including film/video performance) lends itself so naturally to classroom practice, it can coexist easily with other approaches. Thus, more often than not, someone who makes use of the performance approach makes use of others as well. Thus, the performance teacher I cited earlier, the one who said that "in my class we look at each play as if we were the company about to put that play on," also said this:

Another teacher whose "classroom practice focuses on performance strategies" says that other interpretive or technical issues come up as they seem relevant to particular productions." And the teacher whom I described earlier as structuring her whole course around various approaches mentions the "crucial influence" of recent work, "theoretical and practical, on the importance of performance in the creation and interpretation of Shakespeare text. My course," she continues, "seems to be centering around theatricality and collaboration at a number of levels."

These responses suggest to me that Niels Herold is misguided when he asserts in a recent SQ article that performance pedagogy "is now threatened from two sides: from a renewed interest in textual problems that exist 'prior' to and surround performance; and from political criticism of Shakespeare, underwritten in large part by new historicists and cultural materialists" (127). In the classroom, typically an assimilitative arena, performance pedagogy can blend nicely with the very approaches (including the political and historicizing ones Herold discusses) with which it may seem to be in conflict in the more adversx academic press.

METHODS:

My fourth question concerned the methods that teachers of Shakespeare actually employ in the classroom. I asked: "What methods and/or combination of methods are most congenial to your style of teaching Shakespeare to undergraduates?" I then went on to list four methodological areas--lecture, discussion, performance, and film--and asked specific questions about each of their uses. The results are as follows:

Lecture: As one might imagine, only a few of my respondents lecture exclusively, and then only when class size demands it. "I lecture because my class is large," says one, while another describes lecture "as the chief method available in a course of 250," though he goes on to note that he does have some discussions with the large group and that there are section meetings run by GTA's. Another respondent lectures in the one Shakespeare survey course offered on a limited basis at his institution primarily because students in course evaluations "continually refer to a dislike of students talking or guessing about material of which they have no knowledge." But then, even this respondent attempts to lead his class into discussions after lecturing on a particular play for two classes.

Recognizing that, as one respondent puts it, "there is a body of information that I can share with my students that will help them understand the plays," a number of respondents lecture, either formally or informally, to provide contexts for the plays they teach. Lecture topics include etymology, Shakespeare's life, the Elizabethan theatre, the political situation under Elizabeth or James, the Wars of the Roses, the transition from the Roman republic to the Empire, as well as witchcraft, the humors, Elizabethan astrology, religion, etc. Although sometimes these lectures are given formally (I've now put mine on video-tape, for instance), a number of respondents give what might be called lecturettes, short contextual talks at the beginning of the study of a play; one respondent describes his as "impromptu mini-lectures (3-4 minutes) with background information in response to student questions or discussion."

Whether or not it will completely replace our lectures, Russ McDonald's new The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare should prove particularly valuable in helping us enrich the cognitive schemas within which our students can construct the meanings of the plays. Not only does McDonald discuss topics central to study of plays (Shakespeare's biography, authorship problems, Elizabethan theatrical performance, textual issues, Shakespeare's reading, his dramatic language, cultural, political, and religious contexts), he also provides enough illustrations and original documents to give our students a feel for the discourse of the age and a basis for their own research.

Discussion: Rather than simply lecturing, most respondents favor blending their talking with student discussion in various proportions. One of these describes her lecture style as a loose one "that encourages students to break in and question me, push me, challenge me." She continues thus:

Another usually begins the semester with lectures, but encourages students to interrupt at any time. "In a good class," he says, "they are teaching it by the 5th week and I'm acting as referee; in a less good class I have to make provocative and/or ridiculous statements to challenge them to respond."

In order to open up a discussion, some respondents begin a class with a short commentary or interpretation. They may give a brief introduction to the play being studied, focusing on sources, textual problems, recent critical approaches, major themes and dramatic elements, etc. And a few end with a brief summary of issues discussed, questions raised, etc. Many, as I suggested above, try, in the words of one, to "run what is primarily a discussion class, with little lecture-like excursions now and then."

Some respondents prepare students for discussions in advance by distributing study guides and questions. One has developed guides that "make a series of observations followed by an even longer series of questions. In the study guides," he says, "I try to suggest various approaches to the plays." Beginning study of a play with a quiz geared to the study guides, he then opens class discussion with questions from the quiz. Another who bases discussion on study guides says:

Other respondents lay the groundwork for discussions in different ways. One, for instance, has students prepare passages to discuss with the class, contextualizing them in "terms of earlier plays, arguments, and problems." Another assigns a scene or even a line to small groups, giving them twenty minutes to discuss and ten minutes to present it to the class. "Buttressed and encouraged by others," this respondent says, "the students come up with their most original and brave readings in this context." Still another respondent provides directives to stimulate small group discussion; this person also guides small groups to analyze video productions in order to "develop 'expert' explanations of particular performances." And another, who uses group activities to practice a particular method of interpretation and often to anticipate the next writing assignment, says: "I like the group activities because they distribute student voice and responsibility and actually permit a lot of coverage. . . ."

As some of the comments above suggest, style of discussion probably varies a good deal, both among respondents and probably among their individual classes as well. Some discussions (or at least parts of some discussions) are more Socratic, in which teachers try to lead students to see a point or points. Other respondents are dissatisfied with the Socratic method: One uses the method but increasingly sees it as "too teacher-centered to be sufficient"; another, who also dislikes the method, says:

To my query about whether respondents' goal in a discussion was "more to lead students to see a point or more just to stimulate them to raise questions," I received a variety of interesting answers. Sometimes respondents use discussion to lead students to see a certain point (though at times that point might simply be the right question to ask); more often, they use it to open up issues, questions, interpretations, etc. They lead students "to build cases, to construct alternative points of view about an issue or thesis, to expand interpretive details and to debate possibilities" in the words of one; to "raise questions, multiply interpretations" in the words of another; to "explore," "draw out . . . issues," discover "what's puzzling" students," or "question orthodoxies" in the words of others.

Performance: While a few complain that it's "too time consuming" or that it requires "too much time and effort," well over half of the respondents to my survey use theatrical performance of some kind in their classrooms. Performance techniques range all the way from informal "in-class improvisation" to highly elaborate out-of-class presentations. A number of respondents weave performance exercises more or less spontaneously into the fabric of their classes: Two, for example, describe themselves as having "occasional" scene readings or class performances. One respondent just pulls a few students to the front of the class and has them read and discuss a scene together; another sometimes begins discussions of a scene with a reading; another, in lieu of actual performance, makes use of dramatic exercises such as having students mime "the relationship between two or three characters," while another has students "present the essence of a short scene through sound and movement, but not words."

On the less impromptu side are those respondents who actually form groups during class, give them a few minutes to rehearse a scene, and then ask them to "perform" it for the rest of the class. One has two groups of about five students each "dramatize a beat of 10-70 lines." The class then compares "the dramatizations to see what differences in interpretations evolved out of each group, and why." A number of respondents have created performance activities that are a good deal more elaborate than any I've mentioned so far; here is a sample:

Respondents find that in-class performance can have a number of pedagogical benefits: Some feel, for example, that it leads students to read more closely; their students "feel ownership of the language" in the words of one; they truly grapple with language and a sense of character," says another. Others stress the ability of performance to "raise issues of interpretation" or to open students to "interpretative possibilities." Still others stress the "energy, excitement, and student ownership of the plays" or the physical and intellectual involvement that performance can generate.

Film: My particular question on the use of film was as follows: "Do you use film to teach Shakespeare? If so, how and when do you use it?" Most of my respondents took my reference to film to include video tape also, as I intended.

The people who responded to this question were about evenly divided between the eighteen or so who use film/video (almost always the latter) extensively in their classrooms and the nineteen who use film/video only rarely or not at all. In the middle was a group of about fifteen who use film/video occasionally in their teaching.

One of the most extensive users of film/video, himself the author of books, articles, and reviews on Shakespeare on film and video, uses these media in order to examine and even to interrogate the way they represent the plays. Thus, he uses them to

Other extensive media users see film more as a handy "realization of the text" (as one puts it), which they can then use to show "how the plays are open to differing interpretations," in the words of one, and to "let students see how many different performance choices are legitimately offered by any piece of Shakespeare's text," in the words of another. Often comparing two or three different video "performative interpretations" of the same scene or moment, these teachers usually focus their classes on theatrical choices (those of directors, actors, set designers) and, less often, on cinematic ones such as "cutting lines or scenes and camera-view." One respondent who has students gather twice a semester outside of class to view an entire play on video does hold three or four film sessions each semester, pointing out such basic principles as "use of spatial arrangements, light and shadow, editing for film, camera positions, use of sound and music, etc."

Responses to this question suggest that there may be two major differences between those who use film/video extensively in their classrooms and those who use these media occasionally, rarely, or not at all. First, while extensive users tend almost always to use clips of short sequences or moments, less frequent users may be thinking only of using whole films, whose use would consume large quantities of their class time. Second, while extensive users assume that such performances will encourage "an openness to interpretation," infrequent users fear just the opposite: One worries that any one film may screen out "so many other interesting possibilities," while another feels that film productions are "too over-determined to allow individual reading." My own experience, and I am one of the extensive users, is that watching filmed performances, particularly if students have already read and discussed the play-text and also if one can find the time to contrast different versions of the same scene, stimulates rather than constrains student interpretations. My students seem to have no hesitation about arguing with a particular interpretation they have seen on film.

VALUE/IMPORTANCE:

My last question was, "What is your sense of the value or importance of Shakespeare in an undergraduate curriculum?" Given current debates in our discipline about issues of value and canonicity, it will surprise no one that responses to this question were more complex, more variegated, than those to any other. Respondents who read the question as a query about the essential or intrinsic value of Shakespeare's texts differed, often taking sharply defined (either relativist or more absolutist) positions. One respondent, who doesn't "believe in any ultimate value or importance," commented thus:

Through putting it less strongly, others agreed that, in the words of one, the plays were "valuable but not essential"; one, who said that Shakespeare works "awfully well," also argued that she had the "same sort of classes on modern drama, and early women writers, and non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama." Another concurred, saying that "studying Shakespeare has the same value as studying the other Renaissance texts I teach." One respondent, who loves teaching Shakespeare and feels that his plays help students "expand their cognitive lives," still laments the fact that situating him in a category by himself has created a "dangerous and distorting picture" of early modern culture. To overcome Shakespeare's cultural hold, she would be willing to declare a "moratorium on Shakespeare teaching for awhile." At the very least, she says, Shakespeare needs to be contextualized, "not only through historical materials, but through readings against his contemporaries."

At the other, more absolutist and currently less fashionable end of the spectrum are a number of respondents who still argue, in the words of three, that study of Shakespeare gives students "the chance of a lifetime to get close to the work of the absolutely greatest writer--in any language, in any time, of any gender--on the planet"; that he is "the greatest and most popular English writer/playwright"; and that "he simply represents the values of our literary/dramatic history more fully than any other writer." "Whatever we may say or believe as denizens of the post-structuralist academy," says another respondent, "the plays of 'Shakespeare,' what or whoever he may be, still speak to a contemporary student audience more directly, more profoundly, and more beautifully than any other body of work."

Rather than engaging with the intrinsic values issue, most respondents took my question more pragmatically, choosing to interpret value or importance in terms of the effect of the plays on students. Below are a set of statements expressing the themes arising from these responses (Some responses combined two or three themes; others focused on one.):

Study of the plays contributes to our students' cultural literacy: Shakespeare and his plays are so deeply "embedded" (as one respondent put it) in our culture as to constitute, in the words of three others, a "cultural icon," "cultural currency," or "cultural capital." "Shakespeare is the one author students will keep bumping up against for the rest of their lives: in public discourse he is the canon," says another. Because the plays are continually reinterpreted, continually recharged with meaning, says another, "the study of Shakespeare becomes quite literally the study of our own culture, of our own intellectual and moral condition, and of the ways in which our lives and times acquire meaning."

At least two respondents, who accept the cultural literacy argument somewhat grudgingly, have discovered other values in teaching the plays. One, for example, who finds Shakespeare's importance as "partly an institutional imposition" and who calls him "a sentinel at the gates of our profession" hopes, on the other hand, that students

Another, who "used to have a rather Machiavellian argument for students' taking Shakespeare on a "need-to-know" basis" now finds that her "respect for Shakespeare's vision grows and grows, and with it, my respect for his work's teachability."

Study of Shakespeare teaches our students to respond more complexly to issues/problems/relationships: The complexity of Shakespeare's texts "forces students to move beyond simple answers to difficult problems," says one respondent. Shakespeare "raises our levels of toleration of uncertainty," says another, teaching us "what questions to ask and how difficult the answers are." Focusing specifically on issues, another respondent notes that "Shakespeare's deep skepticism, his fondness for presenting several (often contradictory) sides of an issue, creates a forum for scrutinizing all sorts of things (power, gender roles, religion, morality, textuality)." Still another, focusing this time on choices, especially choices in human relationships, says with deep feeling:

Shakespeare "focuses," he "animates" key issues for our students: The plays give "a local habitation and a name to some of the most difficult issues we face as humans," says one respondent. He speaks to our students "across the centuries about what it is to be a person in love, to be a person in community, to have values that one is willing to die for, to be caught in impossible situations from which there is no clear escape," says another.

Seeing themselves in the prism of another culture and identifying with the people of that culture enables our students to experience, even to confront, themselves more intensely: The plays "offer a mirror for Shakespeare's world--a small window away from our self importance and self centeredness"; they "offer another world, another set of identities to explore"; they allow "students to see themselves in the mirrors of Shakespeare's "others"; they give our students "a chance to experience the 'otherness' of themselves, i.e., that their own identities are fluid, open to change or manipulation, misinterpretation and imagination."

Study of Shakespeare helps students develop linguistic and aesthetic sensitivity: Shakespeare "sensitizes students to the power of finely-crafted language and narrative structure"; "reading Shakespeare develops students' awareness of the depth and complexity of the English language"; "the power of Shakespeare's language to enthrall students with its flexibility, expressiveness, and sheer beauty is unmatched." Students can learn "to truly appreciate drama," they can come to appreciate "complex theatrical experiences as actor, director and audience."

While I have set forth the major themes that emerged from responses to the "value" question, I want to emphasize that a number of responses touched not just on one but on a number of these themes. Here, for example, is one such inclusive response, which expresses with quiet eloquence the spirit of many others; it will serve as coda for this report.

WORKS CITED

Calinescu, Matei. Rereading. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1993.

Cornis-Pope, Marcel. Hermeneutic Desire & Critical Rewriting. London: Macmillan, 1992.

Herold, Niels. "Pedagogy, Hamlet, and the Manufacture of Wonder." Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (Summer 1995): 125-134.