Indiana University
Rhetoric & composition, Shakespeare
Abstract for "Good Students Reading Shakespeare"
This paper is a report on a first attempt at discerning how good readers actually go about reading a Shakespeare play. Utilizing lengthy interviews, I have studied the reading processes of students who have proven in upper-level and graduate classes to be particularly perceptive and intelligent readers of the plays.
From these interviews, a set of reading practices has emerged, practices that characterize exceptional readers of the plays: Exceptional readers are frequently first-time rereaders (i.e., they intend to get all they can from the text during their first reading rather than reading, say once for plot and later for meaning), who read slowly and carefully, taking the time to check annotations and, and in many cases, to mark up their own texts copiously. Reading for them is a process of thoughtful engagement, primarily with the world created by the play's language and secondarily with that language itself. The best can hardly read a speech (sometimes not even a line) without reflecting on it, inferring characters' thoughts and feelings, speculating on the hidden dynamics of their relationships, raising questions about word meanings and patterns, and feeling their way toward larger issues and themes. Their reading is so rich because they bring such a variety of schemata to bear on the playtext--social schemata that enable them to perceive how characters act in relation to each other; more formal schemata that guide their reading of the play and lead them to note important images, characters, and moments; and critical and cultural schemata that enable them to identify thematic and cultural patterns.
Full Text of "Good Students Reading Shakespeare"