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Good Students Reading Shakespeare

Bill Griffin
Virginia Commonwealth University

After urging that "the great variety of readers . . . from the most able, to him that can but spell," buy the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, plays that have stood the trial of performance, and whose texts, "maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious imposters," are now "offered to your view cured, and perfect of their limbs," John Heminge and Henry Condell, Shakespeare's fellow actors and first editors, end their preface on a quieter note:

But it is not our province, who only gather his works, and give them you, to praise him. It is yours that read him. And there we hope, to your divers capacities, you will find enough, both to draw, and hold you: for his wit can no longer be hid, than it could be lost. Read him, therefore; and again, and again. And if you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to understand him. And so we leave you to his Friends, whom if you need, can be your guides: if you need them not, you can lead your selves, and others. And such Readers we wish him.

Heminge and Condell touch here on several themes that will be familiar to most teachers of Shakespeare: We all teach readers of "divers capacities"; we too suspect that a student who claims not to like the plays is someone who doesn't understand them; we also urge our students to "read him . . . and again, and again"; and finally we fancy ourselves as guides for most readers of the plays. But we also teach a few students in each of our classes who hardly need us; without our help and guidance, they are already capable of leading themselves and others, as Heminge and Condell put it. It is on this last group of readers that this study focuses.

It doesn't take a Shakespeare teacher long to recognize those students--usually not more than one or two per class--whose ability to understand and interpret the plays sets them apart from the rest. They rarely stumble over the meaning of a word or a line when called on in class, they usually provide the readiest (and most cogent) interpretation of a moment or a scene, and they write the most interesting analytic papers. But as yet, we have no systematic knowledge of how these successful students actually read, or, to put it more accurately, study a Shakespearean play. Such knowledge could serve as an invaluable guide as we try to teach others in our classes to become more intelligent readers. Being able to say with confidence that the reading techniques we are teaching really do work for students would give our teaching a kind of credibility that it presently may lack.

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. After identifying thirty-two such readers, in my classes and those of my colleagues, I interviewed these students as they actually read a play, in most cases Antony and Cleopatra, interrupting them at certain points to discern what was in their awareness at that moment. As a result of their particularly informative first interviews, I had eighteen of these readers return for a second. 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.

As I listened to the first few of these exceptional readers describe their rich responses to a Shakespearean playtext, I began to wonder whether I could ever develop in others the abilities they possessed. Perhaps I was in the presence of a highly talented group of people, people who possessed natural gifts simply beyond the reach of most others. But while it is true that most have been avid readers from childhood, their present way of reading results from choices they have made, choices that other students may also be taught to make.

Active Engagement:

Reading for these exceptional readers is, for instance, a consciously active rather than a passive process: It "isn't a passive activity," said one student in her interview; "it requires an active interest; you can't just be passive with it and let it go," said another. It's "an interactive process," said still another. The process requires so much of my attention that I "cannot have a TV on . . . can't have music going on, unless it's something classical . . . otherwise it distracts me."

Reading a playtext is such an intense process for two of these readers that they associated it with smoking or not smoking: One, who spoke of the "urge to get it all, like to milk it," said it's like "being a little more edgy or not smoking somehow," while the other, who characterized her style of reading as a "quest" or a "scavenger hunt," said that she had to smoke while she did it. All of my best readers would have agreed, I think, with the one who felt that students who took so many English classes that they couldn't focus on any one text long enough to read it closely were making "a really big mistake" or the other who censured teachers for assigning so much reading that they subverted the whole complex process. To her, these teachers seemed to be saying, "Well, it's just a play. It won't take you very long to read."

Reading Stance:

The principal way the exceptional readers in my study bring themselves into such active, purposeful engagement with a Shakespearean playtext is to discover or even imagine for themselves a stance that requires them to communicate their ideas to others. One reader, a graduate student and secondary teacher, forces herself to read thoughtfully by imagining that whenever she reads a play she is "beginning to read it in class with my students"; thus she focuses on "the questions that I know they?re going to ask me." Two others read the play as if they were preparing for a class discussion: One of these writes in the margin the points ("especially questions") she'd like to bring up in class, while the other uses the time before class to verbalize his thoughts. You read better, he says, if "you're responsible for making that meaning and making it explicit."

Those of us who have spent hundreds of hours each year reading and responding to student papers will be gratified to learn that it is the thought of writing papers that generates the most intensity in the majority of my exceptional readers. One, who recently received a full five-year fellowship to do graduate work at Vanderbilt, puts it this way:

So when I approach anything I approach it with the attitude, you know, what can I do with this? How can I turn this into something? How can I reconfigure this play into something that could even be published. I'm thinking long-term.

Others agree. One says, for instance: "I do read things differently when I know I have to write papers about them. I think I read things better." Another admits that beginning to read with a paper in mind means that he will spend "the entire time thinking of things and marking things," while another says that he always reads with a paper "in the back of his mind." And given their sense of the utility of writing papers, it comes as no surprise that a number of these readers remember in particular those teachers who had them write about the texts they read, whether on reading quizzes, in journals, in short response papers, or in longer critical papers. Such papers make you "dig a little deeper," says one. Not only does writing "force you to read the work seriously," says another, "but then it forces you to think about it afterwards; just by getting it down on paper, you work more of it out."

Reading/Rereading:

Anyone familiar with recent reader response studies can hardly be unaware of the emphasis critics and scholars have placed on rereading, though almost always on rereading fiction as opposed to other genres. In his discussion of reading and rereading in Hermenetic Desire and Critical Rewriting, Marcel Cornis-Pope mentions the work of Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Northrup Frye, Wolfgang Iser, Michael Riffaterre, and Thomas Leitch (22); and I would add the more recent very thorough discussion of rereading in Matei Calinescu's Rereading (1993). All of these writers agree, I think, that a first (often called naive) reading of a story is a linear, end-oriented (as Calinescu puts it), attempt to understand narrative and characters, while a rereading is a more circular attempt to reflect on the language of the story, typically for the purpose of revealing how this language constructs meaning and reveals ideology, both in the text and in the reader.

But even while reading scholars discriminate between reading and rereading, most disavow any absolute chronological distinction between the two processes. "What should be clear," says Calinescu, "is that reading and rereading often go together," while Cornis-Pope says that "ideally, the reader should pursue an uninterrupted, 'double dialectic,' with an active, transformative re-reading already implied in first reading." Even such a compulsive rereader as Roland Barthes in S/Z recommends "reading the text as if it had already been read." "Rereading," he continues, "is here suggested at the outset . . ."(15-16). Vincent Leitch calls readers who combine the processes of reading and rereading "first-time rereaders--that is, readers who have trained themselves, in effect to reread a story the first time they read it . . ." (92).

Most of the highly effective readers in this study are either, to borrow Leitch's term, first-time rereaders, or readers whose first-time reading hovers somewhere between the processes of reading and rereading. It's not so much that they don't read the text or at least parts of it again, as it is that they act like rereaders on first reading: Their principal rereading behaviors are as follows:

1) Most read very slowly, so slowly that they often apologize for their slow pace: "I'm a very slow reader," says one; "I always knew I was very slow," says another. "If I read something fast, I have to read it again," says a third. (I might note, by the way, that forty years ago, long before the term "rereading" was au courant, Reuben Brower [In Defense of Reading, 3] described the same process as "reading in slow motion." Terms such as "studying" or "examining" a text might be more accurate than "reading" to describe the slow, careful process of these readers.

2) These readers seem intensely involved in the reading process itself, so intent on what they are reading that they can brook no interruption. "I can't have the TV going, have music going; I can't have somebody talking," says one. Another says that the process is so intense that she cannot do it after work when she's tired.

3) Most underline and annotate their text continually: In their notes, they identify characters, define words, explain allusions, summarize complex speeches, identify stage directions in the lines, interpret (and sometimes judge) characters' words and actions, note significant moments, images, or motifs, and raise questions.

4) Even at the very beginning of a play, most read in a circular or recursive fashion, first reading, then stopping to reread or check a footnote or annotation, and then beginning to read again. "I read and reread and I tend to jump in and out in terms of footnotes and glosses," says one. Another describes her process thus: "I read back, I jump around a lot," while still another says: "If . . . I don't get it, I'll go back and read it again, however many times it takes me to get it and then I'll just go on and do the whole thing that way."

As I suggested at the beginning of this discussion, the relationship between reading and rereading is a relative one, both in the theoretical literature and among these readers. Thus, even, for example, the most scrupulous first-time rereaders I interviewed can read a playtext or at least a part of it a second and perhaps a third time. Some will take the time to reread the part of the play actually discussed in class on a given day ("I'll read the whole thing, says one I've already quoted above, "and then whatever we discuss in class I go back and read those parts), while others will reread at least parts if they are developing ideas or looking for evidence for a paper.

And, with a few exceptions, even those readers who professed to read a text twice (i.e., once for plot and character and once for the complexities of the language) actually read as slowly, intently, and thoughtfully as those who professed to be first-time rereaders. One reader who began our interview by describing herself as a first-time, second-time reader ended by admitting: ". . . I think that I've started jumping to that in-between first and second reading stage because I don't have the luxury of having that first, that time for the first read." Another was surprised to learn that he was "analyzing right from the very start." Perhaps the following comment on reading/rereading, made by one of the most effective readers of the group, summarizes succinctly attitudes and practices of most of these readers: I'm a firm believer in close reading and getting as much as I can the first time through. However, if I were reading this for a class, more than likely I would read it twice.

The fact that most of the readers in my study tend toward a first-time rereading rather than a first quick and then a full second reading indicates to me that they have found a way to adapt to the exigencies of their academic situation, for while we faculty may exhort our students to read and then reread, it should be obvious even to us that most hardly have the time to fulfill our wishes in any systematic way. An English major struggling to keep up with weekly reading assignments in say three literature courses--reading an eighteenth-century novel, a Shakespeare play, and a selection of Donne poems in the same week, while, perhaps, working on a paper--hardly has the time to be rereading what he or she read last week. What, I wonder, does this fact imply for our teaching? Should our classes themselves become more the sites for such rereadings? Should we, for example, spend more time actually having students read (aloud and silently) and analyze passages in class, showing them how to identify those aspects of a text that might then enter into the higher level, more encompassing interpretations that we aim for?

In and Out, or Immersion and Interactivity:

Whether their approach is primarily phenomenological, textual, or response oriented, scholars and critics interested in the reading process typically describe it as a continuous and recursive movement between immersion in the concrete world represented by the text and thoughtful interactivity with this world and the processes of its construction. Mikel Dufrenne speaks of imagination and reflection or "the play between reflective understanding and lived meaning); Georges Poulet distinguishes between perception and reflection; Roman Ingarten between concretization and investigative reflection; Roland Barthes between reading and writing, or more accurately the readerly and the writerly; and David Bleich between symbolization and resymbolization.

Given the dualistic nature of most of these descriptions of the reading process, it is tempting to divide it into two distinct phases, with concretization (creation of the world represented by the text) followed by reflection (analysis of that world and of its construction). After all, doesn't one have to concretize a world before he or she reflects on its meanings and constructions? Such an assumption has led some Shakespeare teachers in the past (myself included) to encourage their students to read a play as if it were being produced in the theatre of their minds, hearing characters' voices and visualizing their costumes, actions, gestures, facial expressions, etc.

However, my interviews with readers in this study suggest that there is no such thing as a theatre of the mind, at least if one means by that phrase a fully concretized world (whether viewed as a stage production or a film) continually observed by the reader. Thus, for example, although my readers see images as they read, such images are never very distinct, or fully developed. Rather, settings are always partial (Egypt is pictured as desert sand, a few little trees, and windswept terra cotta figures; Cleopatra's palace is represented by images of columns or colonades) and human figures are "hazy," "shadowy," or "dreamlike"; for example, a reader will have a vague sense of characters entering a room or of attendants swarming around a stationary character, or of soldiers wearing skirts and swords, etc. Not surprisingly, the most distinct images, particularly of characters, arise from films readers have seen: Thus, Cleopatra is often pictured as Elizabeth Taylor, Antony as Richard Burton, and Octavius Caesar looks like Marlon Brando, "sort of."

One reason why these images are so indistinct is that plays simply don't provide many cues for constructing concrete images; without a narrator, whatever image a reader creates must arise from stage directions (almost always highly abbreviated in Shakespeare, e.g., "Music plays, and they dance" is one of the longer ones) or more often from something a character says, for example, when Cleopatra asks an attendant to loosen her stay, one reader pictures her dress. But the underlying reason why readers' images are so indistinct and incomplete is that, as Wolfgang Iser puts it: "Our mental images do not serve to make the character physically visible; their optical poverty is an indication of the fact that they illuminate the character, not as an object, but as a bearer of meaning" (138). Thus, for example, readers in this study don't so much have concrete images of characters as they do of the feelings or meanings they attach to these characters; for example, as Cleopatra and Antony enter, one reader envisions her as being sarcastic; another describes two characters arguing as being engaged in a sparring match or bantering, while, another who describes the same moment as a fencing match, sees Cleopatra dancing around Antony "trying to rile him up"; another reader describes a threatening figure as brooding or sarcastic, while yet another sees adversaries making peace as engaged in "political matchmaking".

If Iser is right, then readers do not necessarily create an imaginary world at one moment and then reflect on its meanings at the next; rather, they can do both at the same time. The imaginary world they create is often itself a world constituted by meanings they have discerned. Thus, a number of these readers describe imagination and reflection as simultaneous processes:

. . . I read and have the thought at the same time and the thing that follows . . . is writing it down;

Like maybe I'm still reading and maybe there's a process in the back of my head still working on what I've read before. It's hard to describe;

I mean, I think, I'm not sure if those two things can happen simultaneously, if I can be saying them in my head and trying to figure out what they mean at the same time but it's pretty close;

It's almost like there's a voice that's doing the reading but then there's a thinker behind the voice that's thinking it through;

I mean, there's always a part of me as a reader, who is kind of above the text and there's a good portion of me who's involved in the text and enjoying it on that level. . . .

In his Literary Meaning, William Ray, building on Sartre's concept of "imagining knowledge," proposes this description of the reading process, a description that echoes the statements above:

Reading occurs, then, neither entirely in the mode of conceptual meaning nor in that of an intuitively full image. Rather it is the suspension of consciousness between these two poles: no longer pure rule and order, yet not quite full image (22).

As the foregoing discussion suggests, where the kind of imaginative, engaged thinking I have been describing leaves off and the more removed, reflective or investigative thinking identified by critics such as Ingarden picks up is almost impossible to discern. But that a second type of reflective thinking does occur is revealed by readers who describe themselves as immersed in the world of the text at one moment and reflecting on it at the next: One reader says, for example: "I'll stop and I'll think about it for a minute, and then I go back to the text," while another says, "I think the enjoyment comes when I then pull back and have started to get an idea about what's going on and see the complexity." More significantly, two readers who described the process of imagination and reflection as simultaneous at one moment suggest at another that the two process are separate: One says, " . . . I can read back and forth between being objective and analyzing the text and becoming wrapped up in it," while another puts it this way: What I find that I do is that I may read a few lines and then reflect on them before I read more, but sometimes I'm reading and thinking simultaneously.

When it comes to what they reflect on as they read, the expert readers in this study situate themselves along a continuum, ranging at one end from those who read the text as a script to be acted to those who read it more as a document to be analyzed. Both groups are highly sensitive to the language of the play, but their response to it takes them in different directions. For script readers, the play's language is a transparent medium through which they enter the felt life of the play: They typically devote most of their cognitive energy to characters--their motivations, attitudes, relationships with each other, etc. When asked what they are looking for as they read, they respond as follows:

I look for things that help me see the personalities of the characters;

I was looking at what he was saying, what she was saying, her responses to him;

I tend to focus more on the relationships between the characters than on sort of the political structure and the plots and the outside plots.

And their transcripts are full of comments and questions such as these: Antony seems divided between his life in Egypt and his duty to Rome; What is there about Antony's personality that makes it difficult for the messenger to talk to him; Cleopatra seems not to have a clue about why Antony must seem so heroic and dashing and taking care of the whole universe; How much is Antony being played for a fool by Cleopatra; What's the significance of the fact that Cleopatra's attendant Charmian seems so competitive with her; Why does Enobarbus say "Hush, here comes Antony," when it's Cleopatra who walks in; Why does Enobarbus so insensitively ignore Antony's melancholy mood; as soon as Antony gets even a hint that Cleopatra is trying to control him, she backs off; What does the way these people treat messengers tell you about them and their use of power; Antony doesn't seem to understand Cleopatra at all; Antony seems a curiously passive character and he just accepts what people tell him; even though she seems self-centered, Cleopatra is actually more sensitive than Antony is, etc.

Readers at the document end of the spectrum are equally sensitive to the language of the play, but for them it is more opaque, more a medium to be analyzed in and of itself. They tend to be more utilitarian than the script readers: Two, for example, read from the very beginning with a paper in mind: ". . . I'm reading this, it's more for usually to write a paper . . . that's why I pick up on conceits and that stuff," says one, while the other says, "I always read with a paper in mind." And all three of these document analysts seem to have a more clearly defined critical framework than the script readers: One indicates, for example, that she is prone to "feminist readings" and aware of "racial stereotypes'; another that he looks for oppositions, while the third, who looks often for issues of class conflicts, says that on first reading he would pick up on issues that he is "oriented to theoretically," and then 'tease out more subtle meanings, sexual allusions, subtexts" on second reading. This last reader is the only reader in my study to be very conscious of issues of representation and textual construction: When asked about his reading goals, he said:

I think when I was younger, it was the story. The story mattered, not the way things were represented but the representations themselves. I got emotionally involved with a story like "Hobgoblins" by Gorky. I would get deeply involved with that, you know, it would disturb me to read something like that but I loved it. However, over the last few years, I've become more involved with the process of representation, the way these things are done and the way these things--characters and plots--are constructed to affect readers. And I tend to be more aware of that than I am my own involvement with the story although that does still play a role, I am still involved with the story.

I am not saying, by the way, that what distinguishes the readers in this study is their awareness of the larger thematic and cultural issues that grow out of reading a play. They simply arrive at these issues in a different way, with the first group moving outward from their perceptions about character to the larger issues in the play, while the other group tends to pick up the same sorts of themes and issues from allusions, important images, repetition of motifs, etc. One reader in this second group, for example, had developed an almost uncanny ability to spot the motive or reference that would lead him to a central theme of the play, even though sometimes he was not very aware of the subtle character dynamics of a scene.

It is true, however, that in the middle of my script to document continuum are those readers who seem able to balance their involvements with characters with a concern for larger issues. They seem more aware than the script readers, for example, of the need to understand the larger issues of the play, for they say things like:

I'm looking for what is propelling the play forward;

I pulled back for just a second and started thinking about how these things fit together, not only in my mind but in the play's mind;

I'm trying to figure out how this kind of goes along with the play . . . trying to see how it works in the play;

. . . I think a lot of it's an intuitive sense of what the issues are and how those issues are going to be developing. . . .

And second, although very much like the script readers in that they are attentive to subtleties of character and relationships, they, like the document analyzers, jump much faster to observations about theme. One, who was particularly sensitive to language throughout her reading, spotted in the opening speech's references to Antony's "dotage," his Mars-like armor, and to his being "a strumphet's fool" the play's major conflict, between the values of Egypt and those of Rome. Another, sensing the conflict over love versus duty in Antony, wondered "who the real Antony was" and wondered whether Antony's affair with Cleopatra raised "some sort of moral issue . . . is this maybe part of the tragedy, maybe the flaw," he asked? Another jumped quickly from her impression that everyone at the banquet scene "seems on the surface like they're very happy that everything is settled and Antony is going to marry Octavia" to Enobarbus's line "That truth should be silent" to the conclusion that "they don't face up to the truth" to two later references to getting away from the truth. Finally, one perceptive reader, who upon being interrupted about eight minutes into his first reading, said "I was trying to come up with lines that kind of serve as thematic" summarized (at the end of reading one and one-half acts) the themes he saw developing as private duty versus public duty, head versus heart, Egypt versus Rome, and puppet versus master.

In a study of readings of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," George L. Dillon describes three different reading styles: the Character-Action-Moral style, the Digger for Secrets style, and the Anthropologist style. Although the readers in my study correspond only roughly to Dillon's three types of readers, his suggestion that what distinguishes the three reading styles is immersion versus analytic distance does seem to me to describe what I have observed, as long as one realizes that even the readers I have designated as script readers all have the ability to draw back from their experience of the play and arrive at statements of theme; they just do it in a different way.

Schemes and Routines:

Most students of reading now agree that rather than being a mechanical process, the process of reading is at every stage creative and constructive; it involves predicting and anticipating meaning on the basis of knowledge that we already possess. And many psychologists now think of knowledge as existing in a set of data structures or cognitive frameworks called "schemata" (the plural of schema). These schemata enable us to understand how to behave when we enter a restaurant, how to shop for clothes, how to recognize a face, and, for that matter, how read a play. Judging by their behavior, almost all the readers in this study must have possessed what one might call an Antony and Cleopatra schema, whether drawn from film, history, or what they knew of the play, for, with the exception of one reader who needed to consult an encyclopedia, all understood what was happening in the play's opening scene.

In fact, my observations of the expert readers in this study suggest to me that they bring to their reading of a playtext a rich set of schemata--psychological and social schemata that enable them to perceive the significance of characters' words and actions; formal schemata that guide their reading of the play and lead them to note important conflicts, characters, and moments; and critical and cultural schemata that enable them to identify thematic and cultural patterns.

At a very basic level, the readers in this study seem to have in the minds what I would describe as a script or a playtext schemata: When they sit down to read a Shakespearean play, they expect (1) that they will encounter identifiable characters speaking to each other in such a way that what they say and seem to say will signify their attitudes toward and relationships with each other (what one reader in this study called the "inner actions" of a play); (2) that taken together, this dialogue will cohere enough to tell a story, typically a story centered around the resolving of a problem; (3) and that this story will have some sort of significance, thematic or cultural or both, beyond itself.

Thus, most of these readers begin by trying to discern the relational dynamics that constitute the play at its most basic level. They ask themselves: What exactly is character X saying to character Y and why does he say it? And then why does Y reply as he does? And why does X respond to Y's reply as he does? And so on. And for that matter, how about characters A, B, and C, who are silent at the moment; how are they responding to the exchange they are hearing? But rather than trying to trying to pin labels on characters or state the obvious, as some critics assume, these readers are attempting to penetrate beneath the surface of dialogue, often complicated and complex, to get a sense of its meanings, feel, or significance.

But in order to understand the relational dynamics of a play, these readers must also bring a variety of other psychological, social, and cultural schemata to bear in their reading, schemata that enable them to infer from cues that the Roman soldiers scorn Antony for his involvement with Cleopatra, that Antony is deeply infatuated with Cleopatra, that she tries to retain what power she has in their relationship through being coy and manipulative, that he is torn between his love of Cleopatra and duty to Rome, etc.

Of most interest to readers of this paper are the more strictly formal or literary schemata these readers apply as they read, i.e., those features (such as imagery, motifs, figures of speech, etc.) that readers might expect to find particularly significant as they read and analyze a playtext. Borrowing the concept from transformational grammar, critics such as Jonathan Culler and Peter Rabinowitz call such schemata "rules"; I prefer David Bordwell's terms, "routines or procedures." As a group, these expert readers apply a variety of such procedures as they read and analyze: A number, for example, expect that the major problem or central conflict of the play will be set forth at its opening and about an equal number are also aware that functional figures such as soothsayers, clowns, and messengers can be significant. But there is little consensus about the importance of other formal features: One reader notices verse forms, another scene parallels and contrasts, another ambiguities, others connotations or sexual allusions, etc.

There seems to be an equal paucity of consensus where larger interpretative operations or frameworks are concerned. Thus, one reader looks for important patterns, especially repetitions, while another looks for oppositions. At the higher level of critical frameworks, two or three readers seem sensitive to issues involving gender and power, while another seems more sensitive to the relationships between economic and attitudinal changes.

Is the fact that no one reader mentioned very many formal features or critical frameworks simply a function of how much they were able to read during the interviews (hardly anyone got much beyond the first act), is it because they were busy attending to other features of the text, or does it reflect the current lack of consensus in our discipline about which procedures to use in literary analysis. At any rate, through their own practices, these expert readers raise important issues for teachers of Shakespeare's plays: Is it even possible to teach others to read the way these students do? And if so, how do we achieve this goal? Will our current emphasis on cultural and thematic interpretation accomplish it? Or do we need another approach?