{"id":1161,"date":"2012-11-16T10:47:43","date_gmt":"2012-11-16T08:47:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.teachenglishtoday.org\/?p=1161"},"modified":"2012-11-28T15:15:22","modified_gmt":"2012-11-28T13:15:22","slug":"stagefright-teaching-shakespeare-as-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teachenglishtoday.org\/index.php\/2012\/11\/stagefright-teaching-shakespeare-as-drama\/","title":{"rendered":"Stagefright: Teaching Shakespeare as drama"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Stagefright: Teaching Shakespeare as drama<\/span><\/h1>\n

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Hennie van der Mescht<\/h2>\n

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This article is based on the Shakespeare Soceity Birth Lecture which Prof van der Mescht delivered in Grahamstown on 20 April 2011.<\/em><\/h4>\n

Who would have thought that one of the performance criteria for becoming a teacher of English literature was a head for heights? Or high tolerance levels for 100-year-old dust, rat droppings and bat urine? I certainly had no idea \u2013 when I took up an English post at Grey High School, and later at Queen\u2019s College \u2013 that I would spend a lot of time on very high ladders, hanging and adjusting spotlights, or taking down or hanging up stage curtains and flies, or painting and building platforms and other similarly dangerous occupations.<\/p>\n

Because that\u2019s what you end up doing when you believe that Shakespeare lives on the stage and not the page. And in the early 70s very few schools had \u2018theatres\u2019, though they all had halls designed for virtually everything but theatre. School hall stages were dreadful places \u2013 badly lit, badly draped, dark, draughty and dangerous! No catwalks. Great for the opening scene of Hamlet<\/em> and maybe the \u2018Fair is foul\u2019 scene from Macbeth<\/em> \u2013 because the special effects were \u2018built-in\u2019 – but not much else. So if you really wanted to put Shakespeare on stage you had your work cut out for you. You would become an expert in wheeling and dealing, sabotaging school budgets and channeling some money away from rugby to drama, so that you could supplement the two 100-watt lamps that \u2018light\u2019 the stage. You would become knowledgeable about light fittings, tossing out words like \u2018fresnelles\u2019 with ease. You would adopt archeological tendencies, digging down layers of previous generations\u2019 attempts at \u2018theatre\u2019 (mostly variety concerts) in the hopes of finding bits of costume that may work, or bits of metal that may become swords, or foils or halberds. Or a lump of something which may become a hump for Richard.<\/p>\n

You would become a shameless liar as you kept reassuring the first team prop (Marcellus in your Hamlet<\/em>) that he looks good in tights. And Oh! \u2013 you would need a honeyed tongue to persuade the girls\u2019 school headmistress that her Ophelias, Juliets,\u00a0 Desdemonas and Cornelias would be perfectly safe rehearsing till 12 every night in the very attentive company of sweaty 17-year-old boys, ardent with desire for culture; and that things really had changed<\/strong> since the days when \u2018being on the stage\u2019 inevitably led to dissolution and pregnancy.<\/p>\n

Oh, and then of course there are other little things, like cutting the three hours (four in the case of Hamlet<\/em>) down to about 90 minutes, auditioning, casting, directing, getting mothers to make costumes, designing posters, thinking about ticket prices and sales, refreshments (don\u2019t sell potato crisps during interval), asking the metalwork teacher to make swords that don\u2019t bend too easily but are light enough to wield. (There\u2019s nothing more discouraging than a wave of laughter from the audience during a tense sword battle \u2013 and you\u2019re sitting in the wings wondering why they\u2019re laughing but when you look closely it\u2019s embarrassingly obvious that one of the swords has bent at the first blow and is not \u2018unbending\u2019 because it\u2019s made of the wrong metal.)<\/p>\n

Why the bother?<\/strong><\/p>\n

And, well, why bother? Why go to all this trouble? Why, when you could more easily read the text in the comparative safety of your classroom, preparing your Grade 12s for the ordeal of the final examination? When you could be going to bed at a reasonable hour instead of figuring out how to give Lear grey hair that does not puff clouds of dust when he, Lear, \u2018beat[s] at this gate that let thy folly in \u2026\u2019. (More unwanted laughter)<\/p>\n

Well, it\u2019s fun<\/strong>. That\u2019s a good reason. Doing exciting things with groups of enthusiastic teenagers (mostly boys really pleased to be let off prep and allowed to grow their hair \u2018for the play\u2019 and chat to girls every night) is fun. It\u2019s better than going to bed at a reasonable hour.<\/p>\n

And you might learn something<\/strong>. As you struggle to explain why Iago has to say \u2018Ha I like not that\u2019 in a particularly secretive, suggestive yet quiet tone (but not so quiet that Othello and the audience can\u2019t hear him), you learn something. And when Hamlet asks if it wouldn\u2019t be cool for him to whisper his famous last words \u2013 \u2018the rest is silence\u2019 \u2013 you both learn something. And when Gertrude asks you to explain what she\u2019s actually saying in the line \u2018This bodiless creation ecstasy\/Is very cunning in\u2019 you wonder why you\u2019ve taken on this job when all you can do is stammer and say \u2018Hmm\u2026 good question\u2019; but ultimately you learn \u2013 because you remember vaguely that \u2018ecstasy\u2019 meant insanity, and of course the bodiless creation is the Ghost of Hamlet\u2019s father, so Gertrude is saying that Hamlet\u2019s madness is cunningly\/craftily creating hallucinations in which his late father appears to him. So you learn! And Gertrude learns. So that\u2019s another reason.<\/p>\n

And then \u2013 this is difficult to explain \u2013 somewhere among the dusty shadows backstage, or two storeys up on wobbly ladders, or in the wings waiting to prompt but losing your place because Ophelia is just so compelling tonight \u2013 somewhere there is a sense of joining a long line of performers, getting into step, of linking with what generations have done year after year, and you feel yourself part of a history and tradition that puts a bounce in your step and a song in your heart<\/strong> \u2013 even on the night Horatio gets so lost in his lines that Hamlet has to die twice before Fortinbras can enter and wrap things up. So that\u2019s a third reason.<\/p>\n

But the main reason by far is of course the obvious one: you go to the trouble to put Shakespeare on stage because that\u2019s where he belongs.<\/strong> He did not write \u2018books\u2019. He wrote living text, full of movement, laughter, tears, joy and pain, and the best place to see and understand this is on stage. This is not a new idea at all. It\u2019s been around \u2013 in education literature \u2013 since well before the turn of the 20th century, but it is rarely acted upon. I think Rex Gibson may have been the first serious academic\/teacher\/editor who deliberately included what he called \u2018active\u2019 methods in a Shakespeare pedagogy. Gibson, for many years Director of the Shakespeare and Schools Project and editor of Shakespeare texts, was among the first to include dramatic hints and interpretations in annotations to the texts, something the Institute for the Study of English in Africa editions are also very good at. As Gibson puts it, \u2018Active methods \u2026 recognise that Shakespeare wrote his plays for performance, and his scripts are completed by enactment of some kind\u2019 (p. xii). In this country \u2013 and this province in particular \u2013 we have had our own champion of this approach to teaching literature, Andre Lemmer. Many of you will be familiar with his work. Andre\u2019s annual Viva Shakespeare<\/em> workshops \u2013 for many years part of the schools festival \u2013 were always received with great enthusiasm and usually resulted in several \u2018conversions\u2019. I was fortunate enough to co-present one or two of these with him and what an experience that was. And how exhausting! These workshops brought home the sheer physicality of theatre and fed into Andre\u2019s notion of how to annotate the Shakespeare texts referred to above. And when you came away from one of these workshops you really were convinced that Shakespeare belongs on the stage.<\/p>\n

All the world\u2019s a stage<\/strong><\/p>\n

But I must immediately qualify the word \u2018stage\u2019, because I mean any space where people can act, interact, can say lines and move, can enter or leave. Often a space in the classroom or a quad will suffice. For expert or experienced readers of drama a space in the head works. But not for novices: they really do need to experience the play \u2013 they need to encounter the drama-ness of the drama.This is one of the most neglected literacies in the teaching of English \u2013 a dramatic literacy: finding a way of getting the reader to see \u2018through\u2019 the lines on the page, to \u2018see\u2019 the action behind the lines, and there is no better text than Shakespeare\u2019s to teach this. Look at these lines from Othello. <\/em>What\u2019s going on here, dramatically? What can we tell \u2013 from the dialogue only since there are hardly any stage directions \u2013 about how these lines should be delivered, how characters should move, what tone of voice they should use? In short, how can the words on the page become the actions on the stage? Let\u2019s look at a few possibilities: I have annotated the text to show possible \u2018dramatic\u2019 interpretations without which the text dies on the page. [Download extract below by clicking on the link and print separately.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Othello extract<\/a><\/p>\n

We can also look at the many film versions of Shakespeare, where we see a range of different directors\u2019 interpretations of what\u2019s happening on stage. But of course a movie set is not a stage.<\/p>\n

A fascinating article in this context is Peter Thomas\u2019 Shakespeare Page to Stage<\/em>, in which he shows how an appreciation of the handkerchief as the central prop in Othello <\/em>can lead to an understanding of the play as a whole. Here\u2019s his opening paragraph, sufficiently entertaining to read in full:<\/p>\n

Stuff compulsory written tests on Shakespeare and stick your statutory orders in the bin. No ring-binder can help teachers bring the dramatist to life as much as a Kleenex tissue. Departments with more lavish budgets may go for a cotton hanky or a silk neckscarf, but not even the most favoured CTC is likely to invest in a top-of-the-range strawberry number, woven by hallowed silkworms over twenty moons and dipped in mummified essence. I don\u2019t suppose Shakespeare\u2019s prop box had one matching Othello\u2019s description of his gift to Desdemona. So, a Kleenex it is. This simple prop can give students a grasp of Shakespeare\u2019s dramatic method \u2013 of writing crafted for an audience rather than a dutiful reader.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is where the theatrical experience I\u2019m referring to is different from the kind of thing a professional theatre company may do. For me \u2013 as a teacher \u2013 the point is not the performance \u2013 not really. The truth is you will not easily find 18-year-old Hamlets in your average Matric class. And for an adolescent to play Lear with any conviction is a big ask. So, while the play is indeed the thing, it is the educational project that interests me<\/strong>, and it is what those in the play and those able to see it performed will learn from the experience that really counts. And what do they learn?<\/strong> Well, the list is endless but here are some ideas.<\/p>\n