Teaching Shakespeare through Performanceby Milla Cozart Riggio

South Atlantic Modern Language Association

Teaching Shakespeare through Performance by Milla Cozart RiggioReview by: James HirshSouth Atlantic Review, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Summer, 2000), pp. 108-112Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3201546 .

Accessed: 24/06/2014 21:31

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

South Atlantic Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to South Atlantic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.152 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 21:31:39 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=samla

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3201546?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


departure from Christian orthodoxy, he does not often engage them in

dialogue. Nimble Believing is, for the most part, essentially an informed, direct treatment of Dickinson's poetry that abstains from participating in the main currents of critical speculation about Dickinson's work be-

ing generated these days-for example, debates about the textual integ- rity of her poems, her deployment of personae, her experimental ap- proach to language. The book's cardinal virtues are, I think, its siting of Dickinson's poems within the broader context of mid-nineteenth-cen-

tury religious doubt in America and its elucidation of Emerson's influ- ence upon Dickinson.

This book would be most appropriate for introducing upper-divi- sion and graduate-level students to the poems' religious content. McIntosh's prose is accessible without sacrificing precision, although he does tend to use a few words-such as "obsessed"-too frequently and too casually. Moreover, the book's argument suffers from an overall lack of momentum, a problem which is exacerbated by the virtual ab- sence of a formal conclusion. But these small faults pale in comparison to McIntosh's contribution to our collective project, as readers, of dis-

cerning in Dickinson one of our country's premiere poets of cognition.

James R. Guthrie, Wright State University

Teaching Shakespeare through Performance. Edited by Milla Cozart Riggio. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1999. ix + 503

pp. $37.50 (cloth); $19.75 (paper).

Teaching Shakespeare's plays is beset by obstacles. Shakespeare de-

signed his plays as scripts to be performed rather than texts to be read. If readers do not imagine a performance as they read, they will miss or misconstrue significant elements of these works of theatrical art. Un-

fortunately, few students have much experience of live theater, and those who are experienced playgoers may be misled by the differences between the stage conditions of contemporary theater and those of

Shakespeare's time. Although Shakespeare's plays were a form of popular entertainment in his own time, they are complex and subtle and therefore do not resemble most forms of popular entertainment of our time. A teacher of Shakespeare must help students develop the skills

necessary to turn a reading experience into an imaginary performance as well as the skills to handle the challenges posed by the complexity of

Shakespeare's plays. The best of the essays in Teaching Shakespeare through

departure from Christian orthodoxy, he does not often engage them in

dialogue. Nimble Believing is, for the most part, essentially an informed, direct treatment of Dickinson's poetry that abstains from participating in the main currents of critical speculation about Dickinson's work be-

ing generated these days-for example, debates about the textual integ- rity of her poems, her deployment of personae, her experimental ap- proach to language. The book's cardinal virtues are, I think, its siting of Dickinson's poems within the broader context of mid-nineteenth-cen-

tury religious doubt in America and its elucidation of Emerson's influ- ence upon Dickinson.

This book would be most appropriate for introducing upper-divi- sion and graduate-level students to the poems' religious content. McIntosh's prose is accessible without sacrificing precision, although he does tend to use a few words-such as "obsessed"-too frequently and too casually. Moreover, the book's argument suffers from an overall lack of momentum, a problem which is exacerbated by the virtual ab- sence of a formal conclusion. But these small faults pale in comparison to McIntosh's contribution to our collective project, as readers, of dis-

cerning in Dickinson one of our country's premiere poets of cognition.

James R. Guthrie, Wright State University

Teaching Shakespeare through Performance. Edited by Milla Cozart Riggio. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1999. ix + 503

pp. $37.50 (cloth); $19.75 (paper).

Teaching Shakespeare's plays is beset by obstacles. Shakespeare de-

signed his plays as scripts to be performed rather than texts to be read. If readers do not imagine a performance as they read, they will miss or misconstrue significant elements of these works of theatrical art. Un-

fortunately, few students have much experience of live theater, and those who are experienced playgoers may be misled by the differences between the stage conditions of contemporary theater and those of

Shakespeare's time. Although Shakespeare's plays were a form of popular entertainment in his own time, they are complex and subtle and therefore do not resemble most forms of popular entertainment of our time. A teacher of Shakespeare must help students develop the skills

necessary to turn a reading experience into an imaginary performance as well as the skills to handle the challenges posed by the complexity of

Shakespeare's plays. The best of the essays in Teaching Shakespeare through

108 108 Book Reviews Book Reviews



South Atlantic Review

Performance provide teachers with useful advice about how to overcome these obstacles by turning the classroom into a theater.

This large collection contains 29 essays and four Annotated Guides. Contributors include Milla Cozart Riggio (the editor), Michael Kahn, David Kennedy Sauer, Evelyn Tribble, Edward L. Rocklin, Alan C. Dessen, Ralph Alan Cohen, Stephen Orgel, Jill L. Levenson, Richard Schechner, Robert Hapgood, Cary M. Mazer, David Bevington, Gavin Witt, Michael Shapiro, Thomas L. Berger, Stephen M. Buhler, Lois Pot- ter, G. B. Shand, Maurice Charney, Robert Einenkel, Bernice W. Kliman, Elise Ann Earthman,James N. Loehlin, Cynthia Lewis, Miriam Gilbert, W. G. Walton,Jr., David Kranz, Peter Reynolds, Michael Mulin, Peter Donaldson, Larry Friedlander, Felicia Londre, Kimberly L. Janczuk, and H. R. Coursen.

The most useful essays in my view are the ones that provide specific examples of how the significance of episodes is illuminated by imagining how the episode would have been staged in Shakespeare's theater. Robert Hapgood uses performance partly to make the complex point that, although many features of Shakespeare's plays are open to interpretation, they are not open to any interpretation. He and students con- duct an imaginary rehearsal of the episode in which Beatrice asks Benedict to "Kill Claudio." He shows very precisely how the process of carefully preparing a performance of this episode leads students to try out a variety of possibilities, recognizing a few as genuine alterna- tives and rejecting others as inappropriate. Benedick receives a shock when Beatrice gives him this command, but the episode allows for various degrees of reluctance on his part and various degrees of manipulation on her part and results in various degrees of imbalance in the relationship.

Inexperienced readers of a play are not likely to keep in mind visible elements of staging except at those moments when these elements are explicitly mentioned in the dialogue. They are apt to forget about characters who are on stage but who do not speak. Such characters are not extraneous and may change in fundamental ways the dramatic significance of an episode. A dialogue between two characters in front of a large public gathering has radically different dramatic implications than would the supposedly "same" lines of dialogue in a private, intimate exchange between the two characters while alone on stage. Readers are also apt to forget about corpses or props or the spacial relationships among characters when these are not directly mentioned in the text. Staging episodes in class can train students to keep such elements in mind. Alan Dessen shows the importance of helping students develop

109



a memory for stage images with an example from Henry IV, Part L

During the battle of Shrewsbury, Sir Walter Blunt, dressed as King Henry to deceive the rebel forces, is killed by Douglas (5.3). The Quarto contains no stage direction for the removal of the corpse, and it is possible that in Shakespeare's theater this "image of a counterfeit king" remained on stage for the remainder of the play. This would add resonance to later episodes, such as "Falstaff's disquisition on Hotspur's body, in which he uses the term counterfeit nine times" (72).

Dessen's essay also demonstrates that an awareness of the particular stage conditions of Shakespeare's theater is necessary for an under-

standing of particular episodes. For example, Dessen helps students

recognize the implications of the fact that performances in the open-air theaters of Shakespeare's age occurred in daylight. Thus, for scenes that took place at night the company had to convey darkness by references in the dialogue; or by carrying torches, lanterns, or candles; or by cos-

tuming (e.g., nightgowns); or by groping in the imagined darkness; or by failures of the characters to see one another. The failures of characters in A Midsummer Nights Dream to see one another in what, to playgoers, is broad daylight emphasize that some of the failures of the characters to see are metaphorical as well as literal, arising from the blinding power of love. Such an effect is lost in a modern performance that darkens the

stage during night scenes but can be regained by performing the episode in a lighted classroom.

Cary Mazer has found that students come to understand the psychology of characters and the themes of plays when they are called

upon to act particular roles. He illustrates this by giving an account of the process of discovery he and his students engage in when rehearsing the interview between Angelo and Isabella in 2.4 of MeasureforMeasure. They discovered that "Angelo wants Isabella to guess the terms of his ultimatum without his having to state them" (162) and that this is one of a series of episodes in the play in which characters try to justify themselves "by testing others not themselves" (164). Thomas Berger uses performance to explore with students the episode of Gloucester's

blinding in King Lear. He alerts them to the differences between the

Quarto and Folio texts of the episode and to the dramatic significance of those differences. He also notes the variations in staging permitted by each version, as well as the editorial and critical history of the play. His essay brilliantly demonstrates that "textual criticism, performance criticism, and literary criticism can often become so entwined as to be

indistinguishable" (206). Stephen Buhler uses information about the

110 Book Reviews



South Atlantic Review

stage history of a play to teach "students to be more critically aware of the presuppositions they bring to a performance" by foregrounding "interpretive choices and performance conditions" that have varied widely over time (221). By comparing and contrasting surviving commentary on Garrick's portrayal of Hamlet with George Bernard Shaw's commentary onJohnston Forbes-Robertson's performance, for example, he demonstrates to students the range of past performance styles and thus places the contingencies of current performing styles in a broad historical context. G. B. Shand emphasizes the importance of visible elements unspecified in the dialogue or stage directions by an example from Hamlet. Ophelia tries to return "remembrances" to Hamlet (3.1.92), but what these remembrances are is unspecified. Shand has students perform the episode with different options. "Choosing love letters or poems, for instance, may link the scene poignantly with her father's exposure of Hamlet's romantic verses" in 2.2 (245). "Choosing dried flowers may lay groundwork for Ophelia's mad fixation on flowers and herbs" in 4.5 (245-46). Shand effectively argues that performing requires close reading and that close reading requires imagining a performance. Miriam Gilbert describes in detail a very thoughtful "performance-oriented writing assignment" that helps to develop the ability of students to imagine features of staging that have thematic significance but that would be easily overlooked in a purely literary analysis. Stu- dents are led "to focus directly on the relation between verbal and non- verbal" elements (314).

David Kranz provides an excellent introduction to cinematic techniques with many specific examples from Shakespeare films. It should be a very useful resource for teachers who compare and contrast the techniques of Shakespeare's plays with those of film adaptations. Es- says by Michael Mullin and Peter Donaldson alert teachers to the avail- ability of materials about Shakespeare performances on CD-ROM, la- ser discs, and the Internet. The four Annotated Guides provide information about Shakespeare Companies with Academic Affiliations (com- piled by Felicia Londre with Kimberly L. Janczuk), Classroom Editions of Shakespeare (Riggio), Selected Film and Television Resources (H. R. Coursen), and Shakespeare on Video (W G. Watson, Jr.). Each has information that may be of practical use to someone who wishes to teach Shakespeare through performance.

As one might expect, not all the contributions in a collection of this size are valuable. A few consist mainly of self-congratulation or get bogged down in contingent details of the author's teaching experiences

111



that are not generally applicable and that are not interesting in themselves. A small number seem out of place in this anthology and seem

designed instead for a collection entitledAdapting Shakespeare. The most disappointing essay in the collection is by Maurice Charney, who shows a laudable impulse to encourage students to become actively involved but little effort to confront the complexities of Shakespeare's plays.

The difficulty of the long discovery scene in Troilus and Cressida [5.2] stimulated imaginative solutions.... [Thersites's exclamation] "Fry, lechery, fry" (56-57) was underscored by the distribution of French fries. (261)

It is not clear what difficulty the French fries solve. Rather than helping students to understand Thersites's complex and disturbing psychology and his bitter alienation from the other characters, this shtick distracts attention from the issues raised by Shakespeare's play. Elsewhere in the

essay Charney expresses delight that a student once rode a motorcycle into the classroom but does not bother to inform the reader what episode of what Shakespeare play this vehicular performance was designed to illuminate. Rather than helping students bridge the gap between sim- plistic popular entertainment and Shakespeare's complex and challeng- ing popular entertainment, Charney's methods seem merely to reduce the latter to the former. A similar problem arises in the essay by Ralph Allan Cohen, a leading advocate of the currently fashionable device of

having characters in Shakespeare's plays overtly address playgoers in the midst of the action. For example, when Portia and Nerissa discuss Portia's suitors in a performance of The Merchant of Venice, Cohen suggests that the performers "single out members of the audience" who become "the butt of Portia's descriptions" (96-97). According to Cohen, "the result is a comedy familiar to any fan of Don Rickles" (98).

Fortunately, most of the essays in the collection provide detailed accounts of practical teaching approaches and explore questions that should provoke serious thought on the part even of experienced teachers of Shakespeare. Rather than merely asserting that the use of performance illuminates the plays for students, the best essays demonstrate how this actually occurs.

James Hirsh, Georgia State University

112 Book Reviews



Documents

Teaching Shakespeare through Performanceby Milla Cozart Riggio