Analyzing Shakespeare

One of the learning outcomes for all my Shakespeare courses is learning to analyze his work critically.  What does this mean? Just what is to be analyzed and how?

Textual Analysis
Rather than relying upon summaries or reports of Shakespeare's works, my students look at the text closely, identifying literary form on many levels, then interpreting the significance of that form:

• Genre:
  What category of play or poetry does this work belong to? (For example, comedy, tragedy, romance, history; the sonnet, etc.). How does its generic category guide our expectations about what we will be reading? (Certain themes or structures are often associated with specific genres)
• Plot:
  What happens and why within the drama? Shakespeare's comedies often have intricate plots, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream or Comedy of Errors. Other times, as in The Tempest, plot is very thin. Why?
• Themes:
  What are the main themes of a given work? Are these themes that threaded through other works by Shakespeare or his contemporaries?
• Characters:
  How are characters developed? What is their motivation or psychology? What themes do they evoke? Jill Bickham is focusing on Ariel in The Tempest, bringing up good questions like her ambiguous gender.
• Language:
  There are many levels of linguistic analysis with Shakespeare, including
• diction (word choice)
• wordplay (puns, stylistic flourishes)
  For example, Jenny Jones analyzed a pun on the word "dolor" / "dollar" in The Tempest.
• imagery
• metaphors and conceits (extended metaphors)
• dialogue (not just what is said but how an interchange takes place).
  Rachel Ontiveros analyzed the comedic nature of back-and-forth dialogue in The Tempest.
• quotations
  Shakespeare's works have provided so many idioms and quotations that these can be analyzed on their own or as a way into the larger text. Taylor McComb has found a list of Shakespearean phrases.
• Intertextuality
  What other texts connect with Shakespeare's? This can be considered in terms of
• source texts (since Shakespeare's plays were mostly derivative, imitating and adapting prior works)
• allusions within Shakespeare (Shakespeare's texts refer to many classical works, to the Bible, and to contemporary works)
• allusions to Shakespeare (Many subsequent writers and artists directly or indirectly refer to our build upon Shakespeare's works). Alicia demonstrated this by showing how both Dickens and T.S. Eliot explicitly refer to Hamlet.

Contextual Analysis
My students know that many things outside of the text have bearing on how his works are understood. I'd like to specify a few main areas of context

• Biographical Context
  Shakespeare's plays are often read through the lens of his life. For example, he composed Hamlet not long after the death of his son, Hamnet. Arielle Custer does a biographical reading of the Tempest, citing the fact that this was Shakespeare's nearly final play, with the main character, Prospero, being seen as giving the bard's goodbye to the theatre.
• Renaissance Context
  The political, religious, and literary happenings of Shakespeare's lifetime are very relevant to interpreting his work. When characters in Twelfth Night mock a Puritan (Malvolio), this is coming out of a stereotype from Shakespeare's day regarding Puritans being killjoys. 
• Reception
  Beyond Shakespeare's lifetime, there has been a long history of Shakespeare's plays being performed and studied, and of his presence growing as a cultural phenomenon. It's amazing to learn about the history of Shakespeare beyond his day. For example, in the 18th century, Nahum Tate decided to rewrite King Lear's sad ending, and for 150 years everyone believed it ended happily.
• Adaptation
  Shakespeare's art has spawned a lot of other art, and whether that is poetry, drama, music, or the visual arts -- any of these can be seen as ways to interpret both Shakespeare's work and the period or creator of the adaptation. Kaleigh Spooner did a great job of introducing us to visual and musical adaptations of The Tempest. Similarly, Tara Pina led us to a set of illustrations of The Tempest by Edmund du Lac from 1908.
• Contemporary Context
  What is the reception of Shakespeare today, or his role within our culture or world?

This is not a complete list of ways to analyze Shakespeare, but it's a fair start. Later, I will specifically come back to analyzing performances of Shakespeare on stage and on film, as well as analyzing various digital mediations of his work.

What kinds of analysis have you been accustomed to using? What could you push yourself to explore futher?

Use Digital Literacy to Prep for Class

My students prepare for class in terms of the three C's of digital literacy: consume, create, and connect:

Consume

"Go search like nobles, like noble subjects, and in your search spend your adventurous worth" -- Pericles 2.4.51-52

My students are self-directed learners. They know the course parameters (the learning outcomes and general schedule found in the syllabus [English 232] [English 382]), and so prior to attending class they have been reviewing their notes from prior class periods, reading the primary texts, researching various learning resources, and generally thinking through the topics in light of the learning outcomes. They gauge their time (about two hours outside of class for each our attending class), and make decisions about what of all the vast information about Shakespeare is worth their efforts to consume. Hopefully, they make decisions based on the personal value they sense in the topic as much as on the learning outcomes.

Create

"O let me, true in love, but truly write" --Sonnet 21

My students are active, not passive learners. This means that they do things to engage the topics or texts. Of course they might mark up a text, but they might also make an outline or a map of their learning. Or they might use presentation software or other media to come to terms with what they are studying. Perhaps they will curate a set of links, or images, or videos. Perhaps they will make a brief annotated bibliography. Typically my students will document their engagement with Shakespeare on their personal blog. The act of writing and composing thoughts and media helps them think things through, and also leads to more social kinds of learning as they offer their learning process and creative projects to others

Connect

"We have this hour a constant will to publish..." --King Lear 1.1.43

My students are social, not isolated learners. This means that they recognize that interacting with peers and others helps them to better understand what they are studying -- even if the people they speak with about the topic are not fellow class members. Some of their connecting ties back to consuming, since they know that when finding content related to the learning topics, they can often create a human connection with those who have created that content. They know that social discovery is as valuable, or perhaps more valuable, than traditional research. They will, of course, not only read their fellow students' blogs, but connect with them through commenting and in other ways.

When my students arrive in class, they see this limited time as a continuation of a learning process and of conversations already underway as they have been consuming, creating, and connecting.

Sonnet Videos

I'd like all of my Shakespeare students to watch this 20 minute mini-lecture about the history and form of the English sonnet, and, in the video that follows, to watch and listen to Shakespeare's sonnet 130 as read by Alan Rickman (and illustrated with kinetic typography). I look forward to reading each student's comments and/or blog posts about Shakespeare's sonnets.

How to Read Shakespeare

Creative Commons licensed
by Kristina

As new students come into my Shakespeare classes this semester, I think it wise to remind them of my tips on how to read Shakespeare.

The Study of Shakespeare Must Evolve

Creative Commons licensed by Vaun Raymond

That's right: the study of Shakespeare must evolve. This is the theme that I have set for my current Shakespeare courses. On this blog I will be documenting how I am changing my approach to teaching Shakespeare on the college level, and here I will also coach my students in doing the same. It is my contention that Shakespeare can be experienced more meaningfully if students are invited to let go of some traditional approaches and to try other ways newly available due to the wide accessibility of media and new communication tools.

Click through to read my description of how teaching and learning about Shakespeare in the digital age compares with a more traditional approach.

An Experiment in Teleconferencing and Shakespeare

Just what could be done by combining teleconferencing technology with an undergraduate course in Shakespeare?

What could be gained, what put at risk, by splitting a course in Shakespeare between two locations, mediated by telepresence?

These are the questions I'm posing myself today, after receiving an invitation from  the BYU Salt Lake Center to pilot a hybrid course split between there and BYU-Provo. As explained to me by the center's director, Scott Howell, the Vidyo telepresence technology will be available for distance learning for the first time for a humanities course. It makes sense to try this out on a very common course like Shakespeare.

Final Projects for Fall 2011

After some vigorous and helpful discussion Thursday, it was decided that we would put on an event at the semester's end to showcase the projects. One of the groups will take the lead in planning that event (what I'm now calling the media group).


Given that we will be combining all our projects at that point, and given that many students have interest in more than one group, I am allowing (within reason) for people to contribute to more than one project if they have the interest and energy.


With this in mind, please blog about these projects between now and our next meeting on Nov. 8th so we can better define the parameters of the proposals and assign people more firmly to specific projects. Consider responding to this post, or possibly link back to a post on your own blogs.

Proposed Projects

1. Theatrical Production: “Love’s Labours” Averill Corkin is heading up a group that will put on a short production that combines couples from three different plays by Shakespeare. Group members: Averill, Anthony, Eric, Gabe, Justin, Brittni, Martina
2. Art & Education Mason and Amanda Cassandra are combining those with interests in producing art related to Shakespeare with those interested in creating an art and education curriculum of some sort as an open educational resource to be circulated online.
3. Documentary Kelsie has proposed using her film talents to head up doing a documentary film about the production of the various projects and the event showcasing these.
4. Music Video Kara has proposed the creation of some post rock done to a Shakespeare text and of a music video based upon this.
5. Audio Shakespeare Amanda has proposed putting together a group to do an audio performance of a work by Shakespeare to be posted to the LibriVox site in the public domain. Brittni is eager to help.
6. Media Austin will head this group, which combines pragmatic uses of media to publicize and conduct our end-of-semester event, as well as exploratory and creative uses of media to show what can be done in digitally mediating Shakespeare. JJ Despain will also be on the team, along with Eric B.
7. Proposed Production A group that creates a plan for a proposed production of one of Shakespeare's plays. This can include a text "treatment," artistic sketches for the art design or costumes, storyboards, or reference media.

More details about general requirements for the projects follow: