One of the things I’m really working on right now as I study for this exam is thinking about a paper I want to write in November when my Renaissance comprehensive exam is complete and passed. I want to write an English Education paper that discusses using textual intervention to teach Shakespeare. Textual intervention involves taking some aspect of a literary work and tweaking it in some way, and then critically analyzing how that change impacts the text and what critical commentary the altered text now makes upon the original. For example, what would happen if a writer transformed Romeo and Juliet into a short story or rewrote the play so that Juliet was a teen boy and not a girl. What would happen if we set the play in 21st century USA and made the Capulets Democrats and the Montagues into Republicans? These are the types of creative analyses that textual intervention seeks.
One issue that arises in the classroom, though, at least in my experience, is that students are skeptical about “messing” with Shakespeare and need to be re-assured or even introduced to the idea that Shakespeare’s works are not “holy” but that it is indeed ok to read and question these texts critically. So an introductory section of this paper needs to address some of these issues and justify this type of creative involvement to students, and sometimes even their teachers. I need to keep my focus, for now, on the literary side of things, and have been thinking a lot about using Shakespeare’s own writing and recent critical work examining the authorship of his plays in justifying textually intervening in the study of his writing.
I found an article today while browsing JSTOR that got me really excited. It is Heather Hirschfeld’s 2001 article from the PMLA titled “Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship”. I’ve always been interested in the concept of the early modern author, but have never really done a good job in exploring the critical writings surrounding this issue. Hirschfeld summarizes studies in authorship in the Early Modern and gave me a lot of good leads for further reading.
What interests me the most in this work, though, is the concept that writing in the Early Modern, was the product of a multitude of social and cultural forces and merely the product of one man. Shakespeare did not write his plays alone, but relied upon countless influences that affected Shakespearean plays.
Like Lasser points out later in his 2004 book concerning publishers, Hirshfeld explains that the “shaping” of a play also involves “the activities or printers, patrons, and readers”. (610) Its so important for students to realize that there were a variety of forces that shaped the Shakespearean texts that we have today and that those texts need not be cemented in place at all. They need to realize that Shakespeare himself used other written sources as the raw materials for his plays, engaging himself in a sort of textual intervention; Shakespeare certainly had no problems borrowing from and shaping the works of his predecessors. Further, Shakespeare plays, as Hirschfeld indicates were not solely the product of a single author, but the collaborative output of a diverse group of people, including Shakespeare of course, but also patrons, actors, theater owners, playgoers, printers, publishers, booksellers, readers, and a host of others. Hirshfeld summarizes the studies of Early Modern authorship:
What we see in all these studies is a growing concern to understand the author as part of, rather than distinct from, a series of material practices that allow for the generation of material practices that allow for the generation and dissemination of manuscript forms. (613)
I think its particularly interesting for the purpose of thinking of textual intervention in the 21st century English classroom, to consider the roles that the receivers of texts – the playgoers who attended the live performances and the readers who bought the printed books – themselves were a creative force in engendering Shakespeare’s plays. We always tell our students how important it is they consider carefully their audience while writing, and Shakespeare’s plays are masterful examples of texts written to please a diverse audience. In Early Modern drama, this is perhaps most true; plays needed to gratify playgoers or the theaters would not be successful. Plays needed to please readers, or books would not sell.
In the Early Modern, a very particular reader – the patron – influenced literature in a very direct fashion, moreso than any other individual “receiver” ever could. Masques perhaps are the best example of such patron involvement in creating text and performance. Hirschfeld concludes that “authorship of masques was dispersed not only among set designers and musicians but also among royal patrons” (617). We know that Shakespeare’s plays were sometimes staged with the monarchy in mind; particular parts of A Midsummer Night’s Dream have often been thought to have been staged specifically to please Elizabeth I.
In the paper, I want to explore this further, examining how some of these forces affected the plays we have today. I want to discuss not only how Shakespeare was malleable in his own time, but also how in the century following his death, playwrights of the Restoration adapted his plays to fit the needs of their own stage, “messing with” or textually intervening in his plays.
It seems that with so many hands involved in engendering Shakespeare’s plays, though, that for a modern hand to continue that meddling would be no sin. For Shakespeare isn’t holy. His plays should continue today to be something with which we continue to “play” and get creatively involved in.
October 27, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Joe,
It was fun to catch up on your last four blogs this afternoon. As usual, your musings on textual intervention gave me much to think about. The possible pitfall with such a pedagogical method–though not an insurmountable one–is that the teacher winds up teaching something *other* than Shakespeare, something involving the student’s own creativity or emotional experience, with Shakespeare placed second. When you write this paper, you will obviously have to state your objectives concretely. Put another way, Shakespeare practiced textual intervention in order to produce creative works. When students practice TI, what’s the desired outcome for them? Also creative expression? Critics may point out that there is a substantial body of knowledge about Shakespeare’s plays and their original milieu that needs to get transmitted *before* students can intervene in a meaningful way. What do you think?
October 28, 2007 at 5:09 am
[...] Haughey ponders the subject of textual intervention and early modern publishing, and suggests that, since so many hands were involved in producing Shakespeare’s plays, we [...]
October 28, 2007 at 2:41 pm
This idea you present Tony – that “there is a substantial body of knowledge about Shakespeare’s plays and their original milieu that needs to get transmitted *before* students can intervene in a meaningful way – is itself an ideological assumption. Why do we assume that students need this information to engage in a meaningful way with these plays, or so much of it? Why do we make the assumption that we must read Shakespeare to students before they can read it themselves?
I certainly agree with you to a certain point, that students do need a certain set of tools to approach Shakespeare with. They need to have access to his challenging language. They should likely know some of the basics of the stage and how genre has and continues to shape the meaning of the plays. There are other skills that teachers should provide their students with; teachers should play the role of guide, but the bulk of the experience needs to be between the students and the play, and involve the teacher and outside information less than it traditionally has.
My point here is that I believe teachers traditionally have significantly over-emphasized the experiences that other “readers” have had with Shakespeare (including their own experiences) and ignored important elements of their own students’ responses to the plays. Textual intervention seeks to create a balance when incorporated into the classroom. I am not suggesting that we throw away our other sound pedagogical approaches to teaching Shakespeare, only that we consider incorporating textual intervention into instruction as yet another means to bring Shakespeare’s plays to life for our students.
October 28, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Just a short reply. I agree that a variety of pedagogical approaches is desirable, since any one of them has its limits–and creativity is one of your strengths as a teacher, as I’ve seen first-hand. Maybe this approach could lead to more inspired writing at the secondary level, or at least more enthusiasm for it.