Shakespeare: Reading/Text/Theory

Abstract

place and time where two systems come together constitutes an environment.7 Shakespeare's plays and poems are made up of a variety of such systems: linguistic, dramatic, social, political. We, in our institutional setting, constitute another such system. Our classrooms provide environment where these multiple systems communicate with each other-where they resonate. Let me give a specific example. In my introductory Shakespeare courses at Georgetown, I require students to complete four projects, using four different critical approaches: (1) stagecraft, (2) language, (3) history of ideas, and (4) current political issues related to gender, race, nationalism, or sexual orientation. The texts for course include both Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture and Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction. What I hope students learn from course happens at intersection of poetic imagery, of body movement, of ideology, of political resistance-and at intersection of pastness of Shakespeare with pressing concerns of today. The point at which these concerns meet keeps changing, and to me that's exciting thing about teaching Shakespeare. Take As You Like It, for example. When I studied play in graduate school, it seemed to be all about the green world. When I was writing Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England, it seemed to be all about Orlando and Ganymede. When I have most recently taught play in Reading for Sexual Difference, it seemed to my students to be all about Celia and Rosalind-especially about Celia. Who knows what it will be about ten years from now? It's not fixed meaning of these plays and poems but their complex reflective surfaces that earn Shakespeare a continuing place in curriculum. What we need just now, I would argue, is not Paradigm Regained but a version of Pilgrim's Progress.