Teaching the Theatre of Imagination: The Example of I Henry IV

Abstract

OUR SUBJECT IS UNDERSTANDING SHAKESPEARE in the study, the theatre, and the classroom. 1 The dialectical pattern of the conference is clear. Yesterday we heard from critics and scholars on the one hand and actors and directors on the other. Today our obvious if implicit mandate is to combine both perspectives in some kind of pedagogic synthesis. And indeed our classrooms themselves seem to symbolize these two ways of understanding Shakespeare. Some of us teach in rooms that are like a study, their book-lined shelves and desk replaced by a round table at which the scholar's lonely colloquy with himself becomes actual dialogue, the lively exchange of ideas. And some of us teach in rooms that are like theatres, where rows of students face the instructor as if he were on stage. And so he is, for in this kind of classroom the teacher quickly becomes aware that it is not enough to instruct: he must also delight and move. The ideal teacher of Shakespeare, I suggest, must unite both thesis and antithesis, must be both scholar and actor, making each kind of classroom merge with the other, so that the circle of students round his table grow as intensely and immediately involved as any theatre audience; so that questions, challenges, arguments cross and recross the invisible proscenium arch that separates him from his hearers. The trouble with the dialectical plan of the conference is that it entails an anticlimax, both intellectually and dramatically. The scholar and the performer are creative: they reveal new truth, new beauty. The teacher merely combines and transmits: his job is to communicate what they create. There is in fact a kind of chain of being here. For as we all know, teachers are lower in the order of creation-and of universities-than scholars: scholars publish, teachers per-