If This Be Not a Good Class

My paper today presents a series of suggestions. My first suggestion is: if you are from The New York Times, trying to ferret out masturbatory esoterica for the article that appears every end of December without fail, next to the Macy’s clearance sale ads, triumphantly offering proof positive that academics are an effete pack of hyper-intellectuals woefully out of touch with “the real world,” then you should quickly exit and skulk down the hallway to a different conference room. What I intend to do is offer practical advice for teaching Jacobethan drama, or what has affectionately come to be known as the “Liz/Jac, Non-Shak” course,[1] offered with increasing frequency at the upper-division undergraduate and graduate-student levels. I have built a link on my web site to pages containing the substance of my talk today (called “MLA 2007: Liz/Jac, Non-Shak”), and on that same site you can access my syllabus for not only this course, but all of the courses that I have developed during my time at Roosevelt University. My first suggestion to those of you not doing undercover work for the Times is: plunder at will.

My second suggestion is: after this talk, go the book exhibit hall and purchase: Karen Bamford and Alexander Leggatt’s Approaches to Teaching English Renaissance Drama, David Bevington’s English Renaissance Drama anthology for Norton, and A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway’s The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama. As you will see from the extensive, but still selective, bibliography that I have prepared and posted online, the resources available to those of us who want to teach early modern English drama have expanded greatly even since I was in graduate school studying for qualifying exams, digging out copies of the old Regents Renaissance Drama paperbacks at used bookstores which still attributed The Revenger’s Tragedy to Cyril Tourneur, among other outmoded indignities. And I’m not that old.

Although I recommend starting with one of the excellent anthologies of Renaissance drama available from Norton and Blackwell, it is also now possible to build courses around groups of authors, including Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton (Collected Works is brand new from Oxford), and Webster (Oxford has recently published vol. 2 of the Works). Manchester University Press continues to faithfully update the Revels Plays (including interesting groupings such as Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays and Plays on Women), and the new New Mermaids continue to offer a variety of individual plays that allow one to construct a reading list of one’s own. Coming in 2009 from Continuum Press: a new series of critical introductions to widely-taught early modern dramatic texts, including Dr. Faustus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Women Beware Women, Tis Pity She’s A Whore, The Duchess of Malfi, Othello, The Alchemist, The Tragedie of Mariam and Twelfth Night. These volumes will be aimed at an undergraduate readership. (In the interests of full disclosure, I am editing the volume on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, under the series leadership of Lisa Hopkins and Andrew Hiscock).

The ever-widening array of available materials notwithstanding, I suggest using one of the anthologies because a canon has definitely emerged in early modern English drama, and the supporting materials available in textual companions tend to reinforce it. Among the usual suspects are the eleven plays included in both the Bevington (Norton) and Kinney (Blackwell) anthologies: The Spanish Tragedy, Doctor Faustus, Arden of Faversham, Edward II, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, The Duchess of Malfi, Bartholomew Fair, The Changeling and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Of these plays, only The Shoemaker’s Holiday and The Knight of the Burning Pestle are not the subject of essays in Garrett A. Sullivan, Patrick Cheney and Andrew Hadfield’s Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion (Oxford).

Like many of our students today, my first exposure to early modern English drama occurred in the first half of the British literature survey, where we read Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. “What’s this?” I said. I was hooked. Today, I teach Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in British Literature to 1789 and get a similar response from my students, many of whom subsequently enroll in my Non-Shakespearean Early Modern Drama course. A word about boundaries: I do not teach Shakespeare’s plays in the British Literature survey (there are numerous other courses in which students can study Shakespeare’s plays at Roosevelt) nor do I usually teach Doctor Faustus in my Non-Shakespearean Early Modern Drama course. While I do think that there is a value to revisiting plays that students have already read once before in the context of another course (and of being able to “recycle” lesson plans to some extent, from one class to another), my basic tendency is to seek maximum exposure to as many new plays as possible.

While I also perceive the value in teaching Shakespearean texts in tandem with the work of his colleagues, peers and competitors in the early modern London theater, I prefer to exclude his work from my early modern English drama course because I find that students have had sufficient exposure to Shakespeare’s major works by the time they are in an upper-division or graduate-level course to eschew it in this context. I share A.R. Braunuller’s experience: most of the students that enroll in a course such as Liz/Jac, Non-Shak “are advanced ones, most of whom have at least [some] experience with Shakespeare’s plays in the university classroom, and they are likely to know some Shakespearean plays on film or video” (“Performance Conditions,” Approaches to Teaching 35). However, I do permit students to write their first short papers (5-6 pages for undergraduates, 8-10 for graduate students) on a comparative analysis of Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize or The Tamer Tam’d and Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, if they choose.

However, I agree with both Frances Teague and Helen Ostovich that comparisons of the work of other early modern dramatists to that of Shakespeare can often be counterproductive, since students, as Ostovich points out, can be “bewildered by their discovery that other playwrights do not write like Shakespeare: the dialogue has rhythms they don’t recognize, colloquial expressions they can’t decipher, and ideological assumptions they cannot transfer to a modern context. As a result, students focus more on the difficulty of reading than they do on visualizing the action or grasping the issues” (“‘Our Sport,’” Approaches to Teaching 87).

Given the urban location of Roosevelt’s main campus here in Chicago as well as our large Theater Conservatory, I am rather spoiled insofar as each fall semester starts with a Shakespeare play on the main stage on campus, and it is not unusual for off-Loop theater companies to perform non-Shakespearean plays: ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore has proven popular, but we were also lucky enough to have staged readings of The Shoemaker’s Holiday and The Knight of the Burning Pestle at Chicago Shakespeare Theater one semester, as well as two productions of The Roaring Girl within months of each other one spring.

Philippa Sheppard emphasizes the importance of demonstrating to students that these plays continue to be living texts, with current stage histories. I have followed her lead in bringing “in relevant articles from newspapers and magazines and programs from theater productions” (“Fair Counterfeits,” Approaches to Teaching 43). Although it fills me with envy every time I receive an announcement, I signed up to be on the Red Bull Theatre’s mailing list. Located in Manhattan, the Red Bull Theatre offers regular staged readings of Jacobethan plays. I am able to share these announcements (and attendant publicity) with students.

Since I think it will be relatively easy for you to follow my suggestions for texts and develop reading lists based on the offerings in the anthologies or the online version of my syllabus, I want to spend the balance of time today describing the logistics and pedagogical impetus for some specific assignments.

Discussion Board (on Blackboard platform): At the beginning of each semester, I create discussion board threads for each of the plays that we will read with an opening comment or question intended to be provocative and elicit further discussion. In the past, I have required that students post at least three times (out of the fifteen weeks of the semester) and I intend to increase this to five postings when I next offer the course, beginning in January. In general, I have found that we old fogey faculty are more techno-savvy than our students, who may suffer thumb cramps from texting and have no photo albums other than their cell phone downloads to Shutterfly, but who tend to be completely stymied by the notion of uploading an essay assignment to the digital drop box, or participating in an online discussion. I’m trying to coax them along with a moving horizon of expectations each term. I also allow the recalcitrant to earn class participation points by contributing additional postings if they have issues with participating in class discussion.

Mid-term exam: Roosevelt’s Educational Technology Resource Center owns Derek Jarman’s 1991 film version of Edward II and boasts a lovely screening facility, so it is easy to require students to arrange to watch such films in their entirety outside of class time, freeing up our precious hours together for discussion. For the mid-term they will have to write essays in response to one of the following questions:

Question 1: In the play text, what does Marlowe emphasize as the reason for the nobles’ frustration with Edward, and with Gaveston? In the film, what does Jarman emphasize as the source of tension? Does Jarman make any specific changes to the text of the play (judicious cutting, for example) that enable the shift of emphasis?

Question 2: Choose one scene from the play and its corresponding scene in the film and discuss your response to its presentation in the film. Did the scene unfold in the film as you imagined that it did when you read the play? If not, what was different? Which scene do you prefer, the one that you envisioned, or the one that Jarman filmed? Why?

Short paper topic ideas: screen Simon Curtis’s 1993 film version of The Changeling (again, Roosevelt owns this film). Discuss the effect of his decision to excise the sub-plot. Given what the textual introduction suggests to you about the division of labor between the two authors of this play, does this decision privilege the work of one of the playwrights over the other? The sub-plot features a bit of comic relief from the unremitting horror of the main plot; why might the original playwrights have chosen to strike this oscillating balance back and forth between the purely tragic and the tragic-comic? Why might Curtis have elected to focus on the grisly tragedy of the main plot? Is there anything particularly “filmic” about this choice?

I always offer students opportunities to do creative assignments that force them to think through issues of characterization, genre, imagery, and so forth. So, for example, I received excellent papers in response to the prompt, “Rewrite the final scene of The Shoemaker's Holiday as a tragedy.” To refresh your memory if it’s been a while since you’ve read that play, the final scene begins with the dashing young Rowland Lacy and his beloved Rose newly (and furtively) married. The scene opens on Lacy receiving a pardon for abandoning a troop of soldiers assigned to him in order to pursue a romantic relationship forbidden by his uncle, the Earl of Lincoln. Just as the couple rises from receiving a combination pardon and wedding benediction from the King, Lincoln bursts in and declares his nephew a traitor. In the play, all works out in favor of the young pair. But many of my students have gleefully taken up the genre-bending challenge posed by the assignment and written Webster-worthy replacement scenes in which virtually everyone onstage ends up dead in a no-holds-barred tragic melée.

Final project: In an essay on teaching Titus Andronicus, David Worster details strategies for breaking “the vise-like grip on meaning that some professors and editors need to have” (“Performance Options and Pedagogy,” The Theater of Teaching 77). One of the advantages of teaching non-Shakespearean early modern drama is that the grip on meaning is considerably less vise-like. However, opportunities abound to engage in an exercise that Worster details in which students are asked to engage in scrutiny of “(the earliest printed and least edited editions of the texts) and a comparison of those versions to more recent and more heavily edited modern editions” (81). So, for example, students could compare REED or EEBO texts to those published in Kinney’s and Bevington’s anthologies with supporting textual apparatus, including marginal glosses and explanatory footnotes. Since, as I noted earlier, both anthologies include eleven of the same texts, students can compare the editorial decisions made in two different editions of one of a number of early modern dramatic texts and offer their own assessments. Resources such as the Oxford English Dictionary, An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama and A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama will be helpful tools as they draw their own editorial conclusions about the text and argue in support of them. As Worster concludes, “A comparison of multiple editions of the text . . . underlines its irreducibly plural nature, reveals editorial choices as the subjective interpretive decisions they are, and empowers students to explore the dramatic text rather than merely accept what has been prescribed by those who have prepared them” (81-82).

Although it can be difficult to get students (particularly “commuters” – and we have a number of those at Roosevelt) to engage in group activities, I am hoping to get a group or two of students to agree to do a performance project to end the term. Helen Ostovich’s description of her experience making such assignments in Approaches to Teaching English Renaissance Drama is compelling. Her basic pedagogical goal is “to alert the students to the play’s auditory and visual cues by having them concentrate on how textual clues offer possible performance choices in a single scene” (87-88). Ostovich sorts students into groups of four and allows them time in class to acquire one another’s contact information and arrange meeting logistics. Then, each group must select a specific scene to prepare for presentation and clear it with her. She explains: “I recommend that students allow plenty of time to select the scene, read it, block their movements, cut their script, discover interpretations, and consider props, costume and set (these last, I usually suggest, should be minimal). Otherwise, beyond offering myself as a resource or mediator, I leave the specifics to the players” (88).

I model the kinds of work that students might do in such an assignment in class, by working through specific scenes and working with the class as a whole to consider how they might be staged. Film clips (where available) can help here, and so can work with archival materials, including Henslowe’s Diary. I often work with students to pair up items in the list of scripts and props with plays that we have read, such as “one hell mouth” and the descent of Faustus into the fiery pit of hell in the final act of Doctor Faustus. After discussing how we think such a scene might have been staged in the sixteenth century, we can then turn to discussing how the class imagines staging the scene if they were to direct it today, and then conclude with the Technicolor bad acid trip that is this scene in the 1967 film version starring Richard Burton. Who can resist a demonically cackling Elizabeth Taylor, her skin painted luridly red as she draws Faustus to his doom?

In addition to Henslowe’s Diary, I also encourage students to look up any and all words with which they are unfamiliar in their scene in the Oxford English Dictionary, focusing in particular on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century usages. I also bring in An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama and ask students to consider the “types” into which the characters in their scene fit, and the prevalence of these characters in other plays. Is there a particular spike in the popularity of certain kinds of characters (witches, for example) at specific periods of time? What might that mean for their appearance in the scene that they are staging? Finally, I also guide students in using A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama – does the scene that they have chosen include stage directions? What do they mean? How do they think these stage actions will be most effectively realized?

Domnica Radulescu advocates the construction of a “creative ‘ménage à trois’ between seeing, thinking and teaching” (xiii) designed to reconnect the acts of seeing and thinking. Staging exercises compel students to visually realize their thoughts about the text and then, subsequently, to reflect on what they have seen, turning to the text anew with fresh eyes, and ideas.

As Mary Blackstone points out in discussing a similar exercise in Elza Tiner’s collection Teaching with the Records of Early English Drama, sometimes students will need to look at scenes other than the one that they are staging for clues about the appearances and/or costumes of characters in their scenes (34). Therefore, staging exercises engage students in close work not only with the specific scene that they plan to present, but the play as a whole.

Blackstone also discusses the importance of guiding students through archival research – she is focused in particular on using the materials in the Records of Early English Drama (40), but one can apply a similar logic to material available via Early English Books Online and any special collections resources to which you may have access. Again, I am spoiled by my location in Chicago, and the wonderful resources available at the Newberry Library. When the scheduling of my course allows it, I always arrange to take the students in for a “show and tell” session in Special Collections at the Newberry, where we look at early editions of many of the plays that we are reading, and consider the actual texts as artifacts. When, for example, they see a series of quartos and then look at the massive folio volume of Jonson’s Workes, they get a visceral sense of the significance of this publication, and the role that it played in inducting plays into the canon of literature. I urge you to check out the Special Collections at your institution, and also at the main public library in your area – you may be surprised to discover that they own some early modern treasures.

I’d like to conclude by suggesting that the fairly wide range of pedagogical materials available in support of the Liz/Jac, Non-Shak course speaks to its many pleasures. If you have not yet taught such a course, you are in for a treat. I enjoy teaching it so much that I will be happy to field any questions about it in the Q&A, as well as in the hallway after the panel. Or in the book exhibit over the weekend. Or via e-mail after the conference. You get the idea.

[1] A.R. Braunmuller refers to the course in this way, too, in “Performance Conditions,” Approaches to Teaching English Renaissance Drama. Ed. Karen Bamford and Alexander Leggatt (New York, MLA): 35.