Is Shakespeare Legit?

Shakespeare Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

For today’s blog, I’ll start with a little story. A few years ago, when I was barely beginning to think about rebelling against Eurocentric theatre history textbooks, I got a big scholarly shove from a great group of students at Red Rocks Community College.

We were maybe a third of the way through the semester, and I was about to launch into a new module in our Theatre Appreciation class, an overview of theatre history in the 1500-1600s. Anyone who has ever taught theatre history or literature in the West will probably immediately think, oh, she’s going to talk about Shakespeare.

Me, too. That’s exactly where I was going. Shakespeare . . . and then a brief mention of all the other guys (I didn’t even consider women at the time) who were contemporaries but get a fraction of the attention—Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, Thomas Dekker. That's a lot of guys named Thomas! Thankfully, the Royal Shakespeare Company has a handy guide listing brief bios of some of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries.

This was one of those wonderful classes that come along every couple of semesters, and I try to recapture their magic in all future classrooms. They were a raucous bunch—massive understatement—loud enough to often catch the attention of people in the hallway or adjacent classrooms. As I recall, they moved us to a remote annex location the next semester.

The class consisted of a perfect combo of theatre majors and non-theatre majors, and they all felt very comfortable speaking up. Discussions were intense, fun, and just on the safe side of total anarchy.

I started the lecture, and immediately the revolt began.

“Can we NOT start with Europe for once? Jeesh.”

“Is Shakespeare even legit? I heard he just took credit for a bunch of stuff other people wrote.”

“Seriously. How did this one guy get to be such a big deal? He must have stolen material.”

“Or had some serious marketing.”

“I heard that.”

“I had to read Shakespeare in high school. It was soooooooo boring. Please do not put us through that again.”

(Insert various murmurs of classroom approval here.)

What a great way to launch a module, am I right? Where the hell do you take it from there?

I had to admit to myself, many of these same questions went through my mind in high school and college, but I was trying to stick to the approved material.

I heard the cynicism—and genuine questions—of these awesome students. They were asking me very directly to do better.

I paused the slides.

“You know what, you’re right. Let’s go at this from a different angle.”

The tail was wagging the dog at this point.

We spent the next couple of weeks answering their questions. Was Shakespeare legit? Why is his work so popular all over the world still today? Is Shakespeare only popular around the world because of colonialism, or is it really the power of his work? We practiced our research, and all of us learned so much more than we would have with my stale, safe PowerPoint.

Isn’t that a nice story?

Too bad it’s mostly untrue.

That’s what I wish had happened. The first bit really did happen, but I was not yet savvy enough as a professor to improvise on the fly. The part where I stopped my PowerPoint and launched into a much more meaningful learning session? Figment of my imagination.

It has taken me many years to learn to be more responsive to students, to listen to what they have to say and give them credit for their critical thinking and frankness. Our students are savvy and smart and only curious when there is a reason to be.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned about teaching is I have a LOT to learn about teaching. This will never end. It’s best when students lead the way.

I have slowly created a better way to wrestle with Shakespeare in the classroom, and I’ll be incorporating it into the Open Educational Resource (OER) textbook I’m writing during this sabbatical. I’m sure it will be a continual evolution until the day I stop teaching, but I’m making progress.

We start with student questions and let students follow their curiosity. Is Shakespeare legit?

Then, we get the dude on his feet as soon as possible. I doubt it was ever Shakespeare’s intention for us to sit and read his scripts, painstakingly dissecting each word and phrase. Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be heard and seen. They were experiences—not literature. In fact, back in Shakespeare’s day, actors only got their own lines on a scroll with a few cue lines of other characters, so they knew when to speak. No one had a full script at the time of first performances. Time was money, and it would have taken forever to copy out full plays for every actor.

The other thing we look at now in our Theatre Appreciation class is Shakespeare’s contemporaries in other parts of the world. Did you know that there was another rockstar playwright living at almost exactly the same time period in China? His name was Tang Xianzu, and he deserves mention. His plays are also still performed around the world. Both Tang and Shakespeare died in 1616, both have had their plays translated into multiple languages, and plays by both writers are still performed today.

I never would have discovered Tang if it wasn’t for unruly students questioning authority. Who knows what else I’ve been missing, but I look forward to finding out. I’ll keep letting the tail wag the dog.