ShakesFear and How To Cure It The Complete Handbook For Teaching Shakespeare

SHAKESFEAR AND HOW TO CURE IT
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SHAKESFEAR AND HOW TO CURE IT
THE COMPLETE HANDBOOK FOR

TEACHING SHAKESPEARE
Ralph Alan Cohen
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ARDEN SHAKESPEARE
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are
trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in 2006 in the United States as ShakesFear and How to Cure it: A Handbook
for Teaching Shakespeare
First published in Great Britain 2018
Copyright © Ralph Alan Cohen, 2018
Ralph Alan Cohen has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as author of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xvii constitute an extension of this page.
Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa
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For Judy and in memory of Nace
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vi
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Foreword Judi Dench xvi
Acknowledgements xvii
Part I 1
1 Seven Deadly Preconceptions of Teaching Shakespeare 3
2 Eight Don’ts of Teaching Shakespeare 18
3 Nine Dos of Teaching Shakespeare 30
4 Student Complaint No. 1: ‘Shakespeare’s Too Hard’ 53
5 Student Complaint No. 2: ‘Shakespeare is Boring and/or Irrelevant’ 66
Part II 91
Introduction 93
The Plays 98
All’s Well That Ends Well 98

Antony and Cleopatra 105
As You Like It 118
The Comedy of Errors 124
Coriolanus 129
Cymbeline 137
Hamlet 145
King Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 153
King Henry V 162
King Henry VI, Part 1 168
King Henry VIII 187
Julius Caesar 191
King John 197
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Contents
King Lear 203

Love’s Labour’s Lost 211
Macbeth 218
Measure for Measure 226
The Merchant of Venice 232
The Merry Wives of Windsor 238
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 246
Much Ado about Nothing 251
Othello 257
Pericles 264
King Richard II 270
King Richard III 276
Romeo and Juliet 281
The Taming of the Shrew 287
The Tempest 292
Timon of Athens 299
Titus Andronicus 306
Troilus and Cressida 313
Twelfth Night 319
The Two Gentlemen of Verona 326
The Two Noble Kinsmen 333
The Winter’s Tale 339
Appendix: A Personal Guide to Shakespeare on Screen 347
Index 369
viii
PREFACE
Every school day around the world – in nations where English is the native tongue and
in others where it is not – teachers wrestle with introducing students to Shakespeare.
Some are overawed at the challenge of communicating the greatness that they can see in
Shakespeare’s works. Some are themselves not sure what is so great about Shakespeare.
Some do not even like Shakespeare. But all have got to teach him because, well, he’s
Shakespeare, the god of our literary curriculum, and thus, as one of my students termed
him, ‘the Chairman of the Bored’.
The shadow Shakespeare casts over English literature and the fact that he is required
reading in so much of the English-speaking world have made his name synonymous
with daunting academic challenge – an unwanted hurdle that afflicts students and
teachers alike with a phobia I call ‘ShakesFear’. This book is for them.
But this book is also for the teachers who love teaching Shakespeare and who are
looking for fresh ways of going at it. What they find here will affirm their love of
Shakespeare, and, though many of the techniques and methods will be familiar to them,
much else will (I hope) be new enough to spark a thousand variations of their own. Ask
Shakespeare lovers when they first acquired their love of Shakespeare, and most of them
will credit some teacher. But even the best teachers need support and new ideas. This
book is for them.
First, me. I am a rogue English professor. Here’s how I went rogue:

Four decades ago I began taking James Madison University students to England,
primarily to see Shakespeare onstage. They liked it, and over a fifteen-year period I had
the opportunity to see pretty much every Shakespeare production in London and
Stratford. Along the way, I was learning first hand which Shakespeare productions
worked for my students and which did not.
So I tried my hand at staging a play (The Taming of the Shrew, co-directed with Roger
Hall). I directed some more plays, each time discovering more and more to say about
Shakespeare to my English classes. My confidence increased; my enrollments grew.
So I started a travelling Shakespeare company, the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express,
with my former student, Jim Warren. The SSE began as a troupe of JMU students
travelling to nearby high schools with a single show performed by JMU students and
quickly grew into a professional troupe touring three shows all over the country (and
occasionally abroad). We caught the attention of an innkeeper in nearby Staunton,
Virginia. He asked if we were interested in building a theatre there.
So I became a fundraiser, and we built the Blackfriars Playhouse, a re-creation of
Shakespeare’s indoor theatre (designed by Tom McLaughlin) and moved to Staunton,
where we changed our name from the SSE to the ‘American Shakespeare Center’.
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Preface
So, to be near the theatre, I started a graduate programme in Shakespeare and

Performance at Mary Baldwin University two blocks away from the Blackfriars. Thanks
to the work of many talented and wonderful people, the thriving graduate programme
annually produces actors, directors, teachers, and scholars.
That’s my lucky story of how an English teacher who loved Shakespeare went rogue
and did things he never expected. I share it here because this book springs from what I
have learned on this journey. The book will ask you to get out of your own comfort zone,
to try approaches to getting students on their feet, putting Shakespeare’s words in their
mouths, and letting them play.
No two teachers have the same professional experience, and you may wonder if what
I have to say can speak to your situation. I hope so and think so. Co-founding a
Shakespeare company has meant that I have worked with students of all kinds –
elementary school children, kids from middle schools, home schooled kids, kids from
rich prep schools, kids from poor urban schools, students in rural schools, business
people, chiefs of police (that was hard), lawyers, judges, retirees, and (my favourite) other
teachers. I have taught in schools all over America, in England, in Germany, in Italy, in
Taiwan, and in Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Perth and Victoria. I know from workshops with
students of all kinds that joy in Shakespeare is something that we can all share.
And now this book brings these experiences together.
Should Shakespeare be required in schools? Un-requiring Shakespeare might take away

the spinach factor – no one likes to eat what he or she is obliged to eat – but I believe that
Shakespeare gives students four useful kinds of wisdom worth the risk of the spinach
factor: sympathy, solace, power, and delight.
Sympathy. The communal function of art – its main civic virtue – is to share
experience, to teach us how others feel and the ways our own feelings align with theirs.
Art can show what we have in common with one another. When Ben Jonson said of
Shakespeare, ‘he was not of an age but for all time’, he singled out the quality of
Shakespeare’s work that comes closest to explaining his durability. Somehow he was able
to tap that core of human nature that changes least from age to age, from gender to
gender, from race to race, from culture to culture, or from person to person. The variety
of his characters, the counterposition of their views, the different ways they speak invite
a multitude of voices and inflections. Shakespeare’s works are a wardrobe full of roles to
be reinvigorated with each new wearer, inviting students to see how they fit into other
realities – to walk in the shoes of the other sex, for example, or of the old or of the
wronged. Delivering that invitation to our students surely accords with the responsibility
of a society’s public education.
Solace. The flip side of sympathy for others is solace for ourselves. Each of us feels
alone with our inner feelings and, however friends and family may mitigate that
loneliness, we need from time to time to know that others have felt love as we do or
jealousy or fear or anger or betrayal or relief. Shakespeare’s works show us that we may
be lonely but we are not alone. Students who learn that they have affections, fears, hopes,
sorrows, and joys in common with people who lived four hundred years ago are students
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Preface
who have found new friends. And when we can help our students feel their connection
to another age and another culture, then we open their minds and hearts not only to
voices from cultures past, but to voices from other cultures present as well.
Power. Through successive accidents of history, from British colonization to the
emergence from America of movies, rock-and-roll, mass communications, and the
digital revolution – English has become the global language. The Japanese, the Germans,
the Russians, the Chinese, the Arabs, the Scandinavians, even the French know that. They
may not like it, but they all know it, and they have all built their school curricula
accordingly. Students for whom English is the language of their country (by birth or
adoption) have a head start in the world, and giving them Shakespeare sharpens their
edge. It puts them in touch with the wellspring of English – of their language – at its best.
One goal of this book (and should be of yours) is to show that Shakespeare’s language is
theirs. He offers them an ocean of language to sail on, but, imagining that sea too perilous,
they stand fearfully on the shore afraid to navigate it. They need to feel that their own
language is an inlet of that same ocean, connected to it and drawing life from it. If we
lower their fears so that they look at the ocean as their ocean, they can sail on it and
thrive by it wherever they choose to go. For this reason, if for no other, Shakespeare
belongs in our high school curricula.
Delight. My fourth reason will not appeal to politicians and the mavens of assessment,
but it is the one that I hope informs this book – in teaching Shakespeare we can help
students delight in language. Shakespeare shows us an infinite number of ways to play
with words, all the while making them organic to characters revealed through that
language. It is double delight: playing with language to make a play. You need only have
watched an infant learn a new word to know that on some level, delight in words is basic
to human nature. Trust me, your students still have that delight, and you can use
Shakespeare to help them find it.
How to use this book
As much as I might like the idea of your sitting down to read this book from cover to
cover, my assumption is that you are more likely to use it as a reference work. For that
reason I repeat key ideas frequently. I have tried, nonetheless, to make the first five
chapters of the book – Part One – develop naturally out of one another, and I have
designed those chapters to move from the general to the specific. If you want to consider
from scratch the teaching of Shakespeare, then you could begin with Chapter One and
read straight through the rest of Part One. If, instead, you are having a particular problem,
say with language or with in-class scenes, you can go to the chapters that deal with that
one problem. Part Two consists of thirty-seven ‘chapterettes’, each on a different play
(except for King Henry IV, where I deal with both plays together), arranged alphabetically.
If you want to prepare yourself to teach a particular play, look it up in Part Two for ideas
about the text, specific classroom ploys, and also use the Appendix for critiques of
available film versions.
xi
Preface
To give you a little more detail about the arrangement of the book, here is a synopsis
of what you’ll find ahead; feel free to skip it.
Part One
Chapter One begins with the ‘Seven Deadly Preconceptions’ – in which I discuss seven
general approaches to Shakespeare that can be counterproductive. At the same time, I
know that in the hands of some teachers, those very approaches, far from being ‘deadly’,
have helped make Shakespeare come alive for their students. You may be one of those
teachers. If you are, then I expect you’re reading this book not out of a fear of teaching
Shakespeare but out of a love of it. Read the book, then, as a way to enlarge and expand
the things you already do well. That said, I have thought long and hard about where the
‘seven deadly preconceptions’ lead, and I urge you to consider carefully your goals in
teaching Shakespeare. Above all, avoid the two extremes: turn Shakespeare neither into
the Gospel nor into a Renaissance Fair.
Chapter Two presents a list of ‘Eight Don’ts’ for teachers. I begin with the ‘don’ts’
because a list of ‘bad’ methods comes logically out of the previous chapter on ‘bad’
preconceptions. Most books on teaching are shy about saying ‘no’; this book is not. Timid
teaching is my target, and I cannot preach against timidity in a timid book. Here in the
introduction is the only apology I make for the sweeping generalizations you’ll find
elsewhere, and only here do I acknowledge the obvious truth that a good teacher can
break all my rules. If you’ve had success teaching Shakespeare, I want my list of ‘don’ts’,
like my list of ‘preconceptions’, to shake your complacency, not your confidence. If you’re
new to teaching Shakespeare or have not been happy with your classes on Shakespeare,
then I want you to take courage from the list of ‘don’ts’.
By contrast, Chapter Three, my list of ‘Nine Do’s’, comes without any reservations. My
‘do’s’ are meant to give you approaches to the teaching, specifically of Shakespeare, that
are likeliest to engage your students in the work. In the ‘do’ chapter I spend a long time
discussing the details of Shakespeare’s theatre, because once you master a few key facts
about Elizabethan staging, you can turn a classroom into a theatre.
The last two chapters of Part One deal with the two main components of ‘ShakesFear’
– fear of language and fear of boredom. Chapter Four, ‘Shakespeare’s Too Hard’, will
help you wrestle with your students’ fear of the language. This chapter is a mixture of
principle and practice, in which I provide step-by-step instructions on how to show your
students that they already know all they need to know to enjoy Shakespeare’s language.
To debunk the myth of Shakespeare’s difficulty, I use a good deal of the chapter comparing
Shakespeare’s language to a so called ‘easier’ version. Although I hope these exercises can
serve as a model, I urge you to move to your own examples as soon as possible. They need
not – should not – be as long as the passage I work with here.
The fifth and final chapter of Part One, ‘Shakespeare is Boring and/or Irrelevant’,
deals with the component of ShakesFear that has to do with students’ disdain for the
subject – ‘ShakesJeer’, perhaps. These students are harder to reach because unlike
ShakesFearers, who partly blame themselves for their problems with Shakespeare,
xii
Preface
ShakesJeerers admit no fault in dismissing the subject. In describing ways of getting

students past their sense that Shakespeare is boring or irrelevant, I have divided Chapter
Five into six very unequal parts.
In the first section of the chapter, I return to my refrain – ‘stage it’ – and make some
practical suggestions for getting your students ‘doing’ and seeing Shakespeare. No other
approach is more profitable or more likely to work.
The next two sections in the chapter are the flip sides of one another. First help your
students look at the timeless points of interest in the plays, those things that have an
abiding interest for people in every era – sex, puns, violence, the supernatural, parties,
smart underdogs, and stupid big shots. The reverse of this approach is to help your
students see modern instances of the people, events, and interests in his plays. This
section – in which I use parallels to TV, music, movies, and current events – is the part
of my book most vulnerable to the charge of gimmickry. Fine, but a gimmick that gets
students to see themselves in Shakespeare’s plays is a handy tool. This is also the part
of the book where I date myself with antiquated references to popular culture. Let
that be an object lesson to you: stay as current as you can on culture and never think
you’re cool.
The fourth section is a brief warning on the subject of suspense. You will not get your
students to see the excitement in Shakespeare if the question they have first in mind is
‘what happens next?’ Students going to read Shakespeare should not be expecting a
Stephen King experience.
In the last two sections of the chapter, I violate a couple of my beliefs. First, despite my
belief that literature and theatre need serve no practical function, I concede that it can
help to show students the uses of Shakespeare – what he teaches us about living. Second,
ignoring my formalist training and my conviction that you don’t need to know the artist
to know the art, I recommend that in some cases you deal with Shakespeare’s life. Just
for giggles, I end this last section with my thoughts on the issue of who wrote Shakespeare’s
plays.
Part Two
Part Two contains small chapters arranged alphabetically on all of the plays. Each chapter
begins with my ‘comment’ on the play, moves to a section on classroom ‘ploys’, then to
suggested ‘alternative readings’ of scenes in the play.
The comments that begin each of these chapters are at once the least important things
in the book and the parts of the book that are most dear to me. They are least important
because, like anyone’s readings of the plays, they tell you more about the reader than
about Shakespeare, and the reader that matters most to your teaching is you. Of course,
these same comments matter so much to me because they amount to Ralph Alan Cohen’s
Shakespeare, a creation decades in the making and by now as much me as it is Shakespeare.
In them you will see my family, my education, my politics, my religion, my race, my
ethnicity, my gender, and my social background – in short, Shakespeare reconstructed in
my image. Inevitably, in teaching Shakespeare, you will rebuild him in your image.
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Preface
The ploys are exercises that I have used in my classes; usually they work well, and
occasionally they fizzle. But when I look back on the fizzles, the one weak feature they all
share is my tentative performance as a teacher. No in-class exercise can survive a tentative
teacher. Be flexible or firm, be spontaneous or deliberate, be soft or loud, but never be
tentative. These ploys rely on the cooperation of your students and challenge them to try
new things. Remember: you’re the teacher. They will follow you if they have confidence
in you; but the quickest way to lose their confidence is to be tentative. Trust the exercise,
trust Shakespeare, and trust yourself. Each of these exercises will entertain your students;
and, by giving them a variety of ways to ‘produce’ their own Shakespeare, each will give
them something to say about his works.
The idea behind the alternative readings is to push a scene in opposing directions
with two different readings and then discuss it with your students. Rarely do I suggest a
reading that I think is ‘right’; the intent is to suggest the breadth of possibility and to elicit
strong reactions from your students with clear choices. If you’ll trouble to find and
instruct volunteers for these scenes (competence is recommended, but eagerness is all
that is required), I guarantee that alternative readings will succeed in class. One word of
warning: the shorter the passage is you have to deal with, the more successful you will be.
My citations give passages from the start to the end of an entire dramatic beat, but you
may find my selection longer than you need to work with. Don’t hesitate to cut.
Appendix: A Personal Guide to Shakespeare on Screen

I love film and have taught Shakespeare on film courses, but my doubts about the value
of using film to teach Shakespeare have grown with my belief that a live audience is
essential to the experience of Shakespeare. Filmed Shakespeare is intrinsically not about
the relationship of actor to audience. So I urge you to avoid having your students watch
screen Shakespeare under the illusion that they are experiencing the plays. Even the best
film adaptation is liable to persuade a media-wise child that Shakespeare wrote bad
movies. Imagine your students, accustomed to the Avengers or Game of Thrones, signing
into Netflix on a Saturday night and choosing Fiennes’s Coriolanus or Kurzel’s Macbeth
– imagine yourself doing it.
Nevertheless, film used sparingly and in such formats as comparative snippets of the
same scene from two or more versions can spur students’ visualization and stress the
choices a script gives directors and actors. If they see some of Olivier’s Hamlet and some
of Zeffirelli’s Hamlet as well, they will know without your telling them that there is no
single Hamlet. To help select which versions to use, I have put together my guide to
Shakespeare on TV and film. Like my play comments, my film reviews come with a
guarantee that you will frequently disagree.
I begin my graduate course in Shakespeare pedagogy by asking each of the graduate

students to say who his or her favourite teacher was during any part of their education.
Then I ask them to say what made that favourite teacher so good. They give as many
different answers to that question as the teachers they name, but no matter what specific
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Preface
quality they mention – high standards, great empathy, a sense of humour, an ability to
listen, an ability to speak – I hear an admiration for the teachers’ belief in themselves and
their subject. When you undo ‘ShakesFear’ and enable your students to enjoy the treasures
within Shakespeare’s plays, you give them a gift to enjoy all their lives. I hope this book
helps reaffirm your belief in that work and in yourself.
If, as I hope, you find this book useful, visit the American Shakespeare Center (https://
AmericanShakespeareCenter.com/) to enjoy our Teaching pages, our archives, and our
blogs.
xv
FOREWORD
Actors know that playing roles in Shakespeare is a particular pleasure because the many
facets of his characters always offer something new and fresh for the performer. At
the same time, the actor needs to share those discoveries by making Shakespeare’s
language accessible to an audience. Teachers have the same good fortune and the same
challenge – they have the pleasure of bringing the richness of Shakespeare’s plays to
students, and they have the challenge of making those students at home with the language
in those plays.
Ralph Alan Cohen’s book encourages teachers to do that by turning the works into
plays, making their classrooms into stages, and transforming their students into actors
and audience. He provides advice and easy to follow instructions that will take students’
minds off their worries about the language and engage them instead in the joy of making
choices about playing with Shakespeare. At the heart of this book is the deeply held
conviction that Shakespeare belongs to us all and that possessing that treasure can be
play and not work. That is when we learn best. This book is essential reading for teachers
and students of Shakespeare.
Judi Dench
xvi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Once my graduate students, on the first day of their pedagogy class, have named their
favourite teachers and said why, I hand out stamped envelopes and tell them that their
first assignment in the course is to write a letter thanking that teacher for the things she
or he did so well and give it to me to post. Knowing, as all teachers do, that such a letter
from a former student is a treasure, I joy in that chore, as I do now in listing my favourite
teachers.
At Cloverdale Junior High in Montgomery, Alabama, Agnes Johnson taught me to
love grammar and predicted – then to my horror – that I would be an English teacher. At
Dartmouth College, Peter Bien taught me the joy of a good seminar, and James Cox
taught me the thrill of a great lecture; both inspired me to do exactly what Miss Johnson
had predicted I would do – become an English teacher. In graduate school at Duke
University, George Walton Williams showed me (still does) how tending to the works
of Shakespeare is more than a living – it’s a life. Though I did not have Stephen Booth
as a professor, my upstart Shakespeare company lured him to Virginia as a visiting
scholar and director. He is what we should mean when we say a teacher is ‘nurturing’. His
lectures, his conversation, and his writing make our brains work better than they
normally do.
In 1987 Lena Orlin at the Folger Shakespeare Library made an extra space for me in
an NEH seminar on Shakespeare in Performance. During those six heady weeks, the
indefatigable Bernice Kliman and I started a rump seminar to discuss teaching
Shakespeare at college. Barbara Mowat noticed my interest in pedagogy, twice invited me
to edit special issues of the Shakespeare Quarterly devoted to teaching, and became a
beloved mentor. My happiest hours preparing both the first and second versions of this
book were at the Folger, and I owe that happiness to Betsy Walsh and her welcoming and
patient staff in the Reading Room.
With great fondness, I thank the hundreds of undergraduates in my Shakespeare
courses during my three decades at James Madison University. They rewarded my
outrageous enthusiasm for Shakespeare by encouraging even more outrage. From
quaffing drinks in Falstaff contests to festooning the campus with Shakespeare’s banners
of their own invention, they endured every teaching ploy I could invent, and the result of
their indulgence is everywhere in this book. My graduate students at Mary Baldwin
University, particularly in the pedagogy class, worked with me on the first version of
ShakesFear, and succeeding classes, using that book as their text, inspired much of what
you will read in this improved version. One of them, Sarah Enloe, who now directs the
education programmes for the American Shakespeare Center, shapes and improves my
thinking about teaching every time we speak.
xvii
Acknowledgements
My colleagues in the profession have modelled teaching skills to which I can only
aspire. Joan Frederick shared an office with me at JMU, and her student conferences
were a daily lesson in patient and detailed teaching. Alan Armstrong brought me to
Ashland, Oregon, for his teaching institute and showed me how much I had to learn
from high school teachers. Paul Menzer now directs Mary Baldwin’s graduate programme,
and among our students he is famously my opposite for his tailored prose and his
scepticism – a gift and an outlook that challenge me in all the best ways. Patrick
Spottiswoode, who was Sam Wanamaker’s Gabriel for the building of the Globe in
London, showed me through his effortless eloquence that words can build the theatres
that in turn build words.
Two of the great teachers I have known, Professor Tom Berger and Professor Mary
Hill Cole – one completely mad, the other completely wise – have also been my dearest
friends. Both listened to implausible dreams – semester programmes abroad, a touring
Shakespeare company, a re-created Blackfriars Playhouse, and a graduate programme in
Shakespeare and Performance – and both helped to make them come true. Tom, the man
who once shouted ‘theatre’ in a crowded firehouse, taught me the value of precision in a
syllabus and the uses of insanity in the classroom. To my great joy he married Debra, the
love of his life, on the Blackfriars’ stage and retired to Staunton.
Tom came to Staunton because of the Blackfriars, and the Blackfriars came to
Staunton because of Mary Hill. In its first year, she brought the Shenandoah Shakespeare
Express to Mary Baldwin College, where she teaches Tudor history, and through her
cadre of wonderful colleagues (who would become mine) built a fan base that prepared
the way for the building of a theatre and the establishment of a graduate programme.
She’s been the guardian angel for those ventures and my model for great teaching. A
master of the conversational class, she has two qualities of a teacher I envy but too often
lack: the patience to let her students find the answers and the calm to trust that they will.
For this book, which she has read in all its iterations, her advice and support, as in all
things, were essential.
I am grateful to Jason Scott of Prestwick House for helping me to publish ShakesFear
in its first incarnation and to Margaret Bartley at Bloomsbury for her willingness to give
it new and fuller life in this more complete edition. Thanks, too, to my graduate assistant,
Allison Jones, for her excellent work in proofreading, crosschecking quotations, and
creating the ‘ploy’ boxes.
Kate Cohen was my partner in writing this book. An exceptional writer and editor,
Kate guided me through numerous revisions of the first edition and of this one. The
greatest fun I had in writing the book was debating with her the ideas in it and especially
those frequent occasions in which I found her right and myself wrong. If I write another
book, it will be to have that fun again.
Kate is also one of my three favourite daughters. Like their sister, the others have been
patient sounding boards for their father’s love of his job and his subject. Sady Cohen, a
creative film producer, has the fresh perspective and the conversational gift of cheerful
candour that make talking about any project a vacation. Amy Cohen, herself a college
professor, uses theatre to make literature – albeit Greek – come alive for her students,
xviii
Acknowledgements
takes a professional interest in my work, and has become a model for it. If Casca had
been in her class, ‘It’s Greek to me’ would mean, ‘It’s easy.’
Judy Cohen, who married me, has been improving my writing and my life for fifty
years. To all the time and work and expense of my Shakespeare endeavours, she never
just says, ‘Yes’; she always adds, ‘Let me help,’ and she always does.
xix
xx
PART I
1
2
CHAPTER 1
SEVEN DEADLY PRECONCEPTIONS OF
TEACHING SHAKESPEARE
We teach out of our assumptions, and the less we know, the more we assume based on
those assumptions. Many teachers of Shakespeare are not sure what it is they are
supposed to teach, while others try to teach a Shakespeare that they have constructed on
shaky assumptions. These assumptions are common preconceptions about Shakespeare
that obstruct rather than promote the teaching of his plays. Here they are in increasing
order of mischief:
I. Shakespeare’s works are long poems.
II. Shakespeare’s works are philosophical tracts.
III. Shakespeare’s works are primarily narratives.
IV. Shakespeare’s works have definitive interpretations.
V. Shakespeare’s works are ‘high culture’ for serious adults.
VI. Shakespeare’s works are primarily historical artefacts.
VII. Shakespeare’s works are written in a difficult language.
The first deadly preconception: Shakespeare as poetry
The preconception that Shakespeare’s works are long poems is the least harmful.
Shakespeare, after all, was a poet, and a study of his work purely in terms of its poetic
qualities of sound, form, image, symbol, metaphor, tone, and so on, can amaze those
students who have learned to respond to poetry. In fact, good Shakespeare teaching
should always deal with these matters and frequently make them a major consideration.
What, then, is the danger of teaching his work as poetry? There are two dangers, one a
matter of image – or presentation – and the other a matter of substance.
The perennial question of Shakespeare’s image, what he was like, or even who he was,
once seemed to me a false issue. After all, I reasoned, it’s his works that matter; who cares
if they were written by Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, or a committee of sixteenth-
century chiropractors? But now I realize that the fight over his character and identity is
actually a struggle over access to his works. The truth is that Shakespeare was a member
of an acting company, a playwright who used his poetry primarily in plays; he was a
playwright first, a poet second.
‘Why does this matter?’ Discuss with your students the connotations of ‘playwright’
and ‘poet’. Ask them which of the two would be more likely to have a beer with friends;
3
ShakesFear and How to Cure It
which of the two would talk on their level; which of the two would be more interested in
movies, TV, soap operas, politics, sex, or sports; which of the two would tell a dirty joke
or play a prank; which of the two would be more like themselves. Their answer will be
‘playwright’. But, you might argue, that’s their ignorance about poets. True, but that
ignorance is a major stumbling block that brings with it a whole set of ideas about poets
that distance them from the plays.
Just over London Bridge in Southwark Cathedral, near where the Globe stood four
centuries ago, tourists can see a monument to Shakespeare. It was carved in 1903 by
Henry McCarthy, a sculptor shaped by the ideas of the Victorians, for whom Shakespeare
was the poet’s Poet, and for whom ‘poet’ had been defined by the Romantics as someone,
in Wordsworth’s words, who writes from ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.
McCarthy’s sculpture of Shakespeare perfectly reflects these attitudes. To begin with, his
Shakespeare is reclining in a field, leaning on his left elbow, his legs crossed at the
calves. He is holding a wild flower, his back turned to the Globe and sixteenth-century
London in the distance. The body is that of a lithe adolescent, but the head is an
exaggerated version of the Droeshout drawing of Shakespeare, a bald protuberant dome,
sad large eyes, and a weak chin. You don’t have to be Roland Barthes to read the meaning
of the sculpture. It says all too clearly what Shakespeare-Poet has come to mean: a
superbrain pondering on life’s mysteries; a person with a useless body, who lies alone in
fields to suck inspiration from nature while he neglects the real world – and his own
Figure 1 Shakespeare Memorial, Southwark Cathedral, by Henry McCarthy, 1912.

© Southwark Cathedral, courtesy of The Dean & Chapter of Southwark Cathedral.
4
Seven Deadly Preconceptions of Teaching Shakespeare
theatre. A cup full of Keats, a tablespoon of Wordsworth and Shelley, and just a dash of
Byron. That’s the Shakespeare that the Victorians have handed down to us and that’s the
image that is a stumbling block to 95 per cent of our students.
But, questions of negative image aside, teaching Shakespeare’s plays as poetry presents
substantive problems. In the context of the stage, his verse, however poetic, works in an
altogether different way. Take as an example these famous lines from Romeo:
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright.

It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
as a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear –
beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows
as yonder lady o’er her fellows shows.
(RJ 1.5.44–9)1
The poetry teacher could stay quite busy with these lines: issues of sound (metre, rhyme,
alliteration, assonance); questions of tropes (simile, personification); matters of paradox,
of irony, and of foreshadowing (Juliet does prove too dear for earth). But even if those
who teach Shakespeare as poetry are careful to put such verse into the context of the
story, they separate it from the stage and distort it.
Look again at the passage. Romeo is not alone. Virtually the entire cast is on the stage
for the Capulet shindig. This is Romeo’s first view of Juliet, so somewhere on the stage
Juliet must be visible and near her ‘fellows’. What’s more, the servingman of whom Romeo
has just inquired Juliet’s name must be near him at the start of the speech, and Tybalt,
who overhears Romeo – ‘this by his voice should be a Montague’ – is certainly close to
him by the end of his speech, and near to Tybalt must be Capulet, who demands –
‘Wherefore storm you so?’ Staged, Romeo’s speech, though certainly built from elements
of poetry, works entirely differently than when viewed as poetry in the text. The speech
can be audible to the others on the stage, and since Romeo has crashed the party that
gives his words an added dimension either of daring or of addle-patedness. Here is a
young party-crasher so impulsive that he bursts into couplets in front of the servingman
and the nephew of his arch-enemy. Depending on how it is staged, the speech has other
implications for his character. Romeo came to this party looking for Rosaline; if, as he
gapes at Juliet, one of the ‘crows’ around this newfound dove should wave at him and be
ignored, Shakespeare has undercut the beauty of this speech with the definitive staging
of the fickleness of young love.
Because this view of the speech as theatre rather than poetry is more complete and
more truthful, it’s also more interesting. The students who are normally comatose during
discussions of simile, personification, and iambic pentameter will wake up for this
1
All quotations come from the Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, but in order to stress the meaning of the
words and to de-emphasize the formality of the verse, if the beginning of the line is part of the previous sen-
tence, I have made the first letter of the line lower case.
5
vignette of party crashing and girlfriend dumping. Once they understand the theatrical
context of those lines, they are much more likely to enjoy looking at its poetic elements.
Here I give only the barest suggestion of how the stage transforms these lines, but this
book is largely devoted to the idea that every word in Shakespeare’s plays is transformed
in the context for which it was chosen – the stage. Yes, Shakespeare uses unsurpassed
poetry in his plays; but poetry is only one of his building materials, and studying his
plays only as poetry is akin to studying the Parthenon by looking only at how the marble
is chiselled.
By putting Shakespeare’s poetry into its theatrical context, teachers – even those who
have had great success in teaching the poetry of Shakespeare’s plays – will transform and
enlarge its meaning.
The second deadly preconception: Shakespeare as philosophy
Almost as prevalent as the assumption that the plays are long poems is the idea that
Shakespeare’s works are philosophical tracts. Consider again the memorial in
Southwark Cathedral and Shakespeare’s overblown cranium – he’s a ‘brain’. The Victorians
delighted in collections of sayings from Shakespeare, and the legacy of that delight is that
in schools around the English-speaking world, perfectly well-adjusted kids have to
memorize Macbeth’s ‘tomorrow’ speech:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
to the last syllable of recorded time;
and all our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
and then is heard no more: it is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.
(5.5.19–28)
Good speech, that; you cannot find a more powerful statement of nihilism. So powerful,
that, though it has little to do with their world, students will know what it means – ‘I
spent all last night memorizing Shakespeare. He’s so gloomy.’ But Macbeth’s words,
however eloquent, have no authority as Shakespeare’s view of life, not even of Macbeth’s
on a good day. These aren’t ideas that Macbeth has been living by or even a brief speech
he worked up for the occasion; the speech is his response to his wife’s death.
Again, imagine it on the stage. Macbeth and his soldiers come onstage; they are under
siege by Malcolm’s army, but Macbeth – fortified by the witches’ prophecy that he cannot
be defeated until ‘Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane’ – is confident: ‘our castle’s
6
strength will laugh a siege to scorn’. Female cries sound offstage, Seyton goes to see what
happened, and, without any embellishment, reports to Macbeth, ‘the Queen, my lord, is
dead’. For Shakespeare, the playwright, the moment has come for him to show his stuff:
write what Macbeth will say at the news of the death of his ‘dearest chuck’ – degree of
difficulty: 9.9. He says,
She should have died hereafter:

there would have been a time for such a word.
(5.5.17–18)
Now that’s interesting: the ‘tomorrow’ speech comes from a man reduced to wishing that
his beloved wife had died when there was more time for him to react to the news. The
context of the stage moment transforms the philosophical content of the most famous
speech in the play. Yes, the speech is nihilism, but it’s nihilism in the service of Macbeth’s
needs, his need for some sort of consolation, his need to feel his wife’s death, and his need
to understand why he can’t.
And what follows the famous speech? A ‘topper’ – not poetically, not philosophically
– but dramatically, a topper: a messenger with news that Birnam Wood is on its way to
Dunsinane. It may be that once Macbeth undid his world with murder, his own, particular
life became ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’, but for the Birnam Wood army marching
towards Dunsinane to revenge Macbeth’s deeds and restore Scotland (and for King
James I, who claimed Banquo as an ancestor), this day has meaning that death cannot
erase. So, from every character’s point of view except Macbeth’s, his ‘to-morrow’ speech is
wrong. To teach the speech simply as philosophy is to strip it of its meaning in that
moment onstage and to suggest, most incorrectly, that it represents the main idea of the
play or of its author.
The philosophy in his plays is as various and as changeable as his characters. They,
not the playwright, are the ones who philosophize; some of them are stupid, some
are ignorant, some are liars, and most change their minds. If you find that
Shakespeare’s works form a cohesive attitude towards the world and that he seems to
support particular ideas, look more closely, and you are likely to find that it is your
world-view and your ideas that he articulates. That is why Marxists, Republicans,
anarchists, monarchists, pacifists, militarists, deists, atheists, Catholics, Protestants,
feminists, male supremacists, hunters, and vegetarians can all claim Shakespeare as their
own. Fear not: if you teach the playwright and not the philosopher, any philosophy you
wish to share will be on view.
The third deadly preconception: Shakespeare as storyline
Too frequently the storyline is what matters most to teachers, their students, and the
educational establishment. The tendency for teachers to reduce literature to plot and
then test their students on that aspect of a work is why Cliff Notes has made a fortune
7
telling students ‘what happens’. Certainly we want our students to know the narrative of
the plays, but we must be careful that teaching the story does not become our ultimate
goal or that the students who can rattle off the plot of a play think that they have
experienced the work.
I go out of my way to stress the distinction between the story and the play. I have my
students tell me ‘what happens’ in a Bruce Springsteen song, I repeat the plot to them, and
then say I see no need ever to listen to the song. I invite them to buy Cliff Notes or find
some other plot summary to read before they read the play. After all, it makes reading the
play easier if they don’t have to follow the plot; they can pay much more attention to
language and character. Teaching Shakespeare by emphasizing the storyline of a play
gives students the impression that they should be finding something particularly
marvellous in his plots. They won’t. They’ve read Stephen King and J. K. Rowling; they
grew up with Harry Potter; they’ve watched Game of Thrones. Don’t make Shakespeare
compete on that level; he was aiming elsewhere. For him plot is merely a skeleton on
which he hung his plays. In fact, only one of his plots – The Tempest – is original; he
borrowed them from whatever source was handy. Remember that Elizabethan audiences,
who knew many of the stories in advance, went to see the plays, not to see what happened,
but to see how Shakespeare would show it happening. That should be your goal in the
classroom as well.
The fourth deadly preconception: Shakespeare has definitive

interpretations
Many teachers, approaching Shakespeare’s work for the first time on the assumption that
Shakespeare’s works have definitive interpretations, will spend hours looking for the
‘answer’ to the play. The belief that somewhere there is a definitive interpretation will
paralyze your personal reading of the play and make what you have to tell your students
sound borrowed, tentative, or forced. A good introduction can provide useful context
(though I urge you to read it afterwards and not before you read the play), but no critical
work can give you the answer for the simple reason that there is no single answer. You
never need to fear that you are going into class without the crucial ‘key’ to the play. So try
to bring them your reading.
After reading the play carefully, trust yourself to have a valid response, and remember
that the divergence of opinion on every play can be as great as 180°. In some readings of
Henry V, Henry is a hero – almost a god; in other readings he is a cruel and calculating
villain. The Merchant of Venice has been seen as an attack on Jews; it has also been seen
as an attack on Christians. The Taming of the Shrew may be an attack on shrewish women;
it might also be an apologia for them. Some see Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure
as a divine figure; I see him as evil. For two hundred years Midsummer Night’s Dream was
staged as a pure and innocent celebration of young love; now it is just as frequently done
as a Bacchic, highly sexual satire of romantic love (Charles Marowitz once staged the
work on a stage made to resemble a pubic triangle). Play after play yields different truths
8
for different readers, and to succeed as a teacher you must understand that you are the
reader best qualified to interpret your Shakespeare to your students.
The fifth deadly preconception: Shakespeare as high culture
The most common preconception among students is that Shakespeare’s works are ‘high
culture’ for serious adults. It does seem to me that the longer one lives the truer
Shakespeare seems. But the idea that his works are the preserve of the learned ignores
both the history of the stage and the evidence of any successful production.
Of course a basic knowledge of the Bible, Greek and Roman myths and history, and,
naturally, English history and contemporary politics helps in enjoying Shakespeare, just
as it would any important modern writer. But whatever erudition Shakespeare’s audience
might have possessed, Shakespeare knew better than to base his ticket sales on that
knowledge. He wrote his plays for people who might otherwise have gone to a cockfight
or a bearbaiting, two entertainments more primitive than roller derbies or mudwrestling.
In other words, Shakespeare’s original public had no more taste for ‘high culture’ than we
do – indeed, probably less. To get them into his theatre he had to give them much the
same fare that popular culture gives us: slapstick, complicated plots, song, mistaken
identities, fights, murder, ghosts, witches, lavish costumes, drunkenness, lives of famous
people, patriotism, sentiment, love, and sex.
And Shakespeare grows ever more popular. Shakespeare’s Globe in London regularly
sells out its Shakespeare plays, and queues for return tickets are the norm. In 2014,
Britain’s Daily Mirror ran this headline: ‘Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet revealed as
most in-demand theatre show of all time.’ Nor is the phenomenon of popular Shakespeare
confined to England. The largest theatre operation in the Western Hemisphere is Canada’s
Stratford Festival. Australia has Shakespeare companies in all its major cities. Shakespeare
theatres have been built in Washington, D.C.; Ashland, Oregon; San Diego, California;
Montgomery, Alabama; Baltimore, Maryland; and – most excellently – Staunton,
Virginia. Every state in America seems to have a summer Shakespeare festival.
What explains the continuing boom in the Shakespeare business? Are millions of
people each year pretending, just for the sake of snobbery, to like the stuff? Does a
subterranean army of people with advanced degrees in drama emerge annually to buy
those tickets? True, more than a few subscribers squirm their three or four hours before
the Bard as some offering to the God of Culture, but these automatic audiences are only a
fraction of the annual box office. The fact is that no Shakespeare theatre enterprise could
survive unless these 400-year-old dramas can prove themselves again and again, unless
they can reach and delight contemporary audiences of all ages.
They do. In my work for the American Shakespeare Center, I have seen seven-year-
olds hysterical during performances of Midsummer Night’s Dream and Comedy of Errors;
I have seen teenagers sigh in recognition at the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. I have
watched business majors weep at Othello and premeds gasp in horror at Macbeth. None
of these people had seen Shakespeare before; all of them wanted to see more.
9
An experience I had while working towards my doctorate speaks to Shakespeare’s

appeal. A travelling production of King Lear came to North Carolina State University in
Raleigh a half hour away from Duke. Never having seen a production and filled with
scholarly opinions, I went to the show. As I was taking my seat, I overheard a student
couple, both about twenty years old. The boy said, ‘I’ve never been to a play before.’ The
girl, who was sitting next to me replied, ‘You mean you’ve never been to Shakespeare.’ ‘No,’
said he, ‘I’ve never been to a play before.’ I had just read Samuel Johnson’s view that the
blinding of Gloucester is a flaw in the play because it is so brutal that it forces an audience
to remind themselves that they are at a play. ‘Aha!’ I thought, ‘here is a real-world litmus
test of the play, and, in particular, of Dr Johnson’s criticism.’
The production was uncluttered and strong, and at the intermission, which came
before Gloucester’s blinding, I was delighted to hear how entertained my two neighbours
were. They had not been following the theme of ‘nothingness’ in the play, they were not a
bit interested in Shakespeare’s source for the play, they had nothing at all to say about the
Folio versus the Quarto text. No, they were perversely interested in the characters and
the story: they wondered if Gloucester would figure which of his sons was the good one;
they thought the King was stupid; they thought that Cordelia should be glad to be gone
to France; they thought Goneril and Regan were ‘real bitches’.
After the intermission, the two switched seats, so that it was the boy who sat next to
me. At the awful moment of the gouging out of Gloucester’s eyes, the young man, not
remembering that he and his date had changed places, grabbed my leg and said, without
turning to look at me, ‘did you see that!’ Clearly he was still ‘in’ the play. Simultaneously
belief and disbelief, his response was a refutation of Johnson’s point of view. That young
man was responding as all of my students have responded to good productions of
Shakespeare. Their interest is unfeigned, their excitement new and unexpected; they feel
as though they have discovered not Shakespeare but drama itself.
The sixth deadly preconception: Shakespeare as history
The notion that students should see Shakespeare’s works primarily as historical artefacts
is stultifying. They are, of course, historical documents, but that is not where their
magic lies. Think again of the most famous praise of Shakespeare – Ben Jonson’s
comment that ‘he was not of an age but for all time’. Jonson’s view is that Shakespeare
had an ability to speak beyond his own time to all ages to come. The point is that his
plays do not seem bound by the customs, the politics, the personalities, the science
peculiar to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Certainly we can look
at the plays as evidence of the way things were in the days of Queen Elizabeth I and
King James I, and just as certainly research into the period will shed further light on
the works. The essence, however, of the power in Shakespeare’s plays is that we need
not look at them through the eyes of an Elizabethan to enjoy and to learn from them.
In fact, the works of Shakespeare are valuable in inverse proportion to such a
need. Whenever a teacher falls back on the expression ‘in those days’, he or she
10
surrenders a little of what can make Shakespeare important to their students – the
timelessness of his plays.
Take, for example, the question of Juliet’s age. Students are surprised to learn that
Juliet is only thirteen years old when the play opens and just fourteen at her death. I
know I was surprised, and my high school teacher’s easy explanation for this fascinating
aspect of the play was that ‘in those days girls married at a younger age’. Leaving aside the
historical inaccuracy of my teacher’s claim, the effect of that claim on my interest in
Romeo and Juliet was negative. For students such information, after the initial trivia
‘buzz’, only distances the work. Why should they care about a society with such funny
customs? A play based on such odd assumptions could not possibly be connected to
their lives.
But the ‘in those days’ approach is unfair to the play in another way. Let’s assume that
my teacher was right and that it was normal for a woman in Shakespeare’s day to marry
in her early teens. It would be wrong to conclude from that information that a play by
Shakespeare shares the bias of its age. The play could actually be an attack on the
traditions of young marriages, just as it is most certainly an attack on the custom of
arranged marriages. In its very first scene of domestic life, Capulet turns down Paris’s
request for Juliet’s hand on the grounds that she is too young to get married. Romeo
himself appears nonplussed when Juliet proposes
juliet
. . . send me word tomorrow,
by one that I’ll procure to come to thee,
where, and what time, thou wilt perform the rite;
Then, before he responds to her proposal, all this transpires:
juliet (continuing)
. . . and all my fortunes at thy foot, I’ll lay,
and follow thee my lord throughout the world.
nurse (within)
Madam!
juliet
I come anon. – But if thou mean’st not well
I do beseech thee –
nurse (within) Madam!
juliet By and by; I come –
to cease thy strife, and leave me to my grief:
To-morrow will I send.
(2.2.144–53)
Seven lines – a great deal of stage time – elapse from Juliet’s first mention of marriage to
Romeo’s rather ambiguous reply, ‘So thrive my soul.’ If we are to judge his expectations by
11
Mercutio’s dirty mind – admittedly, a harsh judgement – marriage was not the ‘satisfaction’
Romeo had in mind. Even his avowed wish for ‘the exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for
mine’ comes far short of a proposal of marriage. Might not Romeo’s silence suggest his
amazement, at least, at the idea of marriage; the same sort of amazement a seventeen-
year-old today would feel when confronted with such a response to his balcony-climbing?
Not if we assume that everyone got married early ‘in those days’; with that assumption
we put the play into an historical box; with that assumption we lose the possibility of a
connection between Shakespeare and our own young.
Finally, the entire play can read as a series of warnings against the impulsiveness of
teenage love – ‘it is too rash, too unadvis’d, too sudden; too like the lightning’, ‘young
men’s love then lies not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes’, and ‘these violent delights
have violent ends’ – warnings that culminate in the tragic deaths of the lovers. This
reading of the play, a reading strongly connected to the lives of our students, is simply
not available to the teacher who looks at the play as a document about ‘those days’.
Throughout this book, I shall have other occasions to point out the pitfalls of teaching
Shakespeare as an historical artefact. Nowhere do I mean to suggest that historical research
is not valuable in illuminating the plays; but such research should be applied with care.
Fashions change, knowledge explodes, conveniences multiply exponentially, but the major
truths of life – love, friendship, loneliness, grief – are constant. All of us ‘live with bread . . .
feel want, taste grief, need friends’ (Richard II 3.2.175–6), and Shakespeare speaks to these
unchangeables. They are the true subjects of the plays. If you wish, use historical information
about ‘those days’ to make connections between Shakespeare’s world and our own, but do
not use it as a substitute. Your job as a teacher of Shakespeare is to be open to what
Shakespeare has to do with ‘these days’ and with you, and to share that with your students.
The seventh deadly preconception: Shakespeare as another language
The preconception that Shakespeare’s works are written in a difficult language is the
essence of ShakesFear. Frequently, I have heard students say something like ‘I tried to
read Shakespeare, but I can’t understand the old English.’ I have heard teachers say they
wouldn’t mind teaching Shakespeare if the language weren’t so hard for the students.
Even America’s largest Shakespeare company is reinforcing this preconception with a
project to ‘translate’ all the plays into contemporary English. But I believe the difficulty
is one of attitude and perception, not of language – we expect Shakespeare’s language to
be hard to understand, so we open the most scrutinizing channel into our brains and
shut down our normal ways of hearing. Shakespeare frequently chooses a surprising
word – that is what great writers do – and, that word, rather than give us delight, jams
our systems, which are too much on alert for ‘old’ English.
Although students assume that everyone in Elizabethan England had Shakespeare’s
vocabulary, the average theatregoer had less, not more, access to the language of the plays
than do today’s native English speakers. There are two related reasons for this. First, at a
time before dictionaries when the language was changing at an enormous rate, Shakespeare
12
and his fellow playwrights were inventing new words or finding new usages for old words.
Far from putting off his audiences, all these new words appealed to them. Just as this
generation is eager to see what new uses a rap artist will make of words, Elizabethans
were eager to hear the newest coinage from Shakespeare. Second, the success of these
writers – and especially Shakespeare– in coining words made their inventions last, so that
they became almost the basis of our contemporary dictionaries – they became our words.
In short, Shakespeare writes in modern English: 98 per cent of his vocabulary has virtually
the same usage today, but students, stumbling over the one archaic word out of fifty, have
the tendency to shut down their normal comprehension of the other forty-nine. That
psychological blocking is ShakesFear, and my hope is to help you cure it.
Later, you will find an entire chapter devoted to the problems of dealing with
Shakespeare’s language, but I want to establish now that Shakespeare’s language is neither
particularly ‘old’ nor particularly hard. To do that I have created a chart (see Table 1) that
looks at the first complete thought (independent clause) in each play to see which words
are obsolete. I chose to start with the first clause, but you could look randomly at the
thousandth complete clause in each play and find the same results. I have put any archaic
words or usages into bold print, the better to demonstrate their scarcity. I make no
comment at all following those opening lines where even the most average student
would have no problem with meaning. (Notice how many of those there are.)
Table 1 Number of obsolete words in first independent clause of each play

Play First independent clause Obs Comment
All’s Well that Ends In delivering my son from me, I 0 Metaphoric perhaps but all
Well bury a second husband. current words.
Antony and Cleopatra Nay, but this dotage of our 0 The contraction for
general’s O’erflows the measure. ‘overflows’ doesn’t count.
As You Like It As I remember, Adam, it was upon 1 ‘Poor’ here is obsolete usage
this fashion bequeathed me by will for ‘merely’. ‘Thou’ for ‘you’.
but POOR a thousand crowns, and,
as thou say’st, charged my brother,
on his blessing, to breed me well.
Comedy of Errors Proceed, Solinus, to procure my 0
fall and by the doom of death end
woes and all.
Coriolanus Before we proceed any further, 0
hear me speak.
Cymbeline You do not meet a man but 0 Elliptical, but all current
frowns. words.
Hamlet Who’s there? 0 So begins Shakespeare’s
brainiest play.
(Continued )
13
Table 1 Continued
Henry IV, Part 1 So shaken as we are, so wan with 1 ‘Frighted’ is clearly enough
care, find we a time for frighted ‘frightened’.
peace to pant, and breathe ‘Accents’ here is not common
short-winded ACCENTS of new usage.
broils to be commenced in ‘Stronds’ still means ‘shores’.
stronds afar remote.
Henry IV, Part 2 Open your ears; for which of you 0
will stop
The vent of hearing when loud
Rumor speaks?
Henry V O for a muse of fire that would 0
ascend
The brightest heaven of
invention.
Henry VI, Part 1 Hung be the heavens with black, 0 Yoda word order but current
yield day to night! words.
Henry VI, Part 2 As by your high imperial majesty 1 ‘Depart’ is clear enough for
I had in charge at my DEPART for ‘departure’, but I’m being
France, as procurator to your strict. A ‘procurator’ is a
excellence, to marry Princess representative to a civil
Margaret for your grace, so, in the court. Your students won’t
famous ancient city Tours, in know that and you may not
presence of the Kings of France (I didn’t), but that’s not Will’s
and Sicil, the Dukes of Orleans, fault. We still use ‘espoused’.
Calaber, Bretagne and Alencon,
seven earls, twelve barons and
twenty reverend bishops, I have
performed my task and was
espoused.
Henry VI, Part 3 I wonder how the king escaped 0
our hands
Henry VIII Good morrow, and well met. 0
Julius Caesar Hence! home, you idle creatures, 0
get you home!
King John Now, say, Chatillon, what would 0 Elliptical, but all current
France with us? words.
King Lear I thought the King had more 0 ‘Affected’ here in its older but
affected the Duke of Albany than current use of ‘preferred’.
Cornwall.
14
Love’s Labour’s Lost Let fame, that all hunt after in 0 ‘Brazen’ here means made of
their lives, live register’d upon our brass. Still does.
brazen tombs and then grace us in
the disgrace of death.
Macbeth When shall we three meet again? 0
Measure for Measure escalus My lord. 1 All words here are modern
duke Of government the usage except for ‘lists’, which
properties to unfold, would seem here has the obsolete
in me t’affect speech and meaning of ‘limits’.
discourse, since I am put to know
that your own science exceeds, in
that, the LISTS of all advice my
strength can give you.
Merchant of Venice In SOOTH, I know not why I am 1 As you’d predict, this
so sad. obsolete word means ‘truth’.
Merry Wives Sir Hugh, persuade me not: I will 0 England still has a Star-
make a Star-chamber matter of it. Chamber: here are all
If he were twenty Sir John current words.
Falstaffs, he shall not abuse Robert
Shallow esquire
Midsummer Night’s Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial 0
Dream hour draws on apace
Much Ado About I learn in this letter that Don 0
Nothing Pedro of Aragon comes this night
to Messina.
Othello Tush, never tell me! 0
Pericles Young prince of Tyre, you have at 0 ‘At large’ used in its normal
large received the danger of the sense of ‘elsewhere’.
task you undertake.
Richard II Old John of Gaunt, time-honour’d 3 ‘Band’ is an alternative
Lancaster, hast THOU according spelling of ‘bond’ still in use,
to thy oath and band brought ‘Hither’ is archaic for ‘here’,
HITHER Henry Herford THY as is ‘thou’ for ‘you’ and ‘thy’
bold son, here to make good the for ‘your’.
boist’rous late appeal, which then
our leisure would not let us hear,
against the Duke of Norfolk,
Thomas Mowbray?
Richard III Now is the winter of our 0 Never trust the passive voice,
discontent made glorious summer but words are current.
by this son of York.
(Continued )
15
Table 1 Continued
Romeo and Juliet Two households, both alike in 0 Flowery and part of a
dignity, in fair Verona, where we sonnet, but all words current.
lay our scene, from ancient grudge
break to new mutiny, where civil
blood makes civil hands unclean.
Taming of the Shrew I’ll FEEZE you, in faith 1 ‘Feeze’ is archaic. But
something you don’t want
Sly to do to you.
Tempest master Boatswain! 0
boatswain Here, master. What
cheer?
Timon of Athens Good day, sir 0
Titus Andronicus Noble patricians, patrons of my 0 ‘Successive’ here means what
right, defend the justice of my you’d think – his title is one
cause with arms, and, countrymen, of legal succession.
my loving followers, plead my
successive title with your swords
Troilus and Cressida Call here my varlet; I’ll unarm 0 ‘Varlet’ still means a menial
again: servant.
Twelfth Night If music be the food of love, play 0
on, give me excess of it, that,
surfeiting, the appetite may sicken,
and so die.
Two Gentleman of Cease to persuade, my loving 0 All the words here, including
Verona Proteus: home-keeping youth have ‘homely’ meant then what
ever homely wits. they mean now.
Two Noble Kinsmen New plays and maidenheads are 0
near akin.
Winter’s Tale If you shall chance, Camillo, to 1 ‘Whereon’ is archaic for ‘on
visit Bohemia, on the like occasion which’.
WHEREON my services are now
on foot, you shall see, as I have
said, great difference betwixt our
Bohemia and your Sicilia.
Total number of words = 624. Current words = 98.4% 10 archaic words
16
There, then, in the thirty-eight complete thoughts that begin the thirty-eight plays
treated in this book, is a quick survey of the vocabulary of Shakespeare. Out of the grand
total of 624 words I quote above, just ten, or under 2 per cent, of the words are obsolete
in their meaning. The other 614 or over 98 per cent of those words are current – as likely
to be found in a novel by Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith as in Shakespeare – and are
the birthright of your students. The worst of the barriers to your students’ enjoyment of
Shakespeare’s plays is the belief that he wrote in another language; help them destroy that
myth.
In performance – in productions that treat the material as living drama, with actors
who make the words their own – the ‘language barrier’ disappears. After such productions,
my students have one response that they phrase in two ways. Those at all familiar with
Shakespeare, and especially those who have read the work, report no obstacle at all with
the language: ‘I understood every word.’ Those who came to the production never having
read the work say something like this: ‘That was great. Shakespeare’s really good when
they modernize the language.’ ‘But,’ I explain, ‘the language wasn’t changed; that was word
for word from the text.’ When students expect to hate Shakespeare and find the contrary,
they assume it couldn’t be Shakespeare.
Good performances destroy the ‘language barrier’ by short-cutting the useless
translation channel that, in a reading, jams all the other receiving channels. Just as a man
trying to understand a language in which he has some knowledge but is not yet expert
will quickly lose the meaning if he tries to latch onto each individual word, an auditor of
Shakespeare who tries to ‘translate’ will soon lose the gist of what is being said. Like the
immersion approach to foreign language, a Shakespeare production will make a student
‘sink or swim’ – the big difference is that since no true language barrier exists, students
learn, not how to swim, but that they are already swimmers. And in a good performance,
an actor who understands what he is saying and how to ‘suit the action to the word and
the word to the action’ gives such a forceful context to the one arcane word in fifty that
the meaning comes clear. Finally, the physical environment of the production – costumes,
props, bodies arranged onstage and narrative – on the stage helps an audience absorb the
word through the world of the play. Remember that Shakespeare was bringing new
language to his audience, and the stage was his translation machine – and still is.
17
CHAPTER 2
EIGHT DON’TS OF TEACHING SHAKESPEARE
Teaching Shakespeare well is partly a matter of pulling down the barriers – the
preconceptions – that stand between the plays and you, and between the plays and
your students. Not only must you think differently about Shakespeare’s work, but you
must also be willing to approach his work differently in class – to do without the old
paraphernalia of Shakespeare teaching. For that reason, I begin with a negative list – a list
of those things that you should not do. You’ll notice that five of my eight ‘don’ts’ have
exceptions; those ‘don’ts’ warn against teaching tools that have some merit, but that,
handled wrong, do more harm than good. If you are not absolutely certain you know
how to use these tools without doing harm, then give them up altogether.
Here, then, are the eight negative commandments:
I. Don’t make them memorize speeches (except sometimes).
II. Don’t show them films or videos (except sometimes).
III. Don’t take them to stage productions you haven’t seen (except sometimes).
IV. Don’t assign research papers to students new to Shakespeare.
V. Don’t stress Shakespeare’s England (except sometimes).
VI. Don’t strain to cover the ‘whole’ play.
VII. Don’t pretend to like something you don’t like.
VIII. Don’t read in class (or have your students read) more than two sentences
at a time (except sometimes).
The First Don’t: Don’t make them memorize speeches (except sometimes)
Memorization is an important skill with roots deep in the 2,500-year history of rhetoric,
and it ought to be a part of grammar and high school education, but singling out Shakespeare
for this exercise can reinforce the Shakespeare-the-Philosopher-Poet school of thought.
Though students should be accustomed to the music – both melodious and discordant – of
Shakespeare’s language, without mediation the memorization of a single speech, far from
accomplishing that goal, can confirm the student in his or her worst habits of inflection and
worst prejudices about poetry. As for learning Shakespeare’s sentiments, the assignment
risks implying that a speech can sum up Shakespeare, a play, or even a character.
At its worst, the exercise boils down to putting the words in the right order, with only
secondary regard for their meaning. Indeed, without supervision each repetition is likely
18
Eight Don’ts of Teaching Shakespeare
to sap more meaning from the words. And, because class size usually prohibits students
from reciting what they have learned, this assignment does not even bring with it the
main reward that actors get for memorizing speeches: a public performance. (Pity the
class in which the teacher does make time for the recitation of twenty-five to thirty
speeches – even perhaps the same speech – got by rote.)
In short, the memorization assignment reinforces the worst ideas that students
have about Shakespeare: it’s hard work; it’s boring; it accomplishes nothing; it’s ‘words,
words, words’.
Still, for the teacher who is willing to spend a sufficient time and can push and correct
students in a spirit of fun, memorization provides the reward of removing the most basic
barrier to Shakespeare, the text itself. A memorized speech frees your students from the
basic necessity of holding the book when they say the words. That means that classroom
staging exercises can go more smoothly and be more physical. And, by freeing the words
from the written page, memorization, with proper supervision, can show students that
Shakespeare is spoken language and help them speak that language as they speak their
own – without a script. Finally, memorization is the ultimate form of portability; students
who find a passage they like can take it with them wherever they go and use it whenever
they like.
So here are six instructions for the careful use of memorization:
1. Make time for your students to say the speech in front of the class. The worst thing
you can do is divorce the assignment from its practical use by failing to have the
students say the speech aloud. This is not to say that students will be clamouring
to give their speeches; on the contrary, most students are shy and would much
prefer to write out their memorizations. But remember that the reason for
memorization – the logical purpose of it – is the public recitation of the speech.
If that is not your goal, then you are making your students do something useless
and you should abandon the assignment. If it is your goal, then you must believe
in it and make it work for your shy students as well as for your hams.
2. If possible, let the student choose the speech to be memorized. By letting the
student select the passage, you increase the chances that he or she (a)
understands what it means, (b) feels connected in some way to the assignment,
and (c) will enjoy ‘owning’ and using the words later.
3. Use short speeches. The speech assignment should be long enough to give the
student a taste of the memorization process and a sense of accomplishment, but
it should be short enough for the student to have the time to go beyond working
on word order to thinking about meaning and presentation. Short passages not
only take up less time in class, they also ensure a higher level of interest from the
rest of the students by a speedier move from one performance to another. An
ideal passage would be four to ten lines – no more than five sentences, or thirty
seconds to a minute of class time.
4. Always go over the meaning of the speech before the student has to memorize it. In
doing so, you will be shifting the emphasis from the rote memorization of word
19
order to the presentation of the ideas in the words. Understanding how the
words go together makes memorizing the speech easier and makes it more
probable that the student can think the words as he or she speaks them.
5. Use dialogue teams. To stress the dramatic nature of the lines, divide the class
into pairs and let them find two-person exchanges for the memorization
assignment. The advantages of this approach are numerous. First, working with
someone else is always more fun than working alone; second, having a
‘teammate’ requires the student to be more conscientious; third, being part of a
dialogue, rather than reciting a monologue, teaches that Shakespeare’s goal was
as a dramatist between people; fourth, the exercise will show the student in a
small way that acting is not just speaking; it’s also responding.
6. After the recitation, work on the speech and have the students do it at least once
more. This rule is crucial to the success of the assignment. It will be the rare
student who gives a comprehensible reading – let alone an entertaining one –
on his or her first try. More likely, they will mumble and misspeak their lines,
in the process boring the rest of the class. To avoid this – and to create some
excitement in your class – take a firm hand in shaping the recitation. Almost
invariably students will need to do two things: speak louder and recite more
slowly. In addition, you can suggest different approaches. You can do that with
adjectives – ‘do it angry’, ‘do it happy’ – or you can do it, as directors do, with
verbs – ‘complain’, ‘celebrate’ – or for your extroverted students, you can do it
by suggesting types – ‘do it like a gangster’, ‘do it like a Southern belle’, ‘do it
like Homer Simpson’. With care, you can also ask the other students for
suggestions.
The main problem you are likely to have during these sessions is the shy student. The
team approach can lessen that problem a good deal, but you still need to find ways to
encourage and reassure the most timid. My own approach is to face the problem squarely
and with humour. If the student is speaking too softly: ‘Jenny, the fun thing about acting
is that you can pretend to be people, even horrible, loud people like Joe (indicating a
classmate of hers). I want you to pretend that you are the most horrible, the loudest
person imaginable, and do the speech again.’ Then I’d goad her on. ‘You’re only barely as
obnoxious as Joe. Get angry, shout. Really annoy us this time.’ Then, regardless of the
success of my coaching, I tell her how good she was. She may never have to speak in
public again, but she should be able to look back on her Shakespeare performance as
something her teacher liked.
As you can see, the correct use of the memorization assignment means more work for
you, but the great benefit of these ‘directing sessions’ is that they turn your class into a
drama. First, the student audience will find itself interested to see how much a
performance improves and to see how their own suggestions helped. Second, watching
their friends play Shakespearean roles (and seeing you respond) is entertaining.
Finally, such an approach is a graphic illustration that Shakespeare can be done dozens
of ways.
20
The Second Don’t: Don’t show them films or videos (except sometimes)
Once upon a time I welcomed the advent of audio-visual Shakespeare as the solution to
all the problems of teaching Shakespeare. Now I see it as one of the problems. Yes, there
are film versions that by themselves might help to break down the barriers – for most
students, Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, Branagh’s Much Ado, and McKellen’s Richard III.
These films, however, are the exceptions, and although many adaptations are as good or
better – Olivier’s Henry V and Welles’s Chimes at Midnight are among my personal
favourites – the truth is that students will not see in them the joy of Shakespeare. True
they may conclude that he’s not as hard as they thought, but they are also likely to decide
that he’s pretty weak entertainment.
We tell them repeatedly, as we should, that Shakespeare was meant for performance;
we build up their expectation that if they could only ‘see’ some Shakespeare, they’d like it;
and then we send them home to watch the BBC Shakespeare series version of Romeo
and Juliet. They turn it on, they may even sit through it all; but when it’s over, they’re
thoroughly convinced that Shakespeare is all the bad things we said he wasn’t: dreary and
out of date. And insofar as television or the movies is concerned, they’re right.
The fact is that theatre is a fundamentally different medium from television or the
movies. Screen performances may be slightly comparable to proscenium theatre, in
which an invisible fourth wall divides actors and audience; but they are opposite the
experience of the Elizabethan stage, which thrust into the audience and put actors and
audience in the same world. Elizabethan theatre required the audience to ‘work, work
[its] thoughts’, and it made frequent use of the audience in asides, in soliloquies, and in
such staging devices as plays within plays. Shakespeare counted on an audience’s
willingness to play ‘make-believe’ with him, and the members of an audience at the Globe
– then and now – were likely to find themselves a part of the play and sure to find
themselves a part of a community. By contrast, the drama on TV and the movie screen,
unfolds before us independent of our responses and can never create an interaction.
Your students, few of whom have been theatregoers, will not realize this, and, finding
that Shakespeare is bad television, will decide that he is simply bad.
But movies have their uses. They can clarify a scene by showing who says what to
whom; they can make visible action invisible on page; and they can teach the fundamental
lesson that Shakespeare’s words are meant to come out of the mouths of actors. Those are
worthwhile lessons, but not at the cost of their belief in Shakespeare’s power to entertain
and move us. How, then, can a teacher put modern-day media to work for Shakespeare,
not against him?
Here are some suggestions:
1. Watch the film closely before assigning it to your students. Try to watch the movie
from their point of view and keep notes on those parts you think they will not
enjoy. Then:
(a) If you do not enjoy the film at all, don’t assign it. It may still serve for use in
the classroom (see below), but it will only hurt your case if students see it on
their own.
21
(b) If some of the film is good and some of it is bad, assign it, but tell your students
what you didn’t like and why you didn’t like it. This approach can teach them
a lot. It tells them that you don’t automatically like anything labelled
‘Shakespeare’. It stresses that the film is only one version, a version in which
presumably some bad as well as some good decisions were made. Knowing
in advance that there are scenes that you don’t like will focus their attention
and make even those scenes interesting, especially if you ask them to see
whether they agree. If you feel like viciously attacking particular aspects of
the production, don’t hold back. You will become an official channel for your
students’ own hostility towards establishment art and the homework you
assigned. If they agree with you, for example, that ‘cardboard would look
more lively and more solid than the actor who played Orlando in the BBC
As You Like It’, then they have accepted your assumption that the part is
worth doing well. If they disagree, so much the better. In that case, you will
find yourself in the no-lose position of listening to your students argue for a
production of a work by Shakespeare against a fair-weather friend (you).
(c) If you find scenes you like but that you suspect will be too slow or difficult for
your students, assign the film but go over the scenes in question before the
students view it. Frequently, material that would work on the stage simply
dies in a literal treatment of it on film. Take for example the beginning of Act
One, Scene Two of Henry V, in which the Archbishop is explaining the Salic
Law to King Hal – 81 lines of apparently non-dramatic twaddle. The student
who had not been primed to see either the humour or the duplicity in the
Archbishop’s discourse is lost to the play before it begins. Here is where you
earn those big bucks you make as a teacher: you can help your students
anticipate and understand such moments, and even see how a stage
treatment (such as in Olivier’s Henry V) could bring life to them.
2. In class use a scene (or part of a scene) from the film to illustrate specific moments
in Shakespeare, to compare versions, and to look at good and bad choices in the
film version. DVD s and online content have two wonderful qualities: they can be
stopped and they can be repeated. That convenience allows you to work with a
scene by comparing versions, and it lets you discuss how a production choice
can illuminate or obscure the text.
(a) Use the film to illustrate and make vivid your discussion of a passage. Start by
explaining the scene to the class and having them read it. Touch on any
important thematic or linguistic points you wish to stress. Then press play
for that part of the scene only. When it is over, ask the students for comments
and discuss with them the particular merits or faults of the acting and
staging. Now run the scene over again, this time stopping at those places that
illustrate the discussion you have had.
This procedure will be gratifying to the students whose points you are
demonstrating, and the other students will be in for a surprise: they will find
22
the second showing more, not less, interesting than the first. The more
students know about anything, the more they enjoy it. Beyond that, the
process of breaking down the performance right before their eyes will
demonstrate that performances – plays too – are built things. Along the way
you will be teaching your students that criticism – that taste even – is not so
arbitrary as they may have thought; they will see you use evidence to support
not only your views but also their ideas.
(b) Show them SHORT comparative clips of the same passages. Few teaching
techniques can come with a guarantee, but this exercise does. All you need to
do is prepare a DVD or pair of YouTube clips with back-to-back versions of
any passage of the play. Look, for example, at how Orson Welles and Roman
Polanski stage the witch scenes in Macbeth. Discuss with your students the
choices – casting, costume, lighting, camera angle, sound, setting – each
director makes. At first, leave preferences aside and ask such questions as
‘What does the choice gain? What does it lose? What is the director trying to
achieve? Are his/her objectives in line with the play?’ Keep the clips short
– two minutes or less – and keep your students focused on specifics. (See
Ploy C in the chapter on Hamlet.)
The Third Don’t: Don’t take them to stage productions you haven’t seen
(except sometimes)
That’s right: devoted as I am to Shakespeare in performance, as transforming as I think

that experience can be, I do not recommend taking students to productions ‘blind’.
Shakespeare on the stage can be so poorly done that it will undermine everything you’re
trying to teach your students. I once took a group of thirty students, most of whom had
never seen any Shakespeare, to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Stratford production
of Richard II starring Jeremy Irons. What we saw was so poorly conceived, so burdened
with unnecessary stage elements, so woodenly and stupidly performed, that the students,
knowing my enthusiasm for Shakespeare, were embarrassed to talk to me at the
intermission. Had I seen that production before booking the tickets, I’d have avoided it
altogether.
This rule against taking students to unknown productions has two important
exceptions.
1. You can count on a few of the plays. Four of the comedies – A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado about
Nothing – are each a reliable enough mixture of romance and comedy to risk
buying your students tickets before having seen the production. Of the tragedies,
Macbeth’s witches, ghost, and violence make it a good bet; and Hamlet, despite its
length, keeps students engaged; partly it’s the ghost, partly it’s the familiar lines,
and partly it’s the misunderstood child up against a step-parent.
23
2. If knowledgeable reviewers are enthusiastic about the show, then go ahead and
book the outing. This advice works best for productions at major venues in cities
where there are likely to be reviewers. If the production in question is a travelling
show coming to your small town or to a small town nearby, find out where it’s
been and call to get an opinion from whatever organizations may have booked it
previously. If the production is a local amateur or student effort, then make it
your business to attend rehearsals about two weeks prior to the show and base
your decision on what you see. Never discount amateur or school productions.
The casts of such shows tend to have a refreshing earnestness in their work, and,
since the expectations of your students at non-professional shows will be lower,
they are more likely to look past the show’s faults and be surprised by its virtues.
Once you decide to take your class to a play, do nothing half-hearted. Make it the
event of their year. In particular, you must be certain that you:
1. Book the best possible seats. Because funds for this sort of field trip are woefully
short, seeing a play is a rare event for most students. So beg, borrow, and
negotiate to get them good seats. The best seats allow the students to (a) see the
actors better and (b) to hear more clearly what they are saying. In addition, close
seats might put your students in the ‘spill’ of light from the stage and thus, as
Shakespeare’s audience was, more visible to the actors and more accessible for
any engagement with them. The moment an actor ‘uses’ any member of your
group, your entire class will be caught up for the rest of the show. I have seen one
of my students embraced by Beatrice, another tossed a rose by Dromio, another
given a beer by Falstaff, another given a note by Bassanio, and so on. In each case,
the contact between the actor and one of their fellow students locked the entire
class into the world of the play.
2. Spend a class or two going over the play BEFORE the show. The more students
know about the plays, the more they enjoy them. Suspense, in the sense of what
happens next, is not what makes Shakespeare great. Discuss with your students
the major characters and the moments in the play to which you feel most
connected. Go over with them those speeches that you feel lend most meaning
to the play and stage with them a few of the exchanges crucial to dramatic
conflict. Every play has its challenging speech or its complex relationship, and it’s
not cheating to prepare your students for those moments.
3. Give each student something specific to report on after the show. To ensure that your
students are attentive to the play and aware that a production of Shakespeare is a
series of choices by living, breathing people, give each student a staging moment in
the play on which to report. This technique both keeps them attentive to the
production and reminds them that it is a one-time interpretation. For example,
before seeing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, explain to the class that some directors
see an antagonistic relationship between Hippolyta and Theseus and have a student
report whether or not Hippolyta is happy about the upcoming marriage. Ask the
student, ‘What does the actor playing Hippolyta do to show her feelings? Do those
24
feelings change?’ Tell another that directors make a variety of choices about the ass’s
head that Puck puts on Bottom. Some make it realistic, some stylistic. Some make
sure that the actor’s own face is still visible, some do not. ‘What choice does this
director make and how well does it work?’ Reporting assignments can be about
anything – casting, costuming, acting choices, setting – but they must be specific
enough for you to tell your students when they will appear.
If you have twenty-five students, then give twenty-five assignments. Giving these
reporting assignments takes time, of course, but it’s time well spent. First, if you
arrange the assignments as they occur in the play, then you will be giving the
entire class a little theatrical tour of the play. Second – and this is the sneaky part
– even though each student is responsible only for his or her single moment in
the play, they will all hear you assign twenty-four other moments and
unconsciously they’ll be alert to many more moments than their own.
You can be strategic in how you give out the assignments, too. If you have
students who are not much interested in the project, make sure their moments
occur later in the play so that they have to maintain some focus throughout. Give
them sex or action-oriented assignments – Demetrius trying to sleep with
Hermia or the fight between Lysander and Demetrius – and leave character
moments to your more engaged students.
4. After the show, spend some time reviewing the production. Discuss the production
while it is fresh in their minds. In your next class get your students’ responses to
the specific moments you assigned, to the play generally, and shape the class’s
experience into some clearly articulated points of view. At first, your goal should
be to sharpen the issues, not to achieve a consensus. As well as you can, conceal
your own opinions until everyone has had a chance to speak. Once the issues
have been sorted out and the sentiments are clear, then you can deliver your
critique, making sure to refer often to what your students have just said. Never
make a student who has given serious thought to Shakespeare ashamed of that
involvement.
The Fourth Don’t: Don’t assign research papers

to students new to Shakespeare
Teachers that assign research papers to students new to Shakespeare have missed the
point of teaching his works: to help students learn how to read, to enjoy, and to use
Shakespeare. A research paper blocks those goals. Instead of learning how to read
Shakespeare, how to imagine forth his stage, how to hear his characters, they learn how
to read the second-hand imaginings of scholars. For the pleasure of meeting Hamlet,
Juliet, Falstaff, Cleopatra, and Bottom and of seeing themselves in Elsinore, in Verona, in
the Boar’s Head, in Oberon and Titania’s magic wood – in short, for the best experience
of language and the imagination – the research paper substitutes the drudgery of culling
25
through and collecting the observations of critics and scholars. Finally, rather than teach
them how to borrow the wit and rhythms of Shakespeare’s language, how to apply to
themselves his universal sympathy, how to use his common sense, the research paper
teaches students how to use a search engine and how to stitch together the remnants of
other people’s ideas.
Do not misunderstand: I believe in the importance of writing papers on Shakespeare.
But those papers must be designed to bring students into direct contact with the works,
not separate them from Shakespeare with go-betweens, no matter how learned they may
be. Your obligation is to create essay assignments that immerse them in the plays; save
the research papers for college seminars and graduate school.
The Fifth Don’t: Don’t stress the history of Shakespeare’s

England (except sometimes)
The important word here is ‘stress’. Students need and enjoy some background, and you
should give them the information about Shakespeare’s world crucial to each play. The
most important exception to this rule (discussed in full in the next chapter) is an
explanation of Shakespeare’s theatre. Moreover, Shakespeare works out his general truths
about life in terms of the specifics most familiar to his audience, so the need will arise for
your students to have some idea about the Wars of the Roses, about the English
Reformation, about Elizabeth’s lineage, about the high points of her reign, about James’s
Succession. Some concept of the Great Chain of Being, of the Divine Right of Kings, and
of the Correspondences can be helpful. Always be willing to answer their questions
about the life and times of Shakespeare, but remember that the play’s the thing.
That means no snipping out paper dolls in full Elizabethan costume, building
miniature Globe theatres from popsicle sticks, or mounting sixteenth-century maps of
London, England, and the world. Yes, these displays can offer a treasure trove of
information on what it was like ‘in those days’. But such a museum approach has as much
power to interest the normal student in Shakespeare as a display of Snoop Dogg
memorabilia would have power to make someone into a rap fan. Approaching
Shakespeare through cutouts and photos and posters is simply avoiding the issue.
However diverting a discussion of Elizabethan sports, costume, politics, cooking, music,
or bookmaking may be, however much such a focus succeeds in informing students
about the Elizabethan Age, it is not teaching Shakespeare.
In fact, the Renaissance Fair approach can work against an appreciation of the plays. The
message implicit in the illustrations of ruffs, farthingales, muskets, carriages, half-timbered
buildings, and bearbaitings is ‘Look at this fascinating other world, this zoo of quaint
specimens from another time.’ Your job is to make the plays work for your students today.
When, for purposes of exposition or because students ask, you want to discuss
Shakespeare’s times, try to strip away the superficial differences. Students often trip over
their smugness about the present and they can reject things in antique forms without
even sampling them. They have a hard time believing that people four centuries ago
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might be driven by the same feelings or have the same sex drives, or could make the same
kinds of jokes. So try to find ways to show them the similarities beneath the surface
changes in our lives. When they make faces at the barbarity of bearbaiting, mention the
rise of ultimate fighting or remind them that American football persists despite the
damage that concussions do to the brain. If they laugh at the absurdity of Elizabethan
costume or hair, take them on a guided tour through any current fashion or gossip
magazine. If they snicker at soothsayers, read them the horoscope from today’s paper. If
they think Elizabethan belief in monsters, witches, ghosts, and the supernatural is quaint,
ask them about whatever witch, ghost, or zombie movie is currently at the multiplex.
The Sixth Don’t: Don’t strain to cover the ‘whole’ play
No law says that a Shakespeare teacher must give equal treatment to the entire play. After
you’ve sketched out the plot for them and they know essentially where the pieces fit, do
not feel compelled to ‘do’ the whole play. Work on those scenes in the play that you like
best or work on some that they like. Touching any part of a work by Shakespeare brings
you near to its heart. If you can make your students understand well the workings of two
or three important moments in the play, then you have brought them closer to the truth
of the work than ‘covering’ it all by skimming the surface.
To prepare my students for the National Theatre’s production of King Lear, starring
Anthony Hopkins, I had them stage the first 32 lines, in which the Earl of Gloucester
introduces his bastard son, Edmund, to the Earl of Kent. Little of the business in those
lines is expressly about Lear and his daughters; it’s a scene that is sometimes cut. We read
over and discussed the lines, we cast the characters, we blocked them, we discussed the
staging, we altered the blocking, we looked for new hints in the words, we talked about
themes in the play and their connection to this scene, we blocked and staged it again, and
we talked. When we had finished, the students had a firm feeling for the interpretative
space that Shakespeare gives his actors; they noticed Gloucester’s tasteless boasting; they
heard him profess to love both his sons equally; they could see Kent’s directness but also
his sensitivity to Edmund’s feelings; they were aware of Edmund’s significant silence; and
they saw clearly the issue of relations between father and child. Just 32 lines, yet they
were ‘into’ the play, privy to its inner life.
To trade such closeness for a more sweeping but necessarily more shallow treatment
is a bad bargain. You might teach them more about King Lear, the literary artefact, but
you will teach them less of King Lear, the dramatic experience. Their notebooks would be
fuller, but their hearts and their heads, less so.
The Seventh Don’t: Don’t pretend to like something you don’t like
This rule includes lines, passages, scenes, characters – even the play itself. No one, not
even me, likes everything in Shakespeare. Though I believe that an understanding of
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what Shakespeare had in mind would make me see the value of each scene, each passage,
each line, each word, much still leaves me unsympathetic or uninterested. I see no reason
why students shouldn’t be aware of those moments, and I can see several reasons why it
might help for them to know when their teacher suffers a lapse in enthusiasm.
First, the frank admission that a passage bores you altogether rearranges your position
as an intermediary between the students and Shakespeare. You’re not simply promoting
Shakespeare; you can also be critical. This notion will encourage them to be a part of the
discussion, knowing that having doubts does not exclude them from considering the
work or from enjoying Shakespeare. Seeing that you don’t like certain moments also
makes them more likely to credit the pleasure you otherwise take in the work. Finally,
since contrariness is the most reliable aspect of human nature, your declaration that you
don’t see the value of a certain passage is likely to make your students come to
Shakespeare’s defence, and they may even teach you how to like the passage. I once
remarked to a class how little I cared for Clarence’s saccharine and overblown dream
narrative in Richard III. A student objected that she really liked the contrast that the
long-winded and guilt-ridden speech set up with the terse and unsentimental exchange
of the murderers – points I have made since when I teach that scene.
The Eighth Don’t: Don’t have anyone in your class (including you) read
more than two sentences at a time (except sometimes)
This rule appears to prohibit the best perk in teaching Shakespeare: teaching may not pay
much, but we get to play the theatre’s greatest roles. I, for example, do a passable Prince
Hal, a rather undersized Falstaff (though less so every year), a first-rate Bottom, and a
Juliet that I fancy has brought my class to tears. But the temptation is to get carried away
and keep reading, to forget that the attention of these same students might wander even
during a reading by a professional actor, and to think that because you envision the other
characters there and the set and the costumes, your students are imagining the same
thing. Well, they won’t be without your constant help. You must always be building a
theatre in their minds, and to do that you must frequently interrupt yourself and
comment on the text. In fact, this access to the theatre of the mind is one of the great
benefits of Shakespeare in the classroom, since the classroom, perhaps as much as the
rehearsal room, allows the mediation between text and performance.
This brief passage rule applies as well to readings by your students. A ‘read around’,
in which the class reads through a passage student-by-student can be an entertaining
experience, but only if you limit each student to a small bit. Try restricting the passages
they read to an independent clause – ‘read to the next colon, semi-colon, exclamation
mark, question mark, or period.’ That ensures a complete thought but one that’s only
about a dozen words (as few as two: ‘Kill Claudio’). The benefits of the procedure
are many: (1) no student feels overly challenged, (2) students are likelier to understand
the sense of this smaller unit, and (3) therefore more likely to read it so that others can
hear the meaning, and (4) the other students keep hearing fresh voices. Brief passage
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readings also allow your ‘play by play’ commentary to be more specific and so more
helpful.
One important admonition during read-throughs: when a student makes a mistake in
reading – reading too quietly or too quickly to be heard, pronouncing words incorrectly,
missing a word, or mistaking one word for another word – correct the student and have
him or her do it again. Here’s why: (1) you’re teaching how to read, which is your job, (2)
the other students reading along will notice if you let it pass and mistrust your
commitment to the text and to the exercise, and (3) you need the passage to be audible
and correct for any comments you or the class as a whole may wish to make. Students can
be sensitive about being corrected, but if you make corrections in a cheerful and matter-
of-fact way, if you ask to hear the corrected version from the student and applaud the
student’s corrected reading, and if you apply the same coaching routinely every time any
student makes a similar error, then they will soon accustom themselves to it. Make your
coaching, your interjections, and your cheerleading a part of the reading.
These, then, are the ‘don’ts’ of teaching Shakespeare, those techniques and exercises that
can raise the barriers separating your students from your Shakespeare: assignments that
divert students from Shakespeare (memorization, research papers), aids that can backfire
and confirm their prejudices (films, bad productions, bulletin board exhibits), classroom
approaches that block their ability to see you responding to the text (forcing yourself to
‘finish’ the play, faking facts or feelings, using the responses of ‘experts’ in place of your
own). The dangers inherent in my Eight Least Wanted list may not be fatal, but they can
become teaching crutches, and throwing them away will force teachers to rely on the
resources they find in themselves and in the play.
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CHAPTER 3
NINE DOS OF TEACHING SHAKESPEARE
Think of teaching as improvisational theatre, in which your performance takes its shape
not from a script, but from your topic (Shakespeare), from the other actors (your class),
and, most of all, from you. Teaching is a personal profession; the personality of the
teacher more than anything else dictates what happens in class, and a ‘how-to’ book
should not aim to change your personality. You have an idea what you want to say and
how you want your class to respond. How, then, can a book possibly help you make your
‘improv production’ a hit? Any specific scenario it provides is unlikely to suit your
specific class – it may well not suit you.
That’s why I’m offering guidelines – certain things to do (and not to do) that
increase your chances of a good production, a fruitful collaboration amongst you, your
students, and Shakespeare. Rules I and II talk about ways to make Shakespeare personal;
Rules III and IV talk about how to reclaim the theatrical in Shakespeare; Rule V strikes
a blow for small bites; Rules VI and VII suggest two ways to make Shakespeare reach
the young; and Rules VIII and IX consider Shakespeare’s crafting of his language,
bad and good.
I. Do connect the works to yourself.
II. Do stress your own problems with the play.
III. Do stress staging.
IV. Do stage scenes with your students.
V. Do deal with small moments, small speeches, specific words.
VI. Do deal with the ‘dirty’ stuff.
VII. Do stress character, but in your students’ terms.
VIII. Do confront Shakespeare’s poor speakers.
IX. Do deal with sound.
The First Do: Do connect the works to yourself
Shakespeare is alive in our culture now, not because he is grist for graduate school papers
on the Elizabethan world-view or on the Jacobean discourse of power, but because his
works still speak to us. Great Shakespeare critics, no matter their erudition, write their
commentary out of a personal place; they do not filter themselves out of what they have
to say. Their commentary lasts because it puts us into a conversation with the playwright
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Nine Dos of Teaching Shakespeare
and his works. Likewise, we are better teachers when – no matter our erudition – we help
our students join that conversation, and to do that we each need our own personal
response to the work. If you want Shakespeare in your classroom, you must bring him in
as a part of yourself.
Start by choosing your favourite parts of the play – one or two moments for each
of the five acts. After you have chosen your passages, read them aloud until you
are comfortable with the language. Then ask of those passages the following three
questions.
1. What do you like about the words Shakespeare has chosen? the sound? the
tone? the idiom? the formality? the brevity? the images? The answers to these
questions will be what you have to say about the word-craft of Shakespeare.
2. What is happening onstage when these words are spoken? What is the situation?
What is the speaker doing? Who is listening? What are the listeners doing?
Which characters are not listening and what are they doing? What does the
staging tell us about the words? The answers to these questions will be what
you have to say about the stagecraft of Shakespeare.
3. What do the passages you have chosen have to do with one another? Are the
thoughts similar? the humour? the situations? the images? the ideas? How do the
parts relate to the whole? How does the whole relate to the world as you see it?
The answers to these questions will be what you have to say about the
meaning of Shakespeare.
Try to extend your experience of Shakespeare beyond the text; make it your
business to see as many productions as possible and share your responses to those
productions with your class. First-hand reminiscences of productions can energize
your classroom. Give some consideration to the play before you go, and, as you watch,
try to understand the choices the actors and the director make. Note especially those
scenes, characters, and speeches in the play that had never come alive for you in a
reading, and ask yourself what elements of the production brought those moments
to life. When you dislike the choices, mentally argue your point. Make notes for
yourself, even if it’s just on your programme, and go over those notes before they get cold.
With a little preparation and a little effort, you will find every show better than a seminar
on the play.
What’s more, the value of going to a play increases with every new production you see
of the same play. Weighing one production against another and weighing all against your
own reading of the play, will illuminate the work and animate your teaching.
The Second Do: Do stress your own problems with the play
This rule is obviously the corollary of Don’t Rule No. 7: ‘Don’t Pretend to Like Something
You Don’t Like.’ No one reads Shakespeare effortlessly from the start, and even his
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greatest admirers don’t love everything in Shakespeare. When we leave no room for
objections or reservations, we force our students to be disciples or heretics; teenagers
being teenagers, they’d rather be heretical. Students simply will not like everything
about reading Shakespeare, and if they feel disqualified by having a negative response,
then they will dismiss the entire experience as somehow beyond them. Admitting to
your own difficulties with Shakespeare tells your students that is normal and does not
interfere with your general admiration. Make negative reactions legitimate by sharing
your own.
When you assign the play tell your students any issues you have with the play. I tell
them, for example, that Henry V has almost no plot, and I preview the tedium of the
Archbishop’s speech about the Salic Law. In assigning King Lear, I confess that I have
been confused by Edgar’s madman strategy and mystified by much of his language.
Think of two students reading King Lear – one’s been told by his teacher that Edgar is
hard; the other has not – and imagine what happens when they reach the Poor Tom
sections. The one reading it cold must cope alone with his bafflement, question his
reading skills, and wonder whether it’s worth it. The one who knows that his teacher also
had problems with Edgar will presume from your experience that it’s worth wrestling
with Edgar to read King Lear.
Anticipating student complaints by voicing your own reservations before they’ve read
the play also promotes more assertive reading. Knowing that a certain passage or scene
puzzles the teacher is an irresistible challenge to good students to find the answers. When
I tell students that the first time I read Lear I was too young to identify with its themes or
to understand its greatness, I invariably have them report to me that they love the play,
and many of them want especially to explain Edgar to me. Primitive but reliable
psychology.
The Third Do: Do stress staging
Shakespeare was a playwright: when he sat down to write (if he bothered to sit), he was
not imagining his words in print being read silently in the privacy of a study; he was
hearing them spoken by his actors as he watched their faces, their movements, and
their relationship with the audience. You cannot overemphasize this fact. To teach
Shakespeare well, help your students do two things: First, help them imagine the text
they are reading as words spoken by the actors playing the characters. Second, help to
imagine those actors as they would have appeared on Shakespeare’s stage. Why does that
matter?
Simply put, an Elizabethan play works differently than a play written for the
proscenium stage – that picture frame box in front of us where we watch the show
through an invisible wall. Shakespeare did not put on a show in front of the audience; he
and his fellow playwrights made the audience a part of the show. Bruce Springsteen tells
his audiences, ‘You’re in a concert, not at a concert.’ Your job in getting students to enjoy
Shakespeare becomes easier when you can help them understand how his plays worked.
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To do that you need to know something about Elizabethan theatres like the Globe,
essentially a wooden arena with a platform sticking out into the centre surrounded on
three sides by the audience standing in the ‘yard’ or seated in a three-level gallery –
everyone within fifty feet of the stage. You should also know that Shakespeare wrote his
last plays for an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars, with a much smaller audience in the same
configuration around the stage, but all seated within thirty feet of the stage and some –
those willing to pay – sat on ‘gallants, stools’ on the stage itself. Though scholars argue the
details of both the indoor and the outdoor stage, the main points you should stress are
these: (1) There were no sets and the backdrop (frons scenae) was essentially the same
for every show. (2) No curtain hid the onstage action, the audience surrounded the stage,
and they shared the same light (sunlight or candlelight) with the actors – the actors
could see them and they could see each other. These staging conditions made the
relationship between the audience and the play fundamentally different from what your
students know about theatre.
Consider the curtain across the stage in the theatres most common to your students:
it separates the world onstage from the world of the audience. On one side of the curtain
is the world of the play and on the other is the audience. To deepen that division between
the two, house lights go off on the audience when the play starts and the stage lights go
on. Two separate worlds – the audience and the play – and never the twain shall meet.
That’s what your students growing up with proscenium stages and movies (their near
kin) expect theatre to be like. But no curtain or gulf separated the players in Shakespeare’s
day from the audience. Instead, the actors put on the play in the midst of an audience
whom they could see, and the two worlds of the play and the audience were always
simultaneously present to one another.
The fact that there were no sets and the backdrop was essentially the same for
every show will sound primitive to your students, but those conditions meant the
play could move instantly from one imagined setting to another. No stage hands
scurrying around during scene breaks; no cumbersome pieces of scenery or furnishings
rumble on or offstage. King Richard II need only walk on the stage and ask, ‘Barkloughly
Castle call they this at hand?’ (3.2.1), and the audience knows where he is and can
imagine a castle in the distance. Shakespeare sets the scene with words. ‘This is the
Forest of Arden’, ‘Welcome to Rome’, ‘In fair Verona where we lay our scene’. He counts
on us to help the play by imagining the setting. The audience called upon to imagine that
a bare stage is a public street in fair Verona has much more invested than the audience
that sees a curtain open on a plaster of Paris fountain or watches a projection appear of
a street in Renaissance Italy. However much the artwork – plastic or digital – pleases the
eye, the mind remains in the seat with the viewer. But in Shakespeare’s theatre, merely by
virtue of having to use their imaginations the audience put themselves in the play and
participate in the illusion. The more a playgoer has to do, the more he or she joins the world
of the play.
Audience surrounded the stage and shared the same light – sunlight or candlelight –
with the actors – the actors could see them and they could see each other. Plays in
Elizabethan London began at two in the afternoon to take advantage of the best available
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and cheapest form of lighting: sunlight. Lighting a play with sunlight rather than with
the stage lights common to modern theatres makes two big differences. First, there is no
spotlight with which to direct the audience’s attention, only the playwright’s words and
the actors’ movements. Second, and even more significant, the audience is as visible as
the actors – both to the actors and to one another. They can help one another.
Put yourself in the place of the actor playing Hamlet on a conventional proscenium
Broadway stage, and it’s time to give Hamlet’s first soliloquy. ‘O,’ you begin, ‘that this too,
too sullied flesh would melt, / thaw and resolve itself into a dew.’ The lights are on you,
shining into your eyes, and the house – the auditorium – is dark. It may be full, it may be
empty. Except for the first couple of rows lit by the ‘spill’ of the lights, you have no way of
knowing whether it’s full or empty, whether anyone is listening. You are acting into a
void. You are alone.
Precisely this tradition of the actor alone – separated not just from the other characters
in the play, but also from the world of the audience – has shaped our idea of the soliloquy
as a necessary method of revealing a character’s thoughts. Wrong. Shakespeare’s
soliloquies are part of an unspoken dialogue, not only the character’s internal dialogue
but also a dialogue with the audience, the visible audience of the Elizabethan playhouse.
The fact that an audience doesn’t speak back to the actor does not alter the fundamental
fact that the actor is communicating with the people he sees around him. He or she wants
something from the audience – their approval (Brutus), their laughter (Bottom), their
sympathy (Helena), their indignation (Hamlet), even their enmity (Aaron the Moor) –
and the transaction is incomplete without that audience.
Start your soliloquy again, now in an Elizabethan setting. This time you can see
everyone in the house, from touching distance to as far away as fifty feet. You even
know some of them. ‘O,’ you begin again, ‘that this too, too solid flesh would melt/
thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.’ Look at that guy in the first gallery: he’s smiling. He’s
not supposed to be smiling, and there’s a bloke right in front of you smiling, too.
Something’s out of kilter. Your performance needs some adjustment. You zero in on the
smiler nearest you, pause a second to make certain everyone sees you’ve got him in focus,
lower your voice, and, stressing slowly your next word, you say: ‘Or that the everlasting
had not fixed / his canon ’gainst self-slaughter.’ Something about the way you said
‘slaughter’ dissolves the guy’s smile. You go on now, looking carefully for the woman in
this performance to whom you’ll address the ‘frailty thy name is woman’ line. Because the
audience knows that your eyes are on every one of them, all eyes are on you. You are
anything but alone.
In this as in other regards your classroom is like a theatre. Unfortunately for education
classrooms have come to resemble conventional proscenium theatre. After twelve or
more years of sitting in rows and staring straight ahead at innumerable teachers in
innumerable classrooms, students have developed the attitude that insofar as they do not
disturb others, their state of consciousness or unconsciousness is their own business. For
some of them a class, particularly a lecture, is something to attend rather than something
in which to take part. They see themselves as ‘audience’ in the modern sense – unseen,
unheard, untouchable observers whether they are watching television, seeing movies,
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looking at the screens on their devices, or attending class – safe in their anonymity. When
I was teaching undergraduates, occasionally I would throw erasers at students who fell
asleep in my class. This habit bothered my students. (It didn’t much amuse my dean
either.) They had assumed a cloak of invisibility, and being hit with erasers violated their
sense of privacy.
The thing is their sleeping does disturb the class. First, it raises the possibility that I am
boring them, and that changes the way I teach. It makes me alter my performance in an
attempt to rouse them. I get louder, I become more sarcastic, I force bad jokes, I direct my
remarks at them; in short, I twist my lecture and the class out of shape. Second, beyond
its effect on me, their sleeping signifies to the other students something negative about
the class.
Every day in class you face an audience of television and movie watchers, kids so used
to their roles as passive observers that they are surprised when you notice that they are
talking to one another, looking at their screens, or asleep. You keep thinking that you are
in a joint endeavour, and they keep wishing for the invisibility of a movie seat. Imagine
for a moment that you had to conduct your class with the students truly as invisible as an
audience in a darkened theatre auditorium: what could you do to hold them? How would
you know when your points were getting through? Now think of all the ways that your
visible students shape your own performance as a teacher: the head-nodders who
encourage you, the smirkers who force you into more assertiveness or more evasiveness,
the puzzlers who make you repeat a point, the talkers who prompt your most menacing
stare, the snoozers who turn up your volume.
Knowing how uncooperative students can influence your performance in class,
consider how one more distinctive feature of Elizabethan staging might affect an actor’s
performance on that stage: the social arrangement of the audience in an Elizabethan
playhouse. The pricing of tickets at the theatres influenced the location of customers. The
most expensive tickets were in the Lord’s Room above and behind the stage. The cheapest
ticket purchased its buyer standing room on the ground around the platform, which
stood shoulder high, and this part of the audience was known as the ‘groundlings’. Who
they were and where they were had implications for the actors. The fact that wealthy
patrons would take a seat behind the action suggests that theatre was also important as a
social event. These patrons wanted as much to be seen as to see. Frequently, as Ben Jonson
complains in the ‘Induction’ to Bartholomew Fair, the self-important people in the higher
priced sections would make a show of damning the play at hand – with gestures and
expressions and sometimes with words. And while Shakespeare and his players had to be
aware that upstage of them and over their heads the educated aristocrat might quite
literally be giving the thumbs up or down on their work, they had also to keep in mind
that closest to them downstage, literally at their feet, the great unwashed audience of
London – enthusiasts of bearbaitings and public executions – stood eager for sex,
violence, and slapstick. Shakespeare and his contemporaries writing for the public theatre
had to have a wide enough range to please both the gentry and the rabble – in TV terms,
they had to write for fans of Masterpiece Theatre and for fans of pro-wrestling at the
same time.
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Remember too that these different groups not only could watch one another, because
of their configuration around the stage, they had to watch one another. Shakespeare
knew that the audience was an ever-present reminder in the real world of the fiction
taking place onstage. For him there was no such thing as ‘the suspension of disbelief ’; he
understood that audiences simultaneously believe and disbelieve the play before them,
and he revelled in that dual comprehension. By acknowledging that the show extended
beyond the stage, he could enlarge the play and fix it in the real world by making that
audience a part of it. In short, Shakespeare made the visible audience his accomplices in
their own entertainment. Good playwrights operate on an audience’s belief; great
playwrights operate as well on their disbelief. To do that, Shakespeare made them
complicit in the make-believe.
Sometimes Shakespeare turns the audience into a collective character. In Julius Caesar
the audience plays the Roman populace when Antony addresses it as ‘Friends, Romans,
countrymen’ (3.2.74); in Henry V the audience stands for Henry’s army when Henry
speaks to it as ‘we few, we happy few, we band of brothers’ (4.3.60); in Much Ado the
audience becomes the congregation at the wedding when Claudio asks it, ‘. . . would you
not swear, / all you who see her here, that she were a maid . . .?’ (4.1.36–7). In an instant,
the playwright could enlist the entire visible audience as a cast of thousands for his play,
the perfect background for any public speech.
A less recognized feature of Shakespeare’s plays are the lines that make individuals a
part of the play. Passages that would be only mildly amusing on a proscenium stage in
front of an invisible audience come to life if we assume that the actor delivering them
used the audience all around him. No actor can resist using a handy prop, and what prop
could have been handier than the real, live people surrounding the stage? Consider, for
example, a speech given by Pompey, the pimp in Measure for Measure. He’s in prison and
the main point of the passage is that all his former customers at Mistress Overdone’s
whorehouse are also in the prison. Here’s the speech slightly edited:
I am as well-acquainted here as I was in our house of profession: one would think

it were Mistress Overdone’s own house, for here be many of her old customers.
First, here’s young Master Rash . . . Then is there here one Master Caper . . . Then
have we here young Dizzy, and young Master Deepvow, and Master Copperspur,
and Master Starve-lackey, the rapier and dagger man, and young Drop-heir that
killed lusty Pudding, and Master Forthright the tilter, and brave Master Shoe-tie,
the great traveler, and wild Half-can that stabbed Pots, and I think forty more, all
great doers in our trade . . .
(4.3.1–19)
In proscenium theatres the actor playing Pompey delivers these lines as if the characters
he is naming exist in the unseen world of the play. The result is largely dead air. At the
Blackfriars, however, our Pompey points out a different audience member each time he
names an old customer. ‘First,’ he says, ‘here’s young Master Rash’, and points to a nearby
member of the audience. Then he continues looking around the audience for old
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customers and points out Master Caper, young Dizzy, young Master Deepvow, and so on.
The audience loves it, and instead of the speech getting duller as it goes along, it becomes
funnier as the audience members wonder who is next to be recognized as a customer by
Pompey the pimp.
The point for your students in all this is that seeing Shakespeare’s plays as he designed
them to be seen is an altogether different experience of theatre than they could know
from their experiences in theatres, cinemas, and in front of their devices. To paraphrase
Springsteen, the audience expected to be in the play not just at the play.
Part of your job in teaching Shakespeare is to introduce your students to this special
kind of theatre, and you should try always to keep that theatre before them and to read
every line with the awareness that Shakespeare wrote it for that world. Extract the line, if
you will, and look at it in any light you wish, but be certain that your students always
understand where it comes from and where it is most at home.
The Fourth Do: Do stage scenes with your students
The best way to remind students of the stage origins of Shakespeare’s works and to let
them enjoy the dynamics of an Elizabethan stage is to turn your classroom into a theatre.
If you have never tried directing, you will worry that you know too little to use this
approach; but I urge you to try. As Lucio says to Isabella in Measure for Measure, ‘Our
doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.’
(1.4.77–9) And this classroom method, of all those I recommend, will win you the most
good. To help you, I have given you dozens of DIY suggestions in the ‘Ploys’ and the
‘Scenes for Alternative Readings’ sections following my comments on the plays. Trust in
yourself, in your students, and in Shakespeare’s text. Try and try again. You are teaching
Shakespeare today because for four hundred years his scenes have worked on stages
everywhere. I predict your classroom will be no exception.
Here is my advice on staging scenes.
1. Use volunteers. Ask for volunteers. It’s foolhardy to assign this project to reluctant
students; you’ll have to work harder to get much less from them. Volunteers
actually want to be in front of the class, and if you have actors in your class,
you’ll find that they will be quick to raise their hands and offer. But remember
that what you are asking for is not accomplished acting but a spirit of play, and
every class has ‘players’ in it. Ask for ‘players’.
2. Choose a short scene with two to four speaking roles. The scene – or part of a
scene – should never exceed 80 lines, about five minutes, and shorter than that
(30–60 lines) is usually better. Print it out on a single sheet (single side, if
possible) of paper for the actors so they won’t have to be juggling a book, and
give the other students a copy or have them follow along in a class text. In an
hour-long class you can manage three versions with plenty of time between for
comment and discussion. Using a reading of five minutes or less will limit the
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amount of work for you in rehearsal as well as any damage to your class if the
scene falls flat. I recommend two speaking roles and no more than four. One
person reading even the best soliloquy becomes just that – a reading – and
misses the point of staging a scene, which is to stress that the language, though it
is poetic, is an interaction between characters.
3. Have two diametrically opposed readings (you’ll find over seventy examples in Part
Two). The idea behind staging scenes in class is threefold: to help your students
think in terms of the works as plays, to show them how performance choices can
change the meaning, and to revel in the pleasure of making those choices. Doing
the scene in two diametrically opposed ways accomplishes those goals.
(a) After seeing those two opposed versions of the scene – an exercise that takes
no more than ten minutes – a class is primed for a discussion of how the
scenes touch on the play’s most important themes. More obviously, the two
contrasting readings are excellent preparation for talking about the
characters in them.
(b) By staging opposites, you prove to your students that Shakespeare isn’t
fragile; he won’t break when you play with him. He’s safe even from complete
amateurs holding scripts in their hands, hamming it up, having a good time
bending the material first one way and then another. And your class, perhaps
as much to your surprise as to theirs, will find the scenes ‘fun’. They have
already heard that his works are brilliant and profound; what they need to
learn is that he can entertain them, that he can be theirs.
(c) Together the scenes will demonstrate that Shakespeare’s plays – all plays – are
subject to the elements of performance, the look of the actors, their voices,
their movements, their pace, their choices. After a few of these classroom
demonstrations, your students, when they read on their own, will get more
used to thinking of the ways Shakespeare’s words might play onstage.
4. If your players lack experience, rehearse the scenes with your student-players
outside of class. Start by having them read through the scene. This is the time to
catch any pronunciation or language problems and get some idea of how good
your players are and how ambitious you can be with your interpretations. After
the initial read-through, explain to them the diametrically opposed choices in
the scene, and then get your players on their feet and have them make strong
choices, first one way and then the others. Work only a little bit on where your
actors will stand and move onstage, and pay most attention to getting your actors
to understand what they are saying, to enjoy themselves and to feel comfortable
with the scene. Focus on the points in the scene where you like their choices
most. After running through both versions, you should find your players
proficient enough to send off on their own for one practice session of polishing.
5. Let the class suggest a third reading. Cement the class’s sense of ownership by
letting them ‘direct’ a third version of the scene. Your students may want to try
different emotional ranges – ‘make them angrier’, ‘make them funnier’, ‘make him
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afraid of her’, etc. – or they may want to set it in another world – ‘make it a
Western’, ‘make it about the Mafia’, ‘put it in the Deep South’, and so on. Write the
suggestions on the board, let the class discuss each briefly and vote for one or
two changes (more than that is confusing). If one or both of your actors demur,
call for new volunteers; you’ll find you have many more than before. Run the
scene a final time. If the scene is terrible, that will be amusing, and you can
discuss with your students why it didn’t work, secure in the knowledge that you
have proved Shakespeare both accessible and durable.
6. The classroom as an Elizabethan playhouse. Not only is the Globe’s design the
best layout for staging the scenes, it’s also the best configuration for discussion,
for read-arounds, and for generally getting your students out of the passiveness
of the proscenium classroom. Have your students put their desks in a semi-circle
around an imaginary playing space (as small as eight feet wide and six feet deep)
where your scenes will take place. To make sure that all the ‘players’ and all the
‘audience’ in your theatre can see one another’s faces and to keep any of your
students from ‘hiding’ behind others, keep your semi-circle no more than two
desks deep. Put your desk against the ‘upstage’ wall (where the board is). The
Globe had five places an actor could enter: door left (left of your desk), door
right (right of your desk), the central discovery space (in front of your desk), the
balcony (on top of your desk), and the trapdoor (under your desk). Whenever
you do any staging have the students keep those options in mind.
Figure 2 The classroom as an Elizabethan theatre.
39
The Fifth Do: Do deal with small moments, small speeches, specific words
This rule is the corollary of the Sixth Don’t: ‘Don’t strain to cover the “whole” play.’ Never
be afraid to spend time looking closely at any feature of the play – no matter how small.
Always ‘zoom in’.
With Shakespeare you can count on two things: that, as in biology, everything is
connected to the whole and that the smallest part will prove to be a microcosm that
reflects or supports the larger work. At the very least you will find that the word suits the
character and the action, and that connection will provide discussion that leads into the
heart of the work.
If you feel yourself lost in class, try following any phrase or word that catches your
attention. Take, for example, Prospero’s ‘Now my powers are all o’erthrown . . .’ and even
so simple a word as ‘now’. Watch who uses ‘now’ (people in charge, mostly Prospero),
think how it relates to the story (he’s waited twelve years until ‘now’), to the structure of
the play (set in a single day, in the ‘now’, so to speak), and to the conflict (with Prospero’s
brother for what he did ‘then’, with Ariel who is impatient to be released from servitude
and who must await his ‘now’).
As you explore the phrase or word, keep the process of discovery and connection
clear to your students. Frequently return to the context of the word – the play, the scene,
the character, the conflict – and retrace the steps of your argument. Repetition is an
essential tool of teaching; use it. Repetition is an essential tool of teaching; use it.
The Sixth Do: Do deal with the ‘dirty’ stuff
Shakespeare enjoyed jokes about sex; your students enjoy jokes about sex; so don’t pass
up the opportunity to let your students feel connected. And this connection works a
particular charm, because every generation considers itself the discoverer of sex and
fancies itself the inventor of all language about the subject – a code language, an act of
subversion against the authority of the older generation. What a revelation, then, for your
students to find that Shakespeare’s characters speak that language!
Furthermore, the discovery that Shakespeare not only cared about sex but also made
jokes about it helps students turn off the interfering ‘translator’ channel and read or hear
the words with their normal perception. Students who read over Thisbe’s complaint, ‘I
kiss the wall’s hole and not your lips at all,’ and then have the joke explained to them, will
often exclaim, ‘He meant that?’ meaning: ‘If we’d known it was that simple, we’d have had
a lot more fun with this stuff.’ (Explaining the dirty joke has the added benefit of making
them envision the stage: where is Thisbe in relation to Wall when she (he) delivers the
line?)
Two admonitions: First, never snigger or be cute about sex. The right approach is a
detached, matter-of-fact statement of what the line means. Second, show how even the
dirty jokes work in the larger interests of the play. For example, in Romeo and Juliet,
Mercutio’s dirty mind reveals a cynicism that looks suspiciously like the emotional
40
armour of a vulnerable man and that certainly contrasts sharply with Romeo’s view of
love. In Measure for Measure, Lucio’s dirty mouth is his way of levelling society. And in
Henry V, when the Princess discovers that some English words sound like naughty
French words, her initial embarrassment – ‘les mots . . . corruptible, gros, et impudique’
(‘the words . . . evil, coarse, and immodest’) – turns to something like delight when she
repeats them twice. Her enthusiasm suggests that she will be a good match for the Prince,
not just publicly but privately as well.
More difficult are the passages in Shakespeare where a character’s obsession with
sex is evidence of a disturbed mind, as in the cases of Hamlet, Ophelia, Othello, and
Lear. At this level, a discussion of sexuality and love becomes essential to the deepest
understanding of the works, and here you may be on ground where your students’ young
lives have not prepared them to go. Press on at least to that point where they understand
how Shakespeare uses ‘dirty’ language, even if they cannot yet understand why.
The Seventh Do: Do stress character, but in your students’ terms
One traditional approach with which I have no quarrel is character analysis. Whereas
considerations of imagery, structure, themes, and sources run the risk of going far afield
from the theatrical experience of the play, character in conflict is the essence of a play.
During a performance of King Lear, an audience may not be able to trace the development
of the sight imagery, but they know that Gloucester is wiser after he is blinded than
before; during Macbeth, they won’t be counting references to babies, but they will
understand the depth of Macduff ’s grief and anger when, urged to revenge Macbeth’s
slaughter of his family, Macduff ’s reply is ‘he has no children’. A student’s emotional
response to the people in Shakespeare’s plays is a natural place to start a conversation
about the play.
I frequently begin discussion with one question, ‘Who do you like?’ After we have
some unanimous good guys on the board, I ask, ‘Who do you hate?’ Soon I have two
shortlists. Then I begin again with the Good Guy list: ‘Why do you like these guys?’ The
one rule is that students be specific about what their good guys do and what they say to
get on the list. As discussion continues, the support for the characters on the good list
begins to wobble; to some of the students the evidence quoted in favour of a candidate
actually works against him. For example, to the argument for Brutus that he killed Caesar
out of his idealism, a student once responded, ‘That only makes it worse.’ Shortly, you’ll
find that sentiment will grow for moving a name from the Good Guy to the Bad Guy list.
After they have debated the Good Guy list for a while, I move on to the Bad Guy list, and,
inevitably, defenders for almost any character will appear: ‘Cassius isn’t cruel, he’s just
honest’; ‘Claudius is sorry for what he did, and he’s a good king’; ‘Lady Macbeth does
what she does because she loves her husband’. Once the debate is vigorous, your job is to
sort out the main lines of argument and give shape to the discussion. You might observe
that their range of opinion on each character supports the view that Shakespeare created
characters, as life does people, who are neither wholly good nor wholly bad.
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Do what you can to recast characters in your students’ terms. If film and television
offer easy parallels, don’t hesitate to use them. My cultural references – I’m an American
baby boomer – will likely differ from yours, and yours will likely differ from your
students’. Good. We can learn about their shows and they can learn about ours. Different
generations and backgrounds sharing their entertainments while they look for
connections to Shakespeare is education at its best. What couple on TV is like Kate and
Petruchio? What couple is like Benedick and Beatrice? What about Diane and Sam in the
early Cheers? Or what about Frank and Claire in House of Cards? Or Lady Mary and
Matthew in Downton Abbey? Is Tony Soprano like Macbeth? Francis Underwood in
House of Cards like Richard III ?
Or, with care, you can get more personal. Do they know anyone as lovesick as Romeo?
Would that person be capable of suicide over the supposed death of his girlfriend? Do
they have a friend they think will become like Falstaff, always in his cups but never at a
loss for a joke? Has either of their parents ever demanded, as Lear does, an affirmation of
their love? Has any of them ever been jealous and, like Othello, imagined his or her loved
one in someone else’s arms? How bad did it hurt? You may even get to the bottom of why
they like or dislike a character, and they may begin to see the ways in which Shakespeare
is about their own lives.
The Eighth Do: Do confront Shakespeare’s poor speakers
A fast way to liberate Shakespeare from the realm of forbidding genius is to show his
own disapproval of characters who are hard to understand. Your students will encounter
obscure, pompous, or dull speakers in every play; that does not mean that Shakespeare is
obscure, pompous, or dull. On the contrary, such passages mean that Shakespeare, like
your students, takes offence at obscurity, pomposity, and dullness. Show them he’s on
their side about ‘boring’ speakers and you dissolve many of their objections to the plays.
Shakespeare creates characters who speak poorly because the world is full of such
people. Some fail to speak well because they care more about the way they sound than
about what they have to say. Polonius (Hamlet), with his constant digressions, is such a
character, and Pistol (in 2 Henry IV and Henry V), with his ridiculous affectation of blank
verse, is another. Both characters misuse language in a way that makes it hard for other
characters – and for the audience – to understand them. But by having them speak that
way, Shakespeare reveals their character as he lampoons the linguistic abuses of everyone
from scholars to lovers to courtiers. For example, after Osric, the King’s messenger, has
paid an incomprehensible compliment to Laertes, Hamlet mimics him:
Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you,

though, I know, to divide him inventorially
would dozy the arithmetic of memory, and yet
but yaw neither in respect of his quick sail.
(5.2.114–17)
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Confusion in the face of such language is a badge of honour, and when we hear it
knowing that Shakespeare is poking fun at it, a speech we might have worried about
deciphering becomes entertaining for its very indecipherability.
Some of Shakespeare’s characters speak poorly because they do not want us to
understand what they are saying – particularly politicians. In Hamlet, Claudius’s first
words, because they are so difficult to understand, tell us much more about the man than
we would have known if he had spoken clearly:
Though yet of Hamlet, our dear brother’s death,

the memory be green, and that it us befitted
to bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom
to be contracted in one brow of woe,
yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
that we with wisest sorrow think on him
together with remembrance of ourselves.
(1.2.1–7)
This speech sounds grand because Claudius the politician uses stately, balanced
rhythms and hits all the right notes – ‘dear brother’s death’, ‘memory be green’, ‘hearts in
grief ’, ‘brow of woe’, ‘wisest sorrow’. In fact, his point, obscured by the tortured syntax
(‘Though yet . . . /. . . yet’) and the royal ‘we’, is that he is not thinking about his brother
but about himself. And that first sentence is a model of clarity compared to what he
says next:
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,

th’imperial jointress to this warlike state,
have we, as ‘twere with a defeated joy,
with an auspicious and a dropping eye,
with mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
in equal scale weighing delight and dole,
taken to wife.
(1.2.8–14)
Without the royal ‘we’, without the inverted syntax, without the interrupting
modifying phrases and confusing paradoxes (‘defeated joy’, ‘mirth in funeral and dirge
in marriage’), Claudius is saying, ‘I have married my sister.’ That admission is bad
politics, so the politician does what politicians do: he obscures his meaning with his
language. Students will be happy to learn that finding the speech difficult actually means
that they are good readers, that they have understood Shakespeare by not understanding
Claudius.
Some of Shakespeare’s characters speak poorly because they are afflicted with severe
mental disorders, or what Shakespeare’s society called ‘madness’. That term covered
everything from depression to schizophrenia, and a symptom of madness was dissociative
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language, disconnected from the world and even from normal syntax. When Edgar in
King Lear pretends to be ‘poor Tom o’Bedlam’, a beggar escaped from Bedlam (a
corruption of the word Bethlehem) Hospital for the insane, he affects dissociative
language: ‘Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind; says suum, mun, nonny.
Dauphin my boy, my boy cessez! let him trot by’ (3.4.97–9). Of course that’s hard to
understand, and even if careful examination helps explain those words, their prime
meaning comes from their meaninglessness: Edgar’s ‘word salad’ sounds like madness
because he intends it to and, later, Lear’s word salad – ‘paw, paw, paw, paw’ – sounds like
madness because it is.
Sometimes the difficulty of the language is mostly a matter of how long the speeches
are, and students should learn to be suspicious of characters who talk too much. Take for
example the Archbishop of Canterbury in the second scene of Henry V. The king asks
him to ‘unfold’ England’s legal claim to France, and the Archbishop proceeds to speak for
82 lines – nearly five minutes – in terms like these:
Hugh Capet also, who usurped the crown

of Charles the Duke of Lorraine, sole heir male
of the true line and stock of Charles the Great,
to fine his title with some shows of truth,
though in pure truth it was corrupt and naught,
conveyed himself as heir to th’ Lady Lingard,
daughter to Charlemagne, who was the son
to Louis the Emperor, and Louis the son
of Charles the Great.
(1.2.69–77)
And so on and so on and so on in a speech of 81 lines. Scholars with little theatrical sense
have actually argued that the Archbishop’s tedious recitation is historically accurate and
makes an important case for the King’s invasion of France. It may make good law, but five
minutes of genealogy makes terrible theatre (then as now) unless its very length signifies
something about the Archbishop and his argument. People who go on and on might be
doing so because they have little of real substance to say.
Shakespeare knew that as well. Of course his plays are full of characters with
important long speeches, but you should be willing to ask, ‘Is the content of this speech
important enough for its stage time or does its length tell us something about the
character?’ Shakespeare and his audience loved characters who could speak well, and
that is all the more reason to believe that they would be suspicious of characters
who speak poorly or who use up a lot of time saying little. Your job is to attack the
language of such characters and to show how the dramatist makes boring language,
obscure language, and irrational language a part of his art. Students must understand
that such language reflects the failings of Shakespeare’s characters, not their own failing
as readers. Take away that anxiety and you remove a major barrier to an enjoyment of
Shakespeare.
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The Ninth Do: Do deal with sound (even metre, if you know how)
You can count on the sounds in Shakespeare to enhance the sense of the language and to
help you and your students understand the significance of the moment in the context of
the whole. But you must have faith in yourself to grasp those sounds and to see how
Shakespeare is using them. One of the most damaging effects of the institutionalization
of Shakespeare is that average people feel an advanced degree is necessary before they
can express any opinion on a line of verse. Certainly there are degrees of knowledge
about many of the pleasures of life, but a neophyte tasting wine, though he might not be
able to give the vintage and vineyard of a bottle of Burgundy, will know whether or not
it tastes ‘smooth’ or ‘harsh’. Connoisseurs do not have sole ownership of such words. How
much less do the ‘experts’ have special rights to a language we taste all the time?
At the first level of the discussion of sound is the feeling that the language creates.
Here’s a test. Read aloud each of the following quotations from Shakespeare and then
check the appropriate word:
Quotation 1
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
with sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.
(MND 2.1.249–52)
The sound of the passage above is

(a) choppy (b) percussive (c) harmonious (d) urgent.
Quotation 2
But stay: O spite!

But mark, poor knight,
what dreadful dole is here?
Eyes, do you see?
How can it be?
O dainty duck, O dear!
(MND 5.1.270–5)
The sound of the passage above is

(a) lilting (b) fluid (c) sing-songy (d) melodious.
Quotation 3
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
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that I, the son of a dear father murdered,

prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
must like a whore unpack my heart with words
and fall a-cursing like a very drab,
a scullion! Fie upon’t, foh!
About, my brains!
(Ham 2.2.584–90)
The sound of the above passage is

(a) hypnotic (b) steady (c) abrupt (d) soft.
Quotation 4
I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play

have by the very cunning of the scene
been struck so to the soul that presently
they have proclaimed their malefactions.
(Ham 2.2.590–4)
The sound of the above passage is

(a) musical (b) choppy (c) conversational (d) rhythmic.
If you answered (c) for all four passages, then you scored a perfect 100 on the Standardized
Shakespeare Sound Sampler – the ‘SSSS’ – and have qualified as an ‘Expert, Grade 3’. If you
answered (c) in all cases and could point to three features of the passage (using the sounds
of words, word order, the length of sentences, the structure of the sentence, and/or the
punctuation) that contribute to the way it sounds, then you are qualified as an ‘Expert,
Grade 2’. If you answered (c) in each case, can point out features of each passage that
produce the overall sound, and can also say how the sound of the passage is connected to
its content – to what the character is saying and feeling – then you are qualified as an
‘Expert, Grade 1’ and are fully entitled to all the rights and privileges of that rank, namely
discussing Shakespeare’s work with any class of students anywhere. Congratulations!
Three aspects of Shakespeare’s sound that seem complicated – his choice of prose or
verse, his use of rhyme, and his use of metre – require some time to explain but can
stimulate rewarding class discussions. Shakespeare used these features of language as
basic tools, both to tell his audience things about his characters and to help his actors. A
teacher of Shakespeare at any level can get the class to understand these tools well enough
to give them greater insight into the plays.
(1) Shakespeare’s choice of prose or verse

The main division of style in Shakespeare’s work is between passages in prose and
passages in verse. Verse is easy to recognize on the page: the passages that don’t reach the
46
right-hand margin of a column. Of the thirty-eight plays this book deals with, twenty-
eight are at least two-thirds verse, two – both comedies – are at least two-thirds prose,
and the remaining eight are a fairly even mix of prose and verse. Since Shakespeare was
equally adept at both, the question always to ask when looking at a particular play, scene,
passage, or character is ‘why verse?’ or ‘why prose?’
Verse is speech arranged in a repeating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Its
constant rhythms give it a confident and untroubled sound that accords well with people
of purpose and status, people in charge of themselves or of others. In that way, verse acts
to amplify and reinforce the position of the powerful and the educated. It sounds like
language from the top. We expect it from kings and bishops, from romantics, from the
ruling class, and from those who want to please that class – in short, from most of the
characters who people Shakespeare’s plays. We do not expect it from servants when they
talk among themselves, from poor, rural types, from Falstaff and his friends at the Boar’s
Head.
Prose, by contrast, is language without an arranged rhythm. Though it can be as
deliberate and practised as verse, it sounds more like usual speech because it has no
rhythmic pattern. The rhythms (or lack thereof) of prose are what we expect from
unschooled characters – the Bottoms, the Doll Tearsheets, and the gravediggers. For you
as a teacher the fun comes in exploring with students (a) when Shakespeare defeats our
expectations and reverses his use of prose or verse by giving ‘low’ characters speeches in
verse or ‘high’ characters speeches in prose or (b) when he has a character suddenly
change from one kind of speech to another.
We may not, for example, be surprised that Falstaff – ‘that father ruffian’ – speaks only
prose until we encounter his friend, Pistol, a ‘swaggering rascal’ who almost always speaks
in verse. Figuring out why one of Falstaff ’s underlings speaks in verse instead of the
prose of his ‘gang leader’ not only helps students understand Pistol’s character but also
sheds light on Falstaff. Threatened at sword-point, Pistol hoists his diction and unfurls
the mock heroics of
What! shall we have incision? Shall we imbrue?

Then death rock me asleep, abridge my doleful days.
(2H4 2.4.194–5)
A paraphrase of these two lines means, ‘What, are we going to have a stabbing?
Are we going to bleed? Then death kill me and shorten my sad life.’ Pistol embellishes
these thoughts with the Latinate ‘incision’ and the French ‘imbrue’; he addresses death,
he uses alliteration in ‘death’ and ‘doleful’ and echoes ‘asleep’ with ‘abridge’. No one else
speaks like this in Shakespeare’s plays; no one seriously spoke like this in Shakespeare’s
days. Show students how Shakespeare assigns such language to Pistol and they will know
to laugh when Pistol, wishing to shake hands, tells Nym, ‘Give me thy fist, thy forefoot to
me give.’
Announcing to Falstaff the death of King Henry IV and the accession of Prince
Harry, Pistol puts his news like this:
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Sir John, I am thy Pistol and thy friend,

and helter-skelter have I rode to thee,
and tidings do I bring and lucky joys
and golden times and happy news of price.
(2H4 5.3.93–6)
Your students need only read aloud Pistol’s ridiculous bombast to understand that he’s
trying to talk like a hero in a play, and he overdoes it. Like Falstaff, they can enjoy Pistol
for the entertainment value of his foolishness. That Falstaff does in fact enjoy Pistol’s
pomposities is clear when, to humour Pistol, he adopts the same over-lofty poetic
rhythms, syntax, and diction, when he replies:
O base Assyrian knight, what is thy news?

Let King Cophetua know the truth thereof.
(2H4 5.3.101–2)
Falstaff ’s brief flash of mock verse also shows us that his own use of prose – even in
imitating King Henry IV – is a matter of choice. Falstaff, after all, has more than enough
erudition to speak in verse, and one would expect that this status-conscious ‘knight’ who
looks ‘to be either earl or duke’ would put on the airs of language at his command. Might
we find in Falstaff ’s choice of prose a comfortable integrity?
Always be on the lookout for those moments when a character shifts from verse to
prose. What does it mean, for example, when Brutus, who has always spoken in verse –
even in intimate, private conversation with his wife – uses prose to explain his murder of
Caesar to the public? My Shakespeare classes have had spirited disputes over the matter:
some argued that Brutus’s choice of prose was a compliment to his audience of
commoners; others contended that he was ‘speaking down’ to his audience; some thought
that he was just being natural; others that he sounded more artificial. But for all of them,
pointing to the shift from verse to prose raised their awareness of the way the difference
between the two can be significant.
(2) Shakespeare’s use of metre

One element of Shakespeare’s verse that strikes fear into the hearts of teachers and
students alike is the question of metre, the question of – drum roll – iambic pentameter.
For years I myself avoided dealing with the subject. I assumed that it was (a) unimportant,
(b) hard to teach, and (c) boring for my students. I was wrong: it is important, it can be
easy to teach, and students can have fun with it. So here is one of this book’s most
important tips: Learn to deal with iambic pentameter.
Here, should you need it, is a refresher. An iamb is two syllables, of which the second
is accented; and a pentameter line has five such iambs. Simply put, Shakespeare’s blank
verse, like that of his contemporaries, is a ten-syllable line in which every other syllable
is stressed. This pattern sounds like ordinary speech. (That last sentence is iambic
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pentameter.) The result is that a regular line of Renaissance dramatic verse goes: dee
dum dee dum dee dum dee dum dee dum.
So why is that a big deal?
First, for the practised actor the regularity of that rhythm becomes a mnemonic
device, a quick key to the order of the words he remembers. The actor playing Romeo,
accustomed to the beat of iambic pentameter, is less likely to say ‘But soft! What light
breaks through yonder window?’ because the beat of that is dee dum dee dum dum dee
dum dee dum dee, while the true line – ‘But soft! What light through yonder window
breaks?’ (RJ 2.2.2) – perfectly fits the rhythm. In that way, iambic pentameter made it
easier for Shakespeare’s actors to memorize large amounts of text.
Second, iambic pentameter helps Shakespeare show the actor what to stress, and
actors who ignore that information are ignoring what a pretty good playwright is trying
to tell them he hears in his head. To show your students that Shakespeare is choosing to
stress the key syllables, put ten chairs in front of class and have ten students (to show the
occasional ‘feminine ending’ add an eleventh chair and student) line up in front of
the class. Have the ‘odd’ students – the first, third, fifth, seventh, ninth (and eleventh, if the
line has that extra syllable) – sit. They are the unaccented syllables. Have the five students
in the even spots stand; they are the stressed syllables. So there before your class and in
the living flesh is an iambic pentameter line. Now assign them each a syllable from a line
of Shakespeare’s verse and have them say them in order. Tell the standing students in
the accented spots to say their syllables forcefully and leisurely and the seated ones in the
unaccented spots to say their syllables lightly and quickly. Once they have done it a
couple of times, your students will be hearing the complete line as though it was said by
one person.
Here is what happens with the most famous line in Shakespeare:
Syllable: To BE or NOT to BE that IS the QUEST ion

Student: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
To illustrate how Shakespeare arranges the rhythm to fall on the key words, have only the
standing students say their syllables: ‘BE NOT BE IS QUEST.’ Notice how close that is
to what Hamlet – in a Tarzan sort of way – is saying. Now, for fun, have the unstressed
students say their syllables. This is what your students will hear: ‘to or to that the ion.’
Complete nonsense.
You can try this out on every iambic pentameter line in Shakespeare, and the results
are often quite remarkable. A favourite of mine is the most famous line from Macbeth:
To MOR row AND to MOR row AND to MOR row
Most actors don’t stress the ‘ands’ in this speech. Instead of respecting the pattern
Shakespeare heard in his head and fit into verse, they assume that ‘and’ cannot be
important enough to stress; but this is a speech by a man who has come to believe that
life is ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’, so the weary repetition of the ‘and’
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exactly gets at his mood, and the stressed syllables, spoken by themselves, capture his
state of mind: ‘MOR AND MOR AND MOR .’
The third reason to care about iambic pentameter is that it provides a kind of constant
back-beat and, by occasionally going against that beat, Shakespeare can, through the
disturbance in the pattern, suggest an altered state of mind to the actor, an extra
excitement or a disruption in thought. For example, a line that begins with trochee
(DUM dee), instead of the normal iamb (dee DUM ), gives a sort of explosive energy to
what follows. That’s why he frequently opens a play with a trochee as in Richard III –
‘NOW is the WINter OF our DIS conTENT.’
You and your students will find much more of delight than of mystery in the question
of metre. Once they’ve got the rhythm, direct their attention to any blank verse passage
in the plays, listen closely to the metre, and you and they can hear Shakespeare directing
his play.
(3) Shakespeare’s use of rhyme

All of Shakespeare’s plays have some rhyme in them, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
where nearly half of the lines rhyme, to Coriolanus, where less than 1 per cent rhyme.
Rhyme was then and is now a way of heightening language and delighting the ear, and
Shakespeare shows that he is a master of rhyme. He fills his romantic comedies with
rhyme (he even stages something of a sonnet contest in Love’s Labour’s Lost); he loads his
comedies and romances with rhyming songs; he has the Fool rhyme in King Lear and the
witches rhyme in Macbeth; and throughout his career he frequently uses couplets to
signal the end of scenes.
Share this axiom with your students: No character in Shakespeare accidentally
rhymes. Shakespeare made rhymed speech the choice of the character, usually as a way
of showing off (a young lover) or as a way of asserting authority.
In Romeo and Juliet, for example, the lovers’ first conversation forms a sonnet (in which
the lines rhyme: abab cdcd efef gg), and students will understand how the sonnet form of
that first exchange is on one level ‘realistic’ because it fits a recognizable situation: a bright
young man, steeped in romantic notions would want to show off through his language,
and whatever he said would give the amusing impression of being studied; the bright
young woman, amused by his ‘line’, would want to respond in kind. Here rhyme may not
be ‘realistic’ on a verbal level, but it captures realistically the emotional level of the moment.
But when Shakespeare comes to write the lovers’ death scene, even though he indulges
Romeo with a long, theatrical speech, he avoids rhyme and the undercutting effect it
would have on their suicides. That he well understood this comic effect is obvious in the
deaths of the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While Juliet
makes hers brief and to the unrhymed point:
Yea, noise? Then I’ll be brief. O happy dagger!

This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die.
(5.3.168–9)
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By contrast, Thisbe makes her suicide comic with rhyme, and you can show your students
Shakespeare’s mockery of this poetic device simply by acting out Thisbe’s last six lines:
Tongue, not a word.

Come, trusty sword,
Come, blade, my breast imbrue!
And farewell, friends.
Thus Thisbe ends.
Adieu, adieu, adieu.
(5.1.337–42)
This is surefire comedy, precisely because the language is so inappropriate to the action:
Thisbe, presumably having already stabbed herself, before, after, or in the midst of her
death throes, makes the effort to make good the rhyme scheme with ‘adieu, adieu, adieu.’
Perform this for your class and if they don’t laugh, you need to work on your death
throes.
As in the case of the change from verse to prose, your class will always profit
from a discussion of those moments in which Shakespeare switches from blank
verse to rhyme and vice versa. By the application of a little common sense, students
can get inside the mind of a character. Consider, for example, Hamlet’s couplet at the
end of Act Two:
I’ll have grounds

more relative than this. The play’s the thing
wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.
(2.2.605–7)
Yes, this couplet comes at the end of a scene, and Shakespeare frequently used couplets
to close a scene, but the couplet also comes at the end of Hamlet’s second soliloquy, the
‘Hecuba’ speech, in which Hamlet seems for a moment on the brink of raging insanity:
Why what an ass am I! This is most brave,

that I, the son of a dear father murdered,
prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
must like a whore unpack my heart with words
And fall a-cursing like a very drab,
a scullion! Fie upon’t, foh! About, my brains.
Hum –
(2.2.584–90)
Here Hamlet’s language maintains control of the metre, but the structure of his sentences
breaks down and words give way to inarticulate exclamations – ‘fie’, ‘foh’ – until he
replaces an entire line with a single sound – ‘hum’.
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When he begins again, he does so as matter-of-factly as possible, no longer speaking

out of his grief in fragments but making an observation in a well-ordered, four-line
sentence:
I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play

have by the very cunning of the scene
been struck so to the soul that presently
they have proclaimed their malefactions.
(2.2.590–4)
Hamlet is forcing himself back to a reasonable frame of mind, and gradually his language
signals (or perhaps causes) the recovery of his mental processes. Seen in this context, his
final couplet, using the deliberate artifice of rhyme, announces that that recovery is
complete: ‘The play’s the thing / wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king’ (2.2.606–
7) – he has a plan.
The Shakespeare teacher is always juggling three main areas of concern: the play as
literature, the play as theatre, and the play as language. For too long we have forced our
literary concerns on students without giving them the joys either of the theatre or of the
language. Your first job is to conjure up a theatre, but then you must make them hear the
language and let them play with it.
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CHAPTER 4
STUDENT COMPLAINT NO. 1: ‘SHAKESPEARE’S
TOO HARD’
Before we move on to Part Two and individual works with their particular problems, I
want to deal with two general complaints about all the plays that every Shakespeare
teacher faces: Shakespeare’s too hard and Shakespeare’s boring and/or irrelevant. This
chapter deals with the first.
Surely the most prevalent fear students bring to their first encounter with the works
is that Shakespeare’s language is hard to understand, that he requires ‘translation’ into
simpler English, and that most students – most people – don’t have the vocabulary to
read him. This fear turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, prospective readers of
Shakespeare need only to fear this fear itself. As we have seen, Shakespeare’s language has
enough modern currency to make his meaning accessible to the confident modern
reader. Most of the time I have found that a common sense gloss of a word prompts
students to react with, ‘Is that all it means?’ For example, in Richard III, Richard, exulting
over his successful wooing of Anne, says,
I’ll be at charges for a looking glass

and entertain a score or two of tailors
to study fashions to adorn my body.
(1.2.260–2)
To the insecure student who expects a wholly different language (and who does not
perhaps expect that sixteenth-century characters can make fun of themselves), such a
passage can be opaque.
But this same student no doubt knows what it means to ‘charge’ a purchase, knows
that glass is used in mirrors and has heard of ‘through the looking glass’, knows that
‘entertaining’ people means having them as company, and probably knows that a ‘score’ is
a pretty healthy number of tailors and (in the case of Americans) what ‘four score and
seven’ means. So: Richard, surprised that in his deformity he can woo successfully and
pleased with himself, jokes that he’s ‘going to buy a mirror and keep twenty tailors to
make him clothes.’
In short, reading aloud and relying both on dramatic and linguistic context, you can
show your students that they already have the tools to unpack most of the sentences in
Shakespeare. As with Richard’s sentence, you’ll see that the words themselves are not the
problem – they already know ‘charge’, ‘glass’, and ‘score’ – the problem is the sense of
apprehension that slows the comprehension. Such a treatment of the text, in which you
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explain the words with the students’ own resources, is the basic tool in dismantling the
language barrier because on a word-by-word basis that approach demonstrates that the
problem is largely a matter of perception. Used patiently and persistently, such an
approach can become second nature for your students; the problem is that many students
cannot go on ‘automatic’ with this system without first having intensive supervision and
practice. And, unfortunately, the size of most classes and the constraints of most teaching
schedules make such supervision impractical, so, in addition to classroom approaches
that reach as many individual students as possible, teachers need classroom strategies
and exercises that shatter the perceived language barrier in dramatic and memorable
ways. What follows are ‘General Approaches’, positions and practices that should
constantly attend the teaching of Shakespeare, and ‘Stratagems’, specific ways of getting
students beyond the language ‘barrier’.
I. General approaches to Shakespeare’s language
A. Brave all resistance to reading aloud

Reading aloud is the most fundamental step to making the language familiar. It forces
the student (1) to pronounce the words, (2) to understand the syntax, and (3) to choose
inflections. Because the sound of their own voices making sentences can force your
students out of the ‘translation channel’, reading aloud helps them find meaning in a text
that, read silently, can be unintelligible.
But students will resist reading aloud. For many students the idea of having other
people – in class or out – hear them ‘speaking Shakespeare’ is terrifying. Some students have
even told me that alone in their rooms they are embarrassed by the sound of their own
voices ‘doing Shakespeare’. To counter this shyness you must – while making it clear that
you understand their reluctance – be inflexible in requiring that they read aloud. Approach
the subject with mock horror: ‘You must be willing to subject yourself to intolerable social
ridicule. Friends will classify you as a geek, and they’ll stop inviting you to parties, but that’s
the price you pay for doing the job right.’ Try to make the chore a badge of honour.
A good way – and worth the logistical hassle – to get students reading aloud outside
of class is to organize after-school reading groups. Explain that this assignment will
make their reading easier by clarifying the text and by forcing the reader to stay awake,
and that going at a steady rate can actually be faster than reading silently, when the mind
may wander. Give extra credit for being in the reading group. Carrot or stick, do whatever
you can to make such reading a part of their Shakespeare experience. Students must
think that reading aloud is merely the given of taking Shakespeare from you.
B. Dismiss the ‘accent issue’

One strain of ShakesFear comes from the idea that there is a correct way to speak the
words in his plays and that the ‘proper’ pronunciation will sound as much like Sir Ian
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Complaint No. 1: ‘Shakespeare’s Too Hard’
McKellen and Dame Judi Dench as possible. Actually, owing to the laws of the generation
of dialects, we can say with some certainty that Richard Burbage and Shakespeare’s other
actor friends sounded as much like Jed Clampett of Beverley Hillbillies as they did Alistair
Cooke of Masterpiece Theatre. Your students, no matter where they are from, will find
this information liberating.
C. Stress the modernity of Shakespeare’s language by explaining the

words with your students’ own resources
No matter what other task you are engaged in, you will need to gloss the occasional word,
and your overriding habit of mind should be to minimize its difficulty. Again, 98 per cent
of Shakespeare’s vocabulary is current, and your first response to a query about a word is
to look for the ways in which it already belongs to your students.
D. Remind students that Shakespeare’s meaning is tied up in performance

Whenever possible, evoke the stage conditions or the actions that clarify the words. You
can do this simply by explaining the stage context of the speech; you can do it by showing
them a snippet of film or of video; or you can do it by staging the scene. Making meaning
clear is the principal reason for the Third Do – do stress staging.
E. Distinguish the hard language of certain characters from the

work as a whole
As the Eighth Do commands, help your students see Shakespeare’s disapproval and even
ridicule of pompous and obscure speech.
F. Remind your students of the original ‘fun’ of Shakespeare’s linguistic

inventiveness
We too frequently assume that Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audiences spoke just as
Shakespeare did. In fact, the vocabulary of the average Elizabethan had little more of the
language in Shakespeare’s plays than the vocabulary of today’s English speaker. The
difference is that Elizabethan audiences went to plays of Shakespeare and his fellow
playwrights in part because they sought rather than feared the linguistic inventiveness
they found in the theatres. They were looking for new words, not avoiding them. For
Elizabethans, plays were ear candy, and they craved the same variety and novelty that our
students seek on YouTube.
Make this clear to your students: Shakespeare’s audience went to the playhouse not
in possession of the language they would hear there but in search of it.
Shakespeare fills his plays with proxy wordsmiths, characters whose linguistic
invention is a major part of their charm: kings like Henry V (‘Many a thousand widows
shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands’ [1.2.285–6]), natural clowns
55
like Bottom (‘Nay, I can gleek upon occasion’ [MND 3.1.140]), professional clowns
like Touchstone (‘I press in here, sir, among the rest of the country copulatives’ [AYL
5.4.54–5]), word lovers like Benedick (‘The world must be peopled’ [MA 2.3.232–3]),
word manglers like Dogberry (‘Comparisons are odorous’ [MA 3.5.15]), and gods of
language like Hamlet (‘And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?’ [2.2.309–10])
and Cleopatra (‘He words me, girls, he words me’ [5.2.190]). Elizabethans were happy
wondering, ‘What will he say next? How will he say it?’ The advantage in comprehension
the Elizabethan audience had over today’s audience was a delight in new words. Find
ways to replace your students’ dread of unfamiliar words and phrasing with an Elizabethan
appetite for the language game. What follows are some stratagems for doing that.
II. Strategems against the hard language complaint
A. Read from the straightforward speakers

Look for the clearest speech of the plainest speaker in the play, and give that passage a lot
of attention. For example, in Julius Caesar, Cassius’s verse is as lean and hungry as he and
gives ample proof of the modernity of Shakespeare’s language. Here is his macho
condemnation of Caesar:
. . . And this man

Is now become a god, and Cassius is
a wretched creature and must bend his body
if Caesar carelessly but nod on him.
He had a fever when he was in Spain,
and when the fit was on him, I did mark
how he did shake. ’Tis true, this god did shake.
His coward lips did from their colour fly,
and that same eye whose bend doth awe the world
did lose his lustre. I did hear him groan.
Ay, and that tongue of his that bade the Romans
mark him and write his speeches in their books,
‘Alas,’ it cried, ‘give me some drink, Titinius,’
as a sick girl!
(1.2.115–28)
This passage (indeed, the entire speech) read aloud will surprise your students.
Cassius’s sarcastic tone is overt – ‘this man is now become a god’ – and insistent – ‘this
god did shake’. His description of Caesar’s illness (119–28) is downright elementary in its
content (who, what, when, where, and how) and in its diction: the name Titinius is the
only word of more than two syllables and only seven of the other words (fever, coward,
colour, lustre, Romans, speeches, and alas) are of more than one syllable. He uses two
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short sentences all of single syllable words – ‘ ’Tis true, this god did shake’ and ‘I did hear
him groan’ – for emphasis, and he finishes his description with some nasty mimicry and
an almost childish two word comparison of Caesar to a ‘sick girl’.
This passage also contains a clause – ‘that same eye whose bend did awe the world /
did lose its lustre’ – that uses simple words – ‘eye’,‘bend’,‘awe’,‘lustre’ – in an unconventional
manner and illustrates how Shakespeare may be opaque on the page but that read aloud
comes clear in the context. Cassius has just brought our attention to Caesar’s face saying
his ‘lips did tremble’, and then he mentions his ‘eye’ and makes the verb ‘bend’ (we still say
‘bend your eye on this’) into a noun that used to ‘awe’ (they know this means ‘amaze’) the
world but that has now lost its ‘lustre’ (a word for ‘shine’ they know – from shampoo ads).
Speeches such as these – vigorous, dramatic narratives – are a good way to accustom
students to Shakespeare’s vivid phrasing and the way that context provides meaning.
B. Have the class look for ‘easy’ Shakespeare

Ask your students to bring in their nominations for the ‘plain speaker’ in the play at hand.
A class discussion will oblige students to argue a case for the ‘easiness’ of Shakespeare’s
language. That conversation will lead logically to a discussion of what it is that makes for
‘plain’ language. Is it word choice? Is it word order? Is it subject matter? Connect that
discussion to the matter of character, and your students will see that in some way the
characters who deliver these speeches ‘stand for’ the values of plain speech. Ask your
students just what these values are – action? efficiency? energy? ‘maleness’ (both Cassius
and Hotspur seem to denigrate ‘femaleness’)? The search for ‘easy’ Shakespeare can lead
naturally to issues of character and theme at the very core of Shakespeare, and your
students will be discussing in their own language the same matters that fill the scholarly
journals.
C. Have the class look for the hardest passage in the play and then
wrestle with it in class
This assignment, the reverse of the last one, has the same destination. The big difference
is that this chore, by tacitly accepting the complaint against Shakespeare’s language, puts
you on their side and lets them put any hostility to Shakespeare into service against itself.
Since you won’t know in advance which passage they’ll pick, this exercise takes some
guts. But for precisely that reason it offers a dramatic demonstration of your willingness
to test your belief that Shakespeare’s language is no real barrier.
1. Invite nominations for the ‘Hardest Ten Lines’ in the play; fear not, a consensus
will emerge.
2. Establish the context of the passage. Who is on the stage? What have they been
talking about? What matters or actions follow the passage?
3. Now read through the passage aloud – always read aloud – to get a general idea
of the problems and a fix on the passage.
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4. Ask several of your students to give a paraphrase of the passage and let them do
so without comment. Do not yet grapple with the problem words or phrases.
5. Read the passage again line-by-line or clause-by-clause, stopping after each to
ask what the trouble spots are for understanding the meaning..
6. Now ask the class to define or explain the words or phrases they have selected as
the main stumbling blocks. Note that by this time you have now been dealing
with the passage for long enough to feel sufficiently comfortable making
suggestions. Even before you do so, the chances are good that the class will have
made much progress towards a satisfactory understanding of the passage.
7. Now here’s the fun part: ask for suggestions on how to simplify or ‘modernize’ the
language. At first, your students will join in this game with glee, and you’ll have
an outpouring of suggestions.
8. Write some of the best substitutions on the board, and ask your students to
choose ‘the new text’ for Shakespeare by debating the pros and cons of each
choice – the sound, the approximation to Shakespeare’s original words, the
connotations. An odd thing will happen: opposition to suggested substitutions
will begin to grow, and, better yet, you’ll hear them say positive things about the
original like, ‘Shakespeare’s word is more concrete’ and ‘Shakespeare’s word is
more like what Beatrice would say.’
Continue to examine the passage in this way, problem-word by problem-word, and
the chances are that the class will want to keep more of Shakespeare’s choices than their
own – even though the passage is, by class consensus, the most difficult in the play.
On their own they will have learned that even when Shakespeare is hard he is manageable
for them and worth the extra effort. If they do decide the passage is harder than it ought
to be, it likely will be one of Shakespeare’s difficult speakers, and your job is to show them
how the hard language might suit the character (see the Eighth Do).
D. Let your class ridicule a ‘modernized’ edition of the play

Obviously, this stratagem shortcuts the previous, more laboured method of discovering
that Shakespeare’s language is not really so hard. Though students will not see that the
‘real’ Shakespeare surpasses even their own ideas about how to modernize, they will see
that even ‘experts’ have a hard time ‘improving’ Shakespeare; such a hard time, in fact,
that they can look ridiculous, and students love to find experts ridiculous. The two most
widely available modernized Shakespeare series are No Fear Shakespeare, edited by John
Crowther, and Shakespeare Made Easy, edited by Alan Durband, editions that print the
original text on a facing page opposite the modernized version. Both these series stem
from the worthy intention of making Shakespeare’s works accessible to new, young
readers, and in doing so both overestimate the difficulty of Shakespeare’s language and
underestimate their readers. Here is an excerpt from Mr Durband’s modernization of
Hamlet’s advice to the players.
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Hamlet (in Shakespeare) Hamlet (in Durband’s Shakespeare)
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I Please speak the speech as I recited it to you,
pronounced it to you, trippingly on the in a natural way. If you overdo it, as many
tongue; but if you mouth it as many of your actors do, I’d rather the town crier spoke my
players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke lines. And don’t saw the air too much with
my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much your hand, either, like this [he demonstates
with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for with a histrionic gesture ] but do everything
in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may with restraint: because as your passion
say, whirl-wind of your passion, you must reaches torrential, tempestuous and, as it
acquire and beget a temperance that may were, whirlwind proportions you must
give it smoothness. Oh, it offends me to the develop a self-control that will give it a natural
soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated ease. Oh, it gets on my nerves to hear a ham
fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, actor in a wig tear a passion to shreds – to rags
to split the ears of the groundlings, who for even – just to play to the gallery: which for the
the most part are capable of nothing but most part is only capable of appreciating
inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I mindless mime-shows and spectactulars. I’d
would have such a fellow whipped for have a fellow like that whipped for overacting
o’erdoing Termagant. It out-Herods Herod. the villain’s part: a Demon King would seem
Pray you avoid it. (3.2.1–14) mild by comparison. Do avoid that, please!
I have underlined twenty of the ‘simplifications’ Mr Durband offers for the language
of Shakespeare. Try pitting the Durband against the original with your students judging
which works best, the Durband or the Shakespeare? Before starting this competition, tell
your students to consider three questions: (1) does the modernization mean the same
thing, (2) is it truly easier to understand than the original, and (3) does the translation
lose anything from the original? Here is how it might go:
1. ‘Recited’ for ‘pronounced’ – Durband uses a word more common in the context
of acting, but not a jot easier than ‘pronounced’. Hamlet obviously did more than
recite the added lines to the player, he pronounced them in a certain way. The
speech that follows is largely about proper pronunciation.
2. ‘In a natural way’ for ‘trippingly on the tongue’ – Talk about killing all the fun of
language: what student wouldn’t understand Shakespeare’s phrase, and who
would rather pronounce the words ‘natural way’, than ‘trippingly on the tongue’, a
modifier that demonstrates its meaning by the act of saying it? Besides,
‘trippingly on the tongue’ does not necessarily mean ‘natural’; it could, for
example, mean ‘playfully’.
3. ‘Overdo it’ for ‘mouth it’ – Durband’s substitution certainly explains what Hamlet
is getting at, but in the original Hamlet is working up to that idea, and Durband
loses the vivid picture Shakespeare achieves by turning ‘mouth’ into a verb, as in
the modern expression ‘you’re mouthing off again’.
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4. ‘Actors’ for ‘players’ – What’s Durband’s point here? I don’t see any reason for this
change and neither will your students, all of whom will know that ‘players’
means ‘actors’, as in ‘The Not Ready for Prime Time Players’, formerly of Saturday
Night Live.
5. ‘Rather’ for ‘as lief ’ – Here Durband eliminates an archaism over which an
insecure reader might in fact stumble. The question for you to put to your class is
whether or not the context makes clear that Hamlet is expressing a preference.
Shakespeare 4 – Durband 1.
6. ‘Like this’ for ‘thus’ – Doesn’t ‘thus’ still mean ‘like this’?
7. ‘Do everything with restraint’ for ‘use all gently’ – Why? No problem with
Shakespeare’s vocabulary, and gentleness is not exactly the same thing as
restraint; for one thing ‘gently’ is a more positive idea.
8. ‘Develop a self-control’ for ‘acquire and beget a temperance’ – Shakespeare’s
vocabulary here may be a borderline problem, though most students will know
both ‘beget’ and ‘temperance’. You might point out that ‘acquire’ suggests
borrowing or taking from others and ‘beget’ means ‘reproduce’ – meanings
missed by ‘develop’. ‘Temperance’ has a more permanent sense than ‘self-control’,
and is a more positive concept (as in the case of ‘gentleness’ versus ‘restraint’).
9. ‘Natural ease’ for ‘smoothness’ – Durband likes the word ‘natural’ (see above), but
Shakespeare’s ‘smoothness’ is something different. As all your students will
recognize, ‘smoothness’ is a single word describing the performance of the actor.
10. ‘Gets on my nerves’ for ‘offends me to the soul’ – The soul is a deeper place than
the nerves. Bad acting may get on Durband’s nerves, but it offends Hamlet to the
soul. Ask your students who is more upset about bad acting. Beyond that, this is
a play about ‘soul’ – ‘oh my prophetic soul’ – and not about ‘nerves’. In fact,
Durband’s choice here betrays the modern tendency to want to reduce Hamlet to
a play about neurosis, as in ‘my nerves are bad tonight’.
11. ‘Ham actor in a wig’ for ‘robustious periwig-pated fellow’ – If clarity is the only
priority, then we must score another point for Durband, since Shakespeare’s term
would certainly give a reader pause. However, you can make two arguments for
Shakespeare: first, the context together with the acting and stage business
(Hamlet pulling the wig off one of the actors) can make this reference clear; and,
second, ‘robustious periwig-pated fellow’ is fun to say (have your students say it
aloud in unison).
If they still like Durband better, the score now is Shakespeare 9 – Durband 2.
12. ‘Shreds’ for ‘tatters’ – ‘Tatters’ is perfectly clear from the oft used word ‘tattered’; it
makes the phrase ‘tear a passion to tatters’ both alliterative and assonant.
13. ‘Gallery’ for ‘groundlings’ – True, ‘playing to the gallery’ means performing in a
way ‘calculated to please the less sophisticated members of an audience’; but in
terms of the Elizabethan theatre, Durband has actually reversed what Hamlet
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says. ‘Groundlings’ were the commoners, the poor, the illiterate, who stood on the
ground around Shakespeare’s stage; ‘gallery’ referred to the more well-to-do,
better educated clientele in the seats. Your students will know that because,
persuaded by the Third Do, you will have taught them the basic facts about the
Elizabethan stage. Mr Durband’s substitution catches the meaning but ruins the
joke. Hamlet is insulting the audience surrounding him, a comic tactic that never
fails to get a laugh.
14. ‘Only capable of appreciating’ for ‘capable of nothing but’ – Here Durband has
specified and gentrified Shakespeare’s more compact phrase; in doing so he
reduces the comic insult. Hamlet’s original statement suggests that the
groundlings cannot even understand dumb-shows, much less appreciate them.
15. ‘Mindless mime-shows’ for ‘inexplicable dumb-shows’ – Although the original is
absolutely current English, Durband’s change here has a nice ring to it; the
problem is that it misses the ambiguity of the word ‘inexplicable’, in which
Hamlet partly says the dumb-shows can’t be explained and partly admits that for
him they are mysterious. If your students don’t know ‘dumb-show’, no doubt
they’ll see that Durband’s choice loses the insulting word ‘dumb’.
16. ‘Spectaculars’ for ‘noise’ – This intolerable twisting of the text to replace a simple
word misses altogether Hamlet’s point that just as groundlings prefer to see
‘dumb-shows’, they prefer to hear ‘noise’. Again, Durband is neglecting the way
Hamlet is insulting the groundlings.
17. ‘Overacting’ for ‘o’erdoing’ – Odd that Durband should think the word ‘o’erdoing’
needs replacing here when he used ‘overdo’ earlier. Is it the missing ‘v’? Ask your
students if they miss the ‘v’; if so, put the damn thing back, but don’t change this
simple word.
18. ‘The villain’s part’ for ‘Termagant’ – Actually, Termagant was thought to be a
noisy and violent Middle Eastern god. Thus a bad actor who outdoes Termagant
is being superhuman in a bad way, an idea which is picked up in Hamlet’s next
speech, when he says they ‘[imitate] humanity so abominably’. Durband’s
substitution is doubtless simpler but immensely poorer.
Should your students vote for simple but poor, the score would now be
Shakespeare 15 – Durband 3.
19. ‘A Demon King would seem mild by comparison’ for ‘It out-Herods Herod’ – Here
we are at the crux of the language issue. By inventing one word and by a reference
both to the Bible and to Elizabethan tradition, Shakespeare says in three words
(now three famous words) what Durband must translate into seven. Stress the
point that ‘out-Herod’ is not an Elizabethan word; it’s a Shakespearean invention
which refers to the ranting and raving stage impersonations of the king who
ordered the murder of the baby Jesus. It’s the sort of allusion that students don’t
mind taking a few minutes to learn. Once students see that they already have
the tools to understand most of Shakespeare, then they will accept – even
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welcome – having to learn a few things. After you have explained what the phrase
means, who Herod was, and the stage tradition of Herod in Shakespeare’s day, call
the question on Durband’s substituton.
If Shakespeare loses, the score is Shakespeare 15 – Durband 4.
20. ‘Please!’ for ‘pray you’ – Durband’s modern substitution makes Hamlet’s advice
more urgent pleading – especially with the exclamation point. In the original,
Hamlet has ended this part of his advice with the cooler, more distant, and more
condescending ‘pray you’ – in part because he is giving an anti-Herod
demonstration of calm. Durband’s substitution loses that and gains almost
nothing in clarity.
Final score: Shakespeare 16 – Durband 4
This demonstration that little of Shakespeare needs ‘modernizing’ will work almost
anywhere in the text except with passages of Elizabethan slang. If your students choose
to deal with a slang-ridden passage, stress that the problem of understanding slang is not
particular to Shakespeare or his age, and mention that many British and Australian films
are harder to understand than any of the Shakespeare films made in English. I find that
students are willing to accept the difficulties of slang without ‘blaming Shakespeare’ and
that it helps to illustrate why they might want to avoid slang in their own prose.
E. Require a journal of favourite one-syllable words – preferably verbs,

nouns, and adjectives
A journal of Shakespeare’s short words counters the idea that Shakespeare’s art lies in his
complexity and is an excellent method of stressing that his genius derives from a love of
the right word, not the big word. This exercise can make your students word-conscious
without making them word-anxious because it focuses on the simple ways in which
Shakespeare’s language works. Direct them to search for (1) unfamiliar one-syllable
words – ‘coil’, ‘spurns’, ‘bourn’, (2) familiar one-syllable words used in unfamiliar ways –
‘rub’, ‘scorns’, ‘will’, and (3) one-syllable words whose sounds ‘fit’ especially well or that are
fun to say – ‘slings’, ‘grunt’, ‘pitch’. Stress the fact that the choice is theirs and that the list
should include only those words that the students enjoy. Limit the number you require
to something manageable (ten at most per sitting) and have the student record first the
word, then the speaker, the line or clause that contains the word, the listener, the meaning
of the word, and finally the student’s reason for selecting the word.
The care and time attendant on this exercise makes it crucial that you react in some
personal way to each student’s work. At least spot check the journals, and tell the students
that you will call on them occasionally for their ‘one-syllable word of the day’. Devote a
class period to going over their selections, and encourage the class to respond to the
selected words before you do. Finally, when you are going over the text in your lectures,
make certain that you stop occasionally and comment on the one-syllable words you
yourself enjoy.
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F. Have students use a ‘quote of the day’ in daily conversation

This strategem shares the public nature of the previous exercise but lends itself best to
outgoing students. Start by finding some simple, all-purpose phrase that is completely
comprehensible but one that slightly departs from standard speech – such terms as ‘with
all my heart, good youth’ (AYL 3.2.421), ‘for this relief, much thanks’ (Ham 1.1.8), ‘I’ll not
stay a jot longer’ (TN 3.2.1), ‘are you yet living?’ (MA 1.1.113–14) and ‘things must be as
they may’ (H5 2.1.19). Explain to your students that they must memorize the phrase of
the day and use it in conversation three times before the next class. They are to record the
phrase they used, the context of the conversation in which they used it, the names of the
people on whom they used the phrase, and the reactions – if any – of those people.
After you are satisfied that they have become accustomed to using the all-purpose
phrases, move to more specific lines that force them to think a bit more about how to slip
the phrase into a conversation. Find lines that are about interactions between people
such as ‘unknit that threat’ning unkind brow’ (TS 5.2.137) and questions such as ‘are not
the streets as free for me as for you?’ (TS 1.2.229–30). Continue to make the assigned
phrase longer and more specific until your students are using short speeches like ‘. . . do
as adversaries do in law: strive mightily but eat and drink as friends’ (TS 1.2.274–5).
How this stratagem fares depends a great deal on the morale of your class. If they see the
humour in what you are having them do, if they feel protected from public ‘geekiness’ by the
fact that all of them are required to do it, then this will be a popular assignment. This project
has a short span of public acceptance. Since your students are likely to be trying out each
new phrase on the same set of friends, they are soon going to be getting responses like, ‘Oh,
Shakespeare homework, again.’ For that reason you might limit the exercise to four rounds.
G. Have a competition to choose the class’s favourite slogan, motto,

headline, or catch phrase, and then find a public way to use it
This assignment is ‘applied Shakespeare’ in which your students ‘co-opt’ Shakespeare’s
language for fun; its purpose is to make Shakespeare’s works a verbal playground. The
idea is to have the students look for short quotations from Shakespeare that amuse them,
but to make that search a public one with an ultimate goal.
Make it an assignment (individual or for teams of up to three) to find some quote from
Shakespeare of no more than ten words that would fit on a button, a bumper sticker, or a
T-shirt. Give them any directions you like as to the nature of the quote (see below), and
open the class by having the students take turns displaying their chosen quotes (in letters
large enough to be read across the room). Either by a show of hands or by means of an
‘applausometer’,1 have them choose the ‘Shakespeare Quote of the Day’. Meanwhile, you
collect the winning placard. Using those daily winners and, depending on the duration of
your course, semester, or unit, you may then have the students select the ‘Shakespeare
1
A quick, entertaining way to poll students is to bring the contestants and their entry to the front of the class-
room and have the class respond with applause as you put your hand over successive competitors and their
entries. Keep things moving along by making snap judgments as to who gets into the final playoffs.
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Quote of the Week’, ‘Shakespeare Quote of the Month’, ‘Shakespeare Quote of the Course’,
and ‘Shakespeare Quote of the Year’. Finally, according to your means or to whatever
method of payment you and the class have previously decided upon, have the championship
quote made into a product either to be given to the winning contributor or put up for sale.
This project makes a public game out of liking Shakespeare’s language, a game that
shows how Shakespeare’s language can work in the real world. You can make this game
as ‘educational’ as you wish by the instructions you give in assigning each search for
slogans. Keeping in mind the variety of surfaces on which the class slogan might come to
rest – T-shirt, mug, bumper sticker, calendar, greeting cards, etc. – assign them on one
week, for example, to gather quotations on appetites: food, drink, sex, sleep, play. The next
week, perhaps, direct them to quotations on emotions – love, anger, grief, fear, courage;
the next week to quotations on months, seasons, time; the next to quotations that insult
(ever a popular one) or praise; the next to quotations about places from buildings to
beaches; and so on and so on, according to the main themes and interests of your course
and the tastes of your students.
Here are some T-shirt samples from my students:2
places
‘Would I were in an alehouse in London’ – Boy
(H5 3.2.13)
‘Unwillingly to school’ – Jaques
(AYL 2.7.146)
‘When I was at home, I was in a better place’ – Touchstone
(AYL 2.4.15)
insults
‘Amend thy face’ – Falstaff
(1H4 3.3.24)
‘Sell when you can. You are not for all markets’ – Rosalind
(AYL 3.5.60)
‘Away, you three-inch fool’ – Curtis
(TS 4.1.24)
pick- up lines
‘I thy parts admire’ – Nathaniel
(LLL 4.2.115)
‘Come sit on me’ – Petruchio
(TS 2.1.199)
‘Madame, my instrument’s in tune’ – Hortensio
(TS 3.1.37)
2
The ASC has sold hundreds of Top Ten Insults and Pick Up Lines T-shirts chosen by my students.
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feelings
‘I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety’ – Boy
(H5 3.2.14–15)
‘Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile’ – Richard
(3H6 3.2.182)
‘I will not consent to die today’ – Barnardine
(MM 4.3.55–6)
Obviously this exercise teaches students little about the plays, but it is a devilishly
subversive tool for overturning their negative attitudes about Shakespeare’s language. It
manoeuvres them into the position of promoting and purveying the words to others – in
class and out – where they discover not only that Shakespeare’s language is of interest in
the ‘real world’, but also, if they sell them, that ‘the real world’ is willing to pay for it – the
ultimate validation.
My wish in this book is to demystify Shakespeare’s work and to invite you and your
students to his banquet of language. In doing so I have stressed what I know to be the
case; anyone who can read a newspaper in English can pull up a chair at the banquet
table. Now, having made the case that Shakespeare’s language is accessible to your
students and having given you some stratagems for showing them that accessibility, I
must say what you already know: in many satisfying ways, Shakespeare’s language is
challenging – but not because he’s working with a different vocabulary. Shakespeare is
remarkable for his ability to condense or expand a thought, his facility with paradox,
rhyme, metrics, his synthesis of myth and history, his relaxed erudition. Showing any of
this to students is a joy, but you can’t get there if you don’t first pull down the barrier of
thinking that Shakespeare language is made up of obsolete words.
Once that barrier is down and they feel comfortable that the language is theirs, you
can dwell on the occasional archaic meanings of Shakespeare’s word and show them
some of the treasures our language has lost. You can tackle their ignorance of the Bible
and of the classics. You can gaze for a time at Shakespeare’s background and see reflections
of Elizabethan history, politics, and religion in his work. Above all, you can show them
the pleasures you find in the works. When they see your excitement about the ways
things connect, they will want in on the fun. Think of it: students who already enjoy
Shakespeare and who want to feed that enjoyment by knowing more – what better place
to begin an education?
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CHAPTER 5
STUDENT COMPLAINT NO. 2: ‘SHAKESPEARE
IS BORING AND/OR IRRELEVANT’
ShakesFearers, students who complain that Shakespeare’s language is hard, are admitting,
however implicitly, that some of the fault is theirs: ‘maybe he’s great’, they are saying, ‘but
it takes too much work to understand him.’ Show them they have the ability to understand
him, and your job is almost done. But reaching ShakesJeerers, the students who complain
that Shakespeare is boring and irrelevant, is harder, because these kids have dismissed
the possibility of enjoying Shakespeare and refused any of the blame. For them,
Shakespeare is a hoax perpetrated by the older generation. Though this attitude may
merely mask their insecurities, it makes your job as a teacher doubly hard. This chapter
suggests general strategies for attacking the belief that Shakespeare is boring and/or
irrelevant.
Since the ‘boring’ complaint has a variety of causes, the strategies for dealing with it are
varied. My overall advice is to stage the plays, and I offer some tips on doing so. For
students who assume the work is dated, I offer a number of suggestions for getting at the
timeless in the plays. For harder core students convinced that Shakespeare is not cool, I
have provided ways of making connections to contemporary culture. For students who
think Shakespeare’s plays are predictable, I include a section on lowering the expectation
for suspense and redefining the term. For the student who wants to know ‘what’s it good
for’, I discuss ways of finding the ‘useful’ in Shakespeare. Finally, for students who want
some connection to the author – who need to be fans – I provide my own version of
Shakespeare’s life and a refutation of the futile nonsense around the question of
authorship. As always, you will come across ideas expressed elsewhere in this book – all
such repetitions are carefully orchestrated leitmotifs.
I. Stage it, stage it, stage it
My constant refrain – stage the material – is foremost in handling the complaint that
Shakespeare is boring. Imagine trying to teach someone the excitement of basketball
by having her listen to a basketball game on the radio, or trying to show someone
the beauty of a sculpture by Michelangelo or Bernini or Rodin by showing him a line
drawing of the work. Yes, by themselves the words of Shakespeare’s plays can offer
narrative and linguistic pleasures, but Shakespeare meant first of all for his plays to
entertain as theatre. Poetry and wisdom are woven into the web of them, but the ‘magic
of the web’ is theatre itself.
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Complaint No. 2: ‘Shakespeare is Boring and/or Irrelevant’
Once more I acknowledge that here the teacher who has never used theatre in class
must summon the courage for a leap of faith, and once more I offer you as assurance my
own experience.
And these few tips.
A. Choose short moments (see the Fifth Do)

Class scenes needn’t take up much time. You’ll be amazed at how much interest attaches
to the smallest questions of staging, so restrict yourself to no more than 20 lines (the
fewer the better). Narrow down and dig deep. Any moment you or your students choose
will bear fruit, but here are some generic moments that always profit from a close
examination.
(1) The opening few lines The way Shakespeare begins his play is a key to the play as
a whole, and you should stress to your students that in this moment Shakespeare’s
audience members – like themselves – would have no prior knowledge of the characters
or the plot.
Who comes onstage? Who comes in first? Who speaks first? What difference does it
make? What clues do we have as to how the speaker feels about the listener(s)? How does
the listener – or listeners – feel about the speaker? What does the speaker want from the
listener(s)? and vice versa? How can we show that on the stage? Who has the higher
status? How does language show that? How would costume help? How does Shakespeare
tell us where we are? How does he let us know what time or season it is? What are the
main acting choices for these characters? How does this scene, its characters, and its
action relate to the play as a whole?
For example, in As You Like It, Orlando and Adam enter. If Adam enters first, then
Orlando, who speaks first, seems to be following him. The other way, Adam is following
Orlando – a more appropriate place for a servant and perhaps more in keeping with how
little Adam says. Orlando never seems to stop for a response from Adam, which could
mean that he’s too wound up to listen; but Orlando’s frankness also seems to indicate that
he trusts Adam and respects him. By the end of the speech we know that Orlando has
two older brothers, that Orlando believes that one of them, Oliver, has deprived him of
his inheritance, and that Orlando works in the fields. Is that where the scene is set? When
does the text finally tell us that information? What, if any, difference does it make? Your
job is to keep putting the options before your students while you let them look for the
elements they agree on and then lead them in a discussion of the meaning and
consequences of their choices.
(2) The entrance of a title or leading character If Shakespeare has named his play
for a character or if the character has a major role in the play, then it stands to reason that
he would be particularly attentive to the first impression that character makes.
What action and which character(s) precede his/her entrance? Which way do they go
when they leave? What mood do they leave behind? How does that affect the entrance of
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the title character? Where does the title character enter? Does anyone notice his or her
entrance? How does that matter? To whom is he/she speaking? Who has the higher
status? What are the main acting choices for the actor playing this character? How do
those choices change the play?
For example, Romeo enters after a big brawl and after his mother has questioned
Benvolio about his whereabouts. What do we already expect before we see him?
What do we first see when he appears? Your students could arrange the classroom to
look like a brawl has just taken place – an assignment they will relish – and then
have a Romeo enter with his head in a book of love poetry (Shakespeare’s sonnets?).
That stage picture, even before he speaks, will give your class lots to discuss about his
character.
(3) A comic or tragic moment of counterpoint Shakespeare frequently throws

his audience a ‘change of pace’ by introducing a key moment of lightness into a tragedy
or a moment of seriousness into his comedy. The gravediggers in Hamlet, the porter
in Macbeth, and the rustic in Antony and Cleopatra force lightheartedness into their
respective plays. By contrast, the news of the death of the King of France in Love’s Labour’s
Lost, the fight over the changeling boy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the rejection
of Hero in Much Ado about Nothing cast a shadow over those plays. Find the seam
between the tragedy and the comedy and examine the ways it might transform the play.
What action and which character(s) precede the counterpoint? Where do they go?
How does that choice matter? What mood do they leave behind? Where does the
counterpoint character enter? How does he or she look or behave that is different? What
is his or her status? To whom is he/she speaking? How is his or her language different?
How do the actors’ choices change the moment? What meaning might the counterpoint
moment have?
(4) Moments of audience contact Since modern audiences are unfamiliar with
the interaction out of which Shakespeare built his plays, your students will enjoy
seeing how such interaction might have looked. Avoiding the obvious soliloquies
and asides, look for those moments when the audience can be made a part of the scene.
The catch here is that virtually any moment in Shakespeare may present an opening
to the audience, so you can choose any scene to include the audience. Your students,
used to thinking of the action onstage as contained in a fictive world that excludes
the audience, will like seeing how the Elizabethan stage encouraged the audience into
the play. To make the point even more vivid, juxtapose the way the scene would look on
a traditional proscenium stage with its invisible fourth wall and no actor address to the
audience.
For example, in the first scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, after Theseus has sided
with Egeus in favour of Demetrius and tells Hermia that ‘Demetrius is a worthy
gentleman’ (1.1.52), Hermia replies, ‘So is Lysander’ (1.1.53). First do the scene so that
both characters are speaking to one another (as they would on TV, on film, and on a
proscenium stage); then, reminding your students that Shakespeare’s audience virtually
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surrounded his actors, do the scene so that Egeus, Demetrius, and Hermia are all
appealing to the audience as if they were the jury. Ask your students how the change
affects the characters and the meaning of the scene. Ask them which version makes the
language clearer for them.
(5) Male/female clashes Debates between the genders, no matter their apparent
subject, are of special interest. Comedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night,
and As You Like It each offer a dozen points of conflict, and The Taming of the Shrew and
Much Ado about Nothing are entire plays about the battle of the sexes. Less obvious and
thus more surprising for your students are the arguments between men and women in
the histories and tragedies – Anne and Richard, Kate and Hotspur, Nell and Falstaff,
Portia and Brutus, Caesar and Calpurnia, Ophelia and Hamlet, Lady Macbeth and
Macbeth. Stage a brief segment of one of these combats. What does each character say
he/she wants? Is he/she being honest? If not, what does he/she really want? Who is in
control when the scene begins? Who is in control when it ends? Is there a turning point?
Who ‘wins’? Is it a fair fight? When is a sexual exchange political? When is a political
exchange sexual?
How does the fact that boys played Shakespeare’s female characters change our
perspective on these questions?
(6) Death scenes, onstage and reported If love is one of the two main issues in
literature, death is the other. Staging all violence in slow motion and with imaginary
weapons, have your class stage one of the deaths in Shakespeare. The death of Mercutio,
for example, presents myriad questions about theme and tone and attitude. How angry is
he at Romeo? Does Romeo know he is in earnest? Is he so disgusted with the feud – ‘a
plague o’ both your houses’ (3.1.107) – that Romeo’s revenge seems to add even more
insult to his death? Or is he in so much pain that his death reasonably adds fuel to
Romeo’s vengefulness? Does the dying character stand, sit, or lie down? How does each
of those choices change the meaning of the moment? How near are the others onstage?
Do they stand, sit, kneel? How pointed are the last words of the dying character? What
are ways to ‘point’ those words?
Note that Mercutio doesn’t die onstage: Benvolio reports his death. A majority of
deaths are reported. Stage the moment of the report. How does the messenger enter?
How does he or she approach the hearer of the message? How quickly does the messenger
deliver his/her message before the hearer understands it? For example, why does Ross in
Macbeth take forever to report the death of Macduff ’s family, whereas Marcade in Love’s
Labour’s Lost need say only ‘The King your father–’ (5.2.716) before the Princess says
‘Dead, for my life’ (5.2.717)? How much pause is there between the delivery of the
message and the response of the hearer? Does the hearer respond directly to the
messenger, or does the hearer speak to him/herself or the audience? Does the hearer
change positions? How do these decisions affect the scene?
When a character does die onstage, how does a production camouflage the actor’s
breathing. Who else is onstage? How near the body are other characters? Does
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Shakespeare have something else happen to divert the audience’s gaze from the body?
How do you get the body offstage (remember Shakespeare couldn’t dim the lights)? Your
students will enjoy solving these problems, and they’ll hardly notice that they are ‘doing’
Shakespeare.
(7) Supernatural moments Witches, demons, fairies, and ghosts – we are all fascinated
by the supernatural (see below), and your students will jump at the opportunity to find
ways of making the material ‘realistic’ and ‘scary’.
How should a witch move? a spectre? a fairy? a demon? How should it sound?
Should it wear special make-up or costume? If so, what kind? Does it look directly
at the human characters in the scene? or at the audience? Which decision is
scarier? Do the other characters onstage see the spectre? What sound effects might
help the scene? Can you find those sound effects approximated by Shakespeare’s
language?
The Ghost in Hamlet, for example, presents numerous challenges. He seems clearly
recognizable to the same guards who moments before could not recognize one another
in the darkness. They describe his movements – he ‘stalks’, ‘frowns’, ‘beckons’, and ‘marches’
solemnly. When he speaks, he repeats himself a great deal – ‘O, horrible! O, horrible!
Most horrible!’ (1.5.80) – as if Shakespeare were creating a portable echo chamber. His
language is full of long O and long U sounds. Letting your students use the clues provided
by the text to come up with their version of the Ghost ensures that they are making
Shakespeare their own and that you are making Shakespeare interesting.
How does Oberon make himself invisible? Let your students try different ways to do
that without lighting effects (spoiler alert: he tells us he is).
(8) The final lines of a play The last thing we see onstage is the moment that sums up
the play, the moment that the audience takes home with them. If the play has been a
tragedy, does your class wish to make the ending more or less uncomfortable? What are
the ways of doing that? If the play has been a comedy, do your students want to make the
ending happy or unsettling? How?
Shakespeare did not have a curtain; how did he give the play a sense of being over?
Who is the last character onstage? What’s the difference in effect if one or more characters
remain onstage until the bow? Does Shakespeare turn the play out into the audience in
any way? If so, how?
For example, The Merchant of Venice ends with a bawdy speech by Gratiano to
his bride Nerissa. The other two couples are on the stage – Portia and Bassanio,
Lorenzo and Jessica – and so is Antonio, the play’s title character. Normally the character
with the highest status ends a play; Gratiano is the lowest. Run the last 10 lines of the
play and ask your students what effect it has on the play that Gratiano, something
of a fool and the play’s most vicious racist, gets the last word. How would your
students want the other characters onstage to respond to his sophomoric, sexual
teasing? Who leaves the stage first? Who leaves last? Do the others sneak off while he is
rambling on to the audience? Does he leave first? Does he take Nerissa with him? Try
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ending the scene with Portia’s last words instead. How does that change the feel of the
scene? of the play?
B. Do the scene in a second very different way (see Fourth Do in Chapter 3

and Scenes for Alternative Readings)
The primary interest of these scenes for your students will be the way a change in
casting or blocking or characterization can change the entire meaning of the scene.
When you stage your scenes, therefore, do so with an eye to changing key decisions. If
your first Romeo is short and dark, try a tall blond one for the second version of the
scene; if your first Hamlet sits quietly to the side during Claudius’s first speech, have your
second Hamlet follow Claudius and peer into his face; if your first ghost of Banquo
moves slowly and calmly to the banquet table, then have your second one shimmy, shake,
and make faces.
Once your students see how different the material is, they’ll have strong opinions
about how it should be done. People with strong opinions about how to stage a scene
aren’t ‘bored’ by Shakespeare.
C. If necessary, use your students as marionettes

One problem you’ll encounter in trying to stage scenes is that you may not have enough
hams in your class to put together a decent scene. You can get around this hardship by
being the ‘puppet master’ – saying the lines yourself and using the students as marionettes.
To do this, arrange the students in the scene as you want them on the ‘stage’ and then,
moving (sometimes running) from one speaking part to another, stand behind each
character, speak the lines, and even move the student’s arms. As you would guess, the
result is fairly absurd, but it simultaneously makes the relationships between the
characters onstage clear, while your students will find your exertions hilarious. That
hilarity lowers inhibitions and can make the shyest students in the class participants in a
way that doesn’t threaten them. Finally, being puppet master saves time by giving you
complete control over the acting and blocking decisions crucial to points you want to
make or questions you want to raise.
D. Use Shakespeare and Company’s feeding-in method

Tina Packer and Kevin Coleman of Shakespeare and Company have developed a staging
method that is less work for you than the ‘marionette’ approach. This technique allows
one student to act the part without a book in his or her hand, while another student
‘feeds in’ the words from the script. Assign two students to each character. Have the more
outgoing of each pair be the ‘actor’. Have the second student in each pair stand behind
the ‘actor’ and, in a whispered voice, ‘feed’ him or her lines, small clause by small clause.
The ‘actor’, making whatever interpretive choices he or she wishes, simply repeats the
clause or two he or she has been fed. This technique seems cumbersome at first, but in
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almost no time the student ‘actors’ will get the hang of it, and the student audience will
accept the convention and tune out the ‘feeder-in’.
II. Show them the material of timeless interest to the young
When Shakespeare began writing plays, he was between twenty-four and twenty-six;
among the most powerful and influential members of his audience were young men,
aged eighteen to twenty-four, fresh from university; and a significant number of his
central characters (and all the leading roles in his comedies) are young adults. If
Shakespeare accepted Jaques’ division of our acts into seven ages, then we may say
he wrote most of his work about the third and fourth acts – ‘the lover, sighing like
furnace’ (AYL 2.7.147–8) and ‘a soldier . . . seeking the bubble reputation’ (2.7.149–52).
We should, therefore, expect to find everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays the
viewpoint and the concerns of our students as they grow from the age of ‘the whining
schoolboy’ (2.7.145).
And that is precisely what we do find – a world of rebellious, restless, amorous,
oversexed, ambitious, belligerent, status-conscious, insecure, inconsiderate, thirsty,
hungry, energetic, impetuous, smart-arse, competitive, misunderstood young people
loving, fighting, drinking, joking, cheating, scheming, striving, screwing, getting in
trouble, getting ahead, and getting married. Show your students these matters in
Shakespeare, and have no fear that they’ll be bored.
Below I have risked stating the obvious in listing the sorts of things that students need
to see to enjoy Shakespeare:
A. Show them the sex

Nature forces sex to the centre of the world of young people and they delight to find
it at the centre of Shakespeare’s world as well. Sadly, this most human of concerns
everywhere apparent in the works of Shakespeare was suppressed by the ‘improvers’
of Shakespeare for the century following the advent of public school. Teachers
who ignore this aspect of the plays deprive them of much of their interest for students
and present a false picture of the work and its author. Unfortunately, many teach at
schools where dealing openly with matters of sex in the plays is risky. You will have to
judge whether or not your own situation allows you to consider these matters in class.
Even if you have an enlightened administration, approach the issues of sex in a matter-
of-fact manner. Without pandering to your students, help them see how the bawdiness
and sexuality in the plays is Shakespeare wrestling with this fundamental aspect of
human nature.
You can also trust Shakespeare to have dealt with sex and sexuality wisely, and you
can trust your students to be interested in this feature of Shakespeare’s work. The very
fact that the world of his plays – like their own world – has sex as a central concern will
surprise them and connect them to the work (see Chapter Three, the Sixth Do). You will
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find sex in all of the plays of Shakespeare, but you will discover that it works at a variety
of levels: the coarse sexual jokes of The Comedy of Errors and Romeo and Juliet; the sexual
loathing of Hamlet and King Lear; the ‘cleanly wantonness’ of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream; the plain-spoken bartering of The Taming of the Shrew; the sexual ambivalences
of As You Like It and Twelfth Night; the menacing sexual politics of Much Ado about
Nothing and Henry V; the sexual market of Measure for Measure; the repressed sexuality
of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Coriolanus; the overt sexual possessiveness of Othello and
The Winter’s Tale; and, alone in some sublime region, the sexual religion and apotheosis
of Antony and Cleopatra.
So talk about the difference between lust and love in Romeo and Juliet and the
connection between sex and violence (‘fatal loins’); talk about the chastity of the
lovers and the tryst between Titania and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream;
talk about how Hamlet’s revulsion at his mother’s sexuality leaks into his dealings with
Ophelia; talk about how politics, war, and ambition destroy the marriage bed in Julius
Caesar, Henry IV, Part 1, and Macbeth; talk about the debasement of sex in Measure for
Measure and All’s Well; talk about the tussle between sex and love and their various
combinations in Love’s Labour’s Lost and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Talk about sex
in Shakespeare.
B. Show them the puns and the wordplay

Sex in Shakespeare is closely linked to his penchant for puns, and thus Samuel Johnson’s
remark that puns ‘were the Cleopatra for which Shakespeare gladly lost the world’ is the
perfect metaphor, invoking as it does the queen of sexual language (‘O happy horse to
bear the weight of Antony!’). The double entendre of language – our students’ language as
well as Shakespeare’s – primarily bears sexual freight, as though our subversive dual
natures find their ideal vehicle in the duality of language. Every teacher knows the way
that certain words hold irresistible second meanings for students – blow, hole, prick, lay,
thing, organ – but listing them is impossible, first because context can make almost any
word sexual and, second, because the subversive function of such language requires a
continual shifting to new words – bawdy puns are a linguistic floating crap game (see
what I mean). Your students will be fascinated (and will recognize themselves) when
they see Shakespeare play dirty with words like ‘fiddlestick’, ‘piece of flesh’, and ‘goose’. Or
show them the way Pompey, in Act Two, Scene One of Measure for Measure, turns ‘stewed
prunes’ into something other than fruit and thereby demonstrates the way that context
and inflection can give any word sexual overtones.
Of course Shakespeare enjoys puns of all kinds, but his non-bawdy puns will not have
the same universal appeal to your students. In fact, some of your students will argue that
puns are the lowest form of humour, or – in more familiar terms – a pun is a ‘dumb joke’.
People who play with language are people who are comfortable with words; many of our
students are not, and their dismissal of puns is a symptom of that discomfort. The result
of this self-perpetuating sense that words are their enemies is a general rejection of
word-skill, embodied most of all in Shakespeare. Thus, teaching them to love words is a
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key to teaching them to love Shakespeare. Or, perhaps, teaching Shakespeare is a way to
teach them to love words.
One way to make a crack in their defences is to show them the ways in which they
already cherish wordplay. You might start with some of your favourite pun-based jokes
or with some limericks; as soon as they laugh, begin your introduction to the puns in
Shakespeare. More elaborately, you may wish to show them cartoons that rely on puns
(their first introduction to The New Yorker?). Many stand-up comics use puns as a basis
for their comedy; find YouTube clips of some of your favourites. Saturday Night Live
invariably runs skits which rely on quirks of language, and its weekly feature ‘Weekend
Update’ is simply a series of puns built around current events; the writers of The Simpsons
have fun with Homer’s ignorance of language to great comic effect. Mine the Internet
and put together a video of wordplay highlights from those shows (or your own favourite)
as an introduction to puns in Shakespeare.
Many hip-hop stars play with language in intriguing ways, and not all of their dual
meanings are sexual. Take a moment at the beginning of class one week to ask for your
students’ current favourite tracks; you’ll find almost all use double meanings, similes,
metaphors (often mixed), and so forth. You can also bring examples from your own
favourites, but better to start with something they already like.
Once you have shown them their own delight in puns, shift the ground to Shakespeare’s
delight in puns. Examples abound; many of Shakespeare’s most famous characters
are incessant punners – Richard III , Portia, Mercutio, Falstaff, Beatrice, Benedick,
Touchstone, Feste – and none is more obsessed with puns than Hamlet. From his first
words (‘A little more than kin and less than kind’ [1.2.65]) to his last (‘the rest is silence’
[5.2.364]), Hamlet makes word jokes; in fact, his characteristic way of speaking is to
begin a comment and then to interrupt himself with a closer examination of his words
(‘to dream – ay there’s the rub’ [3.1.65]). This relentless suspicion of hidden and subversive
meanings is the probable source of Hamlet’s punning and in scene after scene surprisingly
makes the ‘melancholy Dane’ virtually a stand-up comedian.
C. Show them the witches, ghosts, and goblins

Initially some students may look down on the supernatural elements in Shakespeare’s
plays. They will reason that he lived in an ignorant age when people believed in
ghosts and witches and such, and we all know better than that now. That reasoning
is faulty on both counts. First, though it may be true that many Elizabethans believed
in such creatures, it does not follow that those who enjoyed seeing the supernatural
represented onstage did so because they held those beliefs. Second, if it is true that
now we all know better than to believe in the supernatural, then ask your students
to explain the popularity of such movies as Raiders of the Lost Ark (wrathful, Old
Testament magic), Splash (a mermaid), Twilight (vampires), The Witch (a witch),
World War Z (zombies), Ghostbusters (ghosts), Ghost (one ghost), Beetlejuice (more
ghosts), and The Sixth Sense (ghosts everywhere). TV has always been interested in
the supernatural from The Twilight Zone to The Walking Dead. Or buy a World News,
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a National Enquirer, or a Star from any check-out aisle in America and read your students
such headlines as ‘Baby Born Wearing Tiny Wedding Ring’, ‘Wife Gives Vampire Hubby
Peanut Butter and Blood Sandwich’, ‘Entire Continent Submerged by Devil’s Triangle’. We
cannot turn from our own entertainments or look up from our daily horoscopes to scoff
at the Soothsayer in Julius Caesar, the premonitions in Romeo and Juliet, or the witches
in Macbeth.
D. Show them the mayhem and murder

One fascination of theatre is the opportunity to experience violence and death by proxy,
and your students are likely to share that fascination. What kid hasn’t ‘played dead’? The
classic theatre of Greece may not have shown violence on the stage, but violent events
were at the root of its stories – patricide, infanticide, homicide, suicide, cannibalism, self-
mutilation – and these events are described by the verse of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides in the goriest detail. Shakespeare never shied away from showing mayhem and
murder: the first tragedy on which he worked gives this stage direction, ‘Enter . . . Lavinia,
her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravished’ (Titus Andronicus 2.4 SD ).
Among the instances of violence onstage in Shakespeare’s plays are Caesar’s assassination,
the double suicide of Romeo and Juliet, Prince Arthur’s death by falling, the poisoning of
King Hamlet, the poisoning and stabbing of Claudius, the smothering/strangling of
Desdemona, the murder of little Macduff, the blinding of Gloucester, and Cleopatra’s
death by asp bite.
Just as Shakespeare doubtless used the lure of such sensational material to fill his
theatre, you can use it to capture your students’ interest in the works, but – like Shakespeare
– make it meaningful. First go over the visual aspects of one of these moments. Where
might the actors have been onstage? How might they have managed to create the illusion
of real violence? What did they use for blood? trick weapons? a real snake? How would
they have cleared the stage?
Once your students have got sufficiently into these questions, once they can envision
the action on the Elizabethan stage, start to put the action together with the words. How
does Shakespeare’s language tell us even more about the scene? What sound effects does
he employ? Are the words themselves violent? Do the lengths of the speeches give us a
clue to the pacing of the action? Does the imagery of the language in any way suggest the
action onstage? Let your students find the ways in which the violence builds out of
Shakespeare’s language.
Next shift to the larger questions of context and structure.
Questions of selection: why does Shakespeare show us Banquo’s murder but not
Duncan’s? Macbeth’s death but not Lady Macbeth’s? little Macduff ’s, but not Lady
Macduff ’s? Why does he leave Iago alive at the end of Othello?
Questions of pacing: Why are all of the fights but one in the first half of Romeo and
Juliet? in the first two acts of Coriolanus? How does Shakespeare parcel out the mayhem
in Macbeth? Why doesn’t he show us the three battles in Antony and Cleopatra? Do the
first two Henry VI plays prove there can be too many fights?
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Questions about the mode of death: What does it mean that Portia ‘swallows fire’?
Why is it appropriate that Ophelia drowns? that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern present
their own death warrant? that Desdemona is smothered? that Cordelia is hanged?
What connections can we find between the modes of their deaths and the meanings
of the plays?
Finally, move to the biggest questions: What are the causes of violence in Shakespeare’s
plays? the results? What are the motives for murder? Does murder work? Does it speak
with ‘most miraculous organ’? What are the motives for suicide? Do not look for ‘right’
answers; look for good answers. Answering those questions helps your students use
Shakespeare to explore the kinds of fantasies and fears about murder and mayhem that
we all have.
E. Show them the party animals and party-poopers

Most students love parties; Shakespeare, in his plays, loves parties. Showing your students
this pro-party attitude in the plays can raise their interest in the works and at the same
time expand their understanding of the importance of festivity.
Shakespeare frequently pits the ‘party animals’ against the ‘party-poopers’ and usually
sides with the party animals. Shakespeare’s partyers are legion. These are the characters
who need no excuse to celebrate; like Lee Marvin’s drunken gunfighter in the Western
spoof Cat Ballou, they are always willing to say, ‘I’ll drink to that’. As you’d expect, we find
a lot of them in the comedies: virtually everyone but Adriana in The Comedy of Errors;
Sly and Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew; everyone in Love’s Labour’s Lost and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream; Duke Senior and his merry men in As You Like It (but not
Jaques); Andrew Aguecheek, Maria, and especially Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night;
everyone but Don John in Much Ado about Nothing, and Lucio and Pompey in Measure
for Measure.
Perhaps even more significant are the ‘party animals’ in the tragedies and histories.
Look closely at the characters who want to party in the tragedies. In Romeo and Juliet,
Capulet is at his most sympathetic during his party. He tries to get everyone to dance; he
looks after the food, the music, the lighting, and worries that ‘the room is grown too hot’
(1.5.29). In Hamlet Claudius seems to have a policy of partying as he ‘drains his draughts
of Rhenish down . . .’ (1.4.10). Othello intends to make all of Cyprus a party with his
decree that ‘there is full liberty of feasting from the present hour of five till the bell have
told eleven’ (2.2.9–10). In many respects, King Lear is a man who keeps being frustrated
in his wish to have a party – first, Cordelia spoils his retirement bash; then Goneril puts
an end to the nightly ‘riots’ of his hundred knights. As for the Macbeths, Banquo’s gate-
crashing ghost spoils their dinner party.
Nowhere is the idea of a party as central to the meaning of a play as in Antony and
Cleopatra, where Egypt is synonymous with partying and where your students will find
two of the three greatest ‘party animals’ in Shakespeare – Antony and Cleopatra. For
Antony, ‘whom ne’er the word of “No” woman heard speak’ (2.2.233), who ‘loves plays’,
who ‘drinks and wastes the lamps of night in revel’ (1.4.4–5), the question is ‘what sport
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to-night?’ (1.1.48) Facing defeat and death, he calls for ‘one other gaudy night’ (3.13.188)
to ‘mock the midnight bell’ (3.3.190). The final authority on these matters, however, is
Cleopatra, who looks on all serious business as ‘Roman thoughts’, who seeks distractions
– ‘Give me some music’ (2.5.1), ‘let’s to billiards’ (2.5.3) – and who has ‘drunk [Antony] to
his bed’ (2.5.21).
The greatest of Shakespeare’s ‘party animals’ is Sir John Falstaff; Falstaff isn’t a party
waiting to happen, he is a party in full swing. Falstaff symbolizes for Prince Hal a world
without cares. When Falstaff asserts his youth, he does so in terms of dancing: ‘I am only
old in judgment and understanding; and he that will caper with me for a thousand marks,
let him lend me the money, and have at him!’ (2H4 1.2.190–3). And his addiction to
sherry is such that even in the midst of battle he keeps a bottle rather than a pistol in his
holster.
Your students will likely take the side of the ‘party animals’ against the ‘party-poopers’
of Shakespeare. The ‘party-poopers’ of the comedies are easy to spot: Shylock (‘let not the
sound of shallow fopp’ry enter my sober house’ [MV 2.5.35–6]), Jaques (‘tis good to be
sad and say nothing’ [AYL 4.1.8]), Don John (‘their cheer is the greater that I am subdued’
[MA 1.3.66–7]), and Malvolio (‘Do you make an alehouse of my lady’s house’ [TN
2.3.88–9]). Which parties do the characters dislike or disrupt? What are the reasons each
of these characters oppose partying or break up a party? Do your students like any of
those reasons?
The tragedies provide different questions about parties. Hamlet is the ‘party-pooper’
in his play; he refuses to dress for Claudius’s big party, he comments bitterly on the
festivities of his uncle and his mother, and he throws a theatre party that he hopes will
self-destruct. Why? What offends him about the parties of the King? Like Don John in
Much Ado about Nothing, Iago in Othello uses parties against the party-goers. What do
his methods tell us about him? about the ‘party animals’? Is Cordelia right to break up
her father’s big party at the beginning of King Lear? Why do the Macbeths want to have
their dinner party?
For Antony and Cleopatra and for Falstaff, the anti-party opposition shapes their
stories and defines their meaning. Octavius Caesar puts his resentment of Antony
specifically in terms of his dislike of Antony’s party pleasures – ‘Antony, leave thy lascivious
wassails’ (AC 1.4.57). His values of power, politics, and control are in absolute conflict
with Antony’s values of love, pleasure, and generosity; and he chooses just that moment
in the play when the great powers of the world are literally dancing in harmony to end the
party on Pompey’s ship: ‘our graver business frowns on this levity’ (2.7.119–20).
In Falstaff ’s case, the final, crushing opposition to the party comes from his former
fellow partyer, Prince Hal, who, in ascending the throne, cannot reconcile the role of
‘party animal’ with that of king, and who therefore banishes his old friend. From Henry’s
point of view, banishing Falstaff is banishing irresponsibility, but you and your students
may find that the King in banishing the ultimate ‘party animal’ is also banishing fun and
friendship. Your class may agree with Falstaff when he says, ‘banish plump Jack, and
banish all the world!’ (1H4 2.4.473–4). Pit ‘party animal’ against ‘party-pooper’ to help
them see the issues at hand.
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F. Show them the ‘smart-arse’ fools in Shakespeare

From an early age most of us resent authority and celebrate any challenge to it – especially
as teenagers. For that reason students enjoy the powerless characters in Shakespeare who
manage to tell off the powerful and the privileged. You can increase the vicarious thrill of
these moments if you help them understand the rigid social structure of Shakespeare’s
England, a hierarchical system with stern punishments for insubordination. That’s why
Shakespeare camouflages the critics of the ruling class in the guise of fools – official and
unofficial. Royalty had its ‘all-licensed fools’ – court jesters like Touchstone in As You Like
It, Feste in Twelfth Night, and the Fool in King Lear – in part to have the ruling class hear
unpleasant truths about themselves.
But students particularly like Shakespeare’s unofficial fools – the ‘smart-arse’ fools like
Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – who get the better of their social superiors.
As his name suggests, Bottom is already at the lowest level of the play’s hierarchy, when
Shakespeare contrives to lower him still further when Puck literally makes an ass of him.
Then Shakespeare lets him have the highest female in the play, Titania, the Queen of the
Fairies. When she declares to him, ‘I love thee,’ Bottom replies to this goddess of nature
and the night:
Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that. And yet, to say the
truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays. The more the pity
that some honest neighbours will not make them friends. Nay, I can gleek upon
occasion.
(3.1.136–40)
His words, ‘reason and love keep little company together nowadays’ (138), comes closest
to speaking the meaning of the play, and Bottom’s conclusion – ‘nay, I can gleek upon
occasion’ (3.1.140) – shows he knows he’s a pretty wise ass.
Shakespeare crowds his plays with these ‘smart-arses’ who, in one way or another,
get to best or ‘put down’ authority. Sometimes they do so under cover of costume as
do Sly and the clever servant, Tranio, in The Taming of the Shrew. Sometimes they do
so protected by their apparent stupidity, as does Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing
when he tells Leonato, ‘I beseech your worship to correct yourself ’ (5.1.313). Sometimes
Shakespeare assists a powerless character to become a ‘smart-arse’ fool by disguising the
powerful personage to whom he speaks. In that way, the gravedigger in Hamlet is free to
tell the Prince that Hamlet is mad, and Pistol in Henry V is able to ‘flip off ’ (‘the figo for
thee . . .’ [4.1.61]) the King who has banished his friend Falstaff and executed his friend
Bardolph.
Shakespeare also uses the precocity of children to prick the egos of the mighty. Moth
in Love’s Labour’s Lost riddles rings around Don Armado and the pedants. The young
princes in Richard III see through the adults. In Henry V, it is the Boy’s response to the
King’s rousing battle speech before Harfleur that first gives voice to how the enlisted men
feel about the cause – ‘Would I were in an alehouse in London. I’d give all my fame for a
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pot of ale and safety’ (H5 3.2.13–14). And when Macbeth’s henchman breaks in upon
Lady Macduff and her son and calls Macduff a traitor, the child replies, ‘thou liest, thou
shag-hair’d villain’ (4.2.82)!
A favourite ‘smart-arse’ underdog of my students is Barnardine, the death-row
prisoner in Measure for Measure, who refuses to cooperate in his early execution.
Summoned from his cell by the jailer and the executioner and admonished by Friar
Lodowick (whom we know to be the Duke) to prepare himself for death, Barnardine will
have none of it:
I have been drinking hard all night and I will have more time to prepare me, or
they shall beat out my brains with billets. I will not consent to die this day, that’s
certain.
(4.3.53–6)
This character, who is the lowest of the low, a man condemned to die, defies the symbols
of legal (the executioner), political (the Duke), and religious (the Friar) authority by
refusing to comply in his death . . . in part because he has a hangover. What student can
resist that?
In every play, your students will find some representative of the powerless who
challenges authority in a variety of ways. Seek out those characters and discuss them.
What are their viewpoints? How do they protect themselves in speaking their minds?
What do they risk in voicing their feelings? What role does humour play in their
exchanges with the powerful? Do the powerful recognize that they are being criticized?
If so, what can we tell about the powerful from their responses to these ‘smart-arse’
fools?
G. Show them the foolish big shots

The flip side of the wise fool is the foolish ‘wise man’, and just as your students will enjoy
seeing the underdog talk back to the powerful, they will take pleasure in watching figures
of authority expose themselves as fools.
The foolish big shots of Shakespeare are everywhere, but some are hard to see and
harder to show. In some cases the foolishness of a powerful character is universally
granted; others require another look; and yet others are a matter of opinion reflecting the
values of the critic. Everyone would agree that Polonius’s ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ speech
is foolish and exposes the character’s weakness; fewer, however, see the sententiousness
in his ‘few precepts’ to Laertes. In general, students fail to muster enough contempt for
the four young noblemen in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the fact that Berowne attacks the
asininity of the King of Navarre’s academy deflects their vision from Berowne’s own
superficiality. Your students may see the absurd pride of Caesar’s final speech about
himself, but they may not see that Brutus is every bit as infected with pride. They may be
able to tell that the Archbishop of Canterbury’s explanation of the Salic Law is ridiculously
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tedious and contrived, but they may not notice that King Harry’s reply to Williams’s
concerns about war is a rambling evasion of the points made by this common soldier
(H5 4.1).
Your students will find at least one foolish big shot in every play. Teach them to ask the
key questions: Is what this big shot says true? Is what this big shot says logical? Is this big
shot’s language straightforward? pretentious? How does this big shot feel about his/her
listeners? Does this big shot have any motive to lie? to obscure the truth? Is this big shot
using his/her position to intimidate? How big, in a larger sense, is the big shot?
Teaching your students to disregard position and title and to weigh the true worth of
an idea or an argument is, perhaps, one of the most useful lessons you can give them.
H. Show them children dealing with parents

Closely connected to issues of smart-arses and big shots is a subject your students
know well: dealing with parents. Most of Shakespeare’s plays touch on this subject,
and some of the plays are devoted to it. The parent–child relationship is central to
Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, 1 and 2 Henry IV, Hamlet, King Lear, Coriolanus,
and The Tempest. Although the issues of King Lear are in the future for your students, the
issues that face Juliet and Romeo, Prince Hal, Hamlet, and Miranda and Ferdinand –
unsympathetic parents, demanding parents, parents who do not communicate their
love, parents who remarry, parents who manipulate – are subjects that all your students
will feel are familiar territory and that your less reticent students are likely to feel qualified
to discuss.
They will recognize Jessica’s rebellion against her old-fashioned and unfashionable
father (The Merchant of Venice); they will feel Hero’s hurt when her own father turns
against her (Much Ado about Nothing); they will admire Rosalind’s brave defence of her
father and Celia’s defiance of hers (As You Like It); and they will understand entirely
Kate’s accusation that her father prefers her baby sister (The Taming of the Shrew). Have
your students consider such questions as: What does the parent want? What does the
child want? What arguments does the parent use? What arguments does the child use?
Do both sides fight fair? Who wins? In answering such questions as these, your students
will inevitably rely on the lessons of their own lives – the lessons that make them
conversant with Shakespeare’s work.
Discovering that the feelings, relationships, and games people play in Shakespeare’s
works are ‘for all time’ removes the false sense your students may have of Shakespeare’s
antiquity. More than that, for most adolescents and post-adolescents it’s a relief to learn
through Shakespeare that the whole spectrum of our most private thoughts, from the
monstrous to the trivial, is, was, and likely will continue to be a part of being human.
Finally, we enjoy those companions who are interested in what interests us, so your
students will like an author they discover writes about sex, violence and the supernatural,
approves of parties, encourages smart-arses, deflates big shots, and exposes the unfairness
of parents. That’s not ‘boring’.
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III. Find parallels to Shakespeare in their world
Although showing students the built-in, unchanging ‘juicy stuff ’ in Shakespeare (sex,
word games, ghosts, violence, parties, ‘smart-arses’, and foolish authority) is the most
direct way of confronting the ‘boring’ complaint, occasionally you might want to get at
the excitement in Shakespeare through the more indirect procedure of finding modern
parallels. These two methods should complement each other: when your students cannot
see the value of gold in Shakespeare’s world, exchange it for coin in their own currency.
Every speech and dramatic situation in the plays has some modern equivalent that can
help your students bridge the time from their world to Shakespeare’s.
The danger in this approach is that finding the contemporary parallels can become an
end in itself. The goal of modern illustrations should be to lead discussion back into the
Shakespeare from some new direction to give the student a recognizable perspective. For
example, comparing the hypocrisy of Angelo in Measure for Measure to the exposure of
the sordid sexual activity of a contemporary self-righteous public figure (like US
televangelist Jimmy Swaggart) who had railed against ‘sin’, should create interest in the
play by jolting with its modern echoes. After that, however, the comparison should give
way to an examination of the differences – Angelo’s control of the entire society, the lives
held ransom to his hypocrisy, his philosophical defence of his severity, his willingness to
kill to hide his lust. In short, though it may illuminate a current event, your parallel must
lead back into a discussion of the issues at the centre of the play.
The nature of this approach means that many of the specific parallels I suggest will be
out of date (as is my reference to Swaggart), just as many of the ones you’ll find for
yourself will have a short life-span. I am daily dismayed to discover that the central
characters and events of my life – McCarthy’s communist witch-hunt, civil rights,
Kennedy’s assassination, Vietnam, and Watergate – are, for my students, as clouded in the
mists of time as the events in Shakespeare to which I would connect them. This unpleasant
phenomenon of becoming out of date (getting old) means that you must keep your
antennae tuned to the world of your students.
The examples that follow both illustrate the process of making connections and the
importance of finding new examples.
A. Make connections by casting a movie

One of the quickest ways to get your students to see the connection between their world
and Shakespeare’s is to have them give Shakespeare’s characters modern faces by casting
a play with contemporary personalities. You can sharpen the lessons of this assignment
by having them pick from different groups of people. Most simply, tell them to use
current movie stars to cast, say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 2003, that assignment at
JMU produced this cast:
Theseus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jack Nicholson

Hippolyta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Annette Benning
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Hermia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ashley Judd

Helena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Charlize Theron
Lysander . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tom Cruise
Demetrius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jude Law
Bottom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Robin Williams
Quince . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kelsey Grammer
Flute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tom Hanks
Puck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Johnny Depp
Oberon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Samuel L. Jackson
Titania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Queen Latifah
You will see at once how subject this exercise is to the passing of time, but see as well
the possibilities for discussion in such an assignment. What Theseus-like qualities does
Nicholson have? a sense of being worldly wise? a certain menace? the fact that he is old
but somehow sexy? How are all those facts related to the role of Theseus? Does Annette
Benning’s icy sexiness qualify her to be the Queen of the Amazons, or would the part be
better served by a more cerebral strength like Meryl Streep’s? Is Ashley Judd short enough
to be Hermia? Will anyone believe that Demetrius wouldn’t find a Helena like Charlize
Theron beautiful? Is a forty-year-old Tom Hanks young enough to say Flute’s line, ‘I have
a beard coming’ (1.2.44–45)? Is Johnny Depp too sexy to be Puck? Are there good reasons
in the play to cast a tough black man as Oberon, and is it helpful or trite to cast a black
woman as his Queen? Playing with these matters will engage your students, and every
decision will lead them directly back into the text.
Or have them cast a play with famous political figures. The Clintons as the Macbeths.
Bush Jr as Prince Hal. Boris Johnson as Falstaff. Maggie Thatcher as Volumnia. Or, for a
less politically divisive discussion, use pop and rock stars: Kurt Cobain as Hamlet
(tormented and decided ‘not to be’); Jerry Garcia as Polonius (cuddly old guy who didn’t
know when to stop), Amy Winehouse as Ophelia (abused love object who kills herself),
Bruce Springsteen as Fortinbras (man of action, runs the show); Mick Jagger as the
Gravedigger (mad clown who’s worked for decades); and so on.
Making these parallels requires some specific ideas about Shakespeare’s characters,
and you can bet that many of your students, excited about a chance to discuss their likes
and dislikes in music, will suddenly develop clearer ideas about the play. For your part,
omit no opportunity to have them explain the rock and pop side of the equation – What
are these musicians like? What kind of music do they play? What have they got in
common with the characters in Shakespeare? Are there any specific songs or lyrics that
support their selection for the roles – or is it the image they have created? Let them see
you taking this exercise seriously by taking an interest in their world.
B. Make connections by resetting the play

Setting a Shakespeare play in the present or in a period and place more recent and familiar
than Elizabethan England is a favourite approach of directors, and for good reason:
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directors reckon that if they put Shakespeare’s excellent brew into new bottles, the public
is more likely to sample the stuff. By letting your students suggest ways of shifting
Shakespeare’s plays into another time and place, you help them connect their world to
Shakespeare’s, but you also help them make important distinctions. (As examples, see
what the BBC series ShakespeaRe-Told does with Macbeth, Much Ado, and Dream.)
The key to this exercise is a rigorous demand that the play fit comfortably into its new
setting, and in some ways the more objections your students can raise to the new setting,
the more successful your discussion will be. Look first at characters: are there modern
equivalents for their roles? For example, a modernized version of Romeo and Juliet setting
the play in a contemporary America must find an authority figure who is the equivalent
of a Prince Escalus, with complete judicial power, including the right to execute and the
right to banish. Is he a mayor or a governor? a mafia don? the head of a gang? That
conversation may not solve the problem, but out of it will come a consideration of power
in our world and in Shakespeare’s, of the Duke himself, and of his function in the play.
One problem in transplanting Shakespeare to the present is what to do with court
jesters. Modernized productions of As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and King Lear must
decide what to do with Touchstone, Feste, and the Fool. Has the humour of political late-
night news satirists – Steve Colbert, Samantha Bee, and John Oliver – replaced the
admonitory function of court jesters? Put the problem before your students: what is the
modern equivalent of a professional fool living in a rich household? Could a fool equally
be represented onstage in the role of a free-loading, wisecracking houseguest? What gets
lost in such an interpretation?
After you and your class have looked at the suitability of a modern setting for the characters
in Shakespeare’s play, discuss the problem of translating such anachronisms as horses and
swords into a modern idiom. Just this problem dictated to me the setting of my first
production, Taming of the Shrew (1983, co-directed with Roger Hall). We chose gold-rush
San Francisco as an American setting appropriate for a fortune hunter on horseback, and we
accounted for his ‘old rusty sword’ in his wedding costume by having him in an outrageous
Mexican bandito costume. When these problems of Elizabethan details arise, your students
may prefer a solution that simply changes a word or two in the text. ‘Put up your knives’, for
example, might reasonably replace, ‘put up your swords’; but any such suggestion must be
subject to a full discussion of the differences in connotation between knives and swords, in
the way the change suits the verse, and in the implications of those differences.
C. Make connections by finding personal parallels

Ask your students about characters and situations in their own lives and in the lives of
those they know that relate to those of Shakespeare’s play. This may seem obvious – and
self-explanatory – but it works. You want to be careful, though, not to put anyone on the
spot by asking them to divulge private matters and equally careful not to have them
divulge the personal secrets of others. In asking for parallels you want no names at all.
First, ask the student (volunteers only) to specify any parallel between the ‘real-life’
situation and the play at hand. If the example is, ‘My friend’s mother married this guy my
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friend hated just like Gertrude marries Claudius.’ Lead the class in raising such questions as:
Was the mother widowed or divorced? Was the stepfather close to your friend’s real father
in any way? How soon after the death/divorce of the real father did they get married? Each
of these questions leads to a worthwhile discussion of issues: how is the marriage of Hamlet’s
widowed mother more or less troublesome than the marriage of a divorced mother? Does it
matter that Hamlet’s new stepfather is his uncle? Would a respectable amount of time have
made a difference to Hamlet? What is a respectable amount of time? Every student in your
class is interested in these questions in the context of a ‘real-life situation’.
In the same way, pursue the details of the parallels students wish to make between a
character in Shakespeare and someone they know. Ask the student who says, ‘I know a
guy who is just like Falstaff,’ if the guy is old and fat and a drunk and a thief and a liar and
a coward and a great wit. Where the guy is not like Falstaff, examine the implications.
How is it important to Shakespeare’s work that Falstaff is old? or fat? or a drunk? or a
thief? or a liar? or a coward? or a great wit? By asking those questions in the context of a
‘real person’, you bring alive those much-debated issues in the play.
D. Make connections by finding parallels in current events

This procedure is similar in all respects but one to the previous exercise: here you
substitute the newsworthy and verifiable event for the more personal and anecdotal. You
lose the immediacy of a direct connection, but you force them to look at the world
around them and give them a ‘research’ task. As is always the case in making connections
in class between our world and Shakespeare’s, you must be flexible, inventive, and alert in
seeing the parallels they see.
For example, from Anita Hill’s testimony at the confirmation hearings of Clarence
Thomas, to the accusations Paula Jones made against Bill Clinton, to Autumn Jackson’s
claim that Bill Cosby is her father, to the sexual assault accusations against Donald
Trump, the news media has been full of stories in which women confront powerful men
about their past behaviour. That subject is the essential transaction of the final scenes of
both Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. How do both parties –
Shakespeare’s characters and the personalities in the news stories – argue their cases in
situations in which it is the word of one person against the other? How do reputation and
position play a part in the proceedings? How does our impression of the characters of
the accused play a part in our sense of their guilt or innocence? Students will readily find
the parallels and the contrasts between the contemporary event and Shakespeare.
Remember that your job is to keep turning them back to Shakespeare’s text.
E. Make connections between popular music and the plays

As Bob Seger explains, ‘rock-and-roll will never die’. The celebrity of rock and pop
performers makes them useful as types for casting the plays, and beyond that, popular
music itself provides the teacher with a broad landscape of parallels to much in
Shakespeare.
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Show them Shakespearean form and content in rock. Half of Shakespeare’s tragedies
and all of his comedies are about the tribulations of romantic or sexual love. The same
students who are easily put off by the formality and the ‘passion’ they see in Shakespeare’s
lovers and who will squirm and make faces at a rhyming Romeo or Helena will spend a
small fortune and wait in line for hours to hear Taylor Swift or Beyoncé sing and – yes
– rhyme about love. Show students the ‘formal’ and ‘sentimental’ expressions of love,
jealousy, and desire that fill their world, and you undermine their resistance to such
expressions in Shakespeare.
A quick way to make such connections is to assign song lyrics to appropriate characters
from Shakespeare. It helps (I tell myself) to give frequent examples of this in class. I often
interrupt our discussion of a play with a relevant snatch of a song, and my ‘singing’ voice
adds to the shock value. Here are some of the tunes that have survived Cohen renditions
and helped me gloss a passage:
‘That’ll be the day when you say goodbye, that’ll be the day when I die’ – Cleopatra
to Antony
‘When I saw you standing there’ – Romeo to Juliet
‘Stay just a little bit longer’ – Juliet to Romeo
‘You’ve lost that loving feeling’ – Helena to Demetrius
‘Every breath you take’ – Othello to Desdemona
‘Stand by your man’ – Kate at the end of The Taming of the Shrew
Turn Shakespeare into musical soundtracks, either compiled or composed. Another way
to make Shakespeare connect to the students through their music is to let them give a
musical – rock, country, jazz, pop, rap – treatment to passages from Shakespeare. A
student in my Tragedies class once produced a remarkable ‘metal’ composition she called
‘Out, Vile Jelly’, which gave a heavy metal setting to some of the most despairing lines in
King Lear. In five stunning minutes, Jill Ellswick’s tape taught my classroom to hear the
contemporary world in King Lear’s pain and to hear in heavy metal an age-old agony.
Having your students put Shakespeare’s words to their own music relates them to
Shakespeare in a way similar to sampling. The anachronism of a rock-and-roll or country
or hip-hop format ensures their sense of ownership and frees them from the inhibitions
of trying to do Shakespeare ‘right’.
IV. Dispense with expectations of plot suspense
If it is true that there is nothing new under the sun and that there are only two or
three basic human stories worth telling, then the contribution of the playwright is not
necessarily the story itself but the way the story is told, word for word.
– Sarah Ruhl1
1
Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), page 25.
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For young people raised on Hollywood films, soap operas, and TV series, the one
important question a narrative work of art should raise is ‘what happens next?’ Good
students will sometimes come to Shakespeare with the expectation that reading his
work will entertain in the way that their favourite books do, but students looking for
that kind of narrative suspense in Shakespeare will be disappointed. He was not interested
in the suspense of narrative. He expected his audience to know how all of his history
plays ‘came out’, and, since he borrowed all the plots of his other plays (except The
Tempest) from other sources, he would have supposed that they knew how those stories
ended as well.
Even in Romeo and Juliet, thick with plot, Shakespeare, in the Prologue before the play,
gives away the ending – ‘a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’. Indeed, Shakespeare
counts on the audience’s foreknowledge of the story to increase the sense of irony. When
the Soothsayer tells Caesar ‘beware the Ides of March’, and Calpurnia warns him, ‘do not
go forth to-day’ (JC 2.2.50), and he, surrounded by conspirators, boasts ‘I am constant as
the Northern Star’ (3.1.60), the pleasure we have derives from ‘knowing how things come
out’. The pleasure of having superior knowledge is a basic dramatic building block in the
plays of Shakespeare from Richard III to The Tempest.
Have them reconsider the value of narrative suspense. Ask them how many went to
see a Harry Potter or a Hunger Games movie after they had read the book and knew the
story. Ask if any of them have ever gone on purpose to see a movie twice, and if so, why.
Yes, they will say: to enjoy the work of a favourite actor, the choreography of a great
action sequence, the sound of the music, the beauty of the cinematography, and/or the
language of the dialogue. None will say that they went to see what happens or how it came
out. Ask them now which viewing they enjoyed the most, the first or the second, and the
chances are good that most of them will say the second – the viewing in which there was
no possibility of suspense. That’s because what they enjoy each time is, in Sarah Ruhl’s
words, ‘not the story itself, but the way the story is told.’
V. Useful Shakespeare
There are serious students who do not so much object to the ‘old-fashioned’ nature of
Shakespeare plays as they fail to see in his art any application to their lives. Such
students might understand the language of the play, its plot, and its themes; but literature
and the arts just don’t register on the mental ‘utility metres’ by which they measure
experience. This perspective is sad, because in my view the richest experiences have
the least utility and the best kind of relevance is personal and particular, rather than
political and general. Too often teachers, who should be teaching the pleasures of a
play, succumb to the call of social critics for ‘relevance’ and feel obliged to teach plays,
poems, and novels as a source of gradable essays on philosophy, society, and history (see
Chapter 1, Deadly Preconceptions II , IV, and VI ).
However, if you or your students are looking for ‘useful’ Shakespeare, you can find
practical lessons in his works. Because Shakespeare is a keen observer of human nature,
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in every scene he shows us how people respond in certain situations. His ability to
imagine what different people faced with a set of circumstances would do or say makes
his plays a kind of human petri dish for our examination, from which (with care and
many caveats) your students can abstract useful ‘how to’ guides.
Students might, for example, discuss ‘Ideas for a Happy Marriage’ by looking closely at
Petruchio and Kate in The Taming of the Shrew; Brutus and Portia in Julius Caesar;
Hotspur and his lady, Kate, in 1 Henry IV; Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado about
Nothing; and Antony and Cleopatra. These couples represent a variety of relationships
between strong men and women. Discuss how each partner in these pairs views his or
her responsibilities towards the other and fulfils or fails in those responsibilities. How
much of that failure is behaviour? How much of it is communication? A favourite subject
of Shakespeare’s, in the Sonnets as well as the plays, is jealousy, an emotion with which
most dating-age students have had to deal. What lessons can your students apply from
the experience of Othello, of Claudius in Much Ado, of Ford in Merry Wives, of Leontes
in The Winter’s Tale, of Cleopatra? How is jealousy a ‘me’ issue rather than a ‘you’ issue?
What cures jealousy? What doesn’t?
More practical, business-minded students will profit from Shakespeare’s portrait of
leadership in his gallery of kings. Look closely at the ‘motivational skills’ (or lack thereof)
in such monarchs as Richard II , Henry IV, Henry V, and Richard III , or at the contrasting
strategies of persuasion of Cassius, Brutus, and Antony in Julius Caesar. Discuss the
qualities in human nature to which Shakespeare’s successful orators appeal. Rank the
features of public speaking – clarity, inventiveness, formality, informality, humour, shock
value – that make for great speeches. Or tackle something really big: ‘Shakespeare’s Guide
to Governing’. His plays are full of people, from gardeners (Richard II) to pimps (Measure
for Measure) to clowns (King Lear) to archbishops (Henry V), who have advice on how to
manage the affairs of the kingdom. Search out the political scientists in Shakespeare’s
works, see how their theories hold up in the context of the play, and debate the virtues of
their ideas for our world.
You can also assemble more specific ‘how to’ guides, a process that returns the class to
a consideration of Shakespeare’s language. For example, a guide entitled ‘Shakespeare’s
Tips on “How to Say No”’ would be an intriguing assignment in finding and categorizing
the different ways that Shakespeare’s characters refuse to do something. From Cordelia’s
dangerously laconic refusal to tell her father how much she loves him – ‘Nothing, my lord’
(1.1.87) – to Richard III ’s chilling refusal to honour his promise to Buckingham – ‘I am
not in a giving vein today’ (4.2.118) – to Barnardine’s refusal to participate in his execution
– ‘I will not consent to die this day’ (4.3.55–6) – Shakespeare’s plays are full of people who
say ‘no’. Some speak bluntly, some diplomatically, some so graciously that it sounds like
they said ‘yes’. What is the status of the requester? What is the status of the requestee?
What is the difficulty level of the request? How is the timing of the request? Saying ‘no’ is
a daily necessity, and your class, by looking at the variables Shakespeare deals with in his
plays, can make some sense of the psychology of asking, accepting, and refusing.
Similar guides need writing on a host of other subjects: ‘Shakespeare’s Guide to Saying
“I Love You”’; ‘Shakespeare’s Guide to Saying “I Want to Be Alone”’; ‘Shakespeare’s Guide
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to Saying “Come See My Etchings”’; ‘Shakespeare’s Guide to Saying “You’re an Ass”’. Your
students can suggest many more such useful guides for living, and any such compilation
will do much to win over the utilitarians in your class.
VI. Share Shakespeare’s life with your students
Trained in the heyday of New Criticism, I started teaching Shakespeare by focusing my

students’ attention entirely on the text as a self-contained work and avoiding any
discussion whatsoever of Shakespeare life. Over the years, however, I discovered that
students want to know how Shakespeare ‘happened’; they find something compelling in
the idea of the man behind the works. While they might be bored, for example, to hear
that ‘a new character frequently appears at the beginning of Act Three’, they seem more
alive to hearing that ‘Shakespeare liked to introduce a new character in Act Three.’ Being
able to picture the writer helps students see his work as less of an abstraction, and when
you link the man to the choices he made in writing his play, you make the things you
have to say about the play more interesting – less ‘boring’.
More than that, thinking of the play in terms of its author may help you yourself get
closer to the works. To do that you should familiarize yourself with his life by reading
one or more of the dozens of biographies on Shakespeare.2 Remember that no matter
how scrupulously biographers try to remove themselves, all biographies, even of the
most thoroughly documented lives, present a composite of the subject and the biographer
rather than a pure picture of the subject. How much truer this is for the biographer of
Shakespeare, who must piece together his life from scattered and fragmentary evidence.
But this merging of self and subject can be helpful to a teacher in providing a more
coherent perspective on the plays. Essentially, you create a character – your Shakespeare
– with certain attitudes about his own works. As long as you are careful not to contradict
the facts we know about his life, it makes no difference that your Shakespeare may not
be like anyone else’s. My Shakespeare, for example, thinks that Romeo is a nincompoop,
is scornful of Brutus and Roman ‘honour’, believes the gravedigger wiser than Hamlet,
detests the Duke in Measure for Measure, adores Cleopatra, and thinks he made his last
play, The Tempest, boring on purpose. Your Shakespeare may be even more outrageous.
Fine. What matters most is that your view of the author can animate an interest in
his plays.
Keep in mind that any idea of what Shakespeare was like can exert a stubborn tyranny
over the text and over your students’ understanding of it. Be wary of the power of that
characterization to close out options in your students’ minds. A good preventative
exercise against that danger is to ask the class how some startling new discovery about
2
I particularly recommend three: Lois Potter’s The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography for its at-
tention to the plays; Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger, which reads like a novel; and Peter Holland’s William Shake-
speare for its straightforward brevity. I also recommend that you look at Sam Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives,
a remarkable look at all of the biographies of Shakespeare and what each tells us about the person who wrote it.
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the ‘real’ Shakespeare would change their view of a play. What difference would it make
to The Taming of the Shrew if we discovered that Shakespeare had actually been a woman?
How would the image of a black Shakespeare change our reading of Othello? a Jewish
Shakespeare, of The Merchant of Venice? a physically deformed Shakespeare, of Richard
III? a French Shakespeare, of Henry V? a schizophrenic Shakespeare, of Hamlet?
When you bring up Shakespeare’s biography, you are certain to have to deal with –
drum roll – The Question of Authorship. Students who know nothing else at all about
Shakespeare will have heard ‘Shakespeare didn’t write his plays’, and those looking to
dismiss Shakespeare will find no easier one than a theory that vindicates their lack of
interest. If Shakespeare was a fraud, they reason illogically, why should they read his
works? When you encounter this special form of resistance, you should make these two
points about the authorship issue: (1) the plays are a treasure of poetic and dramatic art,
no matter who wrote them and (2) the evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford-
upon-Avon, born 1564 and died 1616, wrote the plays and poems attributed to him is
irrefutable.
Like ‘birthers’ ignoring the evidence of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, for nearly
two centuries ‘anti-Stratfordians’ (as these hobbyists are called) have been in search of
the ‘real’ Shakespeare. So far their prime suspects are (1) Sir Francis Bacon, who never
wrote a play in his life, nor gave any indication of an interest in theatre; (2) Christopher
Marlowe, a playwright who may have had the talent to be a Shakespeare but who made
the mistake of getting murdered in 1593 when only the first few of Shakespeare’s plays
had been written; and (3) Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who wrote a little poetry of
extraordinarily poor quality, but who, like Marlowe, died years before the last of
Shakespeare’s plays were written.
Undeterred by the inconvenience of facts, the anti-Stratfordians press their case. They
see any absence of biographical documentation, not as the norm for someone living
more than 400 years ago, but as proof of fraud. They ignore the lack of a motive. Why
would anyone – even a member of the nobility – need to use Shakespeare as a ‘cover’ for
his responsibility for plays that pleased everyone from the groundlings to Queen
Elizabeth I and King James I? They ignore the lack of means. How would it be possible
for anyone to make an entire community of actors, writers, and audience over a twenty-
year period party to such a hoax? They ignore the lack of opportunity. Francis Bacon was
too busy, and Marlowe and Oxford were too dead. No plausible motive, no plausible
means, no plausible opportunity – no plausible case.
The man who wrote the plays in the Folio published by John Heminges and Henry
Condell ‘to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive, as was our
Shakespeare’ – the man who wrote the plays in the Folio published with a poem by the
envious and blunt Ben Jonson ‘to the memory of my beloved, the author, Mr. William
Shakespeare’ – the man who wrote the plays in the Folio published in 1623 under the
title, ‘Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies’ – the man who wrote
those plays was, in fact, Mr William Shakespeare.
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PART II
91
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INTRODUCTION
Here in Part Two you’ll find, alphabetically, thirty-seven ‘chapterettes’ each dealing with
one of the plays attributed wholly or in part to Shakespeare (I treat Henry IV, Parts 1 and
2, as a single work). Each ‘chapter’ has, first, a personal and idiosyncratic comment meant
to stimulate or annoy you into your own thoughts on the work; second, some teaching
ploys specific to that play or particularly suited to it; third, some scenes for alternative
readings; and, finally, in the Appendix, some brief remarks about the versions of the play
available on screen.
Comments
As a teacher, I have always found it helpful to have someone else’s overview of the plays,
and I like it when that overview is personal and incautious. I have found valuable
stimulation (and annoyance) in Samuel Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare, written in the
eighteenth century; William Hazlitt’s The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, written in the
nineteenth century; Mark Van Doren’s Shakespeare, Harold Bloom’s The Invention of
the Human, and especially Harold Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakespeare, all written in the
twentieth century; and most recently in Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All. Since
there is no ‘right’ way to read the plays, I like cocksure commentators who don’t waste time
with apologies or qualifications. In this spirit, I offer my own readings of the plays and
depend on you to read me as I read others: happy to write ‘bullshit’ in the margin.
While Part One of this book attempts to establish a firm methodology in dealing with
Shakespeare in the classroom, over Part Two hovers the spirit of imminent recantation.
What you find here is merely my present understanding of the plays, an understanding of
the plays that is constantly in flux. Every time I direct a play, I come away amazed at how
much better it was than I imagined and at how many new things it has shown me. So by
the time you read these comments, I’ll be dubious about many of them. I offer them
merely as tools, valuable as dollar-store bottle openers, to get into Shakespeare’s works;
like any readings of the plays, they reflect the reader as much as they do Shakespeare.
Ploys
Following each commentary on the play, I have described some things for teachers to do
with the plays in class. I call these activities ‘ploys’, activities designed to tempt your
students into the plays. In a world without ShakesFear you would not need these ploys;
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in that world, the same kids who master language and rhyme in rap or who can explain
the plot line and characters in the Star Wars series would go open and unafraid to the
plays of Shakespeare. In that world Shakespeare wouldn’t be a school word to lump with
trigonometry and grammar, but a play word associated with concerts and circuses. Kids
would say to their friends, ‘I’m taking Shakespeare’, like they say, ‘I’m taking film’, ‘I’m in
the dance class’, ‘I’m doing a course on the Beatles.’
But Shakespeare has become a school word, and we need ways to make Shakespeare
work in the schoolroom – usually by transforming work into play and the schoolroom
into a space to play. Each of these ploys has worked well enough for me to recommend
them to you, but their success depends on the same variables that dictate the success of
every class you teach.
● They work well if your students are prepared. They work even better if you are
prepared.
● They work well if your students are in a good mood. They work even better if you
are in a good mood.
● They work well if you have students willing to take a chance. They work even
better if you are willing to take a chance.
● They work well if you have some hams among your students. They work even
better if you are something of a ham.
● They work well if your students are flexible. They work even better if you are flexible.
This last variable is the most important. You will need to adapt each of my ploys to
your own class, your own style, and your own needs.
Scenes for alternative readings
The most basic of all ploys is to do a scene in two different ways and to talk with your
students about the consequences of those choices. This exercise has three essential virtues.
First, it takes the play off the page and puts it on the stage of your classroom. Second, it
shows that there is never a single way to ‘do’ a scene from Shakespeare, that there is no
right and wrong. Third, it gets your students involved in discussions about Shakespeare
on the basis of something they’ve seen and heard and on which they invariably will have
opinions. To encourage you to use alternative scenes, for every play I include a scene or
two to try in different ways and I suggest how you might differentiate the scenes.
Remember: (1) You can do this with any scene from Shakespeare – with any passage.
(2) You can (and should) substitute your own or your students’ suggestions for alternative
interpretations.
The biggest practical problem you will face is who will perform the scenes. The ideal,
of course, is that you have lots of students who are willing and can manage the variations
you ask for in each scene. The likelihood, however, is that (at first) you will have only a
couple of such students in your class, and you will have to decide between using those
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The Plays: Introduction
students (and whatever risk there may be of appearing to single them out for special
treatment) or bringing in outside help.
If you decide to use your own students – regardless of their level of talent – here are
some recommendations:
● Never criticize an acting choice; just suggest another one you like better.
● Speaking too low or too fast is NOT an acting choice – always correct those two
tendencies.
● Use any volunteers you can get for a scene. Girls can play boys and boys can play
girls (on Shakespeare’s stage they did). Untraditional casting is a fine way for
students to explore different worlds.
● Correct mistakes in pronunciation (and check your own). Everyone gets some
words wrong; pointing out when they do is nothing personal.
● Hand out one-sheet scripts or project the passage on a screen so that your
students don’t have to ‘perform’ with a book in their hands.
If you decide to bring in outside help, you will discover that your school’s theatre
community is eager to help. Ask your colleagues in theatre to provide a list of the most
promising students; any drama coach will be glad of a chance to give students more
acting practice, and the students will be excited to perform before your captive audience.
You might simply put up a notice asking for acting volunteers who can visit your class to
read scenes. Either of these arrangements will necessitate navigating administrative
hoops to get permission for students to leave one class and visit another, but administrators
can be surprisingly supportive in expediting an exercise that puts such a premium on
Shakespeare.
For each scene, I have given the act, scene, and line numbers from The Arden
Shakespeare Complete Works, but to help you find the scenes elsewhere, I record the first
and last two words of the speech in parentheses. For example, Hamlet’s first soliloquy
would be listed as Act One, Scene Two, 129 (‘O that’) – 159 (‘my tongue’).
On screen
Yes: the Second Don’t clearly reads, ‘Don’t show them films or videos (except
sometimes).’ This feature of the book is for the ‘sometimes’, but it comes with this label:
WARNING!
Film can cause ShakesFear. Showing Shakespeare on screen without supervision is
detrimental to the teaching of Shakespeare. Using a whole class to show students a
film will damage their minds and your soul.
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Most films of Shakespeare’s plays are bad Shakespeare and worse movies. The fact is
that movies – a primarily visual medium in which the audience surrenders its collective
imagination to that of the director – are the opposite of Shakespeare’s plays – a primarily
aural medium in which the audience must use its imagination to complete the work of
the playwright and the actor. Because the dynamic of films is the opposite of that of
plays, only a handful of the hundreds of movies made from Shakespeare’s plays can
deliver even a fraction of the pleasure of a good stage performance. Moreover, these
adaptations are hard to fund at the level of big studio production and don’t hold up to
mainstream movies. Batman, the Movie always trumps Hamlet, the Movie. For that
reason, students with an aversion to Shakespeare watching a film of his work will believe
their eyes and end up more convinced than ever of his obsolescence.
That said, the most convenient way to bring performance into your classroom is
through film and video. The trick is to do it in a way that ensures the highest entertainment
value. That means (1) using short clips from the movies – never more than three minutes
– and (2) providing either a comparative clip of the same moment from another film or
a live rendering of the same scene. As with the Scenes for Alternative Readings, the goal
of this exercise is to provide students with an enjoyable way to talk about Shakespeare by
taking it off the page and giving it to them in a form they feel confident discussing. The
fact that frequently they’ll be able to talk about actors they recognize and a medium they
are at home with is all to the good.
Occasionally you will want to show your students a scene from Shakespeare or
recommend that they watch an entire film on their own time (teachers who use their
class time for showing complete film adaptations of Shakespeare are simply taking the
day off and pretty much consigning Shakespeare to the students’ mental ‘out’ basket). For
that purpose, I am providing extremely brief sketches of available film versions in the
Appendix. I am not including films that record a stage production. This list is by no
means an exhaustive one, but I try to include the most interesting versions and the
versions you are most likely to find.
In that regard, I recommend two TV series that can help in entirely opposite ways.
For twelve of the most taught plays (I have starred my favourites.) – A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, The Tempest, Macbeth*, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet*, Twelfth Night, Richard
III, The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It*, Julius Caesar, The Winter’s Tale*, and Othello
– you will find that the 1992 series Shakespeare: Animated Tales is a fine resource for
giving your students the overall narrative of the play. These are thirty-minute versions of
the plays, artfully designed by Russian animators in a variety of ways (paint on glass, stop
motion puppetry, claymation) and voiced by such great English actors as Fiona Shaw,
Michael Kitchen, Brian Cox, and Zoë Wanamaker. Best of all, these productions, though
heavily cut, use Shakespeare’s words beautifully.
Finally, for your best students, I can think of no better Shakespeare treat than bingeing
on the Canadian series Slings and Arrows. Each of the three seasons focuses its six
episodes on the tribulations of a ‘fictional’ Canadian Shakespeare company (thinly
disguised Stratford Festival) putting on a major Shakespeare production (season 1,
Hamlet; season 2, Macbeth; season 3, Lear). The stories of the people who work for the
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The Plays: Introduction
festival are smart, hilarious, and moving – and there’s a ghost. The best thing, though, is
how the series sneaks in the Shakespeare content, not only in the plays’ parallels to the
lives of the people in the company, but also in the occasional rehearsals and parts of
shows where we watch the plays from inside the performance. In that regard, Slings and
Arrows models two goals of this book: it reminds us that Shakespeare works are plays,
and it shows us that we learn best when we play with them.
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THE PLAYS
ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
Comments
Let’s start with the title of All’s Well that Ends Well. Like Much Ado about Nothing and
Measure for Measure, ‘All’s well that ends well’ appears to be a comment on – even a
spoiler for – the play. Helena, the daughter of a member of the Roussillon household
staff, gets to marry lord Bertram, the handsome young Count Roussillon. But when we
arrive at that ending, we’re not so sure the play has ended well, because every scene in
which our ‘hero’ appears makes us like him less. This dissatisfaction with the play’s hero
is universal – Bertram is one of the two ‘problems’ with this problem play. Here’s what
eighteenth-century critic Samuel Johnson says about Bertram and the play’s ending:
I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and

young without truth; who marries Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate;
when [he thinks her] dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage,
is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself with falsehood,
and is dismissed to happiness.1
That’s about right.

The play starts with Bertram’s departure to Paris to make his name at court. The first
words of the play are his widowed mother’s as she says farewell, and those words pair
Bertram with his late father: ‘In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.’
This odd locution confuses the role of mother and wife, links birth (‘delivering my son’)
to death (‘bury a second husband’), and poses the question: how will Bertram, the new
Count Roussillon, compare to the old one?
This play is about Bertram, but it is not his play. He has only about half as many lines
as Helena (who has the most at 478) and fewer lines than his mother, the King, and his
companion Parolles. His role is to be observed; we watch his story unfold through the
eyes of others, as he reacts to situations.
All’s Well that Ends Well is Helena’s play.
Helena is the Cinderella of this fairy tale – a heroine of low rank in love with someone
of high rank – one of the strong women that populate Shakespeare’s comedies and take
1
Johnson on Shakespeare, edited by Walter Raleigh (Henry Froude: London, 1908), page 103.
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All’s Well That Ends Well
charge of their fates. Three things set her apart from the others: (1) she doesn’t disguise
herself as a man like Julia, Portia, Rosalind, Viola, and Imogen; (2) she goes it alone
without a sidekick like Celia or Nerissa or a champion like Benedick; and, (3) unlike all
the others, she is a social inferior in the world of the play. She has no rank in an aristocratic
world of lords and counts and countesses; she is merely the daughter of a physician,
brought up in Bertram’s wealthy household.
But Helena has her self-reliance, she has her ambition, and she has a plan, and in quick
order we see her carry out that plan:
1. Confess to the Countess that she loves her son – check (1.3.191).
2. Get his mother’s good will – check (1.3.248–53).
3. Go to Paris and get admitted to the sick room of the King – check (2.1.91).
4. Make a deal with the King to cure him of his deadly disease, in return for
marriage to any man in his kingdom – check (2.1.193).
5. Cure the King – check (2.3.40).
6. Marry Bertram – check (2.3.105).
Shakespeare gets us almost effortlessly to item No. 6, and then Bertram ruins everything.
He’s outraged at the idea of marrying Helena: ‘A poor physician’s daughter my wife! /
Disdain rather corrupt me ever!’
This moment is the play’s fulcrum. The hero rejects the heroine. That’s not how fairy
tales are supposed to happen – the prince doesn’t reject Cinderella over social rank.
Reading this scene, your students will wonder why Bertram would not want to marry the
play’s very smart and enterprising heroine when all the other lords do? They will think
with Marjorie Garber that ‘one by one and each [of the four nameless lords] expresses an
eager willingness to be her choice in marriage’.2
No. The four lords express the opposite of an ‘eager’ willingness. They say the least they
feel they can say under the watchful eye of their King who has just said unequivocally
that the man ‘who shuns [her] love shuns all his love in me’. To understand that, you have
to see, not read the scene. And Lafeu, the plain-spoken friend of the King, is onstage to
make sure that the audience sees what a reader cannot: that in this scene a stiff-faced ‘yes’
means ‘no’. By the time Helena turns to Bertram, she has found herself rejected four
times. To make things worse, each of the lords has managed to play by the King’s
impossible rules and still say ‘no’. Confronting Helena with this linguistic ‘glass ceiling’,
they have reminded the ‘poor physician’s daughter’ that she is out of her league.
Properly staged, Bertram is not the first of the young lords to be displeased by the
King’s marriage lottery; he is the last. Such a shift obviously makes Bertram look relatively
less churlish, and it even makes him seem more honest than the politically adept ‘boys of
ice’. From Bertram’s point of view, the King has changed the rules on how he might fill his
father’s shoes. Bertram has come to the King’s court to make his name, to claim his place
2
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), page 624.
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in the aristocracy as the young Count Roussillon, including a match with a woman of
position. And now, in front of the society Bertram aspires to, the King lets this daughter of
a physician – this middle-class woman without property or title – claim him in marriage.
The scene begins in joy and promise and then takes the most disturbing turn – our
hero truthfully expressing his shallow view of rank, the King trying to explain to him
that goodness outranks rank, then angrily forcing him to marry our heroine, and our
heroine publicly humiliated as a result of the success of her own plan. Fairy tale crashes
into the real world.
So Bertram runs away, sending to Helena his impossible conditions for being her
husband:
When thou canst get the ring upon my finger which

never shall come off, and show me a child begotten
of thy body that I am father to, then call me
husband: but in such a ‘then’ I write a ‘never.’
(3.2.55–8)
And when opportunity presents itself, Helena doubles down on her choice of Bertram by
tricking her runaway husband into bed so that she can meet his conditions. And that
brings us to the second ‘problem’ with this play: Helena.
The same resourcefulness and determination that we like so much in her at the start
of the play begin to unsettle us as she presses on to her original goal of marriage with
Bertram. Why? For love? His treatment of her and his behaviour towards others makes
any love for him seem like self-abuse. Redemption? True, Bertram’s initial rejection of
her and his running from their forced marriage would make her want to escape the
ignominy of being a jilted wife, but the way she chooses to do it – by a public proclamation
that she tricked him into her bed – would hardly raise her in the world’s esteem. Social
climbing? That seems to be the view of those young lords in 2.3. Much argues against this
answer – her professed love for him at the start of the play, her close relationship with the
Countess, and her willingness to give up the protection of the Countess and the comforts
of the Roussillon estate rather than force him from home.
Social climbing, however, is the profession of the play’s most entertaining character –
Parolles. The flamboyantly dressed Parolles is a braggadocio who continually boasts
his travels and service in battle but whom the play exposes as a coward. He is the
only other character in the play besides Helena who seeks the company of Bertram.
Bertram is Parolles’ ticket out of the middle class. And despite the fact that all the other
people in the play, including the other young lords in court, know that ‘the soul of this
man is his clothes’, Parolles has somehow won Bertram’s favour and proudly accompanies
him everywhere.
Parolles enters the play in the first scene as Helena finishes telling the audience about
her love for Bertram. What follows is one of the oddest exchanges in all of the plays. For
over a hundred lines these two banter about sex, our heroine dressed in black and this
braggadocio in his gaudy scarves – a Julie Andrews playing straight man to a Rodney
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Dangerfield doing a long and bawdy riff on virginity. Though they will have little to say
to one another the rest of the play (15 lines, to be exact), they are here completely at ease
together. What they have in common is Bertram and their low social position.
Here’s the start of that conversation:
parolles
Save you, fair queen!
helena
And you, monarch!
parolles
No.
helena
And no.
(1.1.107–10)
Two things are noteworthy about this mutual greeting: First, they joke with each other in
perfect synchronicity (each speaks five words) and in studied brevity. ‘No’ here from
Parolles means ‘no, I’m not a monarch’. Helena’s ‘and no’ means ‘and I’m not a fair queen’.
Second, the joke of addressing one another as royalty might seem random, but it reminds
us that both of these characters would be happy to climb higher on the social ladder by
their closeness to Bertram. This scene, then, without undoing our affection for either
character or our admiration for Helena’s brilliance and can-do spirit, oddly connects her
to Parolles.
The play is full of such oddities. Stephen Booth, the foremost close reader of
Shakespeare, who co-directed our ASC production in 2006, pointed out another. In our
planning, Stephen said he wanted one thing: for the production ‘to make it clear that the
King’s fistula is a disease of the anus.’ ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but why?’ ‘Because the play is all about
butts.’ ‘It is? Where?’ I asked. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you can start with the title.’
Each of the three times I’ve directed this play, that ending has seemed less problematic
and the play more wonderful. To paraphrase Parolles: it all ends well and it all does not.
Ploys
A. Stage the King’s fistula
Scripts: AW 1.2; 2.1

Prep: Handouts, finding props
In class: 40 minutes – 10 intro, 30 ploy
Players: 7
Props: crown, chair, posh bathrobe, folding beach lounge chair
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Let’s return to Stephen Booth’s insistence that our ASC production make clear that the
King of France is suffering from a fistula. An anal fistula is an abscess that occurs outside
the anal tunnel. The disease is both painful and embarrassingly noxious. In Shakespeare’s
time the disease was often fatal, and when we meet the King he is dying of it. Shakespeare
mentions the fistula in the play’s opening when Bertram asks Lafeu, ‘What is it, my good
lord, the king languishes of?’ and Lafeu answers, ‘A fistula, my lord.’ When Bertram says
he hadn’t heard that before, Lafeu says, ‘I would it were not notorious’, and changes the
subject. Shakespeare clearly wants to bring it up, but most productions of the play avoid
it. The object of this ploy is to explore how a production might make clear what the King
is suffering from and why Shakespeare might have thought that doing so would add
something to the play.
In class
1. Make sure that all the students have text to look at. Explain to the class the
objective of this ploy is to explore how a production might indicate the King’s
illness.
2. Ask for seven volunteers. Cast (or have the class cast) them as the King, Bertram
(1.2), Parolles (1.2), Lafeu (2.1), Helena (2.1), and two lords.
3. Using any clues in the text and having your volunteers demonstrate the choices,
decide with your class how the King looks when he enters. Is he wearing a
crown? Is he in regular clothes or in bedclothes (the bathrobe)? How does he
move? Is he standing? If so, is he being helped to walk? Is he being carried? Does
he sit (the chair)? Does he lie down (the beach lounger as a bed)? If so, does he
lie on his back, his stomach, or his side? Does his face show pain? If so, when?
4. Using clues from his opening speech, decide how the King sounds. Does he
speak normally? Is it hard for him to speak? Is his voice quieter than normal?
louder? Does he speak in bursts between the pains? Does he speak through the
pain? Are there other sounds?
5. Finally, have your class suggest to the other actors how each might react to the
King and his problem. How do the lords in the first scene, who are usually with
the King, treat him? People afflicted by the disease smell badly. Are the lords we
first see with him used to it? How does Bertram react when he enters in 1.2? Is
his reaction different from Parolles’? Which of them would be more likely to
show their reaction? In the next scene, does the King’s friend, Lafeu, respond
differently? What about Helena? Do their reactions change?
In your discussion return to the question of why Shakespeare might have found the
King’s disease important. Ask why they think most productions make no effort to
distinguish his illness. What, judging from what the students have seen, would a
production lose by ignoring the King’s fistula? How does that particular disease change
our understanding of the King? of Bertram? of Helena? How does it connect to the rest
of the play? to Parolles’ riff on virginity? to Lavatch’s riff on buttocks? to the play’s title?
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B. Create a language for Helena’s selection scene
Scripts: AW 2.3.64–110
Prep: Scripts
Players: 4 groups of 7
Use this ploy to get at the way that communication can transcend the language we speak.
The lords in Parolles’ regiment surprise him, blindfold him, and make up a nonsense
language to fool him into thinking he’s been captured by the enemy. But language isn’t simply
the words we speak, it’s how we speak them. As we have seen, the young lords to whom the
King is offering Helena say ‘no’ without actually saying no. Have your students rewrite Act
Two, Scene Three, lines 64 (‘Gentlemen, / heaven hath . . .’) to 110 (‘yes, my good lord.’),
inventing language for all the lords but keeping Helena and the King’s lines as they are.
1. Hand out a one-page script that has Helena’s and the King’s lines, cuts Lafeu’s
entirely, and has a blank space to fill in for all of Bertram’s lines and the lines of
three of the four lords (Lord Three doesn’t say anything).
2. Separate the students into four groups of seven (try to have at least one female in
each group) in different parts of the room.
3. Give each group ten minutes to invent a nonsense language to replace each word
in the lines of the lords and Bertram.
4. Have them cast themselves into the seven roles (the shyest one can have Lord
Three) and for clarity’s sake instruct that a female play Helena.
5. Now divide the four groups into:
(a) one group in which, using their nonsense language, all the lords and
Bertram are eagerly saying ‘yes’.
(b) one group in which, using their nonsense language, the lords are stoutly
saying ‘no’ but Bertram is eagerly saying ‘yes!’
(c) one group in which, using their nonsense language, the lords are all eagerly
saying ‘yes, choose me!’ but Bertram is saying ‘no’.
(d) one group in which, using their nonsense language, all the lords and
Bertram are stoutly saying ‘no’.
6. Give them four minutes to rehearse simultaneously in their part of the room.
7. Now, with each group using the assigned direction, have them perform the
scenes. You can do them in any order you like. I think (d) is the ‘right’ answer,
but I have listed them from the happiest outcome for Helena to the saddest.
Discuss. Whose nonsense language worked the best? was the funniest? Which worked
best for the play as a whole?
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A. Helena asks her husband for a kiss Act Two, Scene Five, 54 (‘I have sir . . .’) to 89
(‘Monsieur, farewell.’). Two speaking parts, one non-speaking part (Parolles).
This scene is the first time we see Helena and Bertram since the King forced Bertram
to marry her. She is bringing word to Bertram that the King wants to see him. Though
Bertram had made clear that he didn’t want to marry her, she doesn’t learn until this
scene that he’s not returning with her to his estate. The scene is her painful attempt at
normalizing relations with her new husband.
In the first version have your actors ignore all this and pretend that the newlyweds are
deeply in love. The formality of their language is merely a kind of teasing, her inability to
get to the point is partly a result of that teasing and partly a result of her being distracted
by whatever affectionate things the two are doing. Parolles watches all this enviously
(why does Helena get all the luck?) or impatiently (‘get a room’). They don’t actually kiss
until after her line ‘Strangers and foes do sunder and not kiss’, but when they do, the kiss
is passionate.
In the second version Bertram can hardly stand to be near Helena and keeps his
distance. He is formal, severe, and cold. Helena knows something is wrong and is
desperate to please Bertram. After she says, ‘faith, yes’, she gets up the nerve to move close
to him for the ‘strangers and foes’ and instead of kissing her, he moves away and gives his
line. Parolles looks on in embarrassment and perhaps pain for his friend Helena.
Discuss the indirectness of language in both versions.
(NB . The two actors will need to touch one another in version one, so you need actors
willing to do that, but you will also need to rehearse the scene to make sure that both
actors are comfortable with the blocking.)
B. Bertram comes on to Diana Act Four, Scene Two, 1 to 51 (‘Here, take my ring.’)
Two speaking parts. A ring for both versions, two bar stools and two glasses for the
second version.
In the first version have your Bertram play an inexperienced dweeb. He’s trying to be
cool but everything he says is awkward, from getting her name wrong in the first line to
mentioning what she will look like when she’s dead. Diana knows exactly what he’s doing
but is trying to appear super-innocent and impressed.
Stage the second version as though it were in a bar. Here, Bertram is ultra-confident
because he’s always hitting on women at bars and always succeeds – especially with
women below his station. In this version Diana is playing the tough, unimpressed girl
who is winding up the guy by giving him a hard time.
Discuss how each version fits the rest of the play, especially Bertram’s account of their
relationship in Act Five.
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Antony and Cleopatra
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
Comments
Antony and Cleopatra is my favourite work of art:3 or, in my customary hyperbole, the
most sublime work of the hand of man. Why? Because it encompasses the world.
Consider the opposites it embraces: man and woman, East and West, war and peace,
work and play, lust and love, fortune and happiness, life and death. And, using laughter, it
sneaks all this wisdom past every obstacle our society has raised against it.
Because it speaks for such extremes of experience, Antony and Cleopatra argues,
perhaps best of all of Shakespeare’s works, for his genius for sympathy. Out of a desire to
respect others’ identities and a laudable resistance to a white, male, straight, Christian
bias, the current view is that writers are imprisoned in their races, their genders, their
social classes, their religions, and their nationalities. Only the poems and books written
by people most like ourselves can speak to our own experiences. Literature in this
formulation is largely a record of social, ethnic, and nationalistic differences.
But this is wrong. Novels, poems, plays, films – the whole world of art – are above
all a way to talk to one another, and the greater the work, the more barriers it speaks
across. To my way of thinking, the artist whose understanding reaches furthest across
race, age, sex, nationality, religion, geography, and time, most deserves our gratitude. In
Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare reached farthest outside himself and spoke, somehow,
for the non-English, the non-white, the non-male, the non-Christian, and the non-
Western.
Some of your students will have trouble hearing those voices. They will read the play
as critics have read it for years, as the tragedy of a man who gave up all for love. That is
precisely the viewpoint of the Romans who begin the play by disapproving of Antony’s
behaviour with a hearty Western negative.‘Nay,’ says Philo,‘but this dotage of our general’s
o’erflows the measure’ (1.1.1–2), and he makes clear that Antony’s affair offends not only
the moderate in him but also the macho and the racist: ‘His captain’s heart . . . is become
the bellows and the fan to cool a gypsy’s lust’ (6, 9–10). Your students will have a difficult
time understanding how a man could choose a woman over world domination, and
especially that woman. They will not like Cleopatra. They will see her as unstable,
capricious, treacherous, selfish, and insincere. And they will agree with Philo that Antony
is a fool. They are very young and, if you teach in the West, very Roman. So you must tell
them the story of the rock star and the woman he loved.
A modern parable of Shakespeare’s play

Once there was a rock star in a band with three other young men and the four of them
owned the rock-and-roll world. They were amassing unheard-of fortunes, and every day
3
Because it is, this commentary is twice as long as any in the book.
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their legend grew. No one in the world of entertainment was more powerful than this
foursome, and they were conquering whole new worlds – film, books, TV. Then the rock
star met a woman. She was almost ten years older than he; she was a different race; and
she did wild and weird and stupid things. The other members of the group did not like
her, and the rock star was spending more and more time with her. And then, because of
his feelings for her, he shocked the world by leaving the band and breaking up the
partnership. Meanwhile, he and his lover were doing all sorts of strange things together
– a good deal of it in bed and all of it extravagant. He devoted himself entirely to her; he
did pretty much whatever she wanted him to do; he even made a pretty lousy record with
her. And people shook their heads at what had happened to the rock star, and people said
bad things about his woman. But he said that she was teaching him important things
about life and that he was happier than ever just ‘watching the wheels’, letting the world
go by, and being with her.
As some of your students will know, this is the story of John Lennon and Yoko
Ono. I have found that the comparison between Antony and John and between
Cleopatra and Yoko helps my students to understand better the issues at stake in
Antony and Cleopatra and to take Antony seriously. They see that it is possible for a man
to give up an entire world for a woman, and they can even recognize in their own dislike
of Yoko the vaguely prudish, racist, sexist, and materialistic Roman disapproval of
Cleopatra.
But while finding these connections makes the play more believable to them, they still
look at the work with Western eyes and miss the main miracle: that white, Anglo-Saxon
William Shakespeare has written an Eastern play, a play that mocks all their values. To
shake this smug, Western standpoint a bit, I suggest you show them two things about the
play: first, that Shakespeare associates the Egyptians, not the Romans, with Christianity,
and, second, that the play is funny.
Christianity in Antony and Cleopatra

Antony and Cleopatra reverberates with the Bible and especially with the New Testament,
and those reverberations should work to make the Christian sympathetic to Cleopatra
and her world. She and Antony, after all, are the ones who are certain that they must find
out ‘new heaven, new earth’ (1.1.17). While Caesar disapproves of Antony as a fisherman:
‘. . . he fishes, drinks, and wastes the lamps of night in revel . . .’ (1.4.4–5), she, like Jesus, is
a fisher of men and imagines catching her Antony and saying ‘ah, ha! y’are caught!’
(2.5.15). Cleopatra is the enemy of Herod – ‘that Herod’s head I’ll have’ (3.3.4–5), and
pictures herself, like Jesus, ‘pinioned’ and hoisted up to ‘the shouting varletry’ (5.2.52–5).
As for Antony, he has his Judas in Enobarbus, who betrays his master and then dies out
of guilt when Antony turns the other cheek. And, perhaps, there is no better way of
summing up their deaths than to say that they rendered unto Rome that which was
Rome’s, the world Rome had conquered.
Students will balk at the idea that Cleopatra or her world have anything to do with
Christianity; they will not understand why ‘the priests bless her when she is riggish’
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(2.2.249–50). Her holiness is the play’s great paradox, and to the empirical mind that
judges things by what they seem, Cleopatra cannot have anything to do with Christian
goodness. Your students will have a hard time getting past her aggressive sexuality. They
will be like the Roman Agrippa, who listens to Enobarbus’s famous description of
Cleopatra without really hearing it and whose response is a leering comment on
Cleopatra’s sexual history:
She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed;

he plowed her, and she cropped.
(2.2.237–8)
But notice how the words Shakespeare gives to Agrippa subvert his meaning: they echo
the biblical injunction to turn swords into ploughshares, and they expose the macho
assumption that swords are better than ploughs and that war is better than love. In
Western/male terms, Agrippa has insulted Cleopatra, but in Eastern/female and Christian
terms, he has paid her the highest tribute.
Above all, what makes this play ‘Christian’ is the contempt that Antony and Cleopatra
come to have for things of this world. That contempt for power, goods, fortune, and
death is what Jesus, an Easterner, teaches. Paradoxically, it is the attitude most alien to
students who are raised in Western society, which calls itself Christian but which
worships power, wealth, and success and pretends that death doesn’t exist. For them,
Caesar – the world’s CEO – is a winner; Antony is a loser; and John should have stayed
with the Beatles.
Am I claiming, then, that Shakespeare wrote an Eastern play at a pitch that Western
ears can’t hear? Not exactly. True, we don’t hear the Eastern play, but Shakespeare
makes us feel it. He makes us sense that somehow this Western ‘tragedy’ of a man
who gave up all for love is, well, happy. A. C. Bradley did not include the play in his
enduring study, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), and what he says about Cleopatra’s death
explains why:
[T]he moment, though tragic, is emphatically one of exaltation. We have not been
feeling horror, nor are we feeling a dreadful suspense. We are going to see Cleopatra
die, but she is to die gloriously and to triumph over Octavius.4
Shakespeare understood that at the end of Antony and Cleopatra an audience feeling any
of the things that audiences at tragedies are supposed to feel – pity, terror, sadness –
would only be validating the Roman world-view and subscribing to Caesar’s sense of
triumph. So Shakespeare used low comedy to push the play past high tragedy to
something new and sublime. Antony and Cleopatra insists on its Eastern identity by
subverting Western values with laughter.
4
Shakespearean Tragedy, Second Edition (First Edition 1904) (London: The MacMillan Press Ltd, 1971),
page 396.
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Comedy in Antony and Cleopatra5

In the spring of 1985 I directed a production of Antony and Cleopatra, and a week later,
as it does for all productions, the JMU Theatre department held a public post-mortem
on the play during which the members of the department read their critiques. One of the
department members said he enjoyed the play but he objected to the overall tone, which
he said was too light for a tragedy. He pointed to ‘the character who brings Cleopatra the
asp’ and said, ‘You gave him a country bumpkin accent and had him play the part like a
clown.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘in the text that is exactly what his character is called: “Clown”.’ ‘Well,
maybe so, but Shakespeare couldn’t literally want a clown at that point in the play.’
Shakespeare did want just that: a clown in the play just before the suicide of Cleopatra.
Audiences familiar with Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and even Lear are not
surprised to find comedy earlier in the play, but what sets Antony and Cleopatra apart is
that the comedy continues and even intensifies as the play draws to its conclusion. We
may want to be sad, but Shakespeare won’t let us. Instead, Shakespeare heightens the
conflict between comedy and death.
Look at Antony’s botched suicide. After having stabbed himself at the false news of
Cleopatra’s suicide, Antony lays in agony on the stage. At that moment, Diomedes enters
and delivers his line,
. . . Most absolute lord,

my mistress Cleopatra sent me to thee.
(4.14.119–20)
Antony, who had thought Cleopatra dead and who had given himself a mortal wound on
that account, suddenly suspects her mischief and asks, ‘When did she send thee?’ (121).
Having seen at least thirty productions of the play, I can tell you that when Antony
delivers this line clearly, audiences laugh.
They laugh because they suddenly hear in Antony’s words something akin to Ricky
Ricardo on the I Love Lucy show exclaiming ‘Oh, Lucy!’ at one of his wife’s pranks –
except that in Antony’s case his beloved’s prank has cost him his life. Shakespeare’s text
puts the mundane question, ‘when did she send thee?’ into the most extreme context and
pushes to the limit the comic value of the line.
This effect deepens in Antony’s final scene, a scene remarkable for the action implied
by the famous stage direction, ‘They heave Antony aloft to Cleopatra.’ Every show has a
moment that will be a big production headache for the company that undertakes it; in
Macbeth it is Banquo’s interruption of the banquet; in King Lear it is Gloucester’s blinding;
in The Tempest it is Prospero’s masque. For Antony and Cleopatra, that moment is getting
Antony up to Cleopatra. On the Globe stage, it meant rigging some method of pulling
Burbage fourteen feet above the main stage. However they might have done it, however
5
I have condensed this material from my article, ‘Staging Comic Divinity: The Collision of High and Low in
Antony and Cleopatra’, Shakespeare Bulletin 13.3 (Summer 1995): 5–8.
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a modern director does it, the effort seems incommensurate with the result. One wonders
why Shakespeare didn’t just have Antony brought in ‘aloft’ – the trouble it takes to lift him
is so impractical that it begs us ask the playwright, ‘what’s the point?’
First, the difficulty of the task heightens the vertical symbolism onstage. High and low
is the most important stage relationship, and the harder it is to get Antony up to Cleopatra,
the higher she appears to be. Certainly one theme of the scene is Antony’s ascent, and
Shakespeare not only goes to all this trouble to show him ‘rising’, but he also sees to it that
Antony never appears below again. In other words, the last we see of Antony is ‘above’,
and in the most basic way that visual fact works against the idea of a tragic fall.
Second – and here is the comedy part – the difficulty of the task draws attention to the
material body of Antony and of the actor who plays him: he’s hard to lift. ‘Here’s sport
indeed’ (33) says Cleopatra, a line that sounds to the ear equally as ‘here’s port indeed’,
and this quibble on Antony’s weight quickly becomes a complaint – ‘How heavy weighs
my Lord!’ (33). This moment is Antony’s apotheosis, the ascent of a lord of this world to
his love and his New Heaven; it is simultaneously a moment in which a mistress (who
refuses to endanger herself by coming down to his level) must struggle with all her might
to lift the worldly weight of her lover’s body and in which she kids him about his bulk.
Spiritual and physical counterpoised one against the other, both somehow prevailing
and combined in the choral comment of the other actors: ‘A heavy sight!’ (42).
And the ‘comedy’ continues after Antony is in the arms of his beloved. The circumstance
is the final farewell between a ‘triple pillar of the world’ and his Queen of the Nile atop an
Egyptian monument, but the words are those of a man having a hard time getting a word
in edgewise.
antony
Give me some wine, and let me speak a little.
cleopatra
No, let me speak . . .
(44–5)
Where else in literature does a lover fail to get the permission of his beloved to speak his
dying words?
In terms of the comedy I am describing here, Cleopatra’s famous final-scene reminder
that she is being portrayed by a boy actor makes perfect sense. Contemplating her fate in
Rome, she tells Iras,
. . . I shall see
some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’the posture of a whore.
(5.2.219–21)
If Shakespeare was intent on sustaining an illusion, or if he was set on establishing a

tragic tone, then this line is blindingly bad playwriting. Of course, the line is dazzlingly
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good precisely because it is not about sustaining an illusion or creating a tragic tone.
Instead, it’s about yoking tragedy and comedy together; the tragic circumstance is a brave
queen’s refusal to be Caesar’s trophy; the comic stage reality is the historical fact that on
the early modern stage boys played women. To remind the audience that Cleopatra is
attached to a boy actor’s body is to remind them of their own material presence at a play,
and to do that is to invite the laughter of sudden self-recognition.
We come now to the Clown who so offended my colleague’s sense of tragedy. Clearly
this ‘rural fellow’ offends Cleopatra’s sense of tragedy as well. On this occasion, she has
worked especially hard to achieve a sense of high circumstance. She is determined to be
a queen in her death and to leave behind her mortality:
Now from head to foot

I am marble constant. Now the fleeting moon
no planet is of mine.
(238–40)
At this moment of highest seriousness, the Clown arrives bearing with him the ‘pretty
worm of Nilus’ and a basket full of ‘dick jokes’:
● she makes a very good report o’ the worm

● the worm’s an odd worm
● I wish you all joy of the worm
● the worm is not to be trusted
For both actors the conflict in this exchange is twofold. First, Cleopatra’s major objective
is to get on with her suicide, while the Clown’s objective is to stay and talk to his Queen.
Second, Cleopatra’s linguistic objective is to return to the high circumstance of her earlier
rhetoric in which she is leaving behind earthly things, while the linguistic objective for
the ‘rural fellow’ is to describe the worm with as much innuendo as possible; his subject
is not marble constancy but ‘worms’ and women.
We are watching Cleopatra unable to get on with her death ritual because of an excess
of etiquette on her part and the lack of it in a country bumpkin. We see her, trapped by
the most common kind of courtesy; weaken, soften, and grow greater in our eyes. Her
curt, ‘Get thee hence, farewell’ (257) evolves; first to a simple ‘farewell’ (259), thence to an
acknowledging ‘ay, ay; farewell’ (262), thence to a reassuring, ‘take thou no care; it shall be
heeded’ (266), and finally to a willingness to be the Clown’s straight man: ‘will it eat me?’
(269). Even at this moment of extremity, even in the midst of her performance as the
newly marble Queen, she is willing to play; and this enjoyment of the world around her
makes her seem divinely human.
Shakespeare saves perhaps his richest joke for the precise moment of Cleopatra’s
suicide, the application the asp – of the instrument of death – to her breast. Iras’s silent
death interrupts her farewell speech and looking at the sudden corpse of her friend
and servant, Cleopatra becomes philosophical: ‘thou tells’t the world / It is not worth
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leave-taking’ (295–6). Her next line, ‘this proves me base’ (298), certainly sounds as if
Cleopatra is going to say that Iras’s lack of concern for things of this world ‘proves’ the
Queen baser than the servant. Cleopatra appears to be demurring to Iras’s superior
spirituality.
Wrong.
Cleopatra is chiding herself not for being more worldly than Iras but for being
outmanoeuvred by her:
If she first meet the curlèd Antony

he’ll make demand of her, and spend that kiss
which is my heaven to have.
(5.2.299–301)
Her haste – part jealousy, part lust, part pride – is thoroughly comic in its worldliness.
But the absolute childishness of her determination to have Antony’s first kiss more
completely persuades us of Cleopatra’s connection to the next world than any high
declaration she could make.
To outstrip Iras she must now hurry, so she reaches for the asp:
. . . Come, thou mortal wretch

with thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
of life at once untie.
(301–3)
As she speaks those words, she must put the snake to her breast (since later she asks
Charmian, ‘Dost thou not see my baby at my breast . . .’ [307]), but something goes wrong.
The snake refuses to bite, and Cleopatra says to it, ‘Poor venomous fool, / Be angry, and
dispatch’ (303–4).
That moment is the grand ‘joke’, in many ways the pinnacle of the play’s subversive
comedy. Explaining any joke is deadly; but perhaps a slow-motion close-up will clarify
the comedy. In Shakespeare’s dramatization of one of history’s most famous acts of
suicide, Cleopatra applies a deadly serpent to her breast. Her language (‘Come, thou
mortal wretch’ [301]) as she does so is as rhetorically appropriate to her instrument of
death as is Romeo’s address to his poison: ‘Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide . . .’
(5.3.116). Now assume X-ray vision for a moment and ‘zoom in’ on the asp as it finds itself
placed against Cleopatra’s breast and nipple.6 The question is ‘what do you get when you
put a deadly asp on Cleopatra’s breast?’ The answer is ‘one happy snake’ (rim shot) – an
unangry asp, too full of the contentment of both the lover and nursing babe to bite. This
moment is certainly some sort of ‘tit joke’, but it is simultaneously Shakespeare’s great
compliment to Cleopatra, his staged affirmation of her own view of herself: transcending
6
As implied by Cleopatra’s description of ‘my baby at my breast / That sucks the nurse asleep’ (307–8).
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species, her human female body charms to harmlessness this poisonous serpent of the
Nile.
And Cleopatra gets the ‘joke’ and responds to it:
. . . O, couldst thou speak,

That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass
Unpolicied!
(304–6)
This is her recognition that the asp has come under her spell, that in some way this
serpent, by surrendering its toxic nature to her charms, has cast its lot with Antony and
against Caesar. In her reading of the asp’s mind, by resisting her world rather than
succumbing to her as Antony did, Caesar is not (as he thinks) the greatest politician of
the world but the opposite – an ‘ass unpolicied’.
If Antony and Cleopatra anywhere resists tragedy, it is here in Cleopatra’s last speech,
and we should not be surprised to find that her last words and final stage actions assert
not death but new life. She becomes not only the mother with her baby at her breast, but
the wife as well, with her husband at the other. Her last words are
O Antony! – Nay, I will take thee too.

What should I stay –
(310–11)
Here many editors, followed by many directors, suggest that Cleopatra’s words, ‘Nay, I
will take thee too’ (310), mean that she takes up another asp. But the Clown never talks
of more than one asp; repeatedly he refers to ‘the worm’ in the singular.7
To whom then does she say, ‘Nay, I will take thee too’ (310)? Even Caesar sees it when
he says, ‘she looks like sleep, / As she would catch another Antony / in her strong toil of
grace’ (344–6). Cleopatra, in this next-to-last gesture, is reaching for the Antony she so
clearly sees and hears earlier in the speech. The moment is a mirror image of her brief
jealousy of Iras, as though she is saying to Antony, ‘don’t be jealous of the worm, there’s
room for you as well’, and, as Ann Jennalie Cook reminds us, the words ‘I will take thee
too’ are the woman’s response in the Jacobean Anglican wedding service.8
I have called this reaching gesture her ‘next-to-last’ because it must be followed by a
last gesture – either Cleopatra’s dropping her arm or positioning it somewhere on her
body. One arm should still be holding the asp, ‘the baby at [her] breast’. Thus, the most
logical placement of the other arm is to conclude the reaching motion by having
7
Editors misread Dolobella’s line, ‘the like is on her arm,’ to mean that Cleopatra has a bite on her arm in addi-
tion to the bite on her breast; but Dolobella is referring to Charmian’s arm. Charmian takes the one asp from
Cleopatra’s breast on the line ‘I’ll mend it and then play’ and applies it as to her arm when the guard enters.
8
At a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on Shakespeare in Performance at the Folger Shake-
speare Library, March 1993.
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Cleopatra pull whomever she imagines she is addressing to her other breast. Crossing
her arms in an embrace thus enacts both the high circumstance of a spiritual reunion
with Antony and the low comedy of soothing someone jealous of the ‘baby’ at her breast.
Not coincidentally she will also have assumed the crossed arm pose depicted on the
Egyptian tombs of kings and queens.
Shakespeare has brought us ineluctably to this moment – a moment that challenges
the Western faith about the hereafter with the most legendary example of Eastern
certitude on the subject – the burial of Egyptian kings and queens. Of all popular lore
about the ancient Egyptians the most celebrated was (and is) the pyramids, the palaces
built as housing for their dead kings and queens in the afterlife. Shakespeare stages the
death of Cleopatra as the entrance into that afterlife. Moments later the emblem of
Western civilization, Augustus Caesar, bursts into the scene and tries to impose on it a
Western/tragic reading with his ‘pity’. But he’s too late. An audience will resist that
interpretation because Shakespeare has already made sublime Eastern comedy of Antony
and Cleopatra’s deaths. When Caesar announces that he will take the the couple out of
the pyramid to bury them elsewhere, we know that we are watching a grave robber
desecrate of one of the world’s great pagan tombs.
We also know what happens to the grave robbers of the Egyptian pyramids, and that
ain’t comic.
My Antony and Cleopatra story

When I started teaching at James Madison University, I taught Antony and Cleopatra in
every course I could. As I’ve said, it’s my favourite work of art, so I would finish off all my
sophomore courses in drama and even in fiction with a week or two on Antony and
Cleopatra. I remember particularly enjoying a class I taught in the summer of 1975. My
third daughter was born one day before the course began, so I was in a joyous mood.
Plus, it was a three-week course that met three hours a day, and the students had no other
class competing for their attention. Plus, all of them seemed to like me. All except for one
student named Gay, who sat on the front row and who never laughed at any of my jokes.
I assumed she hated me, and that was bad for two reasons: first, to judge from her papers,
she was far and away the best student in the class, and, second, her mother was my dean.
When, at the end of the course, we finally arrived at Antony and Cleopatra, I went out on
the same limb I’ve gone out on in this chapter. I declared that the play was Christian in
the best sense of the word; I said that if the East had somehow prevailed over the West,
we would read the play as a romantic comedy. At that point, Gay raised her hand for the
first time in the course.
‘Yes, Ms. Finlayson?’ I said, certain she would say, ‘This is a complete crock. I’m going
to tell my mother what an idiot you are, and you can kiss this job goodbye.’
What she actually said was, ‘Two summers ago I was at a retreat with the Maharishi
Maharesh, the one the Beatles studied with, and one of the people in the workshop asked
him if anyone had ever reached a perfect state of understanding. “Yes,” he said,
“Shakespeare, when he wrote Antony and Cleopatra.” ’
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Ploys
A. Hunting the mysterious paradox
Prep: 10 minutes
In class: 30–40 minutes + discussion
Homework: Lists of paradoxes
Paradox – a seemingly self-contradictory idea – is the fundamental building block of

Antony and Cleopatra. The embodiment of paradox is Cleopatra, and the supreme
example of paradoxical language is Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra on her barge.
Repeatedly, Enobarbus has to resort to paradox to explain the inexplicable:
I saw her once

hop forty paces through the public street;
and having lost her breath, she spoke, and panted,
that she did make defect perfection
and, breathless, pow’r breathe forth.
(2.2.238–42)
This kind of language occurs throughout the play and frequently appears in its most
compact form, the oxymoron, or two-word paradox. For example, Agrippa calls Cleopatra
a ‘royal wench’, two words that appear to contradict each other.
1. As a homework assignment, send your students on a paradox search. All of them
are to bring in their five favourite paradoxes from the play (to make things a bit
more challenging, you can exclude the barge speech). Each item on the list must
include enough of the sentence to be comprehensible, and the paradox itself is to
be underlined.
2. Take up the lists at the beginning of class and redistribute them so that no one
has his or her own list.
3. Now have a student read the first paradox on the list before him or her. You are
to judge if the statement or phrase qualifies as a paradox. If it does, all the other
students in the class who have that paradox anywhere on the sheet in front of
them are to put an X beside it in the left-hand margin.
4. Continue reading unread paradoxes until everyone in the class has read a
paradox.
5. Your ‘Roman winner’ is the student who has the most X’s on his or her sheet (which
is being ‘graded’ by someone else) after the first read-through. It’s okay to have a tie.
6. Now ask whose sheets have one or more unread paradoxes. Those people are
your finalists for the ‘Egyptian winner’, and they are to face off.
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7. Have their sheets returned to them. Now each of them is to read one of the
paradoxes that has not yet been read. Whichever of these finalists gets through
the round without either reading (or having read by another finalist) a paradox
someone else in the class has goes into the next round.
8. Continue to eliminate finalists until only one of them has an X-free list or until
all the finalists have read their paradoxes (again, ties are okay). Remember that
you must certify that the sentence or phrase contains a paradox.
This exercise is much simpler to do than to read how to do, and it attunes your
students both to words in the play and to the complex meaning behind them.
B. Block the first entrance of Antony and Cleopatra
Scripts: AC 1.1
Prep: 10 minutes
In class: 20 minutes + discussion
Players: (up to 15)
Props: fans, scarves, goblets, grapes, etc.
When Antony and Cleopatra first enter, Demetrius and Philo are already onstage.
The stage direction reads, ‘Flourish. Enter Antony, Cleopatra, her Ladies, the Train,
with Eunuchs fanning her.’ Never exceeding twenty people onstage and keeping in
mind the thrust configuration of the Globe stage, have your students cast and block
that scene. No one need say any lines. Where are Philo and Demetrius in relation to
Antony and Cleopatra on the one hand and to the audience on the other? Why? How
many ‘Ladies’ are there with Cleopatra? Just Iras and Charmian? Are the ‘Ladies’
separate from or part of the ‘Train’? How many Eunuchs? Are Antony and Cleopatra
touching when they enter? Does everyone stay standing? Why? Does everyone lie
down? Why? Who is moving more, Antony or Cleopatra? Neither? Both? Who is nearer
the audience? How can you block the entrance to prove that Philo is right about
the couple? How can you block it to prove that he is wrong? Every moment of that
entrance rewards discussion.
You can liven the proceedings even more by bringing cushions, scarves, fans (the
larger the better), goblets, and grape clusters or other fruit. When the class consensus
is that you’ve found the perfect entrance, get your students to freeze in the best
arrangement of that entrance, photograph it, and if they all like the image, post it to
Snapchat, Instagram (or whatever social media site is actually current when you do this
activity . . .).
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A. Cleopatra and Charmian on how to win a man Act One, Scene Three, 1 (‘Where
is he?’) to 14 (‘sick and sullen’). Two speaking parts and three non-speaking parts.
Every important figure in this play has two sidekicks. Caesar has Agrippa and
Maecenas, Pompey has Menas and Menecrates, Antony has Enobarbus and later Eros,
and Cleopatra has Charmian and Iras. All of these relationships are worth discussing, but
for the purposes of this exercise what you want to get at is the relationship between
Cleopatra and her ladies in waiting. You and your students will come up with lots of
alternatives for this scene, but the most important one gets at the issue of status. The
question, like so much else in this play, can be paradoxical.
In the first version, Cleopatra expects absolute obedience and Charmian tries to be
deferential. When Charmian suggests to Cleopatra that she is handling Antony in the
wrong way, she does so a little fearfully, and Cleopatra is highly irritated at Charmian for
daring to give instructions to her Queen. Iras should be shocked and afraid for Charmian
when she hears her giving advice to Cleopatra. Alexas should rush out of the room, even
bending in humility as he goes. Everyone keeps a respectful distance. Antony himself
should enter a little fearfully.
In the second version, Cleopatra clearly thinks of Charmian as a friend as well as a
servant. Charmian is used to giving her advice, even lip, and takes great pleasure in it.
Cleopatra so likes hearing sass from Charmian that she actually invites impertinence.
Hearing Charmian’s advice amuses her. Iras is completely at ease physically around the
Queen. She doesn’t hesitate to hug or touch anyone in the scene, including Cleopatra.
Alexas, rather than rushing out, moves slowly and almost truculently. Antony still enters
fearfully.
Ask your students which of these two versions shows us the more powerful Cleopatra:
the one in which she makes everyone follow the rules or the one in which she’s willing to
have them break rules.
B. Enobarbus and Cleopatra – asides or not asides? Act Three, Scene Thirteen,
41 (‘Mine honesty and . . .’) to 69 (‘dearest quit thee’). Three speaking parts.
In all of the Folio, the first collected works of Shakespeare, only four stage directions use
the word ‘aside’, yet editors of the text often decide that discretion is the better part of valour
and have characters who might offend someone speak in asides. For example, in most
editions, the passage at hand begins and ends with Enobarbus speaking in asides. In the
first case, editors add asides because they assume that Enobarbus is apparently speaking
his own thoughts, and in the second they do so because they assume he wouldn’t want
Cleopatra to know that he’s going to tattle to Antony about her behaviour with Thidias.
I think having Enobarbus just say these things to Cleopatra creates a much more
interesting relationship.
In the first version, have your actors do it just as the editors suggest. Enobarbus’s first
six lines are entirely to himself, while Cleopatra (she can be on a throne) simply awaits
the entrance of Thidias. During the scene in which she flirts with Thidias, Enobarbus
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tries to stand far away, the better to spy on them. His final lines are an aside, and Cleopatra
isn’t even aware he’s left.
In the second version, there are no asides. Enobarbus’ first six lines go to Cleopatra,
because he is admitting that he is wavering in his loyalty to Antony and could understand
that she might be, but that ultimately the best way to triumph over Caesar is to stay loyal
to Antony. He wants her to hear that, because he thinks she might be wavering too. When
Thidias enters, Enobarbus is completely intrusive, never standing far from Cleopatra,
and in his last lines he tells her bluntly that he’s going to tell Antony what is going on.
See if your students think the second version is more in keeping with the intentions of
Enobarbus, who speaks his mind and who thinks that Cleopatra is seriously flirting with
Thidias (and by extension Caesar). Just as obviously, if he warns her he is going to tell
Antony, and she gives him no reaction, she assumes that Antony, should he come to see
for himself, will understand that she is only playing Thidias for their advantage. In any
case, your students will see how consequential this editorial decision can be.
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AS YOU LIKE IT
Comments
‘Silly’ is the word that came to mind the first time I read As You Like It at age nineteen;
‘boring’ was not far behind.
It starts like a thriller: the good brother, Orlando, angry about his poor upbringing,
fights with his guardian, the bad brother Oliver, who then persuades a professional
wrestler to break Orlando’s neck in a challenge match before the usurping Duke Frederick
(the rightful Duke is now a political refugee in the Forest of Arden and ‘many merry men
with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England’ [1.1.111–12]). At the
wrestling match Orlando meets Duke Frederick’s daughter Celia and her cousin,
Rosalind, the rightful Duke’s daughter; he and Rosalind fall instantly in love, and to her
relief and everyone’s surprise Orlando beats the wrestler Charles. Orlando’s triumph
angers Duke Frederick because Orlando is the son of a friend of the Old Duke; in a bad
humour, Duke Frederick banishes his niece Rosalind, who in the company of her loyal
cousin, Celia, and the court jester, Touchstone, decides to run away to the Forest of
Arden. Meanwhile, Orlando, informed by the old servant Adam that his brother Oliver
intends to kill him by burning him alive in his house, heads off with the old man for the
Forest of Arden. All that plot and the play is just barely into the second act!
But then the plot comes screeching to a halt, and the next three-and-a-half acts are a
series of conversations about love, marriage, and the meaning of life. To make things
even goofier – at least to my nineteen-year-old self – Shakespeare gives his play a happy
ending in completely unconvincing ways. First, he gives us two implausible offstage
conversions: Oliver suddenly repents his evil, becomes a loving brother, and marries
Celia; and Duke Frederick decides to restore his brother’s crown and live in the woods,
after ‘meeting with an old religious man’ (5.4.158). Second, he has everyone married by
the magical assistance of Hymen, God of marriage. No kidding.
Your students will likely react to this narrative in one of two ways: either they will
think it ridiculous, as I did, or they will accept it as somehow ‘Shakespearean’. Their
presumption is that a writer from an antique age was writing a play for an antique
audience and that the play would have worked fine ‘in those days’, so who are we to
complain about its plot? But it may be that As You Like It works today, as it did in the late
sixteenth century, because of its unexpected qualities – unexpected by modern audiences,
by sixteenth-century audiences, and, I speculate, unexpected by Shakespeare when he
began the work.
Shakespeare was in fact using the conventions of the pastoral romance in As You Like
It and his audiences would indeed have been familiar with those conventions from
poetry (Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, for example), from other plays (especially such
works as John Lyly’s Endymion), and from prose romances (most directly, Thomas
Lodge’s Rosalynde, Shakespeare’s source). In these works, lovesick characters spend a lot
of time working out their feelings in fields or forests, and the plots tend to be feeble
frames for the overwrought outdoor musings of the lovers. Such narratives contain,
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As You Like It
moreover, elements of magic that correspond to Hymen’s appearance in Shakespeare’s

play. So, in support of the response that the oddness of the play is merely the norm for
the period, one could argue that (1) As You Like It would indeed appeal more to the
pastoral-conscious audiences in ‘those’ days and that (2) its plotlessness is a characteristic
of the type of work he was writing.
True. And yet the construction of this play tells me not only that Shakespeare
abandons the business of plot, but, more, that the play is actually about the abandonment
of plot. As we have seen, at the beginning Shakespeare is generating plot at a feverish
pace. No other play of his – not even Richard III – jumps so suddenly into conflicts and
conspiracies; by the end of the first scene of As You Like It Orlando has made his
complaint against his brother (line 23), the two brothers have fought (line 49), and Oliver
has duped the wrestler, Charles, into an intent to kill Orlando (line 157). By Act Two,
Scene Four, the playwright has stirred up a host of what-will-happen-next questions:
Will Orlando thrive in the forest or will Oliver find him and kill him? Will Rosalind and
Celia escape the clutches of Duke Frederick? Will Orlando and Rosalind find each other
in the forest? Will Orlando recognize her? Will Duke Senior and his merry men win back
the dukedom? Will Adam survive the hardships of the forest? Will the women be safe?
Will Rosalind find her father, Duke Senior?
What makes the play odd is not just that Shakespeare delays the answers to these
questions, which he does, or that he switches his attention to other matters, which
he does. What is odd is that he deals with these narrative questions so offhandedly
that all theatrical energy leaks out of the solution. Take for example the matter of
Orlando’s finding Rosalind. Shakespeare shows us Orlando hanging love poems to
Rosalind on trees, so the audience knows from the start who the culprit is. He then
shows us Rosalind entering reading one of the poems. To make the moment suspenseful,
he might have shown her discovering the poems or had Touchstone or Celia tease her
with one of them before she sees it. Nope. Celia assumes it’s obvious who wrote the
lines, but she puzzles, first, over Rosalind’s lack of curiosity – ‘But didst thou hear without
wondering how thy name should be hanged and carved upon these trees?’ (3.2.168–70)
– and then over her inability to guess the obvious answer to the mystery even after
Celia identifies him unequivocally by mentioning Rosalind’s gift to him – ‘a chain that
you once wore, about his neck’ (178). When that clue does not seem to penetrate, Celia
cannot understand what is going on – ‘is it possible?’ (185) – and when Rosalind keeps
asking to be told who it is, Celia is completely bewildered: ‘O wonderful, wonderful, and
most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all hooping!’
(188–90).
The audience must be bewildered too. The question is not – nor has it really ever been
– ‘will Rosalind discover her admirer?’ but ‘how can she possibly not see the obvious?’
The first question is a conventional one related to plot; the second question is stranger
stuff, and the shift from the first kind of question to the second kind of question is
characteristic of Shakespeare’s strategy throughout the rest of the play. He refuses to use
the narrative tricks of his trade to answer first questions and keeps deflecting our view
from the plot to the behaviour of the characters.
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Will the evil brother find and kill our young hero? No: he will have an offstage
conversion and turn up a changed man.
How will the good Duke get his throne back from the bad Duke? Well, the third
brother, whom the audience has never met, will come onstage at the end to tell us that
Duke Frederick met an old, religious man and converted to a religious hermit and is
giving the throne back to Duke Senior. Nice.
Will the country swain William fight Touchstone over Audrey? No: he’ll listen to
Touchstone’s threats, say ‘God rest you, merry sir’ (5.1.59), and exit.
Will our heroine be reunited with her Robin Hood father? Well, sure, but not in the
big hurry suggested by Rosalind’s escape from Duke Frederick to ‘seek’ the good Duke. In
fact, late in the third act, Rosalind casually informs Celia that, ‘I met the Duke yesterday
and had much question with him’ (3.4.32–3), and then, without a thought to Celia’s
amazement, dismisses the whole matter with, ‘but what talk we of fathers when there is
such a man as Orlando?’ (35–6).
When the onstage reunion between father and daughter finally happens, Shakespeare
doesn’t spend any time on it; rather the Duke’s recognition is made part of the wedding
pageant.
duke senior
If there be truth in sight, you are my daughter.
orlando
If there be truth in sight, you are my Rosalind.
(5.4.116–17)
His and Orlando’s revelation are simultaneous and nearly identical: Shakespeare gets one
discovery for the price of two.
In this wilful squandering of dramatic moments, Shakespeare, throughout As You
Like It, perversely refuses to behave himself as a playwright.
Show your students this ‘anti-dramatic’ element in the play, then raise the question ‘why?’
What is Shakespeare up to? What is happening instead of plot? Your students will have
many answers to these questions. Certainly Shakespeare examines a spectrum of attitudes
towards love, from the sickly sentimentality of Silvius (whose presence in the play makes
Orlando’s romanticism nearly palatable) to the horny cynicism of Touchstone – ‘man hath
his desires’ (3.3.74). He also explores the question of the meaning of life through the musings
of characters as diverse as the melancholy Jaques for whom ‘all the world’s a stage, / and all
the men and women merely players’ (2.7.139–40); the cynical Touchstone, who observes
that ‘from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, / and then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
and thereby hangs a tale’ (2.7.26–8); and the old shepherd Corin, who boasts that ‘I earn that
I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good,
content with my harm; and the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs
suck’ (3.2.70–4). Connected to this debate about a meaningful life is the issue of life at court
(the social and political world) versus life in the country (the private world detached from
society). Shakespeare certainly lets his play debate the Big Issues.
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As You Like It
And one of those Big Issues is gender. In the original production a boy played
Rosalind, a heroine who decides to dress as a boy, and in that disguise tells Orlando to
pretend that she is a woman and woo her. A boy playing a girl playing a boy playing a girl
– a world record for gender switching. Shakespeare keeps turning gender inside out, and
his intent to connect this process to the audience is clear when Rosalind addresses the
Epilogue as a woman but says, ‘If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had
beards that pleased me . . .’ (212–13).
The play itself seems re-gendered. Shakespeare, having revved up the great male plot
engine in the first third of his play and chased the good guys into the woods, shuts off the
plot engine – and not just what happens in the play but how the play itself happens, how
it works. He abandons a narrative of cause and effect and embraces instead a narrative of
chance encounters, idle conversations, and magical conversions. And to preside over this
non-linear, non-conflictual, ambivalent world he provides a gender-shifting woman.
Things happen in the Forest of Arden only when Rosalind allows them to happen, as
though Shakespeare, having switched off the masculine engine that raises expectations
of an action-filled play, purposefully switches on a feminine engine in search of
something more. I think that part of why we like As You Like It – why we list it among his
mature comedies – is the sense we have that it is risking something new.
A personal note: I have twice directed this play, and it has steadily climbed the list of my
favourite plays. I think now that As You Like It is Shakespeare’s most genial work, a play
in which the strange condition of being in love – everywhere mocked and everywhere
cherished – ultimately suffuses the world of lovers and non-lovers in a necessary way.
Ploys
A. Greeting card contest
Prep: Prior class intro

Homework: Craft project
Prizes (optional)
As You Like It looks at lovers and love of all sorts; almost every character in the play has
something to say about love. Have your students choose any quote from the play from
four words to four lines long and design greeting cards using photographs and
illustrations culled from newspapers, magazines, or the Internet. Thus, for example, a
photograph of a dishevelled athlete from Sports Illustrated might be on the face of the
card and inside: ‘I am he that is so love-shaked’ (3.2.358). Or a Valentine’s Day card with
a man or woman in a sexy pose on the outside and inside: ‘Come, woo me, woo me; for
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now I am in a holiday humour and like enough to consent’ (4.1.64–5). Or an insult card
with a photograph of a comically unattractive man or woman on the outside and ‘Sell
when you can, you are not for all markets’ (3.5.60) on the inside. On the due day, your
students will bring their cards to class for a card exhibition and sale during which you
turn the class into a card gallery for fifteen minutes. The class can vote on the best card
in a number of categories – funniest, sexiest, most romantic, nastiest, sweetest, etc. – after
which, if they like, the students can put the cards on sale.
This exercise has several benefits. First, it makes the students adopt Shakespeare’s
language and put it into a context of their choosing; second, it helps students clarify the
play’s various positions on love; and, finally, it connects Shakespeare’s appeal to a mass
audience on the subject of love with today’s romance market. Even the conventions of
the pastoral may not seem so distant in the light of one of those ubiquitous greeting
cards with a soft-focus photograph of young lovers in a field of flowers.
B. Make up gestures for the ‘lie seven times removed’
Scripts: AYL 5.4.42–102

Prep: Handouts
Player(s): 1 or 2 Touchstones
A theme of this book is that we impose our own barriers to understanding Shakespeare’s
language and that most of the text is easily accessible. Yes, but occasionally we encounter
a passage that – especially in a reading – yields us almost nothing. A good example of
‘hard Shakespeare’ is Touchstone’s disquisition on the ‘quarrel upon the seventh cause’
(5.4.42–102), in which he explains the seven ways of calling a man a liar (‘giving the lie’)
without getting into a fight. Shakespeare obviously wrote this scene to take advantage of
the comic style of the original actor (perhaps Will Kemp) who played Touchstone, but on
the page the passage is, if not indecipherable, certainly uninteresting. In productions,
however, a clever actor can find ever more insulting actions to accompany the seven
degrees of insults: the Retort Courteous, the Quip Modest, the Reply Churlish, the
Reproof Valiant, the Countercheck Quarrelsome, the Lie Circumstantial, the Lie Direct.
After Touchstone introduces these terms and their accompanying gestures, Jaques asks
him to repeat ‘in order the degrees of the lie’, and he does so in one speedy sentence. The
comic payoff for this business is that during this second quick repetition of the insults
the actor, speeding through the terms, must keep them together with the actions he’s
already demonstrated.
Have your students offer gestures for each insult and, having debated the degree
and comic value of each, choose seven gestures in escalating order of provocativeness.
Then choose ‘volunteers’ to recite the seven degrees as Touchstone’s repeated them
(5.4.88–95), and lead the class in those gestures. Trust me, this exercise is hilarious, and it
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As You Like It
gets all your students on their feet and gives them a glimpse of how much performance
can add to the text.
A. Orlando’s meeting with Rosalind in the forest Act Three, Scene Two, 291 (‘I will
speak’) to 423 (end of the scene). Three speaking parts.
This scene is a long, challenging one and deserves careful rehearsal with the best
volunteer actors you can find. (It will take around eight minutes, so you might want to
cut about twenty or more lines.) You can make editing it a class project in the previous
class. I suggest three versions:
In the first version: a dumb, jock Orlando, who has no idea whatsoever that ‘Ganymede’
is a girl, and a smart, aggressive Rosalind will help to illustrate a feminist reading of the
play. In the second version: a smart, wary Orlando, who figures out not only that
‘Ganymede’ is a girl, but also that she is Rosalind, and a completely lovesick Rosalind.
This variation helps to focus on the question of cross-dressing. If you’re brave, you might
even try the second version with two boy actors. The third version: an exact rerun of the
class’s favourite reading from above, except that you station someone onstage as Celia and
have her turn her head to the audience in varying degrees of disbelief whenever Rosalind
either says something negative about girls or puts herself in a compromising position
with Orlando. I think that this reading is actually the most important one, because in my
own class it was the addition of Celia that made the scene work. You can use this version
to show your class ‘the Celia effect’, the extra dimension that a silent character can bring
to a scene.
B. Rosalind and Celia discuss Orlando Act Three, Scene Four, 1 (‘Never talk’) to 42
(‘and folly guides’). Two speaking parts.
This short and wonderful scene will seem extremely familiar to your students, all of
whom have had to deal at one time or another with a lovesick friend. Do it two ways to
start. In the first version, have Celia be the completely patient and supportive friend who
has to listen to Rosalind swing back and forth from adoring Orlando to being mad at
him. The objective of the actor playing Celia in this first version is to be Rosalind’s best
friend, to deliver lines like, ‘certainly there is no truth in him’, with as much gentleness
and reluctance as possible. In the second version, have the actor playing Celia start the
scene as a friend who will go nuts if she has to be in one more lovesick conversation. Her
patience on the subject of Orlando has run out entirely, and the subtext of everything she
says to Rosalind is ‘just shut up, you idiot’. When Rosalind gets to the part about meeting
her father in the woods and chatting with him, remind your Celia for this second version
that the whole purpose of running away to the Forest of Arden was to seek the protection
of Duke Senior, and now Rosalind is so besotted with love that she has forgotten even to
mention to her fellow runaway that she found her father.
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THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
Comments
Written as early as 1590, The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s early works. Your
students will enjoy the vitality and ingenuity of The Comedy of Errors, and they will also
be able to see why it is, comparatively, a lightweight work, a beginning. Because students
can gauge by its weaknesses the strengths of Shakespeare’s mature work, the play is best
used along with at least one other of his plays. But if this is the only Shakespeare play a
student reads, a teacher can nonetheless make that a valuable introduction to his skill as
a playwright.
One sign that The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s early works is its formulaic
quality. Shakespeare has combined two plays, The Menaechmi and Amphitruo, by the
Roman playwright Plautus, and squared the complications by giving each of the
separated twins (Antipholus of Syracuse and Antipholus of Ephesus) in his source a
separated twin servant (Dromio of Syracuse and Dromio of Ephesus). The central
joke of the play is that the man and servant from Syracuse, newly arrived in Ephesus,
keep being mistaken for their twin brothers who, unknown to them, live in the city.
Shakespeare has set himself the logistical problem of having four characters interact
with an entire community without letting the brothers in either set meet one another
until the end of the play (little wonder this is Shakespeare’s shortest play). A beginning
playwright, ambitious to show his stuff, doubtless found tempting this sort of elaborate
problem of plotting, and Shakespeare’s uncharacteristic obedience to the classical unities
(of time, place, and person) further suggests that his attraction to the project was partly
theoretical.
The primary evidence, however, that the play is one of Shakespeare’s first is the
thinness of the play’s characters. Comparing them with the characters elsewhere in
Shakespeare’s work, will help you teach the meaning of ‘flat’ and ‘round’ characters.
Antipholus of Ephesus may be more lighthearted than his brother, and Dromio of
Syracuse may be a bit cleverer and more mischievous than his, but they, like every other
character in the play – with one exception – rarely rise above the stereotypes necessary
to the plot. That rather remarkable exception to this generalization about The Comedy of
Errors is Adriana, the jealous wife of Antipholus of Ephesus.
By convention and the requirements of this plot, Adriana’s role should be the shrewish
wife whose unfair treatment of her husband has driven him from home. But even
through the comic jangle of the rhymed lines (another sign of the early Shakespeare,
eager to show off ), we can hear an Adriana too human to be pigeonholed by type. When,
for example, she worries about her age, she rather troublingly asks, ‘What ruins are in me
that can be found / by him not ruined?’ And it may be funny when she confronts the
wrong Antipholus, a man who has never seen her before, with her accusations of
infidelity, but her general argument against adultery stands out against the stream of
comedy:
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The Comedy of Errors
For if we two be one, and thou play false,

I do digest the poison of thy flesh,
being strumpeted by thy contagion.
(2.2.141–3)
She calls her husband ‘ill-faced, worse bodied . . . vicious’ (4.2.20–1) and much more and
then immediately admits ‘I think him better than I say’ (4.2.25). When at the end of the
play, the Abbess, the plot’s adjudicator, blames Adriana for her husband’s supposed
madness and insists on nursing him back to health, a cipher would have stood aside in
humiliation, but Adriana will not yield her rights or duties:
I will not hence and leave my husband here;

and ill it doth beseem your holiness
to separate the husband and the wife.
(5.1.109–11)
At the end of the play, Shakespeare, I think, rewards this character in a small way, by
allowing her the pleasure of a little secret from her husband, who must wonder just what
sort of dessert his twin brother might have had at ‘dinner’ with Adriana.
Just as Adriana is a hint of characters to come (Kate, Beatrice, Portia), the play
has in it the seeds of themes and images to come. Here is the separated family; here
is the interrupted banquet; here is the overriding Shakespearean theme of reality and
illusion. But the play is most edifying as a demonstration of a whole kit of dramatic
tools. You can use it to show students how a playwright can use exposition to start the
action of a play twenty-five years after the story began. You can use it to teach them
the Aristotelean ‘unities’ time and place: the action of the play occurs in one place,
Ephesus, and in the span of one day. You can teach them, as you will see in the ploys,
how easy it is to create ‘twins’. You can teach dramatic irony, since almost half the play
consists of the audience watching characters thinking they are speaking to one person
when they are actually speaking to someone else. Comedy of Errors is a fine play to teach
your student the workings of theatre, but by itself it will not teach them the wonders of
Shakespeare.
Teach Comedy of Errors in contrast to his other works: pair it with The Tempest for the
unity of time and place; pair it with Twelfth Night to talk about twins; pair it with Pericles
to discuss shipwrecks and happy endings. As a foil, as the twin to another play, Comedy
will show your students how the stories and the themes that mattered to Shakespeare
when he began writing plays persisted and also how a good playwright matures. Pairing
it with another play will make them both more interesting.
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Ploys
A. The problem of the twins
Prep: Finding props

Volunteers: 4 look-alikes; 4 dissimilar
Props: sunglasses, baseball caps, knitted caps, big jackets, neckties, scarves, face paint,
etc.
Ben Jonson once rejected source material for a play because it had twins in it, and he felt
that only actual twins could play those parts. The Comedy of Errors requires two sets of
twins, and since it is unlikely that twins made up four of the actors in Shakespeare’s
company, we must assume that the company found some way to represent the Antipholi
and the Dromios without casting real twins. Using this issue as a point of departure
about the nature of theatre, have your students do what every production of the play
must do – solve the twin problem.
Do it two ways – first, with students who look alike and again with students who look
very different.
(1) Making twins of students who look alike. Bring with you to class two nearly identical
versions of each of the following: two pairs of sunglasses, two baseball caps, two knitted caps,
two big jackets, two neckties, two long scarves, two fake moustaches, two identical wigs, or
two similar pieces of any other kind of wear. Help your class choose two sets of people who
look alike (you can use males and females, but you can’t mix genders within each set of
siblings). Make certain your class discusses the reason for their decisions about hair
colouring, height, sex, and so on. Try to link those decisions to the text. When you have your
four people in front of the class, move to a discussion of ways of disguising their ‘un-twinness’.
Using the costume pieces you have brought, let your students suggest ways of
costuming the twins within each set. If you are using face paint or a charred cork let the
class help to decide on the ‘look’ for each set of twins. Now discuss movements – especially
for the Dromios – that the twins could have in common. Perhaps they both walk splay-
footed, or perhaps they both always keep their hands in their back pockets, or perhaps
they both keep their heads poked forward. Your class will enjoy making their lookalikes
look even more alike.
(2) Making twins of students who look nothing alike. But the real fun comes when you
do it again, ignore the lookalike problem all together, and make four dissimilar students
look like two sets of twins. Here you have leaped into the real magic of theatre; you have
shown them what Shakespeare understood but Jonson couldn’t – that we have the most
fun when we must work our imagination. Using truly mismatched twins – male and
female, black and white, short and tall, narrow and wide – exactly what you did before
with costume, make-up, and movement.
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What your students are likely to find is that the second way is more entertaining
precisely because it forces them to use their imaginations and to collaborate in the fiction
before them. What’s more, in the course of the play, it helps the comedy if an audience
can keep straight which Dromio and which Antipholus is which.
B. Deal with the hitting
Scripts: CE 2.2.23
Prep: Handouts, finding props
Volunteers: 2
Props: flower, handkerchief, paper, pool noodle, etc.
The masters in Comedy of Errors hit their servants, and modern audiences may not find
this stage business of classical farce funny. Raise the issue of the ‘comic’ hitting with your
students. Can they think of any contemporary versions of such ‘comedy’? Do any of them
consider the Three Stooges funny? Do today’s movies use violence in comic ways? What
about farces like the the Hangover films? Or older, offbeat comedies like Airplane, A Fish
Called Wanda, or The Waterboy, in which physical punishment to central characters is
never to be taken seriously? Or what about cartoons like The Road Runner or South Park?
Having discussed these modern analogues, stage a ‘hitting’ moment (2.2.23, for
example) and have your students choreograph the action so that the hitting is (1) safe
and (2) funny. You must make it safe. You do that by being sure that the victim is in
control of the violence and always out range of any actual blow. If the violence is a nose
twist, a hair pull, or an ear grab, then the Antipholus (aggressor) simply puts his hand on
the nose, head, or ear of the Dromio (victim); and the Dromio covers that hand with his
hand and pretends by his movements that his nose is being twisted, his hair pulled, or his
ear grabbed. You make it funny by the reaction of the victim and/or the absurdity of the
violence. If the Antipholus barely seems to touch the Dromio, but the Dromio goes flying
across the room, that will be funny. If Antipholus hits Dromio with a harmless object – a
flower, a handkerchief, a rolled-up piece of paper, a pie – that will be funny. Your students
will come up with many suggestions.
This exercise will not only entertain your class, it will lead to a discussion of character:
if Antipholus of Syracuse is not mean, how would he ‘beat’ Dromio? Does Dromio like
his master, and, if so, how should he react to the beating? And so on. Beyond such
questions, the whole matter of finding whether or not our sensibilities and senses of
humour can intersect with those of an Elizabethan audience requires a staging.
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A. Adriana’s Speech to the wrong Antipholus Act Two, Scene Two, 109 (‘Ay, ay’ to
146 ‘you not’). Two speaking parts, four actors.
Do this speech three times. In the first version, Adriana and Antipholus of Syracuse
are alone onstage. She gives him the speech straight and, after a single double take, he
listens to it without interruption or much protest.
Then have your students look carefully at the speech, and underline the places where
Antipholus would (1) be shocked into making a sound, (2) try to get away, or (3) think
that she was trying to seduce him. Now do a second version with Adriana holding onto
Antipholus while he reacts at the underlined moments chosen by your class. Discuss the
differences. Did it lose any sense? Was it funnier? Which reaction places worked; which
failed?
In the third version do the scene as you did the second time but add Luciana and
Dromio and have all the actors pretend that they are in a public street and that the
audience (your other students) is a part of their world. Before reading the scene, have
your students decide on those moments (1) when Luciana would be giving support to
her sister, (2) when she would be shocked at her sister’s brazenness in talking about sex
in public, (3) when Antipholus and Dromio would look for support to one another, (4)
when Dromio would be shocked by the thought that his master was having an affair with
Adriana, (5) when any of the four characters would turn to the audience for support, and
(6) when either Dromio or Antipholus would try to get away.
After the final reading discuss the importance to the comedy of the ‘reactor’ characters.
What did each actor do to make his or her reaction clarify the situation? How did each
actor use the audience? What physical choices increased an understanding of the words
and the meaning of the scene? What choices diminished understanding?
B. The argument between Adriana and the Abbess Act Five, Scene One, 91
(‘Good people’) to 112 (‘have him’). Two speaking parts, others with Adriana optional.
This scene is a debate about the authority of the church (the Abbess) versus the
authority of family connections (a wife). For actors, it is a great scene about status. Have
your two actors do it two ways. In the first version, both women try to achieve status by
getting increasingly angry and loud. In the second version, both women try to achieve
status by getting increasingly calm and quiet. Have your students think about which of
the two ways shows more strength and then have them suggest other ways for each
character to achieve a higher status than the other.
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Coriolanus
CORIOLANUS
Comments
Coriolanus is not a loveable play, largely because Coriolanus (first Caius Martius) is
not a loveable man. Or rather he is a man that only a mother could love – if that
mother is Volumnia (more on that shortly). But even beyond its proudly unpopular
title character, the play itself resists the affection of an audience, as though an audience
senses – as it should – that Coriolanus’s contempt for the people extends to them. While
each of Shakespeare’s plays feels unlike the others – their climates differ, their
environments, their sounds, their pace, their solidity, their colours, their architecture,
Coriolanus is remarkable in that its ‘otherness’ exceeds them all, perhaps beyond our
ability to adjust to it.
Its architecture, for example, inverts the normal structure of the histories and tragedies
in which there is stage combat. In most of these plays, Shakespeare arranges the stage
combat so that the crescendo of the action comes near the end. But in Coriolanus the big
battle and the kinetic energy of the entering and exiting combatants come at the start
of the play. That may explain why it has more scenes in the first act (ten) than any
other of Shakespeare’s plays (Macbeth is second with seven). As soon as the fourth
scene we see Coriolanus (then Caius Martius), trapped in the walls of Corioles, and
then enter ‘bleeding’ having single-handedly subdued the town. Shortly thereafter (in
Scene Six), he rallies his previously cowardly troops, who ‘shout and wave their swords,
take him up in their arms and cast up their caps’, as Shakespeare pumps up the sound
track from a ‘parley’ and drums and alarums ‘afar off ’ (Scene Four) to more immediate
drums (Scenes Seven and Nine), trumpets (Scenes Eight and Nine), alarums (Scenes
Eight and Nine), flourishes (Scene Nine), cornets (Scene Nine), and shouts of ‘Martius,
Martius’ (Scene Nine). In the middle of all this excitement we see our hero in single
combat with his mortal enemy, Aufidius, followed by more casting up of caps, this time
with lances.
One could argue that from Act One to the end of the play, Shakespeare builds down
the action of Coriolanus. The next time there is visual and aural excitement is at the end
of Act Three, when the ‘citizens all shout and throw up their caps’ – this time at the sight
simply of Coriolanus walking away. Yes, at the very end of the play there is a sudden spurt
of action as Aufidius’s conspirators yell ‘kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him!’ and murder Coriolanus
in the course of a single line. But the play’s true culmination in Act Five is the very
opposite of the kind of visual excitement Shakespeare usually saves for the end of a play
but here provides in Act One. We watch first Menenius and then the women of the play,
Volumnia, Virgilia, and Valeria, accompanied by young Coriolanus, as they plead for 300
lines with Coriolanus to spare Rome. In short, Shakespeare devotes fifteen minutes of the
first act to staging the sound and fury of a hyperactive Coriolanus’s destruction of a city
(for which the Romans in celebration will greet him); and he devotes fifteen minutes in
the last act to a stationary Coriolanus deciding not to destroy a city (for which the
Romans in celebration will greet his mother).
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Here’s how Samuel Johnson, in 1765, sums up the play’s structural otherness: ‘There is,
perhaps, too much bustle in the first act, and too little in the last.’9 This inversion of
normal expectations is part of a general strangeness in Coriolanus, and it echoes
elsewhere, most notably in the two people most important to him and in his relationship
with them: Volumnia, his mother, and Aufidius, his enemy.
We meet Volumnia in the play’s third scene when she and Virgilia, Coriolanus’s wife,
enter and ‘they set them down on two low stools to sew.’10 Having established the two
women in a predictable domestic circumstance, their sewing in their laps, Shakespeare
then overturns our gender stereotypes, when Volumnia scolds Virgilia for her anxiety at
the absence of Caius Martius (Coriolanus) and the danger he faces in the war and
declares:
. . . had I a dozen sons . . . and none less dear

than thine . . . I had rather had eleven die nobly
for their country than one voluptuously surfeit
out of action.
(23–6)
And she expresses her unorthodox maternal responses in explicitly physical language
and sexual language:
. . . the breasts of Hecuba,

when she did suckle Hector, look’d not lovelier
than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood
at Grecian sword, contemning.
(41–4)
Repeatedly Shakespeare makes clear that the person in the world Coriolanus
cares most for is his mother. This seems to be common knowledge in Rome. Before we
even meet him, Citizen 1 argues that Coriolanus (still Caius Martius) is the ‘chief enemy
of the people’ (1.1.7–8) and dismisses his deeds on behalf of Rome: ‘Though soft-
conscienced men can be content to say it was for his country, he did it to please his
mother . . .’ (36–8).
We first see mother and son together in the second act, when Volumnia and Valeria
have joined the citizens and the tribunes to greet Coriolanus (Caius Martius for a
moment more) on his victorious return to Rome. Shakespeare cranks up the ceremony
with the sound of trumpets, the announcement of his new name, and the crowd shouting
‘Welcome to Rome.’ When Coriolanus objects to the ceremony – ‘No more of this, it doth
9
Plays, edited by Samuel Johnson, 8 vols (1765), vol. 6, page 627.
10
The fact that the sentence ‘They set them down on two low stools to sew’ is a perfect iambic pentameter line
suggests this stage direction is Shakespeare’s rather than the stage manager’s or the printer’s.
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Coriolanus
offend my heart’ (2.1.168) – Cominius, Rome’s chief general, as if to placate him points
out that Volumnia is present (he doesn’t mention his wife Valeria), ‘Look, sir, your mother.’
Coriolanus exclaims ‘O’ and drops to his knees before Volumnia (169).
Visually and aurally the play continually challenges our categories of a normal mother
and son and estranges us from them. We have seen fierce women before – Margaret and
Lady Macbeth, to name a couple – but, though they might frighten us, they do not
confuse us. The staging of Coriolanus does that. We never, for example, see this husband
alone with his wife nor ever see his mother without Valeria, a silent reminder of his wife’s
neglected claim to his attention. From her first speech in the play, Volumnia’s language
seems intent on confusing the role of mother and wife.
If my son were my husband,

I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein
he won honour than in the embracements of his bed,
where he would show most love.
(2–5)
Similarly confusing is Coriolanus’s other personal relationship – his attachment to his

arch-enemy, Aufidius, the general of the Volscians. Shakespeare makes clear that the
two enemies are obsessed with one another. Their first thought before a battle is of the
other. Coriolanus asks the Volscians, ‘Aufidius, is he within your walls?’ and Aufidius
declares that,
If we and Caius Martius chance to meet,

’tis sworn between us we shall ever strike
till one can do no more.
(1.2.34–6)
And that is exactly the scene Shakespeare will shortly stage in the play’s longest fight –
‘Martius fights till they be driven in breathless’ (s.d.1.8). They are Batman and the Joker.
We know they are destined to meet again.
When that happens in Act Four, Shakespeare once again unsettles us. Coriolanus
announces himself to Aufidius, proposes that they join together against Rome, and
offers himself up to death if Aufidius would prefer to act on their ‘ancient malice’ (4.5.99).
The length of Coriolanus’s speech as Aufidius listens increases the suspense as to
his response, but an audience would hardly expect to hear what he says next. ‘Oh,
Coriolanus, Coriolanus,’ he exclaims, ‘Let me twine / mine arms about that body,’ (4.5.109–
10) and – should we wonder if we’re hearing rightly this homoerotic language – adds this
remarkable image:
I loved the maid I married; never man

sigh’d truer breath; but that I see thee here,
thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart
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than when I first my wedded mistress saw

bestride my threshold.
(4.5.117–21)
Aufidius’s heart joys more in seeing his mortal enemy before him than it did to see his
bride enter his bedroom? Volumnia finds the blood spilling from Hector’s forehead in
battle is lovelier than the breasts of his mother in nursing him? The otherness of this kind
of erotically charged language is not its seeming homosexuality in the case of Aufidius,
nor its seeming incestuousness in the case of Volumnia. The strangeness goes beyond a
non-conforming sexuality to a singular inversion of the most fundamental human
instincts – a mother and son bound not by tenderness but by contempt for it; two
enemies whose desire to destroy the other forges a sensual adoration between them. In
fact, it is precisely because neither ‘normal’ nor ‘abnormal’ sexual desire can explain these
relationships that they are undecipherable and impenetrably foreign.
We resist Coriolanus and his play not because of his disdain for the public in the
play, as expressed in his entertaining diatribes against them; or even because of his disdain
for the public in the audience (us), as expressed in the absence of any soliloquy of self-
explanation. We love the inventive insulter and the strong silent type. No, we resist him
because we have the feeling that his wiring is fundamentally alien to ours. It’s a
commonplace that the unhappy fates that befall the other heroes of Shakespeare’s tragedies
are the outcome of some flaw in their human make-up – melancholy (Hamlet), jealousy
(Othello), ambition (Macbeth), rash authoritarianism (Lear), midlife romantic infatuation
(Antony) – flaws that our own wiring helps us recognize. And that brings us to the play’s
grandest inversion, the one that takes place in that visually anticlimactic final act.
Here we watch – with Aufidius – as Coriolanus, wired against compassion and
programmed for revenge, resists the human impulse to spare the lives of his friends and
his family. Silently, he ignores the arguments of his friend Menenius. Then he listens while
Volumnia argues mercy for the sake of his country. Silence. Then she turns up the pressure
and accuses him of not caring for her: ‘Thou hast never in thy life / show’d thy dear mother
any courtesy’ (5.4.162–3). Silence still. Then she stage manages the scene and has Virgilia,
young Caius, and Valeria kneel with her to beg for their lives. Silence still. Finally, choosing
the rhetoric of abuse she appears to have taught him, she insults him to those present
(including Aufidius, chief Volscian) – ‘this fellow had a Volscian to his mother’ (180) – and
starts to leave. At that last moment in the long and stationary denouement of this odd play,
the tragic hero relents, and– at the sure cost of his own life – chooses to be human.
O mother, mother!
What have you done? . . . O my mother, mother! O!
You have won a happy victory to Rome.
(185–9)
This tragic hero dies not as a result of his monstrousness but as a result of reaching for
his humanity: O mother, mother! O my mother, mother. O!
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Coriolanus
Ploys
A. Cap throwing in Coriolanus
Scripts: Cor 1.6; 1.9; 3.3 stage directions

Prep: Prior class intro; scripts for class
In class: 30 minutes with discussion
Props: 6 dowels, horns, caps (all students bring one)
Volunteers: 4 readers, 8 soldiers
As I suggest in my comments on the play, much in the text of Coriolanus is unusual and
there are also some unusual stage pictures. On three occasions the stage directions in the
Folio call for actors to ‘cast up’ or ‘throw up their caps’:
Act One, Scene Six

They all shout and wave their swords, take him up in their Arms, and cast up their Caps.
Act One, Scene Nine
A long flourish. They all cry, Martius, Martius, cast up their Caps and Launces:
Cominius and Lartius stand bare.
Act Three, Scene Three
Exeunt Coriolanus, Cominius, with Menenius. They all shout, and throw up their Caps.
Nowhere else in Shakespeare does this stage direction appear, but here it occurs repeatedly
and the action of throwing caps in the air is described in five other places in the play. The
objective of this ploy is for your class to explore this stage direction and to consider why
Shakespeare has created this stage picture and drawn so much attention to it in the script.
To do that, tell your class in advance that everyone is to bring a hat to class. If you like, you
can add some levity to the ploy by making the assignment to bring a funny hat to class.
Set-up
1. Hand out a sheet with the three stage directions, each preceded by the necessary
speeches prior to the stage direction and the first sentence of the speech that
follows it. (For 1.6 begin with Coriolanus ‘I do beseech you . . .’; for 1.9 begin
with Coriolanus ‘I have some wounds . . .’; and for 3.3 begin with Junius Brutus
‘There’s no more to be said . . .’)
2. You’ll need four volunteers to read text and eight ‘extras’ (about the most
Shakespeare’s company would have used) to play the soldiers/citizens who toss
their caps for each scene.
3. Before you stage 1.6, make sure you practise a safe way to for your extras ‘to take
[your Coriolanus] up in their arms’.
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4. Arrange the class into an Elizabethan stage (see the Fourth Do).
5. Make sure everyone is wearing a hat.
6. Now, with the input of the class, plan the 1.6 stage direction. Where do they want
Coriolanus and Cominius? Where should the ‘soldiers’ be? Should they be all in
one large group or in two or three small groups?
7. Give six of the soldiers dowels for their swords and a simple word to shout and
run 1.6 three times. The first time, have the soldiers/citizens shout and only wave
their ‘swords’. The second time, have them shout, wave their swords and raise
their fists instead of throwing up their caps. The third time, have the soldiers/
citizens shout, wave their ‘swords’, and throw up their caps. Ask the students in
the scene what the difference was for them as performers. How does it affect
their shout? Ask the students watching the scene what the difference was for
them as audience. Making any adjustments the students suggest, do it again.
8. Switch out the eight extras with other students in the class (remember everyone
has a hat) and work through 1.9 twice (no swords this time) with and without
tossing caps. What difference does it make that this time that there are no
swords? That they don’t lift up Coriolanus? How does shouting his name
‘Martius’ instead of the word you gave them change things?
9. In 3.3 your extras will twice need to yell in unison ‘It shall be so, it shall be so’
following Junius Brutus’s cue, and ‘Our enemy is banished! He is gone! Hoo!
Hoo!’ when Coriolanus leaves. To keep your extras from having to hold paper,
have the whole class rehearse these two lines and the cues for them before you
work with the scene.
10. Now, again letting the class place the actors, run this scene twice, once with fist
raised and once with hats tossed. Then – and this is your big finale – have the
whole class stand in their places and run 3.3 a third time and have everyone in
the class join the citizens in their lines and in tossing their hats.
Your students will enjoy this interactive exercise, and afterwards you can discuss with
them what this unusual stage direction contributes to the play as a whole. Does the hat
tossing change its nature each time? How does the play change without it? How does the
gesture echo or contrast with other stage pictures? What do they think Shakespeare was
up to?
B. Shakespeare ‘play’giarizes Plutarch

Someone – T.S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso – said something like,
‘Good artists borrow; great artists steal.’ By that measure, Shakespeare is a great artist and
never more so than when he was stealing material (via Thomas North’s 1595 translation)
from Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. This homework ploy for your
best students contrasts the speech that Plutarch gave Coriolanus when he comes in
disguise to speak with his old enemy Tullus Aufidius with the speech Shakespeare gives
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Coriolanus
him. The speech in North’s Plutarch begins ‘If thou knowest me not yet, Tullus,’ and ends
‘whose service now can nothing help nor pleasure thee;’ in Shakespeare that speech
begins at 4.5.68 (‘My name is Caius Martius’) and ends at line 104 (‘to do the service’).
As your students will quickly see, Shakespeare was shameless in taking whatever he
wanted from that speech. So it’s no challenge to have them say how Shakespeare’s is
similar. The game here is for them to think about how Shakespeare changes the speech.
Ask them to write a one- or two-page report answering the following questions: What
thoughts did he add? What words did he add? What sentences did he rearrange? What
did he cut? Remind them to be specific in quoting from both speeches. And then the best
part of the assignment: ask them to write a paragraph saying ‘why’ he might have made
those changes. (Hint: not to shorten it – Shakespeare’s is only about fifty words shorter.)
How do those changes affect character? status? the strength of the argument? its drama?
After they’ve handed in the reports, lead the class in a discussion.
A. Two officers discuss Coriolanus Act Two, Scene Two, 1 to 36 (‘they are coming’).
Two speaking parts (three minutes).
Two of Shakespeare’s Roman plays take a dim view of the working class whenever
they become a mob, but here gives us a conversation between two functionaries regarding
the merit of the title character. One cares about what the candidate deserves and the
other cares about his attitude towards the people.
In the first version Officer 1 is absolutely certain of what he has to say against
Coriolanus and Officer 2 is equally sure of what he has to say in favour of Coriolanus.
Neither really cares about the opinion of the other, and they begin to shout rather than
speak their opinions. They try to persuade primarily by the fervour of their feelings.
Officer 1 says ‘no more of him’ to stop the argument. In the second version, each listens
carefully to the points that the other makes and tries to make his own points respectfully
and persuade by the reasonableness of his position.
Discuss whether or not both of these versions work. Which reminds you most of the
political debates you’ve heard?
B. Mum gives political advice to Coriolanus Act Three, Scene Two, 92 (‘Here is
Cominius’) to 137 (‘Do your will’). Four speaking parts: three males, one female.
Here as the play moves towards its climax and the confrontation between Coriolanus
and the crowd, Shakespeare reminds us who’s the boss by having Volumnia huddle with
Cominius and Menenius to convince Coriolanus to go through the ritual of showing his
wounds to the people.
The first version is a four-way conversation. Though they don’t speak much, Cominius
and Menenius are at Volumnia’s side. She shares her thoughts with them freely, willing to
coach him or shame him in front of them. Coriolanus speaks to all three of them, and
when she alone is speaking, he looks to them frequently to see if they agree with her.
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In the second version, at her line ‘Prithee now, say you will,’ Volumnia takes Coriolanus
away from the two men (closer to the audience) and speaks privately to her son. His
attention is all on her and everything he says to her is private (that doesn’t mean your
actors should speak in low voices). The two men look on from a distance (they cannot
hear), perhaps a little weirded out that a grown man has to have his mother tell him what
to do. She plays the passive aggressive ‘do as thou list’ and ‘do your will’.
How do the two versions and their different approaches to public and private affect
our sense of Coriolanus? Volumnia? Romans? Discuss how this scene is like and unlike
the final meeting of mother and son.
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Cymbeline
CYMBELINE
Comments
The people who published Shakespeare’s Works in 1623 included Cymbeline with the
‘Tragedies’. That’s odd. True, a queen and a prince die (offstage) towards the end of the
play, but that queen is a cunning, evil stepmother who tries to poison the heroine; and
that prince is a stupid, evil stepbrother who wants to rape the heroine. We are about as
sad to hear of their deaths as we are when the Wicked Witch of the West tells us she’s
melting.
Shakespeare himself seems to have ridiculed the idea of genre in Hamlet when he has
Polonius praise the travelling players who have come to Elsinore as
the best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy,

history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral,
tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.
(2.2.397–400)
Tongue similarly in cheek, I think we should classify Cymbeline as a tragical-comical-

historical-romantical fairy tale.
Like a fairy tale, Cymbeline has a good but misled King (Cymbeline), his daughter a
Beautiful Princess (Imogen), her stepmother an Evil Queen who uses magic potions
on him and on her stepdaughter, an Evil Prince (Cloten) who wants to marry the
Beautiful Princess, a dangerous villain (Iachimo) who tricks the Beautiful Princess
and the hero, her true love (Posthumus), a faithful servant (Pisano) who protects
the Princess, a long-lost friend of the King (Belarius), and two long-lost sons of the
King (Guiderius and Arviragus). And, better even than a Fairy Godmother to supervise,
it has Jupiter, the King of the Gods to preside over a happy ending. Shakespeare has
stuffed this play with so many once-upon-a-time elements that he has a hard a time
fitting it all in. That’s one reason Cymbeline is Shakespeare’s fourth longest play (behind
only Hamlet, Richard III, and Coriolanus).11 It seems to have a little of everything theatre
can afford.
Those theatrical goodies include some of the crowd-pleasing treats we find
elsewhere in Shakespeare: The heroine disguising herself as a boy (for the last time in
any of his plays); armies passing over the stage and ‘in skirmish’; the capture in battle
of a king and his rescue; a sword fight won by the true prince; two beautiful songs,
‘Hark, Hark, the Lark’, and ‘Fear No More the Heat of the Sun’; a supernatural spectacle
featuring the apparitions of Posthumus’s dead father, mother, and brothers, before ‘Jupiter
descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle. He throws a thunderbolt.’ So:
pretty cool.
11
At a speaking speed of 140 words per minute, while Macbeth would take 2 hours to perform, Cymbeline
would require 3 hours and 15 minutes.
137
Most interesting to me, Cymbeline also includes three theatrical moments that require
a notable workload for any production – an intense theatrical ergonomics that speaks to
Shakespeare’s continued eagerness to prod at the relationship between an audience and
the play it is watching.
In Act Two, Scene Two, the villain Iachimo has hidden himself in a trunk that Imogen
is keeping safe in her bedchamber. The audience must absorb into the imagined narrative
of the play the disruption of thinking about the real-world physics of that prop – its size,
the physique and flexibility of the actor inside it, the weight of it, and the logistics of
getting it onstage. Whatever the size of the trunk and the mechanical effort of bringing it
on, audiences will have done the guesswork of concluding that a Roman cad is inside the
trunk. That correct suspicion thus puts the audience in a position of superior knowledge
not only to Imogen, the victim of the plot, but also to Iachimo, the villain executing it;
and guessing the villain’s game implicates an audience in this invasion of the heroine’s
most private place. We become co-voyeurs and violators.
Consider the power of the stage picture Shakespeare has created with unprotected
Imogen sleeping on a bed and near her a box containing Iachimo certainly wide awake
but invisible to us. The time between Imogen’s falling sleep and Iachimo’s opening the
trunk is the stage version of the thrill of intense suspense a child experiences winding up
a Jack-in-the box. The actor in the box controls that radioactive moment. He decides
how long it is. He decides if the lid opens slowly or pops up. He owns us.
Once the lid is open, Iachimo’s compares himself to the rapist of Lucrece:
Our Tarquin thus

did softly press the rushes, ere he waken’d
the chastity he wounded.
(12–14)
Rape? We wonder how close to pornography this scene might go. He turns his attention
to Imogen, ‘whiter than the sheets’, and exclaims, ‘That I might touch!’ (16). But he wants
more than to touch and takes a kiss as his language goes into a close-up. Her lips are
‘rubies unparagon’d’ and ‘her breathing that / perfumes the chamber thus’ (17–19). Still
in poetic close-up, he imagines how ‘the flame o’ the taper . . . would under-peep her lids’
(19–20). Then abruptly he interrupts our voyeurism to attend to business
But my design:
to note the chamber: I will write all down . . .
(23–4)
He gets out a tablet, apparently leaves her bedside, and delays his main objective, teasing
us for as long as he wants with stage business to record the pictures hanging in her room,
the window, the stories woven into the tapestry. ‘Ah,’ he says at last, as if it has just occurred
to him, ‘some natural notes about her body . . . would testify, to enrich mine inventory’
(28–30). He slips her bracelet off, and then ‘under-peeping’ her bedclothes, reports that
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Cymbeline
on her ‘left breast’ there is ‘a mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops i’ the bottom of
a cowslip’ (37–9).
Iachimo, who opened his speech as Tarquin, then reminds us of the rape he is not
attempting when he says Posthumus will ‘think I have pick’d the lock and ta’en / the
treasure of her honour’ (41–2). And as soon as he has raised that thought in us,12 he cuts
us off – ‘No more’ – and then, noting Imogen’s book where she had left off reading of
Philomel’s rape, he leaves her bedside and hides himself again in the trunk.
In Othello Shakespeare had created a similarly intimate bedroom scene when Othello
goes to the sleeping Desdemona’s bed to murder her. As in the trunk scene, the audience
guesses what is in store for the heroine; and, as in the trunk scene, we watch a man set on
a task briefly distracted by the beauty of his victim. But in Othello the sleeping woman is
Othello’s wife, and we hope that Desdemona will wake up and somehow reconcile with
her husband. In Cymbeline Shakespeare has inverted our response. The theatrical
dynamics of the scene make us accomplices as the voyeur’s voyeurs, who fear rather than
hope Imogen will wake, and who may (to their shame) be frustrated that the distraction
of her beauty does not lead Iachimo further.
Let’s turn from this scene about the theatrical power of one kind of trunk – Iachimo’s
chest – to a scene (4.2) about the theatrical power of another kind of trunk – Cloten’s
headless body.13 Each chest belongs to one of the two male villains and each chest is
connected to our sleeping heroine. Of course, bodiless heads appear in other plays of
Shakespeare (2 Henry VI, Richard III, and Macbeth), but this is the only play in which
Shakespeare brings onstage a headless body. As usual, what interests me is what the
workload (for playwright, actors, company, and/or audience) required by a scene tells us
about its importance to its creator.
By that measure this trunk scene mattered a lot to Shakespeare. The script, for
example, goes to unusual lengths to have Imogen wake up beside Cloten’s headless body
and mistake it for her husband’s. To get Cloten into Posthumus’s clothes, Shakespeare has
to have Cloten obsessed by Imogen’s taunt that he’s not worth the ‘meanest garment’ of
her husband (2.3.136). Cloten repeatedly echoes that insult and uses it to justify his
acquiring ‘the same suit [Posthumus] wore when’ he last saw Cymbeline (3.5.26–7). Then
to contrive that Imogen find herself beside the headless trunk, Shakespeare has Belarius
wax pious about Cloten – ‘Our foe was princely / bury him as a prince’ (4.2.249–51) –
and insist that out of respect his sons lay Cloten’s body next to hers. This kind of hyper-
manipulation of the plot prompted Samuel Johnson to say of Cymbeline that its faults
were ‘too evident for detection and too gross for aggravation.’ But the evident jerry-
rigging required to produce this moment is itself evidence that Shakespeare felt the
scene was essential to his play.
12
With this word ‘lock’ or ‘honor’ the actor playing Iachimo will frequently look down towards Imogen’s groin.
13
The fact that both these kinds of trunks appear in Cymbeline, that each is connected to one of the two male
villains, and that each is part of a deception connected to Posthumus seems outside the realm of coincidence.
The work ‘trunk’ appears twenty-nine times in all of the plays, eight of them (including stage directions) occur
in this one play and no more than two times in any of the others. But I have no idea what to make of that fact.
139
Even more obviously, the headless trunk itself raises the workload of the production
and its audience. I have never seen a convincing one. The dummies are too big or too
small or they bend in the wrong places. Did the King’s Men have a master props person
with capabilities beyond our most affluent theatre companies? Or did Shakespeare, as I
suspect, know that the headless trunk would strain almost to breaking the audience’s
ability to stay in the fictive world? Did he calculate that the mental work they must invest
in belief would pay the dividend of ownership?
Of the three scenes in Cymbeline with challenging theatrical ergonomics the final
scene of the play is the most extraordinary. Agatha Christie mystery fans will be familiar
with the endings in which Hercule Poirot gathers all the suspects in a parlour and reveals
whodunit. Well, in Cymbeline that parlour (the stage) has to hold at least fifteen people of
whom thirteen speak in a scene that has at least twenty-five recognition moments
(Comedy of Errors, with the next most, has eleven). In production terms, a scene so
crowded wth anagnorises is a heavy workload for the playwright who has to structure
the unfolding of each new discovery in a logical order, for the actors who have to arrange
themselves on a crowded stage so that the everyone can be seen and have his or her
individual moment, and for the audience who must delight in rather than scoff at the
cascade of revelations.
Bad productions of this play assume that audiences are not up to that work and will
lampoon or ‘send up’ the finale, but good productions trust the playwright. Shakespeare
knew that an audience, given the tools, will work to produce the play they want; and in
Cymbeline he provides the tools, not by keeping the audience ignorant of the answers as
Agatha Christie does, but by giving only to them all the answers. They alone have all the
secrets of the play, and, as the knowing colluders in its finale, they joy in the discovery,
secret by secret, of what they already know as this tragical-comical-historical-romantical
fairy tale rolls to its happily-ever-after.
Ploys
A. Pitching Cymbeline to film producers
Prep: Prior class intro, find props

Homework: Reading and writing
In class: 45–50 minutes
Props: table, chairs, timer
Wicked stepmother, evil sexual predator, comic idiot villain, long-lost brothers who live
in a cave; this play has the makings of a hit movie, and the objective of this ploy is to
explore those possibilities by having your students ‘pitch’ the idea of ‘Cymbeline, the
Movie’.
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Cymbeline
Pre-class prep
1. Create a five-person team of ‘producers’ and assign each of them a different
studio. You can decide which studios to include, but they should differ in
significant ways. For example, the five producers might represent Disney
(cartoons), Miramax (art movies), HBO (series), 21st Century Fox
(blockbusters), and Comedy Central (comedies). Their homework is to be
familiar with the kind of movies made by their respective studios and, based on
that, be ready to consider movies pitched by screenwriters.
2. Create ten two-person teams of screenwriters.
3. The job of each screenwriter team is to prepare a two-minute pitch for a film
based on the play. Warn your students that the short time allowed for the pitch
means more not less homework. The rules of the pitch are as follows:
(a) The pitch is strictly two minutes.
(b) Both members of the team must speak during the pitch.
(c) The pitch should be presented as a totally new idea of the screenwriter team
and should not mention Shakespeare.
(d) The pitch should not use a chronological narrative. (For example, here is a
non-chronological pitch for the film Spotlight: ‘A prestigious American
newspaper puts its reputation on the line by investigating a sex crime. The
perp is the Catholic Church.’)
(e) The pitch must include only characters and events from the play.
(f) The pitch must use a five-word phrase or sentence from the play. (This is the
one rule that will require students to look at the text.)
(g) The pitch must include the name of a famous actor interested in the project
and the role that actor will play.
(h) The pitch should suggest a title for the movie.
(i) The pitch should take into account the kind of movie that the studio makes.
In-class prep
1. Have a large table at a 45-degree angle in the front of the class with five chairs
behind it and have the producer team take their appropriate seats behind the
clearly legible nameplates you have created for each of the studios.
2. Put a timer on the table that all can see.
3. Explain that each screenwriter team must choose one of the five studios to make
its pitch to and – here’s the kicker – each of the studios can only take two pitches.
Thus, the longer a screenwriter team waits to make its pitch the less choice it has
of studios for their pitch.
4. Have the first screenwriter team choose the studio it wants to pitch; address its pitch
to the student representing that studio; customize that pitch to the particular studio.
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5. After the two-minute pitch, have the five producers confer among themselves for
no more than one minute.
6. On the basis of that conference, the student representing the pitched studio gives
thumbs up or down to the project, and says why in no more than thirty seconds.
This ploy requires no discussion. Its object is to have your students think about
Cymbeline in fresh terms, to see its applicability to today’s audiences, to put those thoughts
into a concise form, and to speak well in the context of high stakes. If you want to have
discussion and you have the time when the activity is finished, then you ask such questions
as: Which of the pitches seemed truest to the play? Which pitch was the most intriguing
– had the best ‘hook’? What aspect of the play was the hardest to pitch? What aspect of the
play was the easiest to pitch? You can be sure that this is a ploy the class will enjoy.
B. Serenade Imogen
Prep: Intro and assign 4–7 ‘bands’ of 4–6 students each

Players: 1 Cloten per band of 4–6 students
Homework: Put sampled song, performed or lip-synced
Props: table, chairs, timer
In Act Two, Scene Three, Cloten brings in musicians to serenade Imogen to see if they can
‘penetrate her with [their] fingering’ (14–15). And then they (or he and they) sing a song
that Shakespeare sampled from his own sonnets. In this ploy, your students will present
their serenades to you.
Set-up
1. In a previous class divide your class into serenade bands of 4–6. They are each to
choose their Cloten and their lead singer (it cannot be the same person).
2. They are to choose their band names from language in the play (for example,
‘The Milford Havens’).
3. Their assignment is to put together a serenade sampled from anywhere they like.
4. They can choose to play it and sing it themselves or they can lip-synch and play
it, but they must all participate.
In class
1. Choose what order you like and have the first band come up.
2. Have the Cloten in the group introduce the group by name and then either say
these words:
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Cymbeline
Come on, tune: if you can penetrate her with your

fingering, so we’ll try the tongue too . . . but I’ll ne’er give o’er.
(14–16)
or use some other lines of Cloten’s from the play.
3. Have the class vote for the awards such as ‘Funniest Serenade’, ‘Most Penetrating
Serenade’, ‘Most Clotenish Serenade’, etc.
A. Imogen responds to Iachimo’s advances Act One, Scene Seven, 129 (‘How
should I be revenged?’) to 199 (‘Oh no, no.’). Four minutes per version. Two speaking
parts.
The wager with Iachimo that her idiot husband Posthumus makes over Imogen’s
faithfulness rivets an audience’s attention to her meeting with Iachimo in 1.7. We know,
of course, that she’ll stay faithful to her husband, but how will she deal with this creep?
How will the actress negotiate between the outrage she should feel and her status as
the Princess of Britain, and then, after Iachimo says he was only testing her, does she
forgive him?
In the first version have your Imogen both physically and vocally outraged at Iachimo’s
proposition. She’s in a fury as soon as she realizes what Iachimo is suggesting, and we
hear that fury as soon as she first calls out ‘What ho, Pisanio!’ Then, when Iachimo gives
his excuse, she completely accepts it and forgives him, she’s delighted to keep his trunk,
and she’s really sorry he’s leaving the next day.
In the second version Imogen is also outraged at Iachimo’s suggestion, but this Imogen
tries to maintain her composure while she still makes it vividly clear how repugnant
Iachimo is to her. In this version, when he explains he was only testing her, she doesn’t at
all believe him but has too much class to say so; she’s suspicious of the trunk; and she’s
relieved he’ll be going the next day.
Have a discussion – include the student playing Iachimo (but not Imogen until
later) – about what works best for them and then glean from that conversation some
suggestions (never more than three) to give Imogen for the third version. After that
version, ask her what she liked and did not like about the three versions and why.
B. Imogen responds to her stepbrother Cloten’s advances Act Two, Scene Three,
87 (‘Good morrow, fairest’) to 137 (‘How now, Pisanio!’). Three minutes per version. Two
speaking parts.
You might want to have a class in which you pair this scene with the one above and
watch Imogen say ‘no’ to both of the play’s villains. This scene raises similar issues
regarding status for Imogen, but in this case the frame is comic rather than dramatic.
In the first version have your Cloten play the self-regarding idiot, completely unaware
of how odious he is. You might bring in some props or costume pieces your actor can use
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to make him more obviously a comic character – goggles, bicycler’s helmet, cravat,
bowler hat, swimming cap, eye patch, oversized dark glasses, riding crop, galoshes. In this
version, have your Imogen play a mean, spoiled princess, incensed that such an idiot
would even speak to her.
In the second version have Cloten play it straight – he’s sensitive, in love, and only
wants what’s best for her – and have Imogen as amused and gentle in her scorn as she
can be.
Leaving your two actors out of the discussion, ask your students to compare their
reactions to the two versions of these two characters. Which Cloten, comic or earnest,
best fits the text? Where does the earnest Cloten least fit the text? Which Cloten do they
like better? Why? Drawing on that conversation, make three suggestions to each of your
actors to try in the third version. Then include the two actors in a general discussion of
how this scene has reverberations in Act Four where Guiderius kills Cloten and Imogen
later wakes up next to his headless trunk.
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Hamlet
HAMLET
Comments
If Shakespeare has become literature’s biggest business, then Hamlet is its largest
subsidiary. The Folger Shakespeare Library shelves the commentary on each of
Shakespeare’s plays together by title. Slighter works such as Titus Andronicus and
The Comedy of Errors may each take up a dozen or so, and major works such as Othello
and King Lear may use twenty, but the commentary on Hamlet requires thirty-
seven shelves. Something in this strange play draws people from a multitude of
disciplines and puts them in the mood to publish. That something is primarily the
title character himself, although in many ways Hamlet is unappealing. He is self-
absorbed; he is erratic; he is normally in a bad mood; he is morbid; he is inconsiderate
and can be downright nasty; and he has little compunction about killing people. Yet he
envelops us.
In this longest play of Shakespeare, Hamlet has 40 per cent of the lines, and when
he is not speaking, he is onstage directing our gaze. From his first black-clad entrance
amid a colourful court, he is the watcher, and we watch through him as he famously bides
his time – and ours. His great burden in the play is remembering his father, and the
essence of his conflict with those around him going on with their lives is that they
live only in the present: for Claudius, Gertrude, and the court, the past seems not to
exist. ‘That it should come to this’ (1.2.137) he says, and that phrase demonstrates
the temporal arc of his thinking. His morbidity is simultaneously a sense of the
flimsiness of the past and the oblivion of the future. The message he would have Yorick’s
skull bring to his mother is that the present without connection to the past is body and
sensation only, and body and sensation cease with death – ‘to this favor she must come’
(5.1.192).
Hamlet stands before us as an emblem of time, his father’s picture in the one hand
counterbalancing Yorick’s skull in the other. His memory is fixed on the past, his
imagination on the future, and the play built around him squeezes him and the audience
between time past and time future. And time past keeps intruding on the play’s movement
forward by knocking at the door of the present.
Knock, knock. ‘What is between you?’ (1.3.98) Polonius asks Ophelia, and the past
appears before us in glimpses of ‘tenders’ and ‘holy vows’ and Hamlet’s admission to
Ophelia that ‘I did love you once’ (3.1.115). Knock, knock. ‘Welcome, dear Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern’ (2.2.1) says the King to two friends ‘of so young days brought up with
[Hamlet]’ (11) who will try to trade on a vague past they share with Hamlet. Knock,
knock. ‘Welcome, good friends’ (423), says Hamlet to the actors, finds many changes in
them ‘since I saw you last’ (424), and asks for a speech ‘I heard thee speak . . . once’ (435).
Knock, knock, knock. ‘Enter Fortinbras [the nephew to old Norway] with his Army over
the stage’ craving a ‘promised march’ through Denmark (4.4). Knock, knock. ‘I have been
sexton here, man and boy, thirty years’ (5.1.160–1), the Clown tells Hamlet and adds that
he became sexton ‘the very day that young Hamlet was born’ (146). Knock. ‘Alas, poor
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Yorick,’ and we are suddenly looking back at Hamlet as a child riding piggyback on a
court jester’s shoulders. And, of course, knock, knock, knock – the most insistent intruder
from the past – the Ghost: ‘Remember me’ (1.5.91).
Shakespeare puts past time onstage in the ‘Murder of Gonzago’ and even does
so twice, first as dumb-show and then as play. Just as Hamlet makes Gertrude look
at the husband that was, he forces the King (and the audience) to watch the murder
that was, to look at the past. For Hamlet, the performance of the play is the metaphoric
gesture that stands outside of the movement of time and is part of past, present,
and future. The reason Hamlet appeals so powerfully to us is that he and his play
operate as our minds do – at once part of the flow of time and outside of it, aware
simultaneously of past, present, and future. Shakespeare’s three-dimensional characters
are like real people, like everyone beyond ourselves, but Hamlet is four-dimensional, like
ourselves.
Those are my musings on why the play has inspired more such musing than any other.
I assure you that the play will appeal to your students for reasons that have nothing to do
with theories about the fourth dimension. Next to the Henry IV plays, Hamlet is the play
of Shakespeare most about their concerns, but to get your students to see that, you’ll have
to steer them quickly past all the old potholes about this play. Here is a quick rundown
of fifteen of the most frequently raised questions about Hamlet and, in some cases, my
answers:
● Is the ghost real?
Sure, for the purposes of the play, he is at least as real as Patrick Swayze’s ghost in
Ghost. For students contemptuous of superstitious sixteenth-century Londoners,
you should make sure that they consider the popularity of a film like The Sixth
Sense or my own favourite ghost movie, Truly, Madly, Deeply.
● Where does the ghost come from?
He says he is from purgatory, but it sounds more like hell to me, which explains
why he, like Dracula, cannot abide the daylight. This much we know: a heavenly,
Christian ghost would not be asking for revenge.
● Was Gertrude in on the murder?
No.
● Were Gertrude and Claudius lovers while Hamlet the elder was alive?
Maybe, but I don’t think so. See what your students think. Have them say why.
What clues do they find for that charge? What clues against it?
● Is Claudius’s marriage to Gertrude incest?
For us, no; but the quick marriage to her husband’s brother is pretty creepy.
For Shakespeare’s audience, the official answer had to be yes. To say differently
was treason. Queen Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII , to marry Elizabeth’s
mother, had his marriage to Katherine of Aragon annulled on the argument
that she had previously been married to his brother and that to continue
in that marriage was incestuous. To hold that the marriage of Claudius and
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Hamlet
Gertrude was lawful was to hold that Henry’s second marriage was illegal and
that, therefore, Queen Elizabeth was illegitimate.
● Does Ophelia commit suicide?
The gravedigger thinks so, but I don’t. In a modern court, she could plead
insanity. As far as she is concerned, she was just taking a little lie down on the
river. Your students may disagree, but it doesn’t seem to me a profitable line of
discussion.
● Does Hamlet know the King and Polonius eavesdrop on his talk with
Ophelia?
I think he figures it out right before he asks, ‘where’s your father?’ (3.1.130).
Certainly a realization that Ophelia is letting herself be used to betray Hamlet
helps to motivate his anger. Discussion of alternatives can be useful in showing
the importance of this production decision.
● Who did Hamlet think he was stabbing behind the arras?
The King . . . as Hamlet tells us. Despite the illogical assumption that Claudius
could have positioned himself behind the arras before Hamlet got to Gertrude’s
room, Hamlet is not in a logical mood (and maybe he knew about a secret
passage). Weak discussion question.
● Is Hamlet in love with his mother?
Freud thought so, but he also thought that was normal. I think Hamlet cared
about his mother a lot.
● Were Hamlet and Ophelia lovers? Have they had sex?
I’d say no, based on Ophelia’s obedience to her father, on Hamlet’s apparent belief
that the sex act is not to be taken lightly, and on my sense of what Elizabethans
felt was proper in their heroines. A counter argument, however, could be based
on Hamlet’s language in his two scenes with Ophelia, on the mad Ophelia’s
bawdiness, and on Hamlet’s behaviour at her graveside. A good discussion might
emerge from considering the difference such a relationship would make on the
play as a whole.
● How old is Hamlet?
Thirty. The gravedigger says he has been sexton for thirty years and came to it ‘the
very day that young Hamlet was born.’ Not much room for discussion.
● Isn’t thirty a little old for Hamlet still to be at university?
That is odd, and a good question for discussion. It leads to such conversations
as the nature of universities then and now. It also can lead to a discussion of
that particular university (Wittenberg) and to its two most famous graduates,
one real the other fictional: Martin Luther and Faustus. Shakespeare makes
Hamlet a fellow alumnus of those two quite serious alums of the school in
Germany, and at the same time he makes it clear that Laertes goes to university
in Paris (the Sorbonne). Paris or Wittenberg? Wittenberg or Paris? Ask your
students about that choice.
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● Shouldn’t Hamlet have become king after his father’s death?

Yes. The dying Hamlet prophesies that ‘th’election lights on Fortinbras’ (5.2.362–
3), but the play is not a lesson on medieval Danish political science and works to
that moment on the assumptions of an hereditary monarchy.
● Why doesn’t Hamlet try to win back his rightful throne?
Good question for discussion.
● Is Hamlet insane?
No. He puts ‘an antic disposition on’ and acts (pretends to be) insane, just as
he said he would. Insane looks like Ophelia in Act Four. Hamlet gets pretty
close during the Hecuba speech, but I think he pulls back. Still, this is a
good question for discussion, since what we decide (or what the actor
playing him decides) shapes a good deal of what we think of him and his
musings on life.
I recommend that you keep in mind the real reasons that your students will be
interested in these questions and frame discussions of them in the context of the
connections that will matter to them. After all, Hamlet is about an undergraduate whose
situation at home has changed radically. He must cope with the grief of losing a father
while he wrestles with his anger about a stepfather he doesn’t like and a mother who, two
months after his father’s death, has eyes only for her new husband. Meanwhile, his
girlfriend is trying to break up with him and helping her father spy on him, and two of
his oldest friends are treating him like he’s crazy and pumping him for information to
give to his parents. And throughout Hamlet spends his time questioning the meaning of
life and the possibility of suicide and has no interest in climbing the ladder of success.
None of this will seem distant from your students; all will have felt Hamlet’s alienation,
and many with step-parents will recognize the pressures placed on children by the love
lives of their parents.
This play and its protagonist seem in counterpoint with the world and the hero of
Henry V. Hal knows what he wants and he knows how to get it; your students will
understand that he is the model of political and worldly success. In Hamlet, Fortinbras
represents the same kind of success, and Shakespeare has Hamlet consider his opposite,
‘a delicate and tender prince, whose spirit, with divine ambition puffed, makes mouths at
the invisible event’ (4.4.48–50). By contrast, Hamlet’s spirit, rather than defying invisible
events, negotiates and renegotiates; and Hamlet, so far from being puffed with ambition,
seems primarily eager to retire from the world. Here, then, are two models of living that
your students will recognize. What do you want to be when you grow up? For the
majority I have no doubt that the preferred model will be that of Hal and Fortinbras, who
are, after all, patterns of successful CEO s, but some may think Hamlet’s examined life
more worth living.
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Hamlet
Ploys
A. Have Ghost Try-Outs
Scripts: Ham 1.1, 1.5, 3.4

In class: 30 minutes
Equipment: audio
Prizes
Ghosts were (and still are) good box office, but how might Shakespeare’s company have
staged the ghost scenes in the sunlit Globe at two in the afternoon? And how might the
actor playing the Ghost (tradition has it that Shakespeare played the part) have made it
‘ghostly’? Announce to your students that in the next class you are going to have Ghost
Try-Outs and name good prizes (book, CD, movie pass, pizza) for the scariest ghost,
funniest ghost, and most believable ghost. The rules are:
1. The lights stay on.
2. The equipment permitted is taped music or sound effects pre-set for immediate
play.
3. Each contestant has a maximum thirty seconds for his or her try-out.
4. Costume and/or make-up is allowed but not necessary.
5. Contestants must speak at least one word from the text and may speak up to ten.
6. Decide the winners of each prize by student vote.
Afterwards, lead a discussion on whether or not the Ghost in Hamlet has to be scary.
If not, what should he be instead? If so, what are the elements that go into making
something frightening?
B. Try Claudius for the murder of his brother

In class: Full class
Players: 11 actors, 7 jury members
As I suggest, we see the events of Hamlet through the eyes of its main character. To
restore a sense of what the world looks like from outside of Hamlet, have a trial in which
Claudius must defend himself against the charge of murder. You can choose to let the
prosecution, defence, and witnesses prepare for an assigned ‘trial date’, or to do it start to
finish in a single class.
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Imagine that, because of the Prince’s accusations, Claudius is arrested in the uproar
following the death of Polonius.
1. You will play the judge. Your job as judge is to keep the proceedings moving
towards trial. If, for example, the defence moves to dismiss the trial for lack of
evidence, you must explain why you think the circumstantial evidence is strong
enough to warrant continuing.
2. Assign the parts of Claudius, Hamlet, Gertrude, Ophelia, Horatio, Laertes,
Barnardo, Marcellus, Voltemand, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, all of whom may
be called as witnesses (though Gertrude may not testify against her husband).
3. The Ghost cannot appear as a witness or otherwise.
4. Appoint a seven-person jury, and split the remaining students into the defence
and the prosecution teams. Make sure both teams understand the concept of
character witnesses. Each team must select someone to head their case.
5. Give the teams ten to fifteen minutes to prepare and organize their cases.
6. All evidence must be based on the text, and witnesses cannot make statements
about character or events that contradict the words in the play. During the trial,
impose time limits on various procedures (for example, two minutes for
examination or cross examination of each witness, three minutes each for
summation to the jury, and so on).
7. After the final arguments have closed, your jury should then hold its
deliberations in front of the class (which cannot intrude in any way) but it
should vote on Claudius’s guilt on secret ballots, which its foreman should
tabulate. When you ask the foreman for the verdict, he or she should be the only
one who knows it.
I wouldn’t follow this ploy with a discussion. Let the outcome have the same finality
that a verdict has in real life.
C. Compile a video montage from various productions of the play
Prep: Video compilation

Equipment: AV equipment, access to YouTube
Because of the large number of Hamlet productions available on YouTube, you can edit a
video that will entertain your students and show the power of extra-textual choices. To
stress the filmic choices that directors have to make, choose a silent moment for comparison.
Select some visual decision common to all productions – the first view of Hamlet,
what the Ghost looks like, what Ophelia does when she gives out her flowers, the stage
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Hamlet
arrangement of the ‘mousetrap’, the design of Gertrude’s bedroom, and so on – and record
a sequence of these moments from at least six Hamlets. No sequence should exceed fifteen
seconds. Make certain that the segments appear in chronological order so that your
students can discuss the way one director might have influenced another. Your compilation
might thus begin with Olivier’s opening shot, followed by Richardson’s, followed by
Zeffirelli’s, followed by Branagh’s, followed by Almereyda’s, followed by the same shot
from the Animated Tales of Shakespeare. If you look at no more than fifteen seconds from
eight different productions, your compilation will only take up two minutes of class time.
Then you can move on to the first view of the Ghost in the same order. And so on.
Show this compilation first with the volume turned off (which means that you can use
foreign versions) so that your students can concentrate on the visual elements. Discuss
the effect of such elements as camera angle, lighting, casting, costuming, pace, and
movement. You can then run it again to show the impact of sound.
D. Put on a production of the play from Dogg’s Hamlet by Tom Stoppard

Parodies of Hamlet abound, but Tom Stoppard’s 20-minute version in Dogg’s Hamlet is a
brilliant piece of compression, which Stoppard immediately tops with a frantic 90-second
version. Your students will love it.
A. Hamlet welcomes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Act Two, Scene Two, 221
(‘God save you, sir’) to 316 (‘delights not me?’). Three speaking parts.
In the first version Hamlet is on to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from the start, clearly
dislikes them, and just wants to get rid of them. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, however,
truly care about Hamlet and are embarrassed about their cooperation with the king and
queen. In the second version, Hamlet is delighted to see his old friends, wants to confide in
them, slowly realizes who they are working for, and is deeply hurt by their betrayal. In this
version, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are nervous around Hamlet, assume he is
dangerously insane, and just want to get whatever information they can out of him and
report to the king. Discuss the implications of each of the versions for the play.
B. Hamlet is mean to Ophelia Act Three, Scene One, 88 (‘Soft you now, the fair’) to
162 (‘what I see’). Two speaking parts (for bold actors).
Do one version ‘Victorian’ and one version ‘modern’.
In the first version Hamlet and Ophelia are formal with one another. In keeping with
Ophelia’s earlier description of him (2.1.77–84) to Polonius, Hamlet is distracted for the
entire exchange and at no time expects that anyone is overhearing their conversation.
Ophelia, meanwhile, is shy and frightened and perhaps a little weepy.
In the second version, the two have clearly been lovers. Everything up to ‘where’s your
father?’ is playful, even sexy, banter during which the two caress one another continually.
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For example, with the line, ‘I humbly thank you, well, well, well,’ Hamlet might be kissing
her between the ‘wells’. Until ‘where’s your father?’ Hamlet is happy and affectionate. At
that point, though, he realizes that someone is listening and goes berserk at Ophelia’s
betrayal. The Ophelia in this version is strong and funny and does not weep. [Before
attempting this second version, you must be certain that both students have agreed on
the physical contact they will use.]
C. Hamlet and Gertrude with and without the Ghost Act Three, Scene Four, 94 (‘O,
speak to me no more!’) to 158 (‘heart in twain’). Three speaking parts.
Many productions of Hamlet stage the ‘closet’ scene without the Ghost. Such a decision
turns the scene upside down: with the Ghost we have a mother who is ‘blind to her
husband’s spirit’; without the Ghost we have a son who is ‘seeing things’. Stage these two
versions. The first version is a scene about a shallow and insensitive establishment; the
second version is a scene about a crazy young man. In the version ‘without the Ghost’, the
actor says his (or her) lines as if they are a voiceover of what’s going on in Hamlet’s head.
In the discussion that follows have your students discover the consequences of this big
directorial choice.
152
King Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2
KING HENRY IV, PARTS 1 AND 2
Comments
Taken together these two history plays are as rich as anything Shakespeare ever gave us.
Here is a two-part play with everything: a little romance, a little magic, a big battle scene,
a sixteenth-century version of the gunfight in High Noon, plenty of larceny, some
treachery, great gobs of politics, some tragedy, and the greatest comic figure in the history
of the stage, and yet the two plays are challenging to teach.
For one thing, the very variety of Part One foils readers looking for a single strong
narrative thread. Instead of one story, they get four: the story of King Henry IV trying to
hold onto his kingdom against the claims of former friends, the story of Hotspur trying
to defend his honour, the story of Prince Hal trying to grow up, and the story of Falstaff
trying to enjoy life. For another thing, the language of the play shifts back and forth from
the formality of the King’s English to the inventiveness of the language in the Boar’s
Head Tavern. The challenge of colloquialisms is compounded in Henry IV by the speed
and whimsy of John Falstaff. And that’s the main obstacle between my students and the
play(s): they have a hard time seeing what’s so funny about Falstaff on the page, and it’s
hard to sell 1 and 2 Henry IV without the charm of Falstaff. The ploys you will find below
wrestle with these three difficulties.
The first problem in teaching Henry IV, however, is that it is one work but two plays.
Like Coppola’s Godfather, Part One is something of a joy ride, and though we don’t like
losing Hotspur, well, it’s a matter of turf; but Part Two is, despite the emergence of a
powerful leader, about disintegration. You can teach 1 Henry IV by itself (and it is
frequently anthologized in that way), but to do so is to finish only the story of Hotspur and
to leave the stories of the King, the Prince, and the fat knight in mid-stream. And even if
students can grasp the fun of Falstaff in Part One; the story of the King and the Prince do
not crystallize until Part Two, where Shakespeare resolves the conflict between them.
Nor can anyone see Falstaff clearly until Hal turns him away at the end of Part Two.
Not until then do we see fully – despite the hints that Shakespeare has given us – the
vulnerable man who has always been there. So I urge you to show your students the full
scope of the story of Hal and his father, and of Hal and his fat, old friend.
I must add that no other work in the canon is so relevant to the concerns of your
students as 1 Henry IV. I agree with Stephen Booth that English teachers should not ‘lie’
to our students about why we love the plays by teaching them as sociology, political
theory, or moral philosophy. Nonetheless, without any fudging you will be teaching a
work about big things in your students’ lives, the same things that mattered to you and
will matter to their children: loving and hating parents, becoming someone separate
from them, juggling the demands of friendship and position, winning success and
respect, learning to be a good person. No play in the canon has a better right to be in a
college curriculum.
From the first scene of the play, 1 Henry IV is a struggle between father and son.
Without coaching, many of my students bridle at the King’s wish
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. . . that it could be proved

that some night-tripping fairy had exchanged
in cradle clothes our children where they lay,
and called mine Percy, his Plantaganet!
(1.1.85–8)
As one of my students said, ‘That’s harsh. What parent wants to trade children?’ Henry
himself recognizes that he sins ‘in envy’, and the pain he feels about his son Hal is clear in
the way that he suddenly brings up the subject and just as abruptly leaves it: ‘but let him
from my thoughts’ (90). What is also clear is that no matter what sort of face Henry puts on
it, his son is always on his mind. This central situation in the play resonates throughout the
play and Shakespeare makes a scene between the father and the son central to each of the
two parts of Henry IV. In Part One, Shakespeare underscores that scene by having a mock
rehearsal in preparation for it; and in Part Two, Shakespeare sees to it that the big father and
son scene is no less than the passing of the crown from King Henry IV to King Henry V.
How many of your students have worried about an encounter with an angry father?
In Act Two, Scene Four of Part One, Hal, knowing he must face his angry father, takes
Falstaff ’s advice to ‘practise an answer’, and the two of them put on an impromptu play
for the denizens of the Boar’s Head Tavern. Falstaff plays the King (apparently quite well,
because Mistress Quickly applauds how ‘he holds [the King’s] countenance’), and Hal
pretends to answer to him for his whereabouts. Although Falstaff ’s improvised speech to
Hal is in the form of a stern fatherly lecture, Falstaff adds two surprising touches. First,
he appears to weep (‘for Harry, I do not speak to thee in drink, but in tears’ [410–11]),
and then, having dispensed with business (telling his son to banish everyone but Falstaff ),
he turns affectionate and says, ‘tell me now, thou naughty varlet, tell me where hast thou
been this month?’ (2.4.425–6). At this point, the Prince objects to Falstaff ’s performance,
‘dost thou speak like a king?’ and takes the part of his father himself.
Falstaff has to play the Prince, and Hal, as Henry IV, in this alternative staging, deals
much more harshly with his son: ‘Henceforth ne’er look on me’ (2.4.439–40). Thus
Shakespeare gives us two previews of the scolding that Hal is going to get from his father
– in Falstaff ’s version father’s love wins out over king’s law, but in Hal’s version the reverse
is true. When, two scenes later, the real interview takes place, imagine Hal’s surprise
when his father behaves exactly as Falstaff predicted:
Not an eye
but is weary of thy common sight,
save mine, which hath desired to see thee more,
which now doth that I would not have it do –
make blind itself with foolish tenderness.
(3.2.87–91)
What King Henry says here is that he is so happy to see his son that he is crying. Little
wonder that the Prince is astonished into a one-sentence reply: ‘I shall hereafter, my
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thrice-gracious lord, be more myself ’ (92–3). You are by no means pushing too hard for
connections when you ask your students to consider in light of this scene their own
assumptions about their parents’ feelings for them.
The ultimate scene between father and son in Part Two draws together and resolves
the conflict between these two characters by putting the worst suspicion of the parent –
that he is unloved by the child – in the context of the parent’s death. In effect, Henry gets
to come back from the dead and see how his son has responded to his death. What he
sees, or thinks he sees, is his worst nightmare: his son departed from his sickbed and
already wearing his crown. When Hal, re-entering the chamber sees his father living, he
says, ‘I never thought to hear you speak again’ (4.5.91) and the bitter father replies, ‘Thy
wish was father, Harry, to that thought’ (92). He tells Hal,
thy life did manifest thou lovedst me not,

and thou will have me die assured of it . . .
What! canst thou not forbear me half an hour?
Then get thee gone and dig my grave thyself,
and bid the merry bells ring to thine ear
that thou are crownèd, not that I am dead . . . .
(4.5.104–14)
And in this extreme bitterness Henry links the kind of king his son will be to his apparent
scorn for his father: ‘Pluck down my officers, break my decrees, for now a time is come to
mock at form’ (117–18).
Shakespeare has conflated the two issues of sonship and kingship. If Hal puts to rest
his father’s fear that he does not love him, he will also put to rest his father’s fear over
Hal’s career as King. We, of course, know the truth because we saw how Hal took the
crown, but the Prince must replay the scene for his father. Now it is his turn to prove his
love with his tears. He gives back the crown. And then he too links the issue of his being
a good son to that of his being a good king:
God witness with me, when I here came in,

and found no course of breath within your majesty,
how cold it struck my heart. If I do feign,
o, let me in my present wildness die
and never live to show the incredulous world
the noble change that I have purposèd.
(149–54)
The Prince’s explanation wins King Henry completely: ‘God put it in thy mind to take
[the crown] hence, that thou mightst win the more thy father’s love’ (178). Surely one
point of these two powerful scenes is that father and son – parent and child – love each
other more than they have communicated, and just as surely your students will recognize
and understand the deep needs and fears underlying these scenes.
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Beyond the matter of fathers and sons, parents and children, the two parts of Henry
IV thoroughly explore another concern of new and pre-adults: the competing claims of
friendship and responsibility, fun and work. Falstaff is the weeknight party that stands
between your students and their homework; he is a Grateful Dead concert; he is a
Mallorca Beach; he is cutting school to get high, get wasted, or get laid. But, being those
things, he is also the sweetness in life, that part of life when we are most alive. The
homework, the attendance, the job may get us success, but we don’t reminisce about the
work we did in study hall. But Falstaff is more than expressed libido or the joy of inertia;
he is the pleasures of friendship and the savouring of life, and we must wonder if such
pleasures are ever a waste of time. In some fundamental way, Falstaff ’s play-acting plea
to Hal – ‘Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!’ (1H4 2.4.473–4) – is more than
boastful hyperbole: it is the truth. Henry IV is about the choice young people must make
between enjoying where they are and getting where they want to go.
Finally, in teaching Henry IV you will be teaching a play that asks two related questions:
‘what does it mean to grow up?’ and ‘what does it mean to be a good man?’ In part,
the character of Hotspur – obsessed with ‘honour’ – and, to some degree, the characters
of Hal and Henry, teach us that in order for a man to be good, he has to realize that
the pursuit of ‘manliness’ can be at odds with the pursuit of goodness. In Latin the
distinction I am getting at is clearer in the words virtus – courage, strength, honesty,
patriotism – and humanitas – generosity, love, patience, community. Shakespeare, in
comparing different types of men, shows ambitiousness at the expense of the home,
honour at the expense of sense, competition at the expense of life. In the Henry IV plays,
women – and the values of humanitas they represent – are the silent reproof of that view.
Shakespeare makes them important by their absence, and when they do appear, they are
there to represent the values of love (Lady Percy to her husband), generosity (Mistress
Quickly to Falstaff ), and harmonious community (Lady Mortimer singing to her
husband).
Who are the grown-ups in this play and who are the good men? We see these questions
through the character of the Prince, who must choose between the models before him.
King Henry IV is careworn and well intentioned, but he is certainly not at peace with
himself, and all his good intentions come in second to his ambitions. Hotspur is brave
and may be at peace with himself, but in his combativeness with the world (even with his
wife) he is no grown-up, nor is he good. And then there is Falstaff – lying, thieving,
cheating, rutting Falstaff. Falstaff, of course, is bad and has never grown-up. Of course.
Why then do we feel so much wisdom in him? We know somehow that if we combed
both plays with a ‘mettle’ detector, if we had an instrument to measure spirit and
tenderness, if we could calibrate the fullness of the living, then the needle would jump
farthest when Falstaff comes onstage. When Hal rejects Falstaff, he does so in order to
turn away his ‘former self ’ as part of ‘the noble change [he] has purposèd’, and we are to
understand that he is putting away the ‘courses of his youth’ and growing up. Yet with that
understanding comes the unmistakable sense that the banishment of Falstaff is not just
a loss, it is an emptying. Somehow the good king, the grown-up who defines himself by
turning away Falstaff, diminishes the meaning of goodness and of growing up.
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Ploys
A. The Falstaff Contest
Prep: Auditions in prior class; finding props

‘Volunteers’: 4 Falstaffs (2 men, 2 women)
Scripts: Each Falstaff brings a 2–min speech from 1 or 2 Henry IV
Props: mugs, gallon of cider or other beverage, mop; students each bring a
quarter, dime, nickel, and penny
As my comments suggest, Sir John Falstaff is the heart of the two plays, but he is hard for
students to grasp on the page. That may be because the essence of Falstaff is improvisation,
not just of what he says but of how he says it. Like athleticism, comic greatness is partly
a matter of timing, and enjoying Falstaff on the page is like trying to learn tennis from an
instruction book. To help students get the fun of this character, I suggest a Falstaff
Contest to use before you begin discussion of the play.
1. Hold ‘auditions’ for the contest by calling all the boys to the front of the class.
2. Have them walk across the ‘stage’ one by one, and, as they go by, have the girls
applaud to indicate their choices. You become a human ‘applausometer’.
3. Important: To mute the tendency of students to applaud for their heavier
classmates, stress at the beginning of ‘auditions’ that the main requirement for
being a good Falstaff is to be the life of the party.
4. Choose the six or seven boys who evoke the loudest response, and have them go
through a run-off from which you choose two.
5. Then, while the girls in your classroom are in mid-giggle about what’s happening
to the boys, announce that your casting is gender blind, send the boys back to
their seats, and put the girls through the same process.
6. Now tell your four Falstaffs that they are to choose any speech of Falstaff – not
to exceed two minutes – and prepare to read it in the next class. Tell them that
they need not memorize the speech nor wear a costume nor bring a prop, but
that they can do any or all of those things if they wish.
7. Tell the class that they are required to bring four coins – a quarter, a dime, a
nickel, and a penny – and that 41 cents is the price of admission to the class show.
8. On the day of the contest, clear as large an area as you can in front of the class
and have your contestants come forward.
9. Surprise them by explaining that to get into the spirit of the thing (and to decide
the order of the presentations) you think a chugging contest is in order, for the
which you have brought the requisite number of mugs and the appropriate
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beverage to chug (cider works fine). Ask for two volunteer timers, and instruct
the class to pull for their favourites. The point here is to lower inhibitions, so you
should create as much spillage as possible by rushing your chuggers. Whatever
the outcome, pretend you can’t be sure of the results, and have them do it again.
10. The winner of the chugging contest then gets to name the order of the
presentation.
11. Let each student give his or her two-minute performance (stop them if they go
over the limit).
12. When they have all finished, have them spread out in front of the class with at
least an arm’s length between them. Your students are to vote by tossing coins to
– not at – their favourite Falstaffs – a quarter for the best, a dime for second
place, and so on. Your Falstaffs will have to scramble to gather up their money.
(In a class of thirty, a good Falstaff can pick up a quick five dollars and there will
always be the odd nickel underneath the desk for the deserving teacher.)
Clearly, this exercise has the seeds of chaos in it. Good. You want to put your students
in a Falstaffian frame of mind, to make them forget that they are in a class. When the
exercise is over, they will have had a crash course in Falstaff by laughing at and with a
handful of Falstaffs whom they know – whom they chose. Meanwhile, you can, if you
wish, use the rest of the class period or the next class for discussion with your four
Falstaffs as panellists. Why did they choose their particular passage? What did they think
was their best line? What did the students think was the best line? Was there a common
theme linking the speeches of the four Falstaff contestants?
Instead of discussing a section of text, your students will be discussing – with your
new ‘experts’ – speeches they have heard in the flesh.
B. The front page of the Shrewsbury News

Homework: Writing
In class: 50 min – 20 group work, 30 reading/discussion
Equipment: Black or white board
As a way of clarifying the various strands of plot in 1 Henry IV, have the class compose
page one of an imaginary Shrewsbury News for the morning after the Battle of Shrewsbury.
1. Begin by deciding how many stories there are to tell. Your class may decide, for
example, that these are the stories to tell:
(a) Hotspur killed; Lady Percy disconsolate
(b) Worcester causes unnecessary battle
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(c) John Falstaff claims heroic action

(d) Prince Hal fights valiantly
(e) Prince John participates in battle
(f) King Henry’s forces prevail
(g) Northumberland doesn’t show for battle
(h) Worcester and Vernon executed
(i) Douglas captured and set free
2. Now assign a group to each of these stories. Each member of the group is to go
home to write up his or her assigned story in three to four paragraphs of
journalese – about 100 words – with a headline (they’ll eventually hand these in
to you).
3. At the next class, allow twenty minutes for the group to meet and collaborate on
their final story.
4. Read each of the finished stories aloud.
5. Then turn the class into an ‘editorial’ meeting in which, using the board, you
compose the front page of the Shrewsbury News.
This exercise will force the students to decide on the importance of each story and on
its relationship to the other stories. The main headline, for example, might read: king’s
forces triumph with a subheading like rebel forces smashed at shrewsbury.
Below that perhaps would appear worcester treachery revealed, where they
combine story (b) and story (h); and in another story with an equal positioning, henry
‘hotspur’ percy killed with two sub-headed stories: notorious knight
disputes details and lady percy blames father- in-law, which combines
story (a) and story (c).
A. Lord and Lady Percy at home PART ONE , Act Two, Scene Three, 35 (‘How now,
Kate’) to 117 (‘must of force’). Three speaking parts, and a letter Hotspur is holding.
Although this play is so overstuffed with male preening and machismo that there is
(as in Julius Caesar) little room for women, Shakespeare inserts one of the most engaging
glimpses of marital life in all of his plays. In it, Hotspur is angrily reacting to a letter,
when Lady Percy enters and questions him about his preoccupation with some business
that has ‘banished’ her from his bed and made him talk in his sleep of military matters.
She ends her long opening speech to him (28 lines) by saying that if he does not tell her
what business he’s obsessed with, he does not love her. Instead of answering her, he calls
for a servant, gives him instructions about his horse, and when his wife presses him with,
‘hear you, my lord,’ he asks, ‘what say’st thou, my lady?’ as if she’d never spoken a word.
She wants to be included in his life, and he objects that this is not the time.
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This scene requires two strong actors; you can play the part of the servant. In your first
version of this scene, have your Kate urgent and your Hotspur truly pre-occupied and
oblivious to what she is saying. Let her be getting angry and him impatient. In this
version it is hard to tell if he loves her, and she is clearly worried about it.
In your second version, have Kate in a humorous and teasing mood, and have Hotspur
make it clear to the audience that he hears her but is pretending not to. To emphasize this
idea you might have her pulling at his sleeve and him constantly turning away, but
somewhere in the scene he embraces her warmly and tenderly. In this version it is easy
to tell that he loves her, and that she is not really worried about it.
In a third version, let both be truly angry with, even threatening, one another.
Discuss the impact of these three versions on the play. If Hotspur’s marriage is bad,
how does that reflect on his other activities? on Hal? If Hotspur’s marriage is good, how
does that reflect on his character and his activities? on Hal? What does this family scene
have to do with the play in general?
B. Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet alone and with voyeurs PART TWO, Act
Two, Scene Four, 208 (‘Ah, you whoreson little’) to 282 (‘anon, anon, sir’). Four speaking
parts.
In this scene, Falstaff, concerned about being loved and about getting old, is at his
most vulnerable. He thinks he is alone with Doll Tearsheet, but Hal and Poins eavesdrop
on the scene and ridicule the fat, old knight with a series of ‘asides’.
Explain to your actors that they are not ‘types’: Doll may be a prostitute and have a
funny name, but she’s a smart woman who loves Falstaff. Start the scene by playing some
romantic music you have on tape for the occasion (that choice will be fun to discuss
later) and by saying the page’s line, ‘the music is come, sir’ (225). In the first version, take
out the Prince and Poins and do the scene as if Falstaff and Doll are indeed alone. Have
your actors play the scene as warmly as possible, and have Doll take seriously and
tenderly Falstaff ’s fears of getting old.
Play the second version just like the first, but re-admit Hal and Poins to the scene, and
have them play their asides contemptuously.
Now discuss with your students the different impact of the two scenes. Does the
presence of Hal and Poins diminish or increase our sympathy for Falstaff? Are Hal and
Poins funny? Does the scene diminish or increase our admiration for Hal? How does this
prank compare with the Gadshill trick? Does Doll really love Falstaff? What influence
does music have on the scene?
C. Taking daddy’s crown PART TWO, Act Four, Scene Five, 19 (‘I will sit’) to 46
(‘left to me’), 138 (‘O pardon me’) to 144 (‘long guard it yours’). One speaking part, one
reclining part, and one crown.
To give your students a sense of how important a prop can be, stage at least two
variations of Hal taking and returning the crown. You will need a Henry on a bed (your
desk will do nicely), a Hal who can act, and a crown. Begin the scene with Hal’s line, ‘I will
sit and watch here by the King’ (4.5.19) and then (omitting Hal’s exit) jump to line 138
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– ‘O, pardon me, my liege!’ – as if the King wakes and Hal realizes he’s still alive and cut
to 142 so that the scene ends with
There is your crown,

and He that wears the crown immortally
long guard it yours.
In the first version Hal does not even touch the crown until he says ‘Lo, where it sits’
and puts it on his head. In this version, as soon as Hal sees that Henry is alive, he yanks
the crown from his head and gives it back to his father – ‘ O, Pardon me, my liege!’ (138)
– and when he says, ‘There is your crown’ (142), it is already back in the king’s possession.
In the second version have Hal take the crown as he asks, ‘why doth the crown lie there
upon his pillow?’ (20). In this version, Hal faces the audience and speaks to the crown.
When he examines his father’s breath – ‘by his gates of breath’ (30) – he does so for fear
his father might wake up and see him with the crown, and when he thinks his father is
dead – ‘this sleep is sound indeed’ (34) – he immediately returns his attention to the
crown and away from the King. Finally, he gives back the crown when he begins the line
‘there is your crown’ (142), but doesn’t take his hand from it until the line is finished.
Ask your students what other things might be done with the crown during those lines
and try a third version. Discuss the implications of these for all the versions. Ask the actor
playing Hal which of the versions was more comfortable to play.
D. The banishment of Falstaff PART TWO, Act Five, Scene Five, 41 (‘God save thy
grace’) to 72 (‘Set on’). Three speaking parts, including you as Chief Justice.
Your students must encounter this final scene in some form, and presenting it in class
is the best way to offer it to them. This scene deserves reworking and discussing for an
entire class, and I recommend that if you have the time, the space, and the patience, you
do it from Falstaff ’s entrance at line 5 all the way to his exit and put all the characters in.
In this stripped-down version, cut Pistol’s line, you play the Chief Justice, and have two
good actors do Falstaff and King Harry. End the scene with the new King’s exit.
In the first version, Hal speaks softly to Falstaff and has trouble controlling his
emotions. His words are harsh; his tone is hushed and even consoling.
In the second version, Hal never really looks at Falstaff. He speaks instead to the
audience, and his tone is imperious and unyielding.
Open the floor to discussion or to alternative readings.
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KING HENRY V
Comments
Contrary to just about everybody, I think that Henry V is one of Shakespeare’s best plays.
Even its admirers see it as a flawed work in celebration of the ‘famous victory at Agincourt’,
a pageant rather than a play, a collection of stirring speeches interspersed with comedy
and rounded off with a courtship scene. I see it, both in form and in content, as the logical
extension of the themes and characters begun in Richard II in which a master of language
looks at the connection between words and action and the meaning of worldly success. I
see Henry V as a personal play and a daring experiment that will lead its author to Hamlet.
Henry V is a play that explores and transmutes the very flaws that critics see in it – its
structure, its tone, and, above all, its main character. Henry V is a play about its author.
The critical dismissal of Henry V ignores the fact that from Hal’s first scene in 1 Henry
IV, when he predicts that his ‘reformation . . . shall show more goodly’ (1.2.209) to the
Epilogue of 2 Henry IV – ‘our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it’
(Epilogue 27–8), Shakespeare appears to have been pointing towards this play. Knowing
that, we are obliged to ask why Shakespeare made the choices he did in this unusual play.
The play takes its structure and tone from the device of a Chorus who constantly
glorifies Henry while apologizing for the author and his art: ‘pardon, gentles all, the flat,
unraiséd spirits that hath dared on this unworthy scaffold to bring forth so great an
object’ (Prologue 8–11). The Chorus bewails the limitations of the stage, the way it must
represent place – ‘can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?’ – and time – ‘turning
the accomplishments of many years into an hourglass’ – and he implores the audience,
‘on your imaginary forces work.’ There’s a novel idea: a theatre audience that must
imagine that what they are seeing is real. Critics have taken the Chorus’s apology at face
value, but I cannot see how a playwright who put A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the
stage and cut his theatrical teeth on a four-part presentation of the Wars of the Roses
(talk about squeezing ‘many years’ into an ‘hourglass’!) could seriously be worried about
staging a single battle, no matter how famous the victory.
No, I think the Chorus, like the young king he over-praises, is a mesmerizer, who
manipulates people, events, and meaning with words. The play raises the existential
question of the value of such power. Most of us, bumping up against the realities created
for us, can find meaning in the struggle with the world of reality we inherit. But where is
meaning for the king (or playwright) whose language has the power to remake the
world? In Richard II a king lived alone in a world of his language, but in Henry V, where
Shakespeare shows us the fate of unobstructed success, the language of the king prevails.
If, as critics claim, the play offers a royal procession of one man instead of a plot, that is
because Henry’s word-built reality sweeps all the other characters – the prelates, the
English lords, the traitors, the common soldiers, and, finally, the French – into its wake.
The conflict that drives this play is not between Henry and any of the other characters;
the conflict at the core of Henry V is between the story of success it stages and the story
of failure it represses. Repeatedly, something ‘other’ swims like a shadow under the play’s
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King Henry V
surface. Canterbury and Ely praise the reformed King, but they do so because of their
hopes of bribing him into war with France; the King warns the two prelates to ‘take heed
. . . how you awake the sleeping sword of war’ (1.2.21–2), but he is ‘resolved’ by Canterbury’s
tedious pedantry to ‘bend [France] to our awe or break it all to pieces’ (225–6); the old
friends of Falstaff will follow the King to France but blame him for the death of their
friend – ‘the king is a good king, but . . . he passes some humours and careers’ (2.1.124–5);
the King foils the treachery of three friends but gloats when he catches them in a trap
and refuses them mercy; the King persuades the governor of Harfleur to surrender, but
he does so with images of violated maidens and ‘naked infants spitted upon pikes’
(3.3.38); the Chorus tells us that on the eve of the battle his soldiers ‘pluck comfort’ from
‘a little touch of Harry in the night’ (4.0.47), but what we see is Pistol giving Harry ‘Leroy’
the finger and the King in an argument with enlisted men; during the battle the King is
furious that the French have killed the boys in the luggage, but earlier he had given the
order that ‘every soldier kill his prisoners’ (4.6.37).
As Harry’s victorious tide comes in, the repressed story comes nearer and nearer its
surface. Williams gives it voice in the wisdom of the common soldier, who argues that in
a bad cause the king is to blame for ‘all those legs and arm and heads chopped off in a
battle’ (4.1.133–4). Confronted with the simplicity of Williams’s argument, the disguised
King responds with chopped logic and then ignobly accepts his soldier’s challenge. Left
alone, however, Harry begins his soliloquy with some of Williams’s very phrases:
Upon the king! Let us our lives, our souls,

our debts, our careful wives,
our children and our sins, lay on the king!
(226–8)
But then he lapses into a self-pitying soliloquy whose main complaint is (as his father’s
was) that the poor sleep better at night because they have so little to worry about – a
conclusion completely at odds with what he has just seen: an encampment of sleepless
soldiers. Kate, his princess bride, gives voice to the repressed story in her canny
understanding that Harry’s attentions are not courtship but a negotiated settlement: ‘is it
possible dat I sould love de enemie of France?’ (5.2.169–70). Finally, the Chorus, the
official spokesperson for the King’s success story, ends Henry V with an offhand reminder
of the futility of the play’s entire enterprise:
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned King

of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing
that they lost France and made his England bleed . . .
(Epilogue 9–12)
Is King Henry V a success? Did Prince Hal turn into a great man? Way back in the
second scene of 1 Henry IV, the Prince, alone on the stage for the first time, makes the job
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of stage managing his own future the overarching issue of the plays. When, two plays later,
he is king and has his own play, his ‘reformation’ has taken place, and the play presents itself
as a portrait of the finished product – the great man. The play’s unrelenting, almost urgent,
boosting of Harry’s greatness begs the unasked question of Henry V: what is ‘greatness’?
The Chorus’s circular answer to that question is that greatness is Harry. But much in the
play suggests that he may not be Shakespeare’s answer. Something is missing from Harry,
an internal drama that he and the play rush by and will not stop to hear. That odd evasion
of his inner story, the blank we sense in Harry, is what gives the play its real drama as well
as its undramatic form. Two plays earlier Shakespeare lets us glimpse the importance of
what is missing when a roguish, fat, old man – in an impromptu play within a play – warns
his young friend: ‘Banish [Falstaff ] and banish all the world’ (1H4 2.4.473–4).
Finally, Henry V is – I think – a play about the author himself.
Shakespeare uses this play to push to extremes one model of worldly success, the man
who can control his world with language. It does not seem far-fetched to imagine that at
the point in his career when Shakespeare wrote Henry V he identified with his protagonist.
Already praised in print by Francis Meres as ‘the most excellent’ among English dramatists
and noted for his ‘mellifluous & hony-tongued’ poems and sonnets, Shakespeare must
have felt like a writer at the top of his game, an Alexander the Great with few worlds left
to conquer. A year later the meaning of greatness is much on his mind when Hamlet,
contemplating Fortinbras, who like Henry V is a ‘tender prince . . . with divine ambitions
puffed’ (Ham 4.4.48–9), decides that
Rightly to be great
is not to stir without great argument,
but greatly to find quarrel in a straw
when honour’s at the stake.
(Ham 4.4.53–6)
But Hamlet is the antithesis of such greatness, the negative image of a Harry. Where
Harry is ambitious, Hamlet is not; where Harry controls his environment, Hamlet
cannot; where Harry has put aside camaraderie, Hamlet hungers for it; and, above all,
where Harry, a master of language, relies on words, Hamlet, a master of language,
mistrusts words.
If we imagine that Shakespeare, too, had come to be suspicious of truths constructed
of language, then we may also see Henry V as an important point of departure, a personal
experiment in the politics of language and theatre that freed him to push his art beyond
successful models to areas language cannot contain. One might argue that every play
Shakespeare wrote after Henry V is an exploration – of human nature, of thought, of the
form itself – at the possible expense of professional success. This new agenda may help
explain such problematic plays as Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, All’s Well
that Ends Well, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens; but it also helps explain such triumphs
as Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale,
and The Tempest, those works that succeed in unimagined ways.
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King Henry V
Ploys
A. Paraphrase and parody Pistol’s language
Scripts: H5 2.1; 2.3; 3.2; 3.6; 4.1; 4.4; 5.1

Prep: 10 minutes intro
In class: Rest of the class
With Falstaff removed from the story, the main responsibility for comedy in Henry V
falls to Pistol. Where Falstaff conspires in his own comic effect and is master of his
language, Pistol’s intent to be serious is what makes his language funny. Pistol turns
‘shake hands’ into ‘give me thy fist, thy forefoot to me give’ (2.1.67); he makes ‘don’t cry’
into ‘go, clear thy crystals’ (2.3.52). The problem for you is to get your students to
recognize how funny Pistol’s language is when many of them may just think he’s talking
‘Shakespearean’.
Start by having your students paraphrase each of his sentences as succinctly as
possible. Understanding what he is trying to say will help them appreciate better the
verbal inflation of his speech. What are his linguistic affectations? They will notice the
alliteration – ‘viper vile’, ‘doting death’, ‘Bardolph, be blithe’ – and they may notice his love
of fancy words – ‘egregious’, ‘corroborate’, ‘puissant’. With your help they will learn to pick
out the places where Pistol reverses the normal order of verb and object – ‘thy forefoot to
me give’, ‘her espouse’, ‘I thee command’, ‘my name is Pistol called.’ Point out his tendency
to pump up lines with the last word or two:
A noble shalt thou have, and present pay . . .

(2.1.106)
And friendship shall combine, and brotherhood . . .
(2.1.108)
And Hold-fast is the only dog, my duck . . .
(2.3.50)
Show them his fondness for old words (‘mickle’, ‘wight’), foreign terms (‘quondam’, ‘caveto’,
‘coupe la gorge’), and allusions (‘Cressid’, ‘giddy Fortune’).
Once you feel they can recognize Pistolisms, have them parody his style by
putting contemporary language into iambic pentameter Pistolese. Give them a familiar
phrase from popular culture and let them Pistolize it. If Macdonald’s, for example, says,
‘you deserve a break today’, your students might rephrase it as, ‘while Phoebus plods, your
burger justly take.’ If a politician says, ‘read my lips’, then your students might say,
‘my thoughts on portals pink of mouth are writ.’ The more atrocious, the better. They’ll soon
get the idea.
165
B. Make a human recruitment poster out of Henry’s battle speeches
Scripts: H5 3.1; 4.3.18–67

Prep: 10–15 minutes
In class: Rest of class
Equipment: Camera, tripod.
Henry’s two famous battle speeches – ‘Once more into the breach’ and ‘We happy few’ – rely
on his understanding of human nature. In the first, he provides his soldiers with a physical
image of themselves as warriors (‘tigers’) and gives them the goal of proving their origins
honourable; in the second, he makes a virtue of having so few men and paints a picture of
how the future will remember them. To illustrate the power of the King’s appeal, have your
students organize and photograph two recruitment posters based on those two speeches.
1. Establish a classroom ‘camera angle’ with a camera on a tripod facing an open
area in the class.
2. Let your students pose one or more fellow students (up to fifteen) for a
recruitment poster photograph based on each of the two speeches.
3. Make certain that they pay close attention to Hal’s language.
4. Invite discussion – based on the text – of the poses they struck.
5. Standing on the floor with the ‘models’, alter the composition as discussion dictates.
6. After a suitable amount of discussion (and confusion), sum up the two or three
most distinct alternatives and let the class vote.
7. Then take the picture. Repeat for the second speech.
8. Post the two pictures to social media with appropriate caption from the play.
Students love this exercise because it gets them out of their chairs without requiring
that they read or say anything. What’s more, there is something exciting and official
about having a picture taken, a feeling that what they are doing matters because it is
being recorded – they ‘shall be remembered’. Finally, whether they realize it or not, this
ploy gets your students staging the language.
A. The language lesson Act Three, Scene Four, in its entirety (56 lines). Two speaking
parts. (It helps to have actors who can speak a little French.)
In a seminar I gave on this play, I assigned each student a scene to trim and to defend
those cuts before the class. The student whose job it was to cut the scene in which
Katherine tries to learn English from Alice reported to the class that she simply could not
cut anything from the scene. The class burst into applause.
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King Henry V
I list this scene among those for alternative readings merely because I think your
students should be exposed to its mixture of sweetness and bawdiness. Any two versions
will do, but you might try – in the first version – a bashful Kate and an earthy Alice and
then – in the second version – reverse them.
B. Williams, the King, and the glove Act Four, Scene Eight, 24 (‘How now?’) to 70
(‘not so good’). Three speaking parts, one non-speaking part (Exeter), and two gloves.
One of the moments in the play when I do not like the King is the scene in which he
reveals to Williams that he, the King, was the man Williams challenged the night before.
To begin with, he has the unsuspecting Fluellen wear the glove and receive Williams’s
blow; then, revealing the truth, he lets Williams believe that he is in serious trouble with
his King; finally, instead of taking any of the blame for the incident, he pays Williams off
by filling his glove with money. Shakespeare indicates in two ways that Williams might
have been insulted by this crass gesture. First, Williams does not respond to the King’s
gift, not even, ‘Thanks, your highness’; second, when Fluellen imitates the King and gives
Williams twelve pence, Williams will not take it: ‘I will none of your money’ (67).
In the first version, try the scene with a relieved and grateful Williams, who gives his
defence (lines 50–6) as a frightened supplicant, and says the line, ‘I will none of your
money’ (67), with the stress on ‘your’, as if he’s too proud of having been rewarded by the
King to take such a small gift from Fluellen.
In the second version, have your Williams be angry at the King’s subterfuge and the
trap he set for Williams, have him refuse to take the King’s money the first time Exeter
proffers it (notice that the King has to tell Exeter twice to give Williams the money), and
have him look at the King when he responds to Fluellen, ‘I will none of your money’ (67).
167
KING HENRY VI, PART 1
Comments
King Henry VI, Part 1 is not a good play, but it is frequently good theatre and full of great
material for teachers. As a play it suffers from a surfeit of action and of characters; it has
a numbing number of fight scenes and a confusion of separate stories: Gloucester,
Winchester, Lancaster, York, Anjou, Suffolk, Talbot, and La Pucelle all vie for a central
role, and rarely face to face.
But teachers who want to work with plays as performance – as I urge you to do – will
find rich ore everywhere in the play. Want to work on performing rhyme? Try Act Four,
Scene Four, where Talbot and his son compete in rhyme for honour on the battlefield.
Want to work on armies entering and exiting in battle? You can choose from fifteen such
entrances and ten such exits (I’m not even counting when armies simply march on or
off ). Want to work on balcony scenes? Depending on your staging, there are as many as
a dozen. Want to work on the aside? No scene in Shakespeare plays with that convention
as thoroughly or as delightfully as the scene between Suffolk and Margaret (Act Five,
Scene Two).
Teachers who want to look at Shakespeare’s plays through the prism of history will
find the mother lode in this play. Here – historically validated – are three English earls,
six English dukes, one English bishop, one English king, two French dukes, one French
countess, and a French ‘dolphin’ (in a pear tree). Here are two coronations (one English
and one French) and four famous battles. Here is a staging of the beginning of the War
of the Roses in Temple garden. And here is Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc.
Teachers interested in marketing can tackle the challenge of how to sell the play. As I
write this, the American Shakespeare Center is preparing a production, but because we
know that a title like ‘The First Part of King Henry VI’ is box office poison, we are calling
it ‘Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc’. Dishonesty in advertising? A little bit. The young King
Henry VI , with the sixth-most lines (174) in the play, has an unconvincing claim to its
title. John Talbot, by contrast, has the most lines in the play (407), but ‘Shakespeare’s John
Talbot’ will not sell tickets to a public – even in England – that doesn’t know who he was,
while everyone knows ‘Joan of Arc’. And, though she has roughly half as many lines as
Talbot, her spirit, lurching from heroine to heretic, from martyr to monster, most owns
the play.
She gives to teachers who want to deal with the political issues of gender and
womanhood the play’s greatest treasure: Joan is one of Shakespeare’s first powerful
women, a woman whose fame pivoted on her gender, the maid who led men, and whose
French appellation, ‘la Pucelle’, meant ‘virgin’ to the French and ‘whore’ when the English
pronounced it ‘puzel’. Shakespeare has put into one character all the familiar archetypes
of womanhood.
Joan is the Amazonian warrior who, like Queen Elizabeth, claims a man’s heart in a
woman’s body:
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King Henry VI, Part 1
My courage try by combat, if thou darest,

and thou shalt find that I exceed my sex.
(1.2.89–90)
Joan is the spunky country girl:
. . . I am by birth a shepherd’s daughter,

my wit untrain’d in any kind of art.
(1.2.72–3)
Joan is the holy virgin, as she says of herself:
Joan of Arc hath been

a virgin from her tender infancy,
chaste and immaculate in very thought;
whose maiden blood, thus rigorously effused,
will cry for vengeance at the gates of heaven.
(5.3.49–53)
Joan is a strumpet, first claiming she is pregnant by Charles, then by the French
dauphin, or then maybe the Duke of Alençon, or perhaps Regnier, the King of Naples:
I am with child, ye bloody homicides:

murder not then the fruit within my womb,
although ye hale me to a violent death.
(5.3.62–4)
Joan is a witch, offering her limbs to demons from hell:
Where I was wont to feed you with my blood,

I’ll lop a member off and give it you
in earnest of further benefit,
so you do condescend to help me now.
(5.2.35–8)
In her ‘infinite variety’ Joan is an early exemplar of what the poet Ted Hughes refers
to as Shakespeare’s ‘goddess of complete being’, a forerunner of Cleopatra, threatening us
by eluding definition. But unlike Cleopatra, Joan does not always seem the same character.
At the beginning of the play, we see her as the most patriotic Frenchman might see her:
she’s a heaven inspired heroine. At the end of the play, we see her as the most jingoistic
Englishman might see her: she’s a witch and a whore. But precisely because she seems
more of a cartoon than Cleopatra and lacks her human complexity, you can find no
better example of the locus of male anxiety than Joan la Pucelle.
169
Ploys
Stage three versions of Joan and the demons (Act Five, Scene Two)
Scripts: 1H6 5.2

Prep: Scripts
Personnel: 3 players to play Joan, 3 teams of fiends (4–6 per team),
3 teams of dramaturges (1–2 per team)
This ploy leads to some good discussions of Shakespeare’s view of Joan, but the main
purpose is to get your students to understand Shakespeare’s stagecraft. The Folio gives six
explicit stage directions during Joan’s 33-line speech imploring the ‘fiends’ to help her.
Here they are preceded by the cues for each:
. . . give me signs of future accidents

THUNDER.
. . . appear and aid me in this enterprise
ENTER FIENDS.
. . . Help me this once, that France may get the field
THEY WALK, AND SPEAK NOT.
. . . condescend to help me now
THEY HANG THEIR HEADS.
. . . if you will grant my suit.
THEY SHAKE THEIR HEADS.
. . . England give the French the foil
THEY DEPART.
Set-up
If you are willing to provide the costume and prop pieces, you can do this ploy in a single
class (as long as they’ve read the play).
1. As usual, arrange your room as an Elizabethan stage (see the Fourth Do).
2. You will need an easy-to-read script for each of the Joans, and a cue script with
the stage directions for each of the fiends (see above).
3. You’ll need three teams. Start by asking for three volunteers to play Joan, the
only speaking part; you can choose your Joans without regard to gender.
170
Then, depending on the size of your class, use four to six fiends (they have
no lines to speak) on each team and two dramaturges, one to attend to
the explicit stage directions and one to attend to the embedded stage
directions.
4. If you are springing this on your class, then you’ll need to bring a suitcase
full of things (otherwise you can have them bring their own stuff ). On desks
or tables set up a station (table or desk) each for costumes, props, masks,
and noisemakers. For the costumes desk: 4–6 of each of the following:
raincoats (in any shape); aprons; sheets with a hole for heads; and scarves.
For the props desk, 4–6 of each: plastic gloves; whiskbrooms; pliers; and
bare branches. For the masks desk, 4–6 of each: white and/or black masks;
sunglasses; goggles; and stocking masks. For the noisemakers: kazoos;
rattles; bells; and clickers. If you have other ideas for any of these, great;
but make sure you have enough so that all the fiends on a team can use
the same items.14
5. Each of the three teams then chooses one kind of thing (all the fiends on a team
need to be consistent in terms of their costumes, props, and sounds) first from
the costumes (for example, the aprons), second from the props, third from
masks, and fourth from the noisemakers. A coin flip can determine which team
chooses first, second, and third and from each of the tables.
6. Put each group into a different corner of the room (or let them find a place to
work) and give them fifteen minutes to put together their show.
7. The two dramaturges make sure that (a) the fiends follow their explicit stage
directions on cue and that (b) they look for and use any embedded stage
directions.
8. Each team has four minutes to do the scene. (A reading of the script would take
less than two.)
9. Allow thirty seconds between versions.
In the time remaining, lead a conversation on the different choices your actors
made with the two kinds of stage directions. Point out where you were particularly
pleased with the timing of the text and an action of the fiends. Ask your students for
their favourite moments and production choices. Ask how those moments and
choices clarify the story and shape an understanding of what Joan is saying and who
she is.
14
Clearly, in a production, fiends could all be different, but mixing and matching among the four teams will
lower the opportunity to talk about different choices.
171
A. Suffolk and Margaret swapping asides Act Five, Scene Two, 65 (‘Be what thou
wilt’) to line 130 (‘quid for quo’). Two speaking parts.
The ‘aside’ – words spoken by a character that other characters in the play do not hear
– is the quintessence of theatre magic.
Shakespeare not only made frequent use of the aside, he also toyed with variations of
it. Usually, during an aside, the other characters on the stage do not notice that the
speaker is talking to himself or to the audience. Sometimes other characters onstage will
notice that a character is ‘in his own world’ but not hear what he is saying.
This scene between Margaret and Suffolk takes even more liberties with the
convention. Suffolk breaks into asides, but Margaret not only notices that he’s no longer
talking to her, but also appears to hear some of what he says; and then, to tease him, she
herself begins talking to the audience as though he is not there.
In the first version, during Suffolk’s asides – at ‘I have no power to let her pass’ – your
Margaret isn’t sure he is speaking to the audience, so her own asides are not to the audience
but confused and to herself. Then, once he starts trying to talk to her and she doesn’t listen
– at ‘what though I be enthralled’ – it’s because she really is in her own world. And in the
final line of that version, she says, ‘I cry you mercy’, truly apologetically and then adds, ‘’tis
but quid for quo’ as an exculpatory afterthought. In the second version, Margaret immediately
notices he is speaking to the audience, hears pretty much everything he is saying, and starts
giving him his own medicine by speaking to whatever part of the audience he is not
speaking to. Once his attention turns back to her, she quite deliberately and mischievously
ignores him, and her ‘’tis but quid for quo’ is the conclusion she’s been going for.
Your students will enjoy these readings because they so manifestly make them, as
audience, party to the differences.
B. Rhyme tug of war between Lord Talbot and his son John Act Four, Scene Four
(55 lines). Two speaking parts.
Here is a principle I share with my actors: in Shakespeare no character accidentally
rhymes. If their character rhymes, that character is doing so on purpose. Sometimes it’s a
matter of showing off (lovers, for example), but more frequently it’s a way to establish
authority through language, as though the speaker is saying ‘my thoughts on this subject
are so clear that I can express them through rhyme’. Thus, when two characters vie for
status, they will sometimes compete through rhymes. A character can do this in a number
of ways: (1) he can rhyme a larger percentage of his lines than his opponent; (2) he can
take the last word of what his opponent says and make it the rhyme word for his next line,
in essence stealing the rhyme; (3) he can speak the last rhyme in the dialogue or in the
scene.15 Rap has helped to give students already a grasp of the way good rhymers compete.
15
Another way that doesn’t apply to this scene is that he can use a more complicated rhyme scheme; for
example, instead of six lines with three couplets (AA , BB , CC ), he might speak a quatrain and a couplet
(ABAB , CC ).
172
One of the best illustrations of a rhyme combat is 4.4 where Lord Talbot tries
unsuccessfully to persuade his son John to leave the battle. Lord Talbot tries to establish
a father’s authority in the couplet at the end of his first speech, and Son Talbot stands up
to him with a couplet in his first speech. After Lord Talbot replies with one line, Son
Talbot takes over by rhyming that line and by multiplying his own rhymes until Lord
Talbot takes over again near the end of the scene.
In the first version have your actors try to ignore the rhyme by giving the speeches as
though the rhymes didn’t matter and just happened. They should do the best they can to
make the arguments of the two men clear, but without any concern for the rhyme.
In the second version, have your two actors play the scene by always landing hardest
on the second of the two rhyme words, for example:
You fled for vantage, everyone will swear;

but, if I bow, they’ll say it was for FEAR.
Ask your students to compare this version to the first. They will probably find that it had
a slightly comic effect, but they will also have a stronger sense of the placement of the
rhymes.
In the third version ask your two actors to set up each couplet by landing harder on the
first rhyme than the second, which will still get some stress, for example:
You fled for vantage, everyone will SWEAR;

but, if I bow, they’ll say it was for fear.
The idea here is that the character (Son Talbot) chooses the first rhyme because he
already knows he will rhyme that particular word and thus is in absolute control of what
he is saying.
Discuss with the class which of the two rhymed versions made the rhyme less
obtrusive. Which made the argument clearer? Ask your actors which approach they felt
made them more in control of their thoughts.
173

OR
THE FIRST PART OF THE CONTENTION OF THE TWO FAMOUS HOUSES
OF YORK AND LANCASTER
Comments
To judge by the number of beheadings, the Second Part of Henry VI is Shakespeare’s ‘ISIL’
play, his study of barbarism in the pursuit of power, and the main image in that study –
the play’s emblematic prop – is the disembodied head. In this play a queen wanders
around Act Four, Scene Four, with her lover’s head in her hands; the rebel Jack Cade
beheads two aristocrats, has their heads stuck ‘upon two poles’, and orders, ‘let them kiss
one another.’ Three scenes later a citizen cuts off Jack’s head and brings it to King Henry,
who promptly knights the good beheading citizen for his deed. If Shakespeare’s point is
that a headless country results in headless men, then he’s certainly given this play the
appropriate prop.
This is the first of the Henry VI plays that Shakespeare wrote, and its original title, The
First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (try selling
that title) changed in the Folio to The Second Part of Henry VI after Shakespeare wrote
the prequel, called The First Part of Henry Sixth. (See previous play.) As we have seen, that
‘First Part’ has the problem of cramming sixty-one characters into a coherent story, so we
should expect that this earlier play with its sixty-six characters (the most in any of
Shakespeare’s plays) would be even less coherent. But because unruliness to the point of
anarchy is one theme of this play, its untidiness is almost a virtue.
This disorderliness shows up in the list of characters. Normally, at least half the
characters who say anything in Shakespeare’s history plays are aristocrats, but in this play
two-thirds of the speaking characters are commoners. And they’re not happy with
authority. Simon Simpcox tries to scam the King. Margery Jordan and Roger Bolingbroke
conjure spirits with dire predictions for the royalty. Peter Thump, an armourer’s servant,
petitions against his master. Peter Thump fights with his master. Peter Thump kills his
master. Walter Whitmore, a sailor, kills and beheads the Duke of Suffolk. Jack Cade, a
clothier, leads a rebellion. Jack Cade names himself king. Jack Cade executes lords – by
beheading them, of course. In this play both England and the stage are teeming with
unruly people, and by Act Four, when Shakespeare introduces us to Cade, who would
‘kill all the lawyers’ and hang anyone who can read and write, things seem to have got
about as bad as things can get in the distressed England of the ineffectual King Henry the
Sixth.
What can be worse for a country than a Jack Cade?
Ladies and gentlemen, answers the playwright at the end of this play, Let me introduce
you to Richard Plantagenet the Younger, alias Crookback Richard, alias the Bottled Spider,
alias the Duke of Gloucester, alias King Richard the Third-to-be.
174
But let’s return to the happy scene at the beginning of the play. After a ‘flourish of
trumpets’, the Marquis of Suffolk introduces the young King to his beautiful new Queen,
fresh arrived from France. In attendance are the Lord Protector, Duke of Gloucester; the
Dukes of Somerset, Buckingham, and York; the Earls of Salisbury and Warwick; and
Cardinal Beaufort. For the audience’s first view, Shakespeare has assembled at the
auspicious first meeting of the King and Queen of England the nation’s A-list. Freeze that
picture and you have the perfect wedding portrait.
Except that moments later, when Gloucester the Lord Protector, reads the terms of the
wedding agreement, we will see the ‘guests’ at this wedding outraged. Except that we will
soon learn that Suffolk, the King’s emissary to bring back a wife, and Margaret, his new
bride, are having an affair. Except that we watch as Beaufort, Somerset, and Suffolk plot to
bring down the good Lord Protector. Except that we discover that York, backed by
Salisbury and Warwick, wants to be king and will go to war to win the throne. Except that
by the end of this ramshackle play, four of the men in the wedding portrait Shakespeare
stages at the start of the play will be dead and the saintly King and his ferocious wife will
be on the run from their enemies, led by York and his sons Edward and Richard.
The play’s final picture is diametrically opposite that opening snapshot of unity and
promise: the last thing we see are the Yorks, backed by Salisbury and Warwick, exiting
with banners flying and drums beating. Sequel, anyone?
Ploys
A. Write Jack Cade’s Bill of Rights
Scripts: 2H6 4.2, 4.3, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 4.10

Prep: Prior intro
Homework: Writing, part creative
On hand: Bill of Rights template, board, (optional: legal-sized paper, frame)
Jack Cade is leading a revolution, and he and his followers need your students to compose
the Bill of Rights for the new country he is building. Jack and the rebels have plenty of
ideas on everything from currency (they don’t want any) to beer to clothes to where to
graze their horses. Have your students go through the ideas for the nation discussed by
these revolutionaries during the uprising in Act Four (Scenes Two, Three, Six, Seven,
Eight, and Ten), and each bring to class a document that puts their ten most revolutionary
objectives into the formal language of the US Bill of Rights and its ten first articles, each
followed in quotations by the words in the play of Cade or one of the rebels that justify
that right and the act, scene, and line for those words.
175
For example, Jack the Butcher famously wants to get rid of lawyers, so one of Cade’s
Bill of Rights might look like this:
Article I. The peace of the land requiring the absence of anyone practised in legal
language or logic, it shall be a crime punishable by death to study the laws or rules
of society, or to exercise the duties of any profession stemming from the study
thereof, be it as a lawyer, a defence barrister, a prosecutor, or a judge.
Jack the Butcher: ‘The first thing we do we kill all the lawyers.’ Act Two, Scene Two,
line 76.
Set-up
1. Have the students format their Bill of Rights like an official document and bring
them to class.
2. In class, call into order the Cade Convention. Ask a volunteer to stand and read
to the assembly for their consideration one of the articles from his or her Bill of
Rights with the quotation from the play on which it is based.
3. Ask if anyone has an article promoting the same right (for example, no lawyers)
in different words and have that person stand and read. If you think you have
time, ask for a third version.
4. Ask the ‘convention’ to vote for the version it likes best and put that version of
the article on the board.
5. Now ask for an article supporting a different right and repeat the process of
inviting one or two alternative phrasings.
6. When you have ten articles on the board, ask if someone wants to replace one of
those rights with another one drawn from the text and have that person read the
right and put it on the board (this time without asking for an alternative
wording).
7. Accept no more than three additional articles and then tell the ‘convention’ that
they have to (a) decide which ten of the thirteen rights they want in the final Bill
of Rights and (b) arrange them in order of importance.
8. After class, as a reinforcement of their work, assemble the articles of the
‘convention’ into a fancy looking document on a legal-size sheet of paper and either
make each student a copy or frame it and hang it in your office or classroom.
The objective of the assignment is for your students to put the most ridiculous ideas
of the rebels into a Bill of Rights that imitates as much as possible the dignified wording
of the US Bill of Rights. This assignment will sharpen their reading of the play, challenge
their skill in composition, and, perhaps, heighten their appreciation of James Madison’s
prose. And you will be surprised and delighted by the fervour generated when your
classroom holds the Cade Convention.
176
B. Cade campaign posters
Prep: Prior intro

Homework: Handmade poster
Instead of heightening the demands of Cade’s followers into the formal language of a Bill
of Rights as above, this ploy asks your students to shrink those demands to the kind you
see on handheld posters at political rallies. Tell your students that each of them is to
bring a Cade campaign poster to class.
Set-up
The rules for making the posters:
1. The poster must be on poster board, not paper, and measure exactly 22 × 18 inches.
2. The poster must have no more than six words on it.
3. One of those words must be ‘Cade’.
4. The poster must use at least two colours in addition to the colour of the poster
board.
5. The letters must use lines thick enough and tall enough to be clear from 40 feet
away (roughly the longest dimension of a normal classroom).
In class
1. Have your students keep their posters face down on their desks until the ‘rally’ begins.
2. When you signal for the rally to begin, have the students stand up and raise their
posters high to show to the rest of the room. (If you’d like a little chaos, have
them march around the room holding up their posters and yelling ‘Cade!’)
3. Tell them to look for the one other poster besides their own that they would
most like to have at a Cade rally.
4. Once they have taken their seats again, have each of them say which other poster
they would want.
5. Have the four students with the posters that got the most votes come to the front
of the room with their posters. Ask these questions:
● Which poster is visually most arresting? Why?
● Which poster is verbally the catchiest? Why?
● Which poster best sums up what the Cade rebellion is about as it appears in
the play? Why?
Now have your class choose the Cade rebellion’s official campaign poster.
177
If you want to make this activity and your class even more memorable, then you can
have campaign buttons made of the winning poster slogan to give to your students at a
later date. Imagine how much they would enjoy wearing a Cade campaign button that
they themselves had decided on, for example: ‘CADE ! NO BOOKS ! FREE BEER !’
A. Suffolk introduces King Henry VI to his new bride Act One, Scene One, 1–37
(‘England’s happiness!’). Three speaking parts, six non-speaking parts.
As I say in my comment, the play starts as though we have gathered for a great royal
wedding. It sounds that way – Flourish of trumpets: then hautboys – and it looks that way
as the King and assortment of nobles, a cardinal, and the bride come onstage. And yet the
undercurrents here are what make the scene fascinating. Suffolk, who has ‘espoused’
Margaret in his role as ‘procurator’ to the King, is actually in love with her. The young
King is naive and under the guardianship of the Duke of Gloucester. How will he react
to meeting his bride? And, of course, how will Margaret, a woman who in Part One had
a mind of her own and a taste for Suffolk, react?
In the first version, have your actors play it straight without regard to what has
happened in Part One or what will happen in this play. Suffolk gives his opening speech
purely as a dutiful courtier who has completed his mission of bringing back a bride for
the King. The young King suspects nothing and his greeting to Margaret (including the
kiss) are the straightforward words and actions of a monarch greeting his new bride. Her
response is likewise the sort of courteous but sincere language of an aristocratic bride in
an arranged marriage meeting her husband for the first time. The witnesses look on with
pleasure and give their ‘long live’ line with great approval.
In the second version, every word Suffolk says has a double meaning and his speech is
wink-wink to Margaret about making the King a cuckold and setting up a situation
where he and she will continue to be lovers. He speaks his last two lines of admiration for
Margaret as nearly like a lover as he could do in public. In this version, the King is
oblivious to Suffolk’s tone and is terrified of marriage and even of women. His kiss is
rushed and awkward. Everything he says is what he thinks he ought to say with all these
grown-ups watching. For her part, Margaret means everything she says to the King for
Suffolk to hear as if it’s meant for him. The witnesses are uncomfortable with Suffolk’s
tone, embarrassed about their wimpy king, disturbed by Margaret’s obvious affection for
Suffolk, and give their ‘long live’ line half-heartedly.
In the third version, Suffolk is so in love with Margaret that he is bitter about having to
give her to the King. This King is smitten with love and desire at the first view of Margaret
and transformed into a confident, silver-tongued lover. Margaret is surprised by his good
looks, impressed with his words, and so delighted by her good fortune that she forgets
whatever might have been going on with Suffolk. The witnesses in this version are
dumfounded by Suffolk’s odd self-pity, amazed at the transformation of the King, and
thrilled when Margaret obviously falls for him. In their pleasure at this perfect outcome
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they lead the audience (the rest of your class) in proclaiming ‘Long live Queen Margaret,
England’s happiness!’
Discuss what would ‘work’ for each of these versions and what would not ‘work’ and
the reasons why.
B. Queen Margaret with Lord Suffolk’s head Act Four, Scene Four, 1–24 (‘die for
thee’). Four speaking parts and a cabbage in a bloody pillowcase.
The object of this alternative reading is to explore the range of effects of having a
disembodied head onstage. In this scene, two things are happening at once: At one door
enters the King, Buckingham, and Lord Say; the King is holding written demands from
Cade’s rebels. At the other enters Queen Margaret holding the head of her dead lover,
Suffolk, sent to her by the pirates who beheaded him.
In the first version, when Queen Margaret enters, she shrinks away from the others
onstage, she says her first speech as an aside, something that the king and his courtiers
cannot hear as they discuss the business at hand. Only when the King says, ‘How now,
madam!’ do any of them see Margaret. His reaction is shock first, and then sympathy on
‘still lamenting’, and, finally, sad envy starting with ‘I fear’. The reactions of Buckingham
and Say are disgust. Margaret’s ‘No, my love’ line is completely sincere.
In the second version, Margaret comes to the middle of the stage and speaks her first
speech for everyone onstage to hear. The King, Buckingham, and Say, hoping this
embarrassing episode will pass, ignore her. She is furious at that and directs her ‘Oh,
barbarous villains!’ at the King and his company, who continue pretending they don’t see
her. When the king speaks to her at ‘How now, madam!’ he acts as though he’s only just
seeing her. His ‘still lamenting’ is now a scolding, and his ‘I fear me’ is whining. Margaret’s
final line is entirely sarcastic.
The third version is like the second except that at ‘behold the same’ Margaret pushes
Suffolk’s head into the King’s hands, and that is what prompts him to mention that Cade
wants Say’s head. The King gives Suffolk’s head back to Margaret at the end of his last line
(‘so much for me’).
Because there are so many moving parts in this four-person scene, your students will
enjoy mixing and matching various moments. They’ll also enjoy experimenting with
bizarre ways of playing with Suffolk’s head. Challenge them to find a textually plausible
way to have all four actors have to hold the head.
179

OR
THE TRUE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD DUKE OF YORK AND THE GOOD KING
HENRY THE SIXTH
Comments
So now that you’ve come to the ‘last’ of the Henry VI plays,16 how can you distinguish
three plays so packed with characters (an average of sixty), so full of family names
jumping from generation to generation, so frequently interrupted with stage fights, so
crowded with killings, and so complicated with shifting alliances? I’d love to know. I don’t
know anyone who has them completely sorted out, but here’s how I try do it.
1 Henry VI is the one in which the Yorks choose white roses and the Lancasters choose
red and the one set in France as much as in England – the international one. It’s the one
with Joan of Arc and her demons on the French side and Talbot on the English side.
(And the one where Talbot and his son have a rhyme slam before they both get killed in
battle.) It’s the one where Suffolk goes to France to get a bride for the young King Henry
and ends up falling in love with a dowerless princess named Margaret.
2 Henry VI is the one all about England – the national one. It’s the one where the
English lower classes join the hapless Jack Cade rebellion against the rose-picking upper
classes. Oh, and it’s the one in which the Duke of Gloucester loses his job as Lord
Protector (and his life) because his Duchess is accused of consorting with witches. It’s the
one where Margaret roams around with her Suffolk’s head.
3 Henry VI is the one where Shakespeare’s super-villain – Richard Crookback –
emerges full-blown. There are plenty of good things about this play (primarily scenes
with the super-villainess Margaret), but the best thing is that Shakespeare gleefully
leashes his stagecraft to his word-craft and unleashes Richard, ‘the Devil’s butcher’, who
earns his own play in the sequel, King Richard III. Though he is not the title character
here, he steals this play from the start, gives its most famous speech in the middle, and
provides its farewell kiss at the end.
The beginning
This book is a plea to teachers to let performance help them rid their students of
ShakesFear, and staging the first 20 lines of The Third Part of Henry VI is a fine way to do
that. Have them envision what the first audience would have seen:
A battle drum sounds and six noblemen rush with soldiers onto a stage where there
is a throne. There’s clearly been some skirmish. In the first line of the play, one of the
16
Leaving aside all the rigorous work of textual bibliographers about when Shakespeare wrote each of the three
Henry VI plays, teaching these three plays out of the chronological sequence of the historical events they stage
would be challenging.
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nobles (Warwick) makes clear they are a faction in revolt against Henry VI – ‘I wonder
how the King escaped our hands!’ The leader of this group (the Duke of York, as we will
learn) explains that the escaped king, ‘slyly stole away and left his men’ to the command
of ‘the great lord of Northumberland’, who charged back into battle. Then a younger
nobleman boasts to the leader that he slew the Duke of Buckingham and to prove it
holds up his sword: ‘That this is true, father, behold his blood.’
So this guy is showing off his valour to his father, the leader of the coup. Then another
nobleman holds up his sword and says, ‘And brother17 here’s the Earl of Wiltshire’s blood.’
These two brothers are showing Daddy their bloody swords, when a third young man,
with a limp and a noticeable hump on his back, holds up a severed head and addresses it
– ‘Speak now for me, and tell them what I did’ – and drops the mic by throwing on the
floor the Duke of Somerset’s head.
Your students will think that ‘crookbacked’ Richard’s speaking to a severed head is
some serious ‘one-upmanship’. And funny. And Daddy (York) likes it too and says to him,
‘Richard hath best deserved of all my sons.’ And then he joins in Richard’s joke by asking
the head, ‘But is your grace dead, my lord of Somerset?’ He may even have waved the
head around a little because Richard says, ‘Thus do I hope to shake King Henry’s head.’
This scene will give your students a taste of the gruesome scenes ahead and the way
that Shakespeare weds issues of family (sibling rivalry, for example) with shocking
violence. If you help your students see how Shakespeare sets up his play and introduces
Richard by having them stage these 20 lines, you will not only have taught them this
central dynamic of the play but also made them fans. You will need to bring a severed
head for the main prop (a large cantaloupe or a small watermelon in a ketchup-stained
pillowcase will do).
The middle
In Act Three, Scene Two, after watching his brother King Edward IV try to seduce Lady
Elizabeth Grey, Richard gives the longest monologue in all of Shakespeare – and one of
the best. He begins with an ironic comment on Edward’s womanizing past – ‘Ay, Edward
will use women honourably.’ Then he wishes that Edward’s lechery might have given him
syphilis so
That from his loins no hopeful branch may spring

to cross me from the golden time I look for.
(126–7)
By which, of course, he means the crown of England. That, he tells us, is the only pleasure
the world affords him because he was not made for the pleasures of love since ‘love
foreswore me in my mother’s womb’ by bribing nature
17
Montague is not Edward’s brother but his brother-in-law, a meaningless distinction for the stage business.
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To shrink mine arm up like a withered shrub,

to make an envious mountain on my back
where sits deformity to mock my body,
to shape my legs of an unequal size,
to disproportion me in every part . . .
(156–60)
Then, asking ‘Am I then a man to be beloved?’ (163), he justifies his ambition – ‘I’ll make
my heaven to dream upon the crown’ (168) – as the result of his misfortunate birth. As
we listen, transfixed by his self-loathing, we find ourselves torn between the plausibility
of his explanation and the possibility that it is merely a rationale.
Then he goes from seeking our sympathy as confidantes to partnering with us in his
project. ‘And yet,’ he confides, ‘I know not how to get the crown’ (172). The problem, he
tells us, is that ‘many lives stand between’ him and his goal. But wait, by golly, he has a
solution: ‘I can smile and murder whiles I smile,’ he says, perhaps; and in case we haven’t
noticed, he reminds us he can ‘play the orator as well as Nestor’ (182, 188). And he
concludes the speech and the scene with a teaser for the next play that would do any
Hollywood marketer proud:
Can I do all this and cannot get a crown?

Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down.
(194–5)
The end
Shakespeare might well have made our last view of Richard in this play the moment
when he murders the gentle, peace-seeking King Henry VI in the Tower, saying
to him,
Down, down to hell, and say I sent thee thither,

I that have neither pity, love, nor fear.
(5.6.67–8)
But Shakespeare does something even creepier in Richard’s final scene. King Edward IV
has gathered his family in a throne room to savour his victory and to urge his brothers
Clarence and Richard to love the Queen and to show it publicly by kissing their ‘princely
nephew’ (5.7.27). Clarence does so, and when it’s Richard’s turn, he asks Edward and the
court to ‘witness the loving kiss’, gives the baby a kiss, and turns to the audience to say
what he was thinking when he did:
To say the truth, so Judas kissed his master

and cried ‘All Hail,’ when as he meant all harm.
(32–4)
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Twelve lines after Richard, comparing himself to Judas, kisses the infant Prince, King
Edward speaks the play’s final words – ‘here I hope begins our lasting joy.’
Well, no, but here begins the joy of Richard III and the great success of William
Shakespeare.
Ploys
Mapping 3 Henry VI
Prep: Character assignments

In class: 40 minutes, with discussion
Props: Red and white roses or ribbons for students, large map of England
Shakespeare had a notorious disdain for the dramatic unities of time and place. His plays
are literally all over the map. This ploy is designed to give your students a kinetic sense of
the way the geography of his plays changes from place to place and understand how the
text helps actors and audiences figure out where the action is supposed to be. You might
be able to get this done in half an hour, but the first time you try it, you should plan on
an entire class.
Set-up
1. Have as large a map of England as possible in the front of your room. You can
project one if you like, as long as you can indicate each of the locations as it
appears.
2. The play has fifty characters in it. Assign characters to each of your students.
Avoid assigning two royal characters to any one student. You can pass out red
and white roses (or ribbons for them to pin on) to help everyone remember
which side they are on.
3. Allow ten minutes for your students to search the text and identify the scenes
their character(s) are in by reading the stage directions for entrances.
4. Allow another five to ten minutes for your students to figure out where their
characters are in the world of the play – that is, where their scenes are imagined
to take place. The editors of most editions will give that location at the beginning
of the scene, but Shakespeare does not do that, so ask your students to find any
lines that would help the editor decide on that information.
5. When they know their locales, have them find them on the map of England.
Explain that the room will now become the map with your desk representing
London in the south and ask them to find their setting at a place in the room
that roughly represents where that place is in England relative to London.
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6. Announce that the play is beginning. Read the stage directions for entries and
have all the characters in the play’s first scene assemble at your desk/London.
Have the people who will be in scene two already standing.
7. Once the students in scene one are in place, read the stage direction for the
entries in scene two. That scene is in York, so – as they’ll see on the map – (with
your desk/London as the reference point) those students should move almost to
the back wall standing somewhat to right or ‘east’ of centre. Remind people in
the next scene to be standing and ready to move.
8. Scene three is a battlefield between Towton and Saxton just southeast of York, a
little more towards the centre of the room.
9. And so on. All the scenes in the play but one are north of London (your desk),
and for that one – France – you can have that group stand just inside the door to
the room.
Inevitably, as students rush to get into place – often in the middle of the room – this
ploy will create a hubbub and with it a certain amount of frustration, a feeling many
actors have as they wait backstage for their entrances. Into the bargain, your students will
be discovering (a) how editors decide where a scene is set and (b) something about the
geography and history of England.
In leading discussion ask if the students could discern any patterns in the movement.
If they say yes, good; you can talk about those patterns. If they say no, good; you can talk
about the chaos of war.
Here are two scenes for alternative staging where I suspend my advice (see Chapter
Three) against choosing a passage with only a single character in it. Both these speeches
are shortcuts into an understanding not only of the play but also of two of the characters
on whom Shakespeare spent a lot of thought.
A. The title character owns the stage for once Act Two, Scene Five, 1 to 54
(‘. . . Treason waits on him’). One speaking part for a good actor.
Surely the most woebegone character in all of Shakespeare is King Henry VI . He’s the
title character of three of Shakespeare’s plays in which he speaks, cumulatively, more
lines than Shakespeare wrote for all but five of the characters in his plays.18 Trouble is no
one ever listens to him. Here in his last play he finally gets the stage entirely to himself
for 53 lines, during which he describes the battle going on, bemoans his life, wishes he
had been born ‘a homely swain’, imagines what it would be like to pass the time as a
shepherd, and compares the comforts of that life to the discomfort of being King. (Note:
18
Hamlet and Iago in one play each, Antony in two plays each, and Hal in three plays; Richard Plantagenet in
his four plays just edges out Margaret in her four plays.
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you might consider cutting 10 to 15 lines of this rather long speech; just make sure you
leave in the lines I mention below.)
In the first version, have your Henry throw a pity party for himself. He’s not really so
much talking to the audience as he is whining out loud. The parallelisms beginning ‘How
many make the hour . . .’ and ending ‘. . . months and years’ (26–38) he delivers like a
spoiled kid complaining about chores. Everyone has it better than he does.
In the second version, have your Henry make the first 20 lines (through ‘grief and
woe?’) all about how much he cares for others and hates violence. Here he is reporting to
audience the horrors of war as an innocent child might do. At ‘O God!’, when he begins
to think about being a homely swain each parallel line grows more wistful and hopeful.
And when he gets to ‘Ah, what a life were this!’ (41), he really wants to make the audience
understand the joys of a simple life. He’s not bitter about his own life; he’s envious of
theirs.
Discuss the pros and cons of the two readings with your class. Which Henry is more
interesting and which more boring: the spoiled brat or the good man worried about the
world? Ask them why? Does their answer to that question apply to the rest of the play?
What about to Richard?
B. Richard alone with us at last Act Three, Scene Two, 147 (‘What other pleasure . . .’)
to 195 (‘. . . pluck it down’). One speaking part, again for a good actor.
Almost exactly halfway through this play about the Yorks and their fight to get the
throne from Henry VI , Richard Plantagenet, the youngest and most outrageous son of
the Duke of York, gets to be alone with the audience for 70 lines. From the moment
Richard stepped onstage in Part Two, his appearance would have had the audience’s
attention. The 1594 Quarto stage direction for that first appearance – ‘Enter the Duke of
Yorkes sonnes . . . crook-backe Richard, at the one doore’ – set him apart from the
beginning. Here, in the next instalment, this visually abnormal and morally deviant
character gets to explain himself to us.
In the first version, your actor performs the soliloquy as his lament on his deformity,
his complaint that it has excluded him from love, and his plan to make the English crown
his consolation prize. Throughout the speech he’s speaking as much to himself as to the
audience and trying to justify his cruelty and ambition. He finishes that justification at
line 171 (‘a glorious crown’) and begins to consider the obstacles he will face at line 172
(‘And yet I know not how to get the crown . . .’). In the first version he’s assessing the
situation. What are the factors against him? All those lives between him and the throne.
What are the factors in his favour? His ability to hide his feelings and his willingness to
kill to get what he wants. He’s thinking up these things as he goes along, and he ends up
giving himself a pep talk.
In the second version, your actor is always working the audience, trying to win them
over. He wants to persuade them of his logic – can’t be a lover, so I must be a king. When
he shifts to the question of ‘how to get the crown’, rather than trying to figure it out, he’s
showing off to the audience how hard it will be by listing the odds against him. And this
time when he gets to talking about his talents –
185
Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,

and cry ‘Content’ to that which grieves my heart,
and wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
and frame my face to all occasions
– he’s not giving himself a pep talk; he’s bragging to the audience. He’s also illustrating to
them how good he can be at playing that part. Finally, when he starts saying the atrocities
he’ll commit, it’s not to charge himself up; it’s to scare the audience like the Joker would.
Discuss which of these diametrically opposed approaches to Richard is more
entertaining, which more persuasive, which more realistic, which more chilling.
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King Henry VIII
KING HENRY VIII

OR
ALL IS TRUE
Comments
I argue in my comments on The Tempest that the Epilogue to that play is Shakespeare’s
‘final farewell’, but two years after The Tempest, Henry VIII appeared and was followed by
The Two Noble Kinsmen within the year. In Shakespeare’s defence, when he said farewell
in The Tempest, he didn’t necessarily know he’d be involved in Henry VIII; and, in my
defence, although The Tempest wasn’t Shakespeare’s last play, it is the last play he wrote
alone: Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen were collaborations with John Fletcher,
the man who would succeed him as company playwright for the King’s Men. So: The
Tempest as Shakespeare’s final play? True and not true.
Which brings me to the alternative title of Henry VIII: All Is True. Like so many of
his titles (Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night or What You Will, All’s
Well that Ends Well), this title, All Is True, winks at the audience by asserting a judgement
of the play that experiencing it might bring into question. In the case of this history play
about controversial events less than a century old (more recent than events in any of
Shakespeare’s other history plays), the assertion that ‘all is true’ waves a red flag. It’s as if
Shakespeare and Fletcher were saying, ‘Here’s a play about the two previous monarchs
you still most think of and discuss, a play about a who’s who of aristocrats whose families
are still powerful, and a play about the (ongoing) single most disruptive religious
upheaval in England’s history, one still happening. We say of this play ‘all is true.’ Do you
buy that?’
Consider how you react today to biopics about people who have dominated headlines
in your lifetime – Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King,
Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth II , Princess Diana – and imagine how theatregoers
in the early seventeenth century would have witnessed Henry VIII. Just as you compare
any film or play about recent celebrities with what you know, Shakespeare’s audiences
would compare their own received notions of these famous Tudors with a play about
them.
In producing Henry VIII, the King’s Men were selling the celebrity of its title character
and his all-star circle. ‘Think ye see / the very persons of our noble story / as they were
living,’ says the Prologue (25–7). And beyond selling who the audience would see in this
play, the company was selling where they would see the play. That where was a key ingredient
in the ‘all is true’ pitch: ticket buyers knew they would be watching one of the most famous
moments in English history – the trial in which Henry divorced Katherine of Aragon (and
thus the Catholic Church) – in the very room in which that event took place. That room
was the hall in the Blackfriars monastery that became the most successful theatre in
187
London, the Blackfriars Playhouse.19 In Act Two, Scene Two, Henry (probably played by
Richard Burbage) announces to Wolsey the venue for this most consequential of trials:
The most convenient place that I can think of

for such receipt of learning is Black-Friars.
(2.2.136–7)
Think how the audience at the play – ‘the first and happiest hearers of the town’ (Prologue
24) – would have looked around and murmured their self-satisfaction at being in that
room to see that trial. Site-specific theatre at its best.
How good is the play? In purely dramatic terms, the answer is ‘not very’, but according
to Gordon McMullan, ‘it was performed in every decade, and in every year of some
decades, from the mid-seventeenth century well into the nineteenth century . . .’20 Why
might that have been? One reason for its popularity is its attraction as a multi-biopic of
legendary historical figures from England’s ‘Golden Age’. But perhaps its greatest appeal
to audiences drawn to the visual pleasures of sets and costumes was the royal spectacle
called for by the play’s elaborate stage directions.
What makes the length and detail of the stage directions in Henry VIII remarkable is
that rather than play to an audience’s desire to see imagined events, these directions are
playing to an audience’s curiosity about actual events, their wish to be eyewitnesses to
history. The aim of the authors of Henry VIII was reportorial and the result is stage
directions (culled in large part from Holinshed’s Chronicles) detailing costumes,
personages, and props designed to put the audience as close as possible to the headline
events of royals. The play was meant to combine the attraction of the TV shows You Are
There and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Look, for example, at the detail in just thirty-
three words of the 233-word stage direction for Anne’s coronation: ‘A canopy borne by
four of the Cinque-ports; under it, QUEEN ANNE in her robe; in her hair richly adorned
with pearl, crowned. On each side her, the Bishops of London and Winchester.’ In Henry
VIII, the average size (128 words) of the stage directions for the five historical moments
(the meeting of Henry and Anne, the divorce trial, Anne’s coronation, the Privy Council
meeting, the christening of Elizabeth) suggests that the authors were investing in the
long-term future of the play by managing its authenticity.
It is pleasant to imagine that Shakespeare and Fletcher’s alternative title for Henry VIII
was staking a claim on the documentary form. It is even more pleasant to imagine that the
alternative title was a wry comment on the ambition of any re-created history: ‘All is true.’
19
James Burbage and his sons, Richard and Cuthbert, purchased the hall in 1596 and remodelled it as a theatre
for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. They could not obtain permission to play there until 1608, by which time
they had become the King’s Men. Shakespeare wrote at least five plays explicitly for the Blackfriars Playhouse,
including Henry VIII. It was during a production of this play at the Globe (and not the Blackfriars, where it
belonged) that the thatch caught fire when a cannon was discharged and the Globe burned down. As one of the
proprietors of the re-created Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, all I can say to that is that’s the sort of
thing that happens when you put on a play in the wrong place.
20
Henry VIII, ed. Gordon McMullan, Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2000).
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King Henry VIII
Ploys
Indictment of treason against William Shakespeare and John Fletcher
Prep: Handouts (examples of indictments)

In class: 40 minutes – 30 grand jury deliberation and writing,
10 reading indictments
The material in Henry VIII is politically dangerous territory for Shakespeare and Fletcher.
In a bad mood, King James I might have taken umbrage at any number of things. As a
Protestant, he might have considered the portrayal of Katherine of Aragon too supportive.
As the son of the executed Catholic Queen, he might have found the depiction of the
families who supported her too negative. As a King whose own personal life was not up
for scrutiny, he might have felt that in staging any part of Henry VIII ’s affair with Anne
the playwrights had stepped over the line. As the successor to a wildly popular Queen
Elizabeth (who had killed his mother), he might have taken offence at the religious
overtones the play gives her birth.
1. Divide your class into ‘grand juries’ of five to eight students.
2. Tell them to come up with an indictment against Shakespeare and Fletcher for
some transgression in Henry VIII.
3. They are to find at least three ‘pieces of evidence’ in the text or stage directions of
the play that show how it endangers the kingdom by being performed publicly at
the Blackfriars.
4. In the most inflated and legalistic rhetoric, the indictment must use specifics
from the text to describe the dangerous offence and describe an appropriate
punishment.
5. Presiding as Chief Justice, have each grand jury select its Jury Foreperson to read
out the indictment charges to the class.
6. Lead class in a discussion of each. And, based on the evidence and the purple-
ness of the prose, have them vote on the three best articles of treason against the
playwrights.
This ploy will attune your students to the politics in the play. If your class is reading
more deeply in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, suggest to your grand juries that
they find a pattern of treason in the other works, either of Shakespeare or of Fletcher.
A. The Old Lady teases Anne Boleyn about her prospects Act Two, Scene Three,
16 (‘Alas, poor lady!’) to 49 (‘who comes here?’). Two speaking parts.
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The play shows us little of Anne Boleyn, the ill-fated second bride of Henry VIII ;
because she only speaks in two scenes, how we feel about her depends on the choices the
actor makes in those two scenes. In Act Two, Scene Three, Anne is sympathizing with
Queen Katherine’s position and says she wouldn’t want to be a Queen, and the Old Lady,
knowing the King had been attracted to Anne at Wolsey’s banquet, teases her about her
ambitions. I’ve chosen just the conversation preceding the Lord Chamberlain’s entrance,
but the scene is so enjoyable you might want to do the whole thing (total: 107 lines).
In the first version Anne is completely sincere about her lack of ambition and totally
unaware that anything is brewing with the King. In this version the Old Lady is genially
and genuinely trying to suggest to Anne that worldly success is worth the compromise.
In the second version Anne is smitten with the King, couldn’t care less about Katherine,
is quite aware that opportunity is about to knock, and everything she says is merely a
pose. The Old Lady in this version is annoyed at Anne’s pose and trying to expose her
hypocrisy.
Which Anne do your students like better? Why?
B. Wolsey repents Act Three, Scene Two, 345 (‘And so we’ll leave you’) to 385 (‘hopes
for heaven’). Three speaking parts.
Cardinal Wolsey, the second most powerful and wealthy man in England, is the play’s
Machiavel, and 3.2 is the scene in which he falls from his great height. At the departure
of the Duke of Norfolk, who has delivered the bad news, the playwrights give him a
soliloquy in which he repents his past and declares his ‘heart new open’d’. Because Wolsey
makes a philosophical and religious U-turn in the space of 21 lines, the speech is a
challenge for an actor. Sometime during the speech, Thomas Cromwell, Wolsey’s protégé,
enters and listens, ‘standing amazed’.
In the first version, Cromwell doesn’t enter until ‘O how wretched . . .’ (line 364). In this
version Wolsey is truly repentant, speaks in a matter-of-fact fashion to the audience, and
doesn’t know that Cromwell has been listening until after he finishes the speech. In the
exchange that follows Wolsey’s main concern is Cromwell’s welfare.
In the second version, Cromwell enters after two lines of Wolsey’s speech at ‘all my
greatness’, and hears the rest; Wolsey speaks this time as in confession and prayer to God
and doesn’t know Cromwell is there until he begins line 371 (‘and when he falls’), which
he delivers directly to Cromwell as a warning. In the exchange that follows, Wolsey’s
main concern is getting into heaven.
In the third version, Cromwell again enters at ‘all my greatness’, but this time Wolsey
notices him but pretends not to and uses the speech to make Cromwell feel sorry for
him. In the exchange that follows, Wolsey’s main concern is how he appears to Cromwell
and how history will judge him.
Have your students say which of the three versions they most prefer and discuss with
them their preferences. Which makes Wolsey most sympathetic? Which makes him most
entertaining? How much does Cromwell’s reaction to Wolsey have to do with how we
feel about the cardinal?
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Julius Caesar
JULIUS CAESAR
Comments
One morning, when he was thirty-five years old, William Shakespeare awoke grumpy. He
was hungover from a night at the Mermaid with George Chapman and Ben Jonson. He
had slept badly and had had a weird nightmare.
His bad dream took place in the future – four hundred years in the future. To his
amazement his name was everywhere. Every bookseller had his complete works in Folio
and at least a dozen or so paper Quartos of individual plays (‘Why would I write a play
about Timon of Athens?’ he wondered); he saw his name on brightly coloured posters
and on big shiny, glowing signs in front of theatres; through the wonder of dream-vision,
he saw such signs simultaneously in large cities all over the world (‘So this is Paris’), he
saw his face on mugs and on flimsy cotton shirts. He even saw himself in a package
labelled ‘action figure’. At first this was pleasant, but as he watched the bookstores, the
theatres, the shops taking in vast sums of money, he wondered where it was going and
learned that his direct descendants died out within two generations and his theatre
company was shut down.
So he woke up grumpy. His work, his words, his ideas were going to be a major
industry and make strangers rich. It was more than he could stand. How could he stop it?
He thought all day, and then it came to him. He would write a play without comedy or
sex, full of long, serious speeches, and he would make that play about such a pivotal
historical event and such famous persons that every school in the English-speaking
world would put it into the curriculum. Students would first be introduced to his work
with this play, and the result would be that they would never want to read or see another
work by William Shakespeare in their lives. In this way, he would ensure that a large
majority of the modern world hated him and thus reduce to a fraction the profit others
would make off his works. That evening he started writing Julius Caesar.
Actually Julius Caesar is a wonderful play; it’s just the wrong one to use for teaching
teenagers a delight in Shakespeare. Like you, however, I have to teach it, and the first time
I stood in front of a class trying to get them interested in hubris, tragic flaws, and dramatic
irony in Julius Caesar, I felt more and more as if the class was looking at me through
soundproof glass. At the end of the hour, I told them I wanted a rematch, that we would
start the play again the next class. At home that evening I thumbed through every book
I had on the play looking for a way into the work. I found an essay by G. Wilson Knight
entitled ‘The Eroticism of Julius Caesar.’21 ‘Eroticism’? I thought maybe I’d better give the
play another look.
What I found was a play peopled with men so wrapped up in the politics of ‘manhood’
that channels of physical desire – heterosexual and homosexual – are blocked and the
whole society is sick. Critics have thoroughly discussed the images of sickness in the play,
21
The Imperial Theme (London: Methuen, 1968), pages 63–95.
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from Caesar’s ‘falling sickness’ to Ligarius, the sick man who insists on joining the
conspiracy, but for me the crucial passage about sickness is the scene between Brutus and
Portia (2.1.232–308).
The main business of that scene is Portia’s attempt to learn what has been preoccupying
him, but Shakespeare casts the discussion in terms of health. ‘It is not for your health thus
to commit your weak condition to the raw cold morning’ (234–5), Brutus tells Portia.
‘Nor for yours neither’ (236), she replies. She asks him why he has been behaving so
strangely, and he puts her off with, ‘I am not well in health, and that is all’ (256). When
Portia replies that he is wise enough to embrace the means to health, he makes a little
joke: ‘why, so I do,’ he says, gives her a hug, and tells her to go to bed. This patronizing
makes Portia angry:
. . . What, is Brutus sick,

and will he steal out of his wholesome bed
to dare the vile contagion of the night,
and tempt the rheumy and unpurgèd air,
to add unto his sickness? No, my Brutus.
You have some sick offence within your mind . . .
(262–7)
Portia has not only diagnosed Brutus’s problem – ‘some sick offence within your
mind’ (267) – she has also, though she doesn’t know it, pinpointed the cause of it: he has
left his ‘wholesome bed’, the bed that makes him whole. Brutus embraces her jokingly as
the ‘means to come by health’ (258), but the deep irony of this condescending gesture is
that she is the means to come by health. Brutus, like everyone else in the play, has
abandoned the part of himself that is nurturing and restorative. They have the Roman
sickness: a competitive preoccupation with ideals such as stoicism, bravery, and honour,
which they define in purely male terms. The result is an unhappy world of blunted desire,
a world of men failing to replace love and family with honour and politics. That failure is
what creates the play’s eroticism, appearing like leaks in the dam of love and desire.
We see it most of all in the oddness of male bonding in the play. Caesar reminds his
young friend Antony to touch Calpurnia, Caesar’s wife, in the running of the Lupercal,
‘for our elders say the barren, touchèd in this holy chase, shake off their sterile curse’
(1.2.7–9). Why does Shakespeare include this detail from Plutarch’s Lives, if not to show
us the odd transaction of a man with the ‘falling sickness’ asking his friend for help in
getting his wife pregnant? As for weird male bonding, Brutus’s instruction to his fellow
conspirators, ‘stoop, and let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood up to the elbows and
besmear our swords’ (3.1.105–7), sets something of a standard. As Knight points out,
Antony turns Caesar’s wounds to ‘dumb mouths’ that ‘do ope their ruby lips to beg the
voice and utterance of my tongue’ (260), envisions the citizens kissing ‘dead Caesar’s
wounds’ and dipping their ‘napkins in his sacred blood’ (3.2.133–4), and fetishizes
Caesar’s mantle: ‘I remember the first time ever Caesar put it on . . .’ (168–70). All of this
is odd, but the most symptomatic bit of eroticism may be Portia’s proving her constancy
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Julius Caesar
to Brutus by giving herself ‘a voluntary wound, here, in the thigh’ (2.1.299–300). Portia’s
sense that in order to join the male club, she must endure pain – and in a place on her
body normally associated with pleasure – is completely in keeping with the sick climate
of this Rome. As is another odd detail from Plutarch: Portia’s suicide by ‘swallowing fire’.
Here again pain perverts a normal process of pleasure and nourishment – eating – and
here also Shakespeare blends the imagery of fever with the mysterious fire of the Roman
skies and streets.
What your students are likely to notice but to ascribe to ‘the way they spoke in those
days’ is talk of love between the men. Yes, Shakespeare’s society was more comfortable
with the use of the word love between men, but even so, the use of it in Julius Caesar is
exceptional, and your students show good sense if they are confused about it. Brutus and
Cassius in particular like to use the word. Repeatedly Brutus says he ‘loves’ Caesar and
continues to say so after stabbing him, and he addresses the citizens as ‘Romans,
countrymen, and lovers.’ We get an even stronger sense of Brutus’s use of ‘love’ because
Cassius seems so jealous of his friend’s feelings. When Cassius complains to Brutus, ‘I
have not from your eyes that gentleness and show of love as I was wont to have’ (1.2.33–
4), he uses language that might equally begin a sonnet. He sounds like a jealous spouse
when he bares his breast, gives Brutus his dagger, and says, ‘strike as thou didst at Caesar;
for I know, when thou didst hate him worst, thou lovedst him better than ever thou
lovedst Cassius’ (4.3.105–6).
The point is not that these men are homosexuals, but rather that their politics and their
codes that they have separated them from their selves. To use Portia’s language, they are
not ‘whole’, they have somehow separated their minds from their personhood, they are not
‘incorporated’; they are not whole. This division of self is the separation Brutus speaks of
when he says, ‘in the spirit of men there is no blood’ (2.1.167). And he misses the
contradiction when he wishes that they ‘could come by Caesar’s spirit and not dismember
Caesar’ (168–9). From Boston to Baghdad men dismember one another and themselves to
come by their spirits and prove daily that there is blood in the spirit of men.
The final symptom of the Roman sickness is suicide. Elsewhere in Shakespeare suicide
means other things: in Romeo and Juliet it is about rashness and unbearable bad luck; in
Hamlet it is about insanity; in Othello it is about shame and self-loathing. On the stage
those suicides do not elicit laughter, but I have rarely seen a production of Julius Caesar
where the young people watch the suicides at the end of that play without giggling. The
suicides in Julius Caesar are silly; Shakespeare clearly shows us this. Cassius kills himself
because he is ashamed to see Titinius ‘my best friend ta’en before my face!’ (5.3.33). In
fact, he saw nothing of the kind, as Titinius makes clear when he enters a moment later
and tells the dead Cassius, ‘thou has misconstrued everything!’ (5.3.82). Then, of course,
Titinius kills himself. As for Brutus, after he tells Cassius that he finds it ‘cowardly and
vile’ (5.1.101) to commit suicide, he goes from one soldier to another trying to find
someone to kill him. When Pindarus agrees, Brutus gives him his sword, covers his eyes,
and is stabbed. ‘Cowardly and vile’ thus describes Brutus’s death better than it does any
of the others in the play.
When you teach this smart, smart play, valorize the work but not the Romans.
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Ploys
A. Making the storm a character in 1.3
Scripts: JC 1.3
Prep: Prior class intro (optional), finding ‘instruments’
Players: 4
The stage directions at the beginning of the third scene of the play say ‘thunder and
lightning’; 100 lines later the stage direction is ‘thunder still’; and at line 137 Cinna says,
‘what a fearful night is this!’ The sounds effects of a storm last through the entire scene.
Shakespeare’s company produced the sound of thunder by rolling cannon balls on a
metal surface, achieved the effect of wind by turning a drum between canvas sheets, and
created a lightening effect with squibs, a kind of flash powder.
Stay away from the gunpowder, but show your students the extra dimension that
sound can bring to a scene by having your class make the noise of a storm during a
reading of 1.3.
1. First, decide with them how they will make those noises. They can make the
sounds vocally or physically or they may want to use ‘found instruments’ to do it
– beating on trashcans, blowing over Coke bottles, rattling Venetian blinds,
scrunching newspapers – invite any ideas they may have.
2. Once you have figured out how to make the noises you want, then decide exactly
when the noises should come. Is the noise intermittent or continuous? If the
latter, the actors will need to yell over the sound. Such a necessity can add tension
and urgency to the scene. Or the class might decide to make its storm interact
with the characters in the scene. The noise, for example, might build in a way that
seems to frighten Casca on purpose; or it may thunder whenever Caesar’s name
is mentioned, while the wind blows at the name of Brutus; or perhaps the storm
is at its loudest whenever the word Rome or Roman is spoken.
This exercise heightens students’ understanding of the way that sound can create a
sense of place and increases their appreciation of timing and detail. It requires a high
level of involvement without requiring any sophisticated performance, and students, will
of course, enjoying making noise in class. (Because the scene is fairly long, you might
first cut some of Casca’s or Cassius’s speeches.)
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Julius Caesar
B. Lighting the conspirators in 2.1.1–232
Scripts: JC 2.1.60–112 (‘ ’Tis good’ – ‘resolution.’)

Prep: Prior class intro (optional), finding ‘instruments’
Players: 1 speaking, 9 non-speaking
Props: candles, blindfolds (for rehearsal)
Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists could not make the stage dark, but they had three
ways of getting an audience to ‘see’ the darkness: (1) write words that say it is dark, (2)
have actors act as though it is dark, (3) use props that indicate it is dark. Such lighting
signals contribute much of the mood to the night scene between Brutus and his co-
conspirators. Because modern productions, relying on low lighting, dispense altogether
with the stage business written into the play, they lose a key to the movement Shakespeare
built into the scene. This exercise shows students how and why Shakespeare ‘lit’ his plays.
1. Cast nine students in the roles.
2. Direct the scene in the ‘dark’ by blindfolding your actors, and while your reader
reads the passage, supervise a walk-through.
3. Have the spectating students decide when and where the nine players would
need a candle to see. (You’ll need two candles.)
4. Decide through trial and error who has the candle(s) and when the action
requires candlelight. Make sure the choices accord with the text. Tell the
blindfolded students to remember how they moved when they couldn’t see.
5. Now run the scene again without blindfolds using a candle at the places your
students decide.
Discuss what the students have learned from the exercise. It will explain, for example,
why Cassius keeps identifying the conspirators to Brutus even though he knows them all
well, and as he names them, Cassius is probably holding a ‘light’ to the face of each of the
men he names. They will see how Shakespeare was able to direct the audience to imagine
darkness. Have them consider the pluses and minuses of such ‘lighting’.
A. Casca’s comedy Act One, Scene Two, 214 (‘You pulled me’) to 293 (‘farewell
both’). Three speaking parts, including you as Brutus.
Outside of the ironic tone of much of the play, the one sustained comic moment is
Casca’s description to Brutus and Cassius of the people offering Caesar a crown. His
cynicism is refreshing in the context of Brutus’s idealism and Cassius’s manipulation. For
the actor, the question is how best to keep both Casca’s comedy and the sense of what he
195
is saying. You play Brutus, and recruit another straight man to play Cassius. Have your
Casca do two versions of his report.
In the first version, Casca is a comedian, purposefully ‘punching up’ certain lines – for
example, ‘if Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less’ (1.2.273–
274). In this version, your Casca plays to the crowd (the classroom). In the second version,
Casca is bored and the comedy is unintended.
As usual, discuss the two versions with your students. How does Casca’s tone change
our view of Caesar? How does it affect our view of Casca? of the conspirators? Is one
reading funnier than the other? Why? Is that humour helpful to the play? How?
B. Brutus and Portia Act Two, Scene One, 232 (‘Brutus, my lord’) to 302 (‘noble wife’).
Two speaking parts.
Your students will find this scene between a wife and her husband remarkably
contemporary.
In the first version, Portia is angry at Brutus and insulted by his treatment, while
Brutus is focused wholly on the plot and is just trying to contain his irritation with Portia
for disturbing him. His seeming kindness to her at the end of the scene is just a matter of
getting her to leave him alone. He is not really going to tell her about his plans to kill
Caesar. She shows him the wound she gave herself to punish him.
In the second version, Portia is more concerned with her husband than hurt about his
treatment of her; while Brutus, whose first priority is Portia, just hasn’t realized how
much he has hurt her by trying to protect her from knowing too much about the
conspiracy. She shows him out of shame the wound she gave herself.
Now discuss with your students which of the versions they like more, which is more
in keeping with what has gone before in the play, and which is more in keeping with the
scenes to come. You may wish in particular to discuss Brutus’s odd response to the death
of his wife: ‘speak no more of her’ (4.3.156) and ‘why, farewell, Portia’ (187).
C. Brutus and the sick man Act Two, Scene One, 311 (‘Caius Ligarius, how?’) to 333
(end of scene). Two speaking parts and a handkerchief.
The most visible expression of the sickness in Rome is the character of Ligarius, who
ignores his illness to join Brutus and the conspirators. To show students how the idea of
sickness can work in different ways, do one version of the passage in which Ligarius’s
illness is physical and one in which his illness has also affected his mind.
In the first version, Ligarius can hardly stand up, he coughs continually, and he speaks
in a hoarse whisper (but loudly enough for everyone in the class to hear him). Brutus is
touched by Ligarius’s courage and concerned about his welfare (he may also be afraid of
catching whatever Ligarius has).
In the second version, Ligarius is physically powerful but is wild-eyed and maniacal
about joining the conspiracy. Brutus seems to catch Ligarius’s state of mind and becomes
more and more excited about the scheme and the thought of killing Caesar.
How do the two versions affect your students’ view of Brutus and the conspiracy?
196
King John
KING JOHN
Comments
In the nineteenth century, King John was one of Shakespeare’s most frequently produced
works; a measure of its popularity is that it was the first of Shakespeare’s plays to be made
into a movie (1899). Since then, not so much. Theatre companies devoted to Shakespeare
will stage the play as part of their mission, but otherwise productions of King John are
rare. In 2015 the Globe in London produced The Life and Death of King John to
commemorate the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta – a special staging
to celebrate a special occasion that King John himself would rather not have remembered.
How do we explain its popularity in the nineteenth century and its unpopularity
now?
As for its popularity then, the nineteenth century was England’s great Age of Empire,
and this play is not only studiously about English history, but also about England’s
struggle to define itself as not like the rest of Europe. What’s more, the nineteenth century
was the theatrical age of the lavish production, when impresarios like Henry Irving filled
the stage with actors and scenery, and King John provides plenty of royal roles – one
queen, two kings, two princes, two dukes, three earls, and a really evil cardinal –
sometimes accompanied by entire armies. Finally, the scene in which Arthur pleads with
Hubert not to put out his eyes with a hot poker might have appealed to the Victorian
taste for melodrama.
As for its unpopularity now, well, it’s just not a very good play. In fact, it seems to have
been unpopular even when he wrote it, and the blame for that may be Shakespeare’s. One
rough measure of a play’s reception in early modern London is whether or not it was
published. Although history plays were particularly popular in print, King John did not
appear in print until after Shakespeare’s death, when his friends included it in The
Complete Works. By contrast, his source for the play, George Peele’s The Troublesome
Reign of King John, was popular enough to have been published in a single volume
edition in 1591 and republished twice.
In revisiting Peele’s hit, Shakespeare seems interested in something beyond box office;
he complicates either the story or the characters in it. The historical debates that his play
re-enacts obscure the narrative and then fizzle out. And beyond the matter of the
unsatisfying storyline is Shakespeare’s scrupulous handling of characterization,
particularly his refusal to let us either like or altogether dislike John himself.
So why would you want to teach this play? You wouldn’t want to teach it to high
school students in an English class, but the play offers many attractions for the advanced
literature student and for drama students at all levels. For the literature student, the work
is an ideal site for considering Shakespeare’s approach to his source material. For the
drama students, it offers one great character – Philip, the bastard son of King Richard I
– and several great scenes. In the Bastard’s forthrightness (with himself as well as with
others), in his humour, and in his language the Bastard is worth the price of tuition to
any class on playing Shakespeare.
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As for the humour, it is as dry and strong as a good martini. Pretty much everything
the Bastard says cuts to the heart of a matter in a way that satirizes conventions and
our expectations. Here, for example, is what he says to his mother when she confesses
her adultery and admits that not her husband, but Richard the Lion Hearted, was his
father.
With all my heart, I thank thee for my father.

Who lives and dares but say thou didst not well
when I was got, I’ll send his soul to hell.
(1.1.270–2)
In place of any recrimination, he gives her a full throated ‘well-done, Mum!’ That rhyming
couplet promising Mum he’ll kill anyone critical of her adultery would normally be the
Bastard’s exit line and the ‘button’ ending the scene, but the Bastard adds a challenging
quatrain, as fine an acting exercise for two as it is an exit.
Come, lady, I will show thee to my kin,

and they shall say, when Richard me begot,
if thou hadst said him nay, it had been sin.
Who says it was, he lies: I say ’twas not.
(273–6)
‘Come, lady’ is an implied stage direction; the Bastard has to say those words because
Lady Faulconbridge is not joining him as he tries to exit on that first couplet. Why does
she hesitate? Amazement? Anger? Hurt? Does that force the actor playing John to
appease her with ‘Come, Lady’ or is he being firmer with her? Is his elaborate rhyming
part of his appeasement? Or is it wholly ironic? Or is he simply having too much fun
congratulating his mother in rhyme for having slept with a king?
Throughout the play, the Bastard is an antidote to the hypocrisy of the political world
around him, and he becomes a redemptive comic chorus to the proceedings, never
taking himself or his situation too seriously.
The Bastard is also a counterbalance to the overwhelming downward pull of the play,
a downwardness made literal by the fatal fall of the young Arthur and embodied in the
grief of his mother, Constance. Her lament for the death of her child is perhaps the most
powerful speech of parental grief in the English language.
I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine;

my name is Constance; I was Geffrey’s wife;
young Arthur is my son, and he is lost:
I am not mad: I would to heaven I were!
For then, ‘tis like I should forget myself:
O, if I could, what grief should I forget!
(3.3.45–50)
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King John
Hearing herself called mad, she tests her own sanity – she pulls at her hair and knows its
hers, she names her own name and the names of her husband and her son – and the most
conclusive proof of her sanity is the pain she is in and the oblivion of madness she would
prefer. And yet she admits she loves her grief because
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
remembers me of all his gracious parts . . .
then, have I reason to be fond of grief.
(93–8)
This speech of grief on the loss of a son raises the question of when Shakespeare wrote
the play. Scholars argue for dates from 1593 to 1597. I want it to be no earlier than August
1596, because that’s when Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died, and in my narrative,
Shakespeare’s grief at that death would explain not only Constance’s soul-searing speech
on the death of a child, but also why Shakespeare might have written a play bound more
to the accidents of this world than to the wishes of an audience.
Ploys
A. Post an illustrated personification of death and commodity
Scripts: KJ 2.1.561–98; 3.3.25–36

Homework: Illustration
In class: 5–10 minutes per presentation
Tech: AV equipment, access to social media
Two of the great speeches in the play rely on personifications to make their point. The
Bastard, at the end of Act Two, comments on the political shenanigans he’s watched and
concludes that everyone succumbs to that ‘smooth faced gentleman’ Commodity
(financial expedience). Constance, thinking that her son is dead, calls on ‘amiable, lovely
Death’ to put her out of her misery.
In making these two abstractions into personages, Shakespeare gives specific
descriptions. The Bastard calls Commodity a ‘purpose-changer’, a ‘sly devil’, a ‘broker’, a
‘break-vow’, a ‘smooth faced gentleman’, ‘tickling’, a ‘bawd’. Constance speaks of Death’s
‘odoriferous stench’, his ‘sound rottenness’, his ‘vaulty brows’, his ‘household worms’, his
‘grin’ and pictures him embracing her (3.3.25–36). This ploy asks your students to
illustrate either Commodity or Death and to post that illustration with key words from
the text to social media. They may use any kind of illustration they wish – drawing,
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painting, a montage of created and sampled images, enhanced photos of celebrities they
think might capture the essence of Death or Commodity, a selfie or a photo of someone
costumed as Death or Commodity. They are free to create the final product in any way
they choose as long as they produce (1) a likeness of Death or of Commodity that in
some way reflects Shakespeare’s language and (2) a caption for that image with words
from his text.
You and your class can decide how publicly to share their images, perhaps
restricting them to a group site that only the class can see. However, the more widely
you disseminate their work, the more memorable for them you make their efforts and
this play.
Screen and discuss the captioned images. Ask about the process of their thinking, the
reason for the medium(s) they chose, the significance to them of the caption, and any
discoveries they may have made.
B. Compare speeches of King John and the Bastard
Scripts: KJ 2.1.206–34; 1.1.182–219

Prep: Handouts
Breaking down the speech habits of characters with long speeches is a good way into the
play. Look at the first long speech of King John (2.1.206–34) and of Philip, the Bastard
1.1.182–219). Start by reading each speech through and making certain that the content
is clear – make a note for later of which parts gave trouble to your students. Now,
alternating between the speeches, read to the end of an independent clause from each
and ask your students:
● which of the clauses is the longer?

● which contains the simpler words?
● which has more nouns? more verbs?
● which is better connected to the sentence(s) before and after?
● which is more visual?
● which is more repetitive?
● which addresses the audience more frequently?
As you proceed, your students should begin to notice that these differences are, on the
whole, consistent. Ask them which of the speakers they prefer and why. Ask what their
speaking styles tell us about the situations they are in, about what they want, and about
their characters.
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King John
A. Arthur pleads for his eyes to Hubert Act Four, Scene One, 39 (‘Must you with hot
irons’) to 121 (‘touch your eye’). Two large speaking parts, one small speaking part; one
non-speaking part (optional). (Try to cast a large Hubert and a small Arthur [a female is
fine]. Props: a hibachi, two pokers [for safety use two spatulas], one chair, one rope.)
This agonizing scene in which Hubert pleads with his jailer not to blind him is also a
remarkable instance of persuasion.
In the first version have your Arthur yield to his terror. He can rush his words, scream
and cry, and – until they tie him to the chair – kneel, and use his hands in any way to try
to stop Hubert. Have your Hubert just trying to endure the onslaught of sound. Hubert’s
first hesitation comes when he hears Executioner No. 1 say, ‘I am best pleas’d to be from
such a deed.’ After that his conscience, rather than the boy’s pleas, begins to bother him.
In the second version have your Arthur fight back his fears and force himself to be
calm as he searches for an argument that will move Hubert. The first argument (41–58):
when Hubert was sick he, even though he’s a prince, loved him and took care of him. His
second argument (60–70): even iron would not be so hard and pitiless. Then (75–83) he
promises to be still and not speak at all. Then (91–5) he wishes that Hubert might have
some small thing get in his eye so that he might imagine the pain that Arthur will feel.
Then (97–104) he offers to trade his tongue for his eyes. Then (105–10) the embers die
and he argues that heaven extinguished the coal to save him. Finally (112–20), he
imagines that the fire, if it grew hot again would ‘snatch’ at Hubert rather than do this
thing. Have your Arthur ‘find’ each of these tacks, and go slow enough and deliberately
enough for your students to be able hear him shift. Tell the actor that Arthur’s only
chance is to get Hubert to hear each new thought. In this version, Hubert relents because
he hears each argument.
Ask your students which of the two versions held their interest more – Arthur’s ‘wash’
of terror and fear, or his careful language. Then, in a third version, have the actor combine
the two approaches.
B. Constance and a parent’s grief Act Three, Scene Three, 43 (‘Lady, you utter’) to
105 (‘follow her’). Three speaking parts (King Philip, Pandulph, and Constance, a good
female actor with long unbound hair), other non-speaking courtiers onstage. Crown and
bishop’s hat.
Ploy A deals with the Constance’s preceding speech, but this is the one that makes the
short list of great speeches on the unspeakable pain of losing a child.
In the first version Constance’s voice and movements are frenzied. Vocally she swerves
back and forth from weeping to shrieking; physically she is tearing at her hair and suddenly
moving from one of her auditors to another. Phillip, Pandulph, and the courtiers watch her
with fearful disgust, embarrassed at what she is doing and worried for themselves.
In the second version Constance does not move; she can sit, kneel, squat, stand, but she
does so in a single place. And, having been accused of ‘utter madness’, she forces herself in
the first speech about madness to speak in great control, never screaming or crying. Her
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goal in her first speech (‘Thou art holy . . .’) is to show with perfect logic that she is sane
(see Comments). In her second long speech (‘Yes, that I will . . .’) she gives her reasoned
argument against religion’s assurance that she’ll be in heaven with her child. In her third
speech (‘Grief fills up . . .’), she explains why she needs her grief. In this version, Philip,
Pandulph and the courtiers hear the power of her arguments and grow in their sympathy.
Have your students discuss the different impacts of the first emotive version and the
second disciplined and intellectual version. Mix and match the versions, but in the third
version have Philip wearing a crown and Pandulph a bishop’s hat.
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King Lear
KING LEAR
Comments
When I started teaching, I believed that King Lear was not a play for young people.
Partly, the commentary I had read had convinced me that the play was too bleak
and too profound to speak to twenty-year-olds, but mainly I remembered reading
the play as an undergraduate myself and not liking it.22 It had a silly beginning: a
creaky, old fairy tale about dividing the kingdom. It was hard: I couldn’t understand
the Fool’s jokes, or Lear when he was crazy, or Edgar pretending to be crazy. It was
depressing: everyone, even Cordelia, dies. The only survivor is Edgar, and I didn’t like
Edgar or his ‘poor Tom’ strategy. So the first time I taught the play, my basic approach was
to assume that my students had not enjoyed reading it and to defend it from their callow
philistinism. About half way through the class, one student raised his hand and said, ‘I
don’t know about everyone else, but I loved this play.’ ‘So did I,’ offered another. ‘Me too.’
‘I liked it a lot.’ ‘Is there anyone here,’ I asked, ‘who didn’t like King Lear?’ The room was
silent.
I was the callous philistine. They got King Lear.
When we consider Lear’s fate and relate it to ourselves, we find a difference with
Shakespeare’s other tragedies. In those plays, we might find what we have in common
with the characters in Shakespeare’s other tragedies, but we can distance ourselves from
their actions and their ends. We might fall in love, but we wouldn’t commit suicide; we
might campaign against a political leader, but we wouldn’t assassinate one; we might
resent our stepdads, but we wouldn’t kill them; we might get jealous, but we wouldn’t
smother our beloved; we might want to get to the top, but we wouldn’t murder our bosses
to get there. Those tragedies made up of unusual circumstances leading to unlucky and
extreme responses are probably not going to happen to us. We can watch them with a
sideways glance. King Lear stares us directly in the face because it will happen to us. This
time the special circumstance of Shakespeare’s story – Lear is a monarch and we are not
– works in reverse. The point of this play is that the tragedy happens even to kings. Being
a king doesn’t protect you from age, loss, loneliness, and need. Being a king doesn’t
guarantee love or respect or care. Being a king can’t save you from what we all face: the
terrifying fact of our unappealing, unavoidable, and ‘unaccommodated’ mortality.
The ‘silly beginning’ of King Lear

That ‘silly beginning’ is not silly at all. Put yourself in Lear’s place. You’re old, you
know that you must die, and you know that you can’t take it with you, so you decide to
22
My initial response to the play may be a result of my reading it at the Wellesley College Library while I was
waiting for my girlfriend (now my wife) to get out of French class, and there I was – nineteen years old, on a
weekend away from an all-male school, and in love – trying my best to care about an old fart, too stupid to see
who his good daughter was. Context is everything.
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parlay your position and possessions into the best deal you can for your remaining
years. You want some time off; you want to rest. You have three children, and while poor
men must rely on the generosity of their children for the comforts of old age, you are a
king: you can make doubly certain of your children’s care by buying it. However, it must
not look like you need anything; it must look as though you are giving, not receiving. So
you create a ceremony for that purpose; in the ceremony you will play the part of the
generous father and give one-third of your kingdom to each of your three daughters,
who, for her part, will publicly confirm how much she loves you. That, of course, is what
Lear does.
Lear’s critics within and without the play call him a foolish old man, but actually,
before the show gets on the road, he shows more good sense than your average powerful
monarch: he acknowledges his mortality, he understands the limits of possession, he
wants to enjoy his last years, and he seems aware of the fragility of the family bond
(hence the necessity of the quid pro quo). He is foolish not because he tries to negotiate
a retirement but because he responds so badly when the negotiation begins to fail.
Cordelia destroys the ceremony by taking it literally; she will not play her part because
she knows she cannot pay Lear’s price. He wants a public declaration of what no parent
can have – a child’s unqualified love – but Cordelia says she can love him ‘according to
[her] bond, no more nor less’ (1.1.93). She hears the old man say it is his ‘intent to shake
all cares and business from our age’ (38), and she warns him that he can have only ‘half
[her] care and duty’ (102). Lear’s fury at her answer is easier to understand when we
realize that Cordelia’s offence is not just that she refuses to make a speech about how
much she loves him, but also that she blows his cover by talking about duty and care. She
exposes his needs in the midst of what is supposed to be a show about his generosity. Her
recognition of the truth is humiliating. That is her real offence: she betrays the true terms
of the negotiation; she shatters the charade of a father giving to his daughters.
The hard language in King Lear

Three characters use language that is hard to understand: the Fool in his riddles, Lear in
his madness, and Edgar in his disguise as Tom o’Bedlam. Fortunately, as my students
explained to me, by the time this language appears in the play, the plot is well along and
the reader is caught up in the narrative. Nevertheless, you should prepare your students
for the two kinds of difficult language in the play – wit and madness – with a preview of
key passages and a discussion of their nature. You can point out that the two kinds of
speaking are diametrically opposed: wit is language that assumes an orderly world and
aims at a fixed point, while the language of madness assumes no logic outside of itself
and continually shifts its aim.
Look, for example, at the Fool’s reply to his master when Lear warns him of the whip:
Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out, when

the Lady Brach may stand by th’ fire and stink.
(1.4.109–11)
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King Lear
Note that the Fool’s reply builds first on the words of the person he is talking to; Lear had
threatened to whip the Fool, so the Fool, reminding his master that it is dogs who get
whipped, equates truth with a dog. The syllogism is:
1. the Fool = a dog
2. the Fool = Truth
therefore
3. the dog = Truth
But the implied logic goes further:
1. that which is not the dog ≠ the truth
2. Lady Brach (bitch hound) ≠ the dog
therefore
3. Lady Brach ≠ truth.
In other words, Lady Brach is Goneril, who stands by the fire (rules the house) and
stinks. The language assumes a logical world of connections and makes the point that
truth in the person of the Fool is punished and exiled, while untruth in the person of
Goneril usurps the house.
The job of the court fool is to be a truth teller to the monarch. Wit stands in an orderly
universe and makes jokes about the disorderly. So, though it puzzles me along with every
commentator that this major character simply disappears from the play in Act Three, it
makes a certain sense. Once Lear goes mad, he has no use for witty language. The
medicine the Fool uses to cure Lear cannot minister to madness.
By contrast, the language of madness does not attach itself to an outside reality.
Madmen have lost their connection to an orderly world and can only laugh instead at
juxtapositions we cannot see. Look with your students, for example, at Lear’s language in
Act Four, Scene Six:
No, they cannot touch me for coinage; I am the King himself . . . Nature’s above art
in that respect. There’s your press money. That fellow handles his bow like a
crowkeeper. Draw me a clothier’s yard. Look, look, a mouse! Peace, peace; this
piece of toasted cheese will do’t. There’s my gauntlet; I’ll prove it on a giant. Bring
up the brown bills. O, well-flown, bird. I’ th’ clout, i’ th’ clout – hewgh! Give the
word.
(83–92)
Of course, the first thing to notice is that there are other people onstage, but Lear’s
language takes no account of them nor makes any connection to the external world.
What we glimpse instead are fragments of the connections in Lear’s interior world.
‘Nature’s above art in that respect’ (86) certainly refers to the idea of coining, which is in
turn related to Lear’s insistence that he is the real thing (i.e. the king), and that, of course,
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connects to ‘there’s your press money’ (86–7). Suddenly, Lear shifts his thoughts to
someone’s handling of a bow and arrow, and then, once more, to a mouse he thinks he
sees. The line about the toasted cheese is probably about catching the mouse, but the
transition is fuzzy and even fuzzier into ‘there’s my gauntlet’. In his interior world, Lear is
challenging someone, but his language confuses hand-to-hand combat (‘brown bills’, a
term for halberds, a combination axe and spike) with hawking (‘well flown, bird’) and
with archery (a ‘clout’ was a bullseye). His speech jumps to a finish with ‘give the word’, by
which he means password, as though he has just seen Edgar.
How can you ‘teach’ the meaning of such a passage to students? You can’t. But you can
teach them that the significance of the passage is the very obscurity of its meaning, and,
in that way, you can increase their access. Once your students know they have no
obligation to make sense of this language, they can enjoy trying to follow the interior
transitions Lear is making. In this case, Lear’s mind is brimming with questions of
legitimacy, of counterfeiting, of his own identity, of man as predator, of his own prowess
as soldier or hunter or sportsman. Have your students suggest what things are going
through his mind and how they are connected to his history in the play.
Cordelia’s death and the ‘depressing’ nature of King Lear

I said at the beginning of this section on King Lear that when I first read the play I found
(1) the beginning silly, (2) the language difficult, and (3) the story depressing. Only
on this last point did my students agree. The death of Cordelia is inexcusable. Goodness
dies elsewhere in Shakespeare, but always the machinery of the play requires it, and we
as audience accept the death as inherent in our transaction with the play. Juliet’s death is
the given of ‘star-crossed lovers’; Ophelia’s death grows from the play’s deliberations on
self-annihilation; and Desdemona’s death is the play’s crucial tragic action. All these
deaths ‘work’ within the universe of the play’s art. But Cordelia’s death ignores those
rules. The inhabitants of King Lear have already gone through their cataclysm; we have
watched them maddened, mangled, and murdered. We have watched Lear endure the
storms inside and out, and we have seen the love of his daughter deliver him from both.
We as audience know the rules; enough is enough. Even Edmund wants the machinery
to stop – ‘Some good I mean to do despite of mine own nature’ (5.3.241–2) – and tries to
stop Cordelia’s death – ‘Quickly send.’ When, at the end of a play of horrors, a playwright
has the villain send a last-minute reprieve to save the blameless from hanging, then we
trust in that reprieve by all the rules that govern the commonwealth of theatre and
theatregoers.
So what Shakespeare does next breaks all the rules of the game of theatre.23
23
He breaks all the rules of historical accuracy as well. In all of his sources – Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia
Regum Britanniae, John Higgins’s Mirror for Magistrates, William Warner’s Albion’s England, Raphael Holin-
shed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and even Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene – Cordelia lives.
As Stephen Greenblatt says, ‘the original audience, secure in the expectation of a very different resolution, must
have been doubly shocked’ (The Norton Shakespeare, First Edition, page 2310).
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King Lear
Lear enters ‘with Cordelia in his arms’ (5.3.254) and tells us, ‘she’s gone for ever’. We try
to take in this information, but all we know about going to plays rejects it, and all the
while Lear’s words keep certifying this theatrical breach of faith as if he hears the
audience protesting to him that she can’t be dead:
I know when one is dead, and when one lives.

She’s dead as earth.
(258–9)
Then – and may Shakespeare’s bones shake for this – Lear plays to our sense of the
outrageousness of the proposition that Cordelia is dead and holds out the hope that she
still lives:
Lend me a looking glass.

If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why then she lives.
(259–61)
That’s it, we think, she’ll recover and the play will return to the bounds of theatrical
experience. Shakespeare toys even further with that expectation when Lear, who entered
carrying her and who is presumably the person closest to Cordelia onstage, announces
that ‘This feather stirs; she lives!’ (263). But Cordelia is dead, and Shakespeare, having
killed her in a way that stresses the narrative excess of that death, twists and twists a
bewildered audience’s sense of betrayal.
But it is Cordelia’s death that makes the play transcendent, because in breaking the rules
of the theatre, Shakespeare insisted on abiding by the rules of the world. Or rather the one
rule that the world itself abides: the happiest life, the best life, ends, and without regard for
convenience, merit, or peace of mind. To show us that human ‘triumph’ is illusory,
Shakespeare needed more than a blameless death: he needed a dramatically unnecessary
death, a death outside the safe bounds even of tragedy, a death that breaks the flimsy laws
of the commonwealth of theatre but obeys the laws of human existence: Cordelia’s death.
And the great paradox of King Lear is that only Cordelia’s death makes possible the
greatest, because truest, vision of human good, a good within our grasp and beyond the
reach of death. To show us this one small light, Shakespeare wants it as dark as possible
without the bauble of false consolation to distract us from this good. So he begins with a
king who has the best an old man could wish for – kingdom, family, authority, respect –
and strips them away from him. The main action of the play becomes a relentless cosmic
subtraction that reduces Lear to the play’s famous image, a shelterless old man in the
storm. Lear sees that image of himself in the ragged Edgar:
Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a
poor, bare forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come,
unbutton here.
(3.4.105–8)
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Our clothes are mere ‘lendings’. Lear makes the connection between himself and the
naked ‘poor Tom’: taking off his own clothes, he hurries the stripping motif in the play
and reduces himself to the same ‘poor, bare forked animal’ (106–7).
To this zero sum, to this storm, to this dark vision of mankind Shakespeare brings the
one possibility of good in the world: unbought, undeserved, unexpected love. A daughter
kneels beside the helpless father who has wronged her and asks, ‘How does my royal
lord? How fares your Majesty?’ (4.7.44). She does not call him ‘father’; her love ignores
what he is, what we all are, and ‘restores’ him to his throne. By itself the redemptive gift of
that moment must weigh in the balance of the play against the randomness of fortune
and the certainty of death. Cordelia confers on Lear and on his life what the world and
death would deny to all of us – worth – and she does so with the one and only power that
confers importance on us all: love.
Ploys
A. Fool duel
Groups: 4–6
Players: 1 Fool per group
Is the Fool funny? Tackle this question using your best class clowns.
1. Divide the class into four to six groups.
2. Each group is to put forward a Fool who will present to the class any ten of the
Fool’s lines.
3. The team with the funniest Fool wins.
As a way of stirring interest and discussion, suggest to the class that they model their
Fools on any of dozens of more modern clowns. Imagine, for example, the difference
between a Chris Rock Fool (cynical and angry) and an Adam Sandler Fool (sweet and
stupid), or between a Dave Chappelle Fool (streetwise) and a Woody Allen Fool (paranoid
and neurotic), or between an Eddie Izzard Fool (manic and out there) and a Ricky
Gervais Fool (understated and snide), or between a Wanda Sykes Fool (loud and profane)
and an Ellen DeGeneres Fool (bewildered and ingratiating). From Bart Simpson to Amy
Schumer, you and your students can supply your own.
Students will enjoy this ploy, and it lends itself to good discussions. Consider which
type of Fool Lear would have been most likely to hire and why. Chris Rock over Bart
Simpson? and so on. Which of these Fools would stand the best chance of getting Lear to
keep his sanity by laughing at himself? Why? Which would quit the job (as Lear’s fool
appears to do)?
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King Lear
Then the biggest question – one that you can use to redeem the ‘unfunny Fools’:
Should the Fool be funny at all? Are his lines funny, or are they too bitter to be funny? Is
the situation beyond humour? What is the effect on the play of an unfunny Fool?
B. Compare the two texts
Scripts: KL 3.6
Prep: Handouts
In more advanced classes you may want to take up the matter of the two different texts
of King Lear. Nineteen of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays appeared in Quarto form (a
single play) before the 1623 Folio of the collected plays. The differences between the
Quarto and the Folio versions of these plays range from slight, as in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, to extreme, as in King Lear. This ploy will give your students a strong sense of the
playwright at work.
Choose a scene (I suggest Act Three, Scene Six) and make copies of it as it appears in
the Quarto and in the Folio versions in the Oxford Complete Works or in The Norton
Shakespeare. Have your students read completely through both scenes. What are the major
differences? How do those differences change character? How do they change the plot?
How do they affect theme? Which one of them would be more interesting onstage? Why?
If a student had to choose one, knowing that the other would disappear forever from the
world, which would it be? How do the other students feel about what would be lost?
Now look at the edition you have been reading; it is probably a combination of the
Quarto and the Folio. What was the editor willing to cut from his edition? Why was he
willing to make that cut?
A. Gloucester, Kent, and Edmund in the opening scene From the first line of the
play to line 32 (‘and away he shall again’). Three speaking parts.
This exchange between Gloucester and Kent, in which Gloucester discusses conceiving
his illegitimate son, is disturbing on a number of levels. In the first version, Edmund is out
of earshot of the two other men, Gloucester clearly doesn’t want to hurt his feelings, and
Kent is enjoying Gloucester’s jokes. In the second version, Edmund must be a part of the
conversation; Kent is uncomfortable and trying to make Edmund feel better. How does
this scene work with the Lear plot? How does it work to motivate Edmund?
B. The Dover ‘suicide’ Act Four, Scene Six, 1 (‘When shall I . . .’) to 60 (‘I have no
eyes’). Two speaking parts.
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This scene will require two good actors. Edgar in particular should be someone
capable of doing three different ‘voices’: (1) Tom o’Bedlam’s voice until line 31; (2) Edgar’s
‘real’ voice at lines 33 and 34 (‘Why I do . . . cure it’), from line 42 (‘And yet I . . .’) to 45
(‘Alive or dead?’), and again for line 47 (‘Thus might he pass indeed. Yet he revives.’); and
(3) the voice of the ‘fisherman’ who ‘finds’ Gloucester, to the end of the passage.
You can use this scene to suggest the power of Shakespeare’s theatre of imagination,
because in this scene we see Edgar stage a play within the play. To get at the theatricality
of the scene, I suggest that you stage a naturalistic version and a shamelessly
theatrical one.
In the first version, arrange your classroom in proscenium fashion with all the
‘audience’ in front of the action. Have Gloucester’s eyes covered with a ‘bloody’ scarf or
have him wear dark sunglasses. Have Edgar ignore the audience, speak only to Gloucester
and to himself, and vary his voice between Tom, Edgar, and the fisherman only
moderately. His objectives are to show his devotion and to grieve over his father’s plight.
Throughout the scene Gloucester is as dubious as the text will allow. When, for example,
he says, ‘methinks the ground is even’, he does so as he checks out the floor with his foot.
In this version, the main idea is to do the reading as if it were a movie without a stage or
an audience.
In the second version, arrange your classroom in Elizabethan style on three sides of the
action. Here Gloucester keeps his eyes clinched to indicate blindness. Edgar speaks
directly to the audience. His objective is to teach his father patience (and the audience
how that is done). He hams up his voice as Tom o’Bedlam and as the fisherman. When he
says ‘You do climb up it now. Look how we labour,’ he acts as though he’s been going up
a steep hill for hours. When Gloucester points out to him that his voice is changed, Edgar
overcompensates in returning to the voice of Tom o’Bedlam. When Gloucester tells
Edgar to go away, then your Edgar should make much of altering his voice as if it were
disappearing into the distance. In this version the whole idea is to stress the theatrical
elements by acknowledging the stage and the audience.
Now discuss the two versions with your class. What difference does it make to have
Edgar acknowledge the audience? Which version moved them most? Which version
amused them most? Which version made them understand the language best?
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Love’s Labour’s Lost
LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST
Comments
In many ways, Love’s Labour’s Lost will confirm the worst fears your students may have
about Shakespeare. To start with, little happens in the plot of the play: four noblemen,
led by the King of Navarre, swear oaths of study and abstinence, and, when four
ladies, led by the Princess of France, come for a visit, the men break their oaths by
falling in love, writing poetry, and disguising themselves as Russians (say what?);
meanwhile an assortment of commoners join together to put on a masque; the masque
goes unfinished and the four couples part unmarried. End of play. In no other of
Shakespeare’s plays does so little actually transpire – no action, no violence, no death, no
sex, no weddings.
Worst of all, for those who come to Shakespeare fearing his language, Love’s Labour’s
Lost is stuffed with all the triggers of ShakesFear: ornate speeches, long on words and
short on matter; Elizabethan vernacular; poetical flourishes; classical allusions; and even
jokes in Latin. Shakespeare could hardly have designed a play less likely to overcome a
student’s conditioned reflex against his work than Love’s Labour’s Lost.
And for that very reason, Love’s Labour’s Lost is an ideal play to demonstrate that
Shakespeare stands apart from the characters he created, that he can make fun of his
characters and their language, that not every moment or speech should be taken at face
value. The teacher who shows students how Love’s Labour’s Lost speaks to them and for
them will have given them a tool that opens much else in Shakespeare and in literature
in general. That tool is irony.
Love’s Labour’s Lost is full of people who abuse language: they speak too much, they
reach for obscure words and syntax, and they value the form of what they say more than
the content. Students have little trouble seeing the absurd linguistic excesses of
Holofernes, Nathaniel, and Don Armado. Holofernes provides a recognizable target in
the schoolteacher. The Latin teacher’s need to translate combines here with the teacher of
rhetoric’s need to create a simile:
The deer was, as you know, sanguis, in blood; ripe as the pomewater,
who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of coelo, the sky, the welkin,
the heaven; and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra, the soil,
the land, the earth.
(4.2.5–9)
That’s forty-seven words to say four: ‘the deer is dead’.

His admiring friend, Sir Nathaniel, mimics Holofernes when he tells him of ‘a
companion of the king’s, who is entitled, nominated, or called, Don Adriano de
Armado’ (5.1.7–8). That same Don Adriano de Armado, the ‘vain, ridiculous, and
thrasonical’ Spanish braggadocio (5.1.12), is the prime example of the play’s comic
overspeakers – the word-clowns. Like Holofernes and Nathaniel, Armado never
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settles for one word when a dozen will serve: ‘I do affect the very ground, which is
base, where her shoe, which is baser, guided by her foot, which is basest, doth tread’
(1.2.163–5).
Your students will easily laugh at the play’s clowns, but you will need to help them
understand how the four noblemen – Navarre, Dumain, Longaville, and Berowne – share
with the verbose clowns a tendency to care less about what they say than how they say it.
The four noblemen – like the word-clowns – love to hear themselves speak. It turns out
that the inflation of language in the subplot is not comic relief from the serious business
of the play, it is the serious business of the play.
Look no further for Shakespeare’s subversion of our young ‘heroes’ than the play’s
opening speech by the King of Navarre.
Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,

live register’d upon our brazen tombs,
and then grace us in the disgrace of death,
when, spite of cormorant devouring Time,
th’endeavour of this present breath may buy
that honour which shall bate his scythe’s keen edge,
and make us heirs of all eternity.
Therefore, brave conquerors . . .
(1.1.1–8)
Navarre sounds as if he is leading the most heroic military action ever undertaken, and
an audience could reasonably expect next to hear Navarre say ‘once more unto the
breach, dear friends’ and rush with his three fellows into battle. What Navarre says
instead is that he and his ‘brave conquerors’ will make a ‘little academe’. He’s not going to
war; he’s proposing a study group. Navarre may be serious, but the point for your students
is that Shakespeare is joking. He has opened his play with a joke about the King and his
naive project, and to enjoy that joke – and this delightful play – all your students need is
irony. Introduce them to the irony in the work, and your students will see that Shakespeare
is on their side against the action of his own play.
Berowne, the realist among these four young leading men, also thinks the King’s plan
is silly and says so:
O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep,

not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep.
(1.1.47–8)
That’s well said – the King’s ‘little academe’ both summed up in and opposed in
one couplet. We might think at this point that Berowne is the play’s plain speaker,
but if plain speaking is about using words to tell the truth, we’d be wrong. When
the King reminds Berowne that he has already given his oath, Berowne protests
that, ‘I only swore to study with Your Grace / And stay here in your court for three
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years’ space’ (51–2). Then Longaville objects, ‘You swore to that Berowne, and to the
rest’ (53), and Berowne answers flippantly in rhyme: ‘by yea and nay, sir, then I swore in
jest’ (54).
‘Swearing in jest’ is an oxymoron. When you do that, you are ‘forsworn’. Our four lords
like to speak their words, but not so much keep their words. The opening action of the
play is their signing of the pledge ‘not to see ladies’, after which the Princess shows up
with her three ladies, and the four men immediately rush to break their oaths in order to
woo them. They are ‘forsworn’. As Berowne confesses at the end of the play, they have
‘played foul play with [their] oaths’ (5.2.752). That is why the ladies mock them, and that
is why Shakespeare has the play punish them by withholding from them (and the
audience) a happy ending. As Berowne complains,
Our wooing doth not end like an old play;

Jack hath not Jill: these ladies’ courtesy
might well have made our sport a comedy.
(5.2.865–7)
How hypocritical are these aristocrats, full of ‘taffeta phrases, silken terms precise’
and ‘three-piled hyperbole’, to mock the word-clowns. How nasty they are in ridiculing
Don Armado’s prose. How gratifying it is, then, in Act Four when the secret sonnets of
the four lords become in turn the object of public sport. How delicious it is, when
Berowne pledges to speak more plainly and promises Rosalind that, ‘my love to thee is
sound, sans crack or flaw’ (5.2.415) to have her nail his French affectation: ‘Sans “sans,” I
pray you.’
Finally, with some ironic distance from these romantic ‘leads’, we can watch more
critically as they heap scorn on the gift of the word-clowns, their masque of the ‘Nine
Worthies’. This unfinished ‘show’ at the end of Shakespeare’s play, like ‘Pyramus and
Thisbe’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, relies for its comedy on the earnest theatrics of
amateurs who wish to offer entertainment to their superiors. In Dream Bottom’s
irrepressible enthusiasm for the project preserves the show from the discourteous trio of
grooms, but in Love’s Labour’s Lost the four gentlemen, intent on showing off for the
visiting ladies, heckle the show to a close.
What emerges from a staging of this scene is a growing sense of the callousness of the
‘gentlemen’ and the humanity of the ‘clowns’. When the aristocrats torment Holofernes by
pretending to confuse Judas Maccabee with Judas Iscariot and then descend to the even
more puerile name game of calling him ‘Jud-ass’, Holofernes rightly protests, ‘this is not
generous, not gentle, not humble’ (5.2.624). Later, after a thorough humiliation by his
noble hosts, Don Armado exits with this speech:
For mine own part, I breathe free breath. I have seen the day
of wrong through the little hole of discretion, and I will
right myself like a soldier.
(719–21)
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The speech is remarkable. The initial butt of the play asserts his freedom, sees his faults
(unlike the aristocrats), and determines to improve himself. The man whom our putative
heroes mocked at the beginning of the play for his language ends the play by rising above
them.
Shakespeare, who always had to concern himself with the number of available actors,
must have delighted in the ironic mathematics of this scene and the comment it makes
on the four nobles. Costard, Moth, Holofernes, Nathaniel, and Don Armado try to stage
the Nine Worthies with five actors, but what we watch is a more disturbing show that
might be entitled ‘The Five Worthies and the Four Unworthies.’
Irony is the key to your students enjoying this play. Irony makes it no surprise that the
four women decline the proposals of the men. Irony endears the play’s clowns to an
audience. Irony puts Shakespeare on your students’ side against the very affectations and
attitudes that they may once have condemned as ‘Shakespearean’.
Ploys
A. Stage ‘The Five Worthies and the Four Unworthies’
Scripts: LLL 5.2.546–708

Prep: Intro one week in advance
In class: Two full classes for rehearsal and show
Players: 15–17
Production team: Director, costumer, props
To get at the complexity of the masque within the play and at the ironic quality of the
play, have your students stage a production of the ‘Worthies’ (from the entrance of
Costard as Pompey to the exit of the Worthies) in your classroom. This ploy is a big
undertaking, but it provides a big payoff.
1. Announce to your students that in one week they are to put on the ‘Nine Worthies’.
2. Cast the parts. You’ll need at least the four young aristocrats, the four young
ladies, Boyet, Armado, Moth, Costard, Holofernes, Nathaniel, and Marcade
(that’s fifteen), and you can add non-speaking parts for a Jaquenetta and a Dull.
Have the class decide whether or not they would like to memorize their lines.
(Extra credit is a good bribe.)
3. Assign production roles to as many of the remaining students as possible. At the
least you’ll need a director, a costumer, and a props person. If you wish, you can
appoint a costumer for the characters who are not in the masque and then assign a
costumer and a props person to each of the five worthies who appear in the show.
4. Provide at least one class period for rehearsal.
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5. On the day, arrange the non-cast members of your class as an Elizabethan

theatre (see the Fourth Do), in front of their desks situate the nine students who
represent the audience within the play (four lords, four ladies, and Boyet), and
then have the five others come out to play the clowns on ‘centre stage’. In this way
your class can more readily understand how that configuration makes the real
audience an extension of the action in the play.
When the production is over, ask questions. How does the physical arrangement of
‘real’ audience and ‘play’ audience connect the two? Do members of the real audience feel
irritation with the ‘audience’ of aristocrats who will not let the show go on? Which of the
gallants leads the heckling? How do the actors playing the characters in the masque feel
about the heckling? What part does Boyet play in the proceedings? Why is the King
relatively quiet? How are we to take the Princess’s encouraging comments (‘Proceed,
good Alexander’ [563]; ‘Alas, poor Maccabaeus, how hath he been baited’ [628]; ‘Speak,
brave Hector; we are much delighted’ [664])? What is the effect of the silence of the other
women?
B. Choose the best and worst love poems
Scripts: LLL 4.2.97–111; 4.3.21–37, 55–68, 96–115

Prep: Handouts
Homework: Choose best and worst
This simple ploy is useful in getting students to focus on language, its delights, and its
excesses. If you teach poetry, this exercise also provides a fine introduction to the sonnet.
1. Print out the four poems that the young noblemen write to the four ladies. I
would print them in the order they appear in the text: Berowne’s, the King’s,
Longaville’s, and Dumaine’s. Send the students home with these poems and tell
them to choose the best poem and the worst. Tell them to be ready to say what
they like and do not like about each poem. Make it clear that there is no right or
wrong answer.
2. Before the class discusses the poems, take a vote on each poem. Ask, ‘How many
of you think that this is the best poem?’ Then, ‘How many of you think that this
is the worst poem?’ Every student has to vote once (and no more than once) in
each of those two categories.
3. When everyone’s two votes are in, start with the first poem and ask the people who
thought it was the worst to give one reason why. Then ask those who thought it was
the best for one reason why. Go back and forth between the cons and the pros until
each student who voted worst or best on that poem has had his or her say. Then
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move on to the next poem. Guide the discussion so that your students consider both
content (all but the King address the problem of the lover having broken his vow)
and form (there is one proper sonnet – Longaville’s – and two ‘oversized’ sonnets –
the King’s with an extra couplet and Berowne’s with an extra iamb in each line).
4. At the end you can give your opinion, as long as you make it clear that what you
think is only your opinion. Your job here is not to reach a consensus but to point
out how people have different tastes.
5. Finally, ask your students to discuss how each of the poems with its faults and
virtues reflects the character who wrote it.
My experience over many years is that Berowne, the King, and Longaville get about an
equal number of votes for best poem, while Dumaine’s poem always gets the most votes
for worst. I happen to like the childlike quality of Dumaine’s poem and the lovely image
of the wind getting to touch the beloved’s cheek. Right now my favourite of the four is
Longaville’s for its conversational style and for the three different and clever ways he
justifies having broken an oath. My least favourite poem is the King’s; I think the image
of a tear rolling down his face like a coach is bizarre and unresolved.
Only my opinion.
A. The princess’s welcome Act Two, Scene One, 90 (‘Fair Princess, welcome’) to 113
(‘make me stay’). Two speaking parts; seven listeners (the three ladies, the three lords,
and Boyet). This short passage is worth doing in a number of ways.
The first version. The King is in excruciating embarrassment over his situation, and
the Princess is furious at the insult to her and her ladies. The lords are so struck by
the three ladies that they don’t notice the King’s situation at all. The three ladies don’t
give a darn about their sleeping arrangements; all they want is the men, and they
don’t want the Princess to blow it. Boyet is concerned about the Princess’s lack of
diplomacy.
The second version. The King is oblivious to his discourtesy and is busy showing off his
‘kingliness’ to the other three lords. The Princess actually prefers to sleep in the field, is
only kidding with the King, and thinks he’s cute. The three lords are embarrassed at their
friend’s obtuseness and hardly notice the women. The three ladies are irritated with the
Princess for getting them into a situation where they might have to sleep outside. Boyet
is also worried about his sleeping arrangements.
The third version. The King is gobsmacked over the Princess. The three lords and the
three ladies are likewise gobsmacked over one another. Boyet is beaming at the success
of his mission.
See which of these versions your students enjoy most. Which do they think is the
funniest? Which do they think tells the story most clearly? Decide on a final version that
both maximizes the fun and tells the story.
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B. Spatting or chatting Act Five, Scene Two, 1 (‘Sweet hearts, we’) to 29 (‘wit well
played’). Four female actors.
The exchange between Katherine and Rosaline is one of the most mysterious in the
play. The scene starts off entirely playful, and suddenly Katherine is calling Rosaline
‘light’ (slutty) and making fun of her dark complexion. Let your students explore whether
they are kidding or deadly serious.
The first version. Rosaline is just kidding and surprised Katherine turns ferociously on
her somewhere in the speech beginning, ‘He made her melancholy . . .’. Maria is on
Katherine’s side, and they have both been waiting to give Rosaline a piece of their minds.
The Princess is worried about Katherine’s state of mind.
The second version. Rosaline starts the argument with her nasty reminder of the death
of Katherine’s brother. Katherine delivers her barbs with a sense of calm and superiority,
while Rosaline gets angrier and angrier. Maria is deeply embarrassed by the whole thing.
The Princess is amused to see Rosaline lose it but wants to make peace.
The third version. Rosaline and Katherine have always hated each other. Their fight
makes Maria cry. The Princess breaks it up for what seems like the hundredth time.
The fourth version. What fight? We both just love each other to death. Maria is
oblivious to the whole thing. The Princess is bored.
When you have done all four of these versions, discuss with your students the
implications of the backstory of the death of Katherine’s brother. Discuss as well the
racial overtones of the discussion here and elsewhere in the play (see 4.3.243–69) of dark
complexions.
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MACBETH
Comments
Only four of Shakespeare’s plays are shorter than Macbeth, and all of them are comedies.
Macbeth is a short tragedy . . . and that’s the point. Take the fast track and the ride doesn’t
last long. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth take the fast track; they want the ‘future in an instant’,
they kill to hurry the future, and, having jumped ‘the life to come’, they find ‘tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow’ on the other side, and it signifies nothing. To show us this truth
Shakespeare makes the play a brief candle, and he gives to the actor (Richard Burbage),
who struts and frets in the part of Macbeth, almost exactly one hour upon the stage.
The result is a play whose horrors rush ever faster past the audience. Here is a timeline
of the 1992 Shenandoah Shakespeare production:
Time Event Time since last event
00 min. Play starts
30 min. Macbeth murders Duncan 30 min.
56 min. Henchmen kill Banquo 26 min.
62 min. Banquo’s bloody ghost enters 6 min.
68 min. Apparitions confront Macbeth 6 min.
74 min. Henchmen kill Lady Macduff and son 6 min.
85 min. Lady Macbeth sleepwalks 11 min.
88 min. Drums of war begin 3 min.
91 min. Macbeth starts losing composure 3 min.
96 min. Malcolm’s army gathers 4 min.
98 min. Seyton reports death of Lady Macbeth 3 min.
102 min. Messenger reports approach of Birnam Wood 4 min.
103 min. Birnam Wood marches onstage 1 min.
105 min. Macbeth kills young Siward 2 min.
107 min. Macbeth and Macduff fight 2 min.
109 min. Macduff enters with Macbeth’s head 2 min.
110 min. Play ends 1 min.
One hour and fifty minutes after the SSE production of Macbeth began, it was over.
To be true to its theme, the play has to be quick, and Shakespeare throws that ‘quickest
way’ into relief by juxtaposing it with the slower ways, the ways of nature. The Macbeths
choose murder to shorten time, to leapfrog over the natural process of coming to the
throne, and in so doing, they set themselves against natural growth. Duncan says to
Banquo, ‘I have begun to plant thee and will labour to make thee full of growing’ (1.4.28–
9), and images of this sort of natural and slow fruition are everywhere associated with
Macbeth’s enemies, primarily through children.24 Shakespeare has given almost everyone
24
See Cleanth Brooks’ essay, ‘The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness,’ in his book The Well-Wrought Urn
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1947).
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Macbeth
else in the play children. Duncan (whom Macbeth kills) has Malcolm and Donalbain,
Banquo has Fleance (whom Macbeth tries to kill), Macduff has little Macduff and his ‘little
chickens’ (whom Macbeth kills), Old Siward has Young Siward (whom Macbeth kills).
Natural generation surrounds and mocks Macbeth, whose first words to Banquo
about the witches’ prophecy are ‘your children shall be kings’ (1.3.86). Later, having got
the crown, he complains that the witches ‘put a barren sceptre in my grip, thence to be
wrenched with an unlineal hand, no son of mine succeeding’ (3.2.61–3). Being king
means nothing unless he can wipe out all natural ‘succeeders’; the play becomes Macbeth
against generation. When Banquo’s son Fleance escape the murderers, they say ‘we have
lost / best half of our affair,’ and Macbeth laments that he ‘had been perfect else’. When he
sees the witches’ show of the natural succession of kings stretching out to ‘th’ crack of
doom’ (4.1.117), he sends his minions out to slaughter Macduff ’s family.
Shakespeare weaves into the language of the play this opposition between Macbeth
and nature, between the ‘future in an instant’ and the unhurried generation of nature,
between murder and offspring, and he stages that opposition as well, sometimes in ways
we cannot see when we read the play.
In Act Two, Scene One, Banquo enters with Fleance, who is holding a torch. That torch
signalled to Shakespeare’s audience that they were to imagine the scene in darkness, and
to stress the point Shakespeare has father and son talk about the night and how dark it is:
banquo
How goes the night, boy?
fleance
The moon is down . . .
banquo
Hold, take my sword. There’s husbandry in heaven;
Their candles are all out.
(1–5)
At that point, Macbeth enters with a servant holding a torch. So get the picture: the two
friends that Shakespeare has introduced to us as a pair stand onstage, each near a
torchbearer, and at the end of the scene they go their separate ways. Banquo must exit
following the light of the torch his son carries, while Macbeth, having dismissed his
servant, exits in the opposite direction following ‘a dagger of the mind’. Literally, one way
is a torch and the child; the other is a dagger and murder.
In the ‘sleepwalking scene’ we see what has become of Lady Macbeth’s ‘future in an
instant’: she is condemned to have no future at all; instead she relives endlessly that
moment in which she and Macbeth tried to ‘jump the time’ by murdering the King. Her
life has become yesterday and yesterday and yesterday.
An even more startling visualization of thematic material, however, is the brief
moment in Act Five, Scene Six – one of the shortest scenes in all of Shakespeare – when
Shakespeare shows the audience Birnam Wood arriving at Dunsinane: ‘Drum and
colours. Enter Malcolm, Siward, Macduff, and their Army, with boughs.’ The very brevity of
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the scene argues the importance to Shakespeare of staging that moment. He could, after
all, have had the messenger in the previous scene tell us that the army has already put
down its ‘leavy screens’, or he might even have had Macbeth, as if from a lookout, describe
the moment. The effort involved for so short a scene – finding the boughs, getting them
and the ‘army’ onstage, and then getting everything offstage in ten lines – seems
incommensurate with the gain. You can imagine the actors saying to Shakespeare, ‘Will,
give us a break. Why do we have to do this scene with trees?’ And I can imagine
Shakespeare saying something like, ‘We have to show that when you kill a king, a best
friend, and a baby, Nature’s gonna send a forest for your ass.’
Two topics of conversation ‘outside’ the play

The Curse. The theatrical tradition is that no one involved with a production of Macbeth
is supposed to say its name, but instead call it ‘the Scottish play’. The origins of this
superstition are a number of unfortunate mishaps in the play’s stage history; but, given
the popularity and physical nature of the play, the wonder is that there have not been a
good deal more. Macbeth, after all, is both one of Shakespeare’s most frequently produced
plays and one of the plays with the greatest number of violent scenes, so one would
expect that over the course of four centuries, the play would accumulate a lot of accidents.
I suspect that a little research would turn up at least as many accidents in the stage
history of, say, Comedy of Errors, (‘the Ephesian play’?). But, of course that play doesn’t
have a trio of witches chanting curses around impressionable actors.
King James I. To get my students thinking about Shakespeare the professional, I talk
about the probability that Shakespeare wrote the play with King James I (and the financial
reward of pleasing him) in mind. James, the first Scottish king of England, came to the
throne in 1603, two years before Shakespeare wrote Macbeth and Shakespeare’s company
became the King’s Men when he chose to be their patron.
Shakespeare, knowing that the King traced his lineage to the historical Banquo and
fancied himself an expert on witchcraft, thinks, ‘how can I shape this material into a play?’
So for James the Scotsman he writes a play about Scotland, and for James the demonologist
he creates a world of witches, the chants they use, the details on how they amuse
themselves, and even the ingredients and measurements for their best recipes. Finally, for
James the genealogist, Shakespeare celebrates his connection to Banquo, as we have seen,
makes generation a major theme in the play, and James must have enjoyed very much a
play in which his own kingship is made the inevitable result of the rule of nature.
Your students should envision the King and his courtly audience surrounding the
players at the first court performance of Macbeth; since they share the same light, they
are a part of the scene. When, about six minutes into the play, Witch number 3 says to
Banquo, ‘Thou shalt get kings’ (1.3.67), everyone looks to King James and smiles, and in
that magic moment Shakespeare has connected audience and actor, play and reality,
history and the present. James becomes the play’s ever-present answer to Macbeth, his
ultimate opponent. When the ‘blood-boltered Banquo’ points into the mirror to show
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Macbeth
that his descendants will bear the coronation insignia of England, Macbeth’s potent
Freudian image – ‘some I see that twofold balls and treble sceptres carry’ (4.1.120–1) –
would at least have turned every eye in the house towards James. Burbage may even have
delivered that line directly to the new monarch from Scotland. In that moment,
Shakespeare has erased the line between the two worlds, made the king a part of the play
and the play a part of the king.
And, oh, yes, he’d have made the King a lifelong friend of the company. Good politics,
good business, good art.
Ploys
A. Which witches?
Scripts: Mac 4.1.1–38

Prep: Prior class intro, in-class planning session, scripts, scoresheets
Prizes (optional)
What did Shakespeare’s witches look like? Were they scary? disgusting? funny? How did
the actors create ‘witchy’ effects? Remember, they couldn’t even turn out the lights. Have a
witch competition using Act Four, Scene One, 1–38. Your students will enjoy solving this
theatrical puzzle.
1. Divide your class into teams (no more than ten).
2. Establish the rules:
a. Each team is limited to three witches, but the other members of the team
can contribute to visual or sound effects.
b. Witches may, of course, be male (Shakespeare’s were).
c. Each team has a maximum of four minutes to perform the 38 lines.
d. All effects must be within the technological capabilities of Shakespeare’s
company (i.e. no electrical or electronic wizardry) and stage.
e. Teams must stick to the text, but more than a single voice can speak the
lines.
3. Give each team a name from the play: for example, The Sailors’ Thumbs, The
Dashed Brains, and so on.
4. Hand out score sheets to rate each team for such things as humour, scariness,
disgustingness, weirdness, preparation, acting, sound effects, make-up, costume,
movement, and overall performance. (Note that these categories reward different
aptitudes.)
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5. Give them a twenty-minute planning session in the class before the day of the
competition.
6. On the day of the competition use some sort of fateful system – from a coin toss
to a Ouija board – to assign the order of their presentations.
7. Give out prizes appropriate to the Halloween season. The last time my class did
this, the first-prize winners received brooms, runners-up got pumpkins, and the
booby prize was chicken parts.
Base the next class discussion on the ideas sparked by the competition. If the witches
are scary, how does that affect an audience’s sense of Macbeth and Banquo? Does it alter
our response to the play’s action? What if they are funny instead? Is Banquo laughing at
them and Macbeth taking them seriously? Again, what impact does such a choice have
on our understanding of the play’s action?
B. Symphony of the sound effects in Macbeth
Prep: Finding ‘instruments’

In class: 3 class periods
Tech: Recording equipment
Macbeth is a play full of sounds. In addition to the normal ‘flourishes’ (musical fanfares),
‘alarums’ (trumpet or horn call to arms), and ‘hautboys’ (oboe mood music), the play has
thunder, knocks, hoots, chimes, drums, and other sounds. Make it a class project to
orchestrate – in the order in which they occur – all the sounds in Macbeth.
1. Have the class compile a complete list of all the sounds that take place in the
play.
2. Divide the class into groups with different responsibilities. Get your band
members to handle the horns and, perhaps, the drums. Find other musicians to
compose and play the witches’ music. Assign another group to the thunder,
another to the knocks, another to the chimes, and so on.
3. Make one class a rehearsal session to which everyone must bring the
instruments they need for their sounds. Practise the sounds in sequence and
make a list of the sequence of sounds, which will serve as a ‘score’. Remember
that every sound must come either from a stage direction in the Folio (i.e. not
bracketed in a modern edition) or from an implicit stage direction – ‘did you
hear an owl hoot?’
4. Discuss the overall effect with your students and settle on such things as tempo,
tone, and volume.
5. Set the date for the ‘recording session’.
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Macbeth
6. Record your official Macbeth soundtrack (it should be about seven to ten
minutes long).
This exercise is a splendid way to make your students appreciate the non-verbal
methods with which Shakespeare shaped and coloured his play. And when you’ve
finished the project, you will have a digital recording of your class’s Macbeth that you can
send your students for souvenir copies of their ‘production’.
C. Macbeth’s head
Scripts: Mac 5.9.20–1

Prep: Prior intro, visual barrier
Homework: Choose best and worst
Prizes
Here’s a gory exercise for younger students. At the end of the play Macduff enters ‘with
Macbeth’s head’ and says, ‘Hail, King, for so thou art. Behold where stands th’ usurper’s
cursèd head’ (5.9.20–1). How did Shakespeare’s company stage this? Did they use a fake
head? If so, how did they make it convincing? Or did they forget about realism and just
rely on the imagination of the audience?
1. At least two weeks ahead, announce Cursèd Head Day, on which students
present their versions of Macbeth’s severed head.
2. Stress to your students that:
a. their job is to solve a staging problem
b. they must be able to reconcile their solution with the text, and
c. real severed heads will not be accepted.
3. On Cursèd Head Day, prepare some sort of visual barrier – a screen or a curtain
– from behind which each contestant is to appear.
4. Have the students bring their solutions – under wraps – so that you and their
classmates will not see their entry before they enter from behind the curtain or
screen.
5. Stand in front of the screen as Macduff and, as you say, ‘Behold where stands
th’usurper’s cursèd head,’ point to the place where the student will appear.
6. Give a prize for the most realistic head, a prize for the ickiest head, and a prize
for the funniest head.
Discuss what elements go into grossing out an audience. What part does imagination
play in horror? What part does realism play? What is the line between scary and gross
and between gross and funny? Why are eyeballs more disturbing than ears?
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This exercise will be popular with your students and unpopular with your
administration.
A. Lady Macbeth reading her husband’s letter Act One, Scene Five, 1 (‘They met
me . . .’) to 37 (‘brings great news’). Two speaking parts.
When we first meet Lady Macbeth, she is speaking with Macbeth’s words as she reads
a letter he has sent her from the field. The actor must decide if this is the first time she has
read the letter or not. This seemingly small choice will demonstrate to your students the
impact that such specific decisions can make on the character and on the play.
In the first version, Lady Macbeth has already read the letter from her husband. Your
actor should read the letter as if she were looking for the best bits to share with the
audience. She should already be thinking of how to use the letter to persuade her husband
to murder the King, and when the messenger brings the news of the King’s arrival, first
she’s upset because she’s thinks Macbeth has changed his mind, and then she collects
herself and sees the news as good luck.
In the second version, she is reading the letter for the first time, and in that moment
the letter itself gives her the idea of murdering the King – again for the first time. When
the messenger brings the news, it’s spooky for her because she’s never had these thoughts
before, and she has to overcome her sense that people can read her thoughts.
In discussion ask your students which of these two alternatives produces the most
ambitious Lady Macbeth and which the most sympathetic. Ask them how each choice
affects their understanding of Macbeth.
B. In the dark after Duncan’s murder Act Two, Scene Two, 1 (‘That which hath’)
to 56 (‘Whence is that knocking?’). Two speaking parts to be memorized and one
knocker.
For the four scenes leading up to Act Two, Scene Two, when Macbeth returns from
the murder of Duncan, Shakespeare has been establishing the darkness of the night. The
moon is ‘down’ and there are no stars out; in short, ‘thick night’ has answered Lady
Macbeth’s summons and covered the murder in a ‘blanket of the dark’. Shakespeare and
his colleagues, however, could not make the stage dark (since sunlight lit the stage), so
actors had to act in a way that made the audience imagine the darkness.
While lighting designers have to choose between showing us the darkness and
showing us the action, Shakespeare could show his audience total darkness and
simultaneously let them see every action and expression of the actors.
To explore the possibilities for imagined stage darkness, you’ll need two actors willing
to be ‘off book’ for the 58 lines before Lady Macbeth exits in Act Two, Scene Two, and
you’ll need two ‘daggers’ (these must be completely safe: rubber or wood with no sharp
edges). Have them rehearse the scene with their own blocking, and do not mention
anything to them about the darkness.
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Macbeth
For the first version, let them do the scene in class as they rehearsed it.
Then, for the second version, ‘turn off the lights’ by blindfolding the two actors. Have
them run the scene without being able to see, but tell them to pay particular attention to
their movements and to try to remember the reflexive expressions on their faces. In this
version have Macbeth enter – as he does in the Folio – at his first line, ‘Who’s there?’ He
will be trying to find her until she says, ‘wash this bloody witness from your hands.’ When
the lights come on (or the blindfolds come off ), discuss with the two actors their
sensations. Ask them how the darkness affected their urgency, their secretiveness, their
fear, and so on. Then have them do it again and attempt to re-create their movements
with the blindfolds off.
Ask your students how the scene has changed from their first run. What effect did it
have on the scene to have the two Macbeths unable to see? You will be amazed how much
the scene has changed (you’ll see, for example, why Lady Macbeth doesn’t notice that
Macbeth’s brought the daggers with him until 40 lines into the scene).
C. The Porter Act Two, Scene Three, 1 (‘Here’s a knocking . . .’) to 20 (‘remember the
porter’). One actor and one knocker.
Shakespeare obviously intended the Porter’s speech for a clown of some type, and if
you have a class clown who likes to act, give this role to him or her.
The first version. The Porter is quite obviously drunk. He’s also young and couldn’t care
less about his job. He speaks the speech proscenium-style to no one in particular.
The second version. The Porter is a seasoned drinker, and he’s pretty good at hiding his
condition. He’s forty and cares a lot about his job, so his strategy is to complain about
others. He speaks the speech to the members of the audience, frequently turning one of
them into the butt of his joke.
After your actor has done it both these ways, discuss with the class which one was
more interesting and which was funnier. Ask if those two things are synonymous. Then
ask them for suggestions, and, after discussing various approaches have the class agree on
a third version.
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MEASURE FOR MEASURE
Comments
Your response to Measure for Measure depends on how you judge a play. Do you measure
it only by its power to entertain you? Do you measure it against other plays? What kind?
Do you measure it against other comedies? Does it have to have a clown? lovers? a happy
ending? Audiences can’t help bringing their expectations into a show, and because
Measure for Measure will not fit neatly into the category of either comedy or tragedy,
tradition groups it with All’s Well and Troilus and Cressida as one of Shakespeare’s
‘problem plays’. Shakespeare, who put clowns in tragedies and melancholics in comedies,
seems to have disdained genre, but he knew that audiences watched plays through the
lens of genre and would set those expectations against the play he was writing and
generate energy from the dissonance between it and our expectations. In so many ways
– its setting, its subject, its clowns, its heroine, and its leading man – this work disturbs
us by subverting our expectations of a ‘comedy’.
Measure for Measure is a play about what Bob Seger calls ‘the fire down below’, and
Shakespeare has set it in a nasty world. It’s a world of brothels and prisons, far from the
‘green world’ of the early comedies. It’s a world that reduces people to their bodies, sees
love only as desire, and makes desire into a legal and economic problem. It’s the story of
a War on Sex in which authority’s public stance is ‘just say no . . . or die’ and in which the
same authority, in private, will not take ‘no’ for an answer. It’s a world where religion is a
matter of self-denial and where the State uses religion to intrude on the private world of
its citizens. It’s a world where Authority dispenses a ‘justice’ that entrenches the wrongs
of the society and calls it a Happy Ending.
In this play one of the two ‘clowns’, Lucio, is a syphilitic fop, and the other, Pompey, is
a pimp. In this play our leading lady, Isabella, wants to be a nun and, faced with the choice
of having her brother Claudio die or having sex with the play’s villain, Angelo, she
proclaims that, ‘more than our brother is our chastity.’
All of these features of the play are ‘problems’ for our expectations of a comedy, but I
think what disturbs us most and sets up the most entertaining dissonance – the problem
hiding in plain sight – is the play’s hero, Duke Vincentio. Our sense that the play’s villain
is Angelo, the ‘Vice-Duke’, deflects us from Shakespeare’s real target, the Duke. More
troubling than the quality of Angelo’s villainy is the quality of Duke Vincentio’s goodness.
The play about the evil of Angelo falters and leaves an audience uncertain about the
Happy Ending; the play about the evil of the Duke holds together completely and leaves
an audience certain that the Happy Ending is not. The trick to seeing how well Shakespeare
hits his mark in this play is to recognize that he is aiming at the Duke.
The Duke is a man who, finding his city slipping into the sewer, passes the buck by
leaving the job of law enforcement to a deputy. He clings to control, however, by staying
in Vienna in disguise, and the disguise he chooses is crucial in understanding his abuse
of authority: he impersonates a friar. Political authority here confiscates divine authority
and in so doing echoes the confusion of legal and religious right and wrong that
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Measure for Measure
permeates the play. The fact is that we see Vincentio arranging to play God – to bear ‘the
sword of heaven’ – two scenes before we see Angelo at the same game.
In the guise of a friar (how mortal a sin is Priest Impersonation?), the Duke does
some eavesdropping that puts Polonius to shame: he listens in on the conversation
between a sister and her brother over whether or not she’d save his life by sacrificing her
virginity. His costume, moreover, lends God’s apparent backing to two unholy suggestions:
the substitution of one woman’s body for another at a forced assignation, and the
substitution of one man’s head for another at a forced execution. This tendency of the
Duke to play God culminates in the last scene of the play. Here, the Duke, who said
earlier that ‘I love the people, but do not like to stage me to their eyes’ (1.1.67–8), publicly
orchestrates his version of a Happy Ending for the last half hour (535 lines) of the play.
He uses the holy sacrament of marriage to Mariana to punish Angelo for attempted rape
and wrongful execution; and he uses marriage to a whore to punish Lucio for saying bad
things about him.
But the forced marriage that most damns the Duke is the last one he ordains, Isabel’s
marriage to him. However much an audience might expect a comedy to end in marriage,
this moment comes as a surprise. Recall that at the beginning of the play Isabel is joining
a convent (and complaining that the rules are not strict enough for her). And nowhere in
the play have Isabel and the Duke ever exchanged romantic words. At a minimum, the
Duke is hijacking Isabel’s life on the assumption that she has changed her mind about
taking vows; more emblematically, he is seizing one of God’s brides for his own.
Shakespeare stages that moment in a way that parallels Angelo’s attempt to possess
Isabel’s body for a night with the Duke’s success in possessing it on a regular basis.
Angelo’s terms are clear: have sex with me and you get your brother back alive. This
simple quid pro quo is fundamental to the stage business at the end of the play when the
Duke, who has told Isabel that her brother is dead, ‘unmuffles’ Claudio with these words:
If he be like your brother, for his sake

is he pardoned, and for your lovely sake –
give me your hand and say you will be mine . . .
(5.1.487–9)
All Shakespeare needs to do to exculpate his main character is have Isabel indicate that
she is happy at this good fortune. Instead, he has Isabel, who is in no position to protest,
remain silent for the rest of the play.
Those who would argue that Isabel’s silence could be interpreted as assent must ignore
not only the ease with which Shakespeare could have made her happiness clear – and
didn’t – but the dynamics of the rest of the scene. Something in her silence bothers even
the Duke, as his last speech makes clear. First, he hurries through his dealings with the
other characters, dismissing Claudio and Juliet in one line and Mariana and Angelo in
two, thanking Escalus and the Provost in two lines each, pardoning himself in three.
Then, he repeats his ‘offer’ of marriage, but this time he phrases his proposal in much
more tentative terms:
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. . . Dear Isabel,
I have a motion much imports your good,
whereto if you’ll a willing ear incline,
what’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.
(530–3)
This speech and its phrasing make sense only if the Duke sees Isabel’s silence from his
marriage proclamation 40 lines earlier as a sign of her resistance and of her powerlessness
as a subject and a woman. That silence is an indictment of the Duke; it resists him, his
world, and our expectation of comedy.
But the resistance in the play that gives me most joy is that moment of pure subversion
when an irresistible force – the Duke in friar’s garb – meets an immoveable object – a
hungover prisoner’s refusal to be executed. The lowest of the low, a condemned murderer
named Barnardine, has the dignity to say ‘no’ to both secular and religious authority in a
way that reverberates with both Christian and Existentialist meaning:
Friar, not I: I have been drinking hard all

night and I will have more time to prepare me, or they
shall beat out my brains with billets. I will not consent
to die this day, that’s certain.
(4.3.53–6)
This truculent refusal to comply by dying is as dark as comedy gets, and for that reason,
perhaps, as comic.
I said earlier that how you respond to Measure for Measure depends on how you judge it.
I suggest that one measure of a work of art is the playwright’s success in achieving his
aims. I further suggest that in this play Shakespeare’s aim was to discomfort his audience,
to subvert their expectations. By that measure for the play, Shakespeare could hardly
have written a better play.
Ploys
A. Replacing the prunes
Scripts: MM 2.1.87–114
Prep: Scripts
Players: 3
Props: hats, boxes, or bags
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Measure for Measure
In Act Two, Scene One, Pompey, the pimp, and Froth, one of his customers, are arraigned
before Escalus and Angelo. In the course of explaining to Escalus how the wife of
constable Elbow came to be in a bawdy house, Pompey tries to confuse the issue by
telling a shaggy dog tale about prunes. He is clearly making it up as he goes along, and
coaching Froth to back up his story. On the stage the interrogation can be hilarious, but,
because it relies on the ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink’ of the stage business, your students will
find it almost meaningless on the page.
You can give your students a sense of the fun in the scene and at the same time show
them the power of innuendo by doing lines 87–114 (to ‘come, you are a tedious fool’) once
as they are written and then repeatedly with replacement nouns for ‘prunes’ and ‘dish’.
1. You’ll need three willing students to do the parts of Escalus, Froth, and Pompey.
The Pompey should be someone who can turn a phrase and can improvise, so
you may want to play Pompey yourself.
2. Ask your students to write on separate slips two nouns in which the first noun is
something small enough to be swallowed and the second noun is something
which can contain the first – for example, in place of ‘prunes’ and ‘dish’ a student
might suggest ‘goldfish’ and ‘bowl’.
3. Collect the first noun in one hat, box, or bag; and the second noun in another.
4. Now have your three ‘volunteers’ stand in front of the class and read the scene.
5. Have your Pompey select a substitute noun for ‘prune’ out of the first hat, box, or bag
and a substitute noun for ‘dish’ out of the second, and use those two words in telling
Pompey’s shaggy dog story. Pompey’s job is to tell the story smoothly to Escalus
while getting Froth to agree to the tale as he goes along – nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
6. He or she then improvises any details appropriate to the new nouns.
This ‘mad lib’ ploy will give your students the pleasure of hearing the pairs their
classmates come up with, but they will also see a vivid demonstration of how Shakespeare
has a character speak ‘badly’ for the purposes of comedy. Lastly, if the nudging and
winking are good enough, they will see how easily the language absorbs innuendo.
B. Tableaux vivants of the final scene
Scripts: MM 5.1
Players: 10–15
Tech: Camera
A good method for making these issues visual for your students is to have them use some
of their classmates to arrange several tableaux vivants – stage pictures – of the end of the
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play. At a minimum there are ten people on the stage – the Duke, Friar Peter, Isabel,
Mariana, Angelo, Escalus, the Provost, Claudio, Juliet, and Lucio, but the addition of
Lucio’s whore and an officer would bring the number to twelve. Your limit, however, is
fifteen.
In class
1. Set up your room as Elizabethan theatre (see the Fourth Do).
2. Cast your students as the characters in the scene.
3. Arrange the characters around one another as they might have been at the final
two lines of the play in a performance at the Globe. You do not have to accept
the frequent editorial emendation that has Lucio exit with two guards (I don’t),
but he might be in the grip of guards.
4. Begin your first tableau with the placement of the Duke and then position all the
other characters around him and leave the placement of Isabel to the last. Is she
next to him? even in his arms? Or is she as far away from him as she can be?
even with her back turned? Discuss the meaning of each character’s position and
posture.
5. Have all the students exaggerate the response of each of their characters.
6. Say ‘freeze’, and snap a picture.
7. Then do another tableau, this time beginning with the placement of Angelo.
8. Do a third tableau beginning with the placement of Isabella.
Discuss the differing implications of each of the tableaux, and insist that your students
refer to the text in making their points. Post the best pictures with this caption: ‘MM
5.1.535–6’.
A. Duke and Friar Act One, Scene Three, in its entirety (54 lines). Two speaking
parts.
In the first version, the Duke speaks to the Friar with respect and warmth, and the
Friar listens to the Duke as though he were a good friend and responds with pleasure to
the idea of helping the Duke to a friar’s habit. They exit together.
In the second version, the Duke is haughty, explains himself in a condescending
monotone, and commands the Friar to get him a habit. Meanwhile, the Friar’s posture
and expression make clear that he doesn’t care for the Duke or his plan. At the mention
of the habit, the Friar should try to protest, but the Duke will bully him into silence. The
Duke strides off ahead of the Friar, who follows hesitantly.
In many ways this scene is precursor of the final scene, when the Duke imposes his
will on a person of religion (Isabella) who cannot say no to him.
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Measure for Measure
B. Claudio and Isabel (and the Duke) Act Three, Scene One, 53 (‘Now, sister, what’)
to 150 (‘hear me, Isabella’). Two speaking parts, one non-speaking part.
Again, to give your students an idea of the importance of the Friar/Duke’s
eavesdropping, do this scene in the first version without him, and do it in the second
version with him standing directly over them (he might stand on a desk) reacting to their
conversation. Have your students notice which lines his presence spotlights, and discuss
the difference in the feel of the two versions.
Isabel’s stern virtue in this scene makes her a pretty unsympathetic character to
students, so, in addition to asking how the Friar/Duke’s presence changes our feelings for
her, you may wish to do a third version in which you find ways to make comprehensible
her anger with her brother. You can make him more craven and let his behaviour explain
her disgust, or you can make clear that she is nearing a nervous breakdown. Your students
will have suggestions.
C. Duke and Lucio Act Three, Scene Two, 83 (‘Friar? What news?’) to 177 (Lucio’s
exit). Two speaking parts.
My dislike of the Duke makes me wonder whether or not some of the accusations that
Lucio makes against him are true, and that suspicion leads to this alternative reading.
In the first version, Lucio is loud and obnoxious; he does things like slap the Friar/
Duke on the back. His main object is to drop the Duke’s name by pretending that he
knows him. The Friar/Duke, meanwhile, is so shocked by some of the things that Lucio
is saying that he does ‘takes’ to the audience. He finds Lucio’s accusations so absurd that
he actually starts laughing in places.
In the second version, Lucio really believes that the Duke would be more lenient; he
may be exaggerating his familiarity with the Duke, but he has seen the Duke partying.
Lucio’s point about the Duke is not that he is corrupt but that he is a good old boy who
knows how to have fun and doesn’t take himself too seriously. In this version, the Friar/
Duke is angry at Lucio’s indiscretion and is really trying to scare him off from telling his
stories. His rebukes are ill-natured and sharp, and he loses all his good humour.
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THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
Comments
The Merchant of Venice is a painful experience for a Jew; no interpretation of the play can
hide the smell of anti-Semitism in the Venice and Belmont of the play. I cannot, for
example, hear Gratiano punctuating every sentence with ‘Jew’ without remembering the
bully in high school who, having seen me taking judo classes, called me ‘Jew-do Cohen’.
The high school teacher who undertakes the teaching of The Merchant of Venice must
understand that (1) it will discomfort any Jewish students in the class and (2) the Jewish
community is right to be concerned that careless teaching of the play might promote
anti-Semitism. In The Merchant of Venice it is all too easy for the simple-minded to see
Shylock as the only impediment to a perfect world – the same point of view that drives
anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi movements throughout the world.
As a Jewish teacher and director, I have had to come to terms with the Shakespeare
who wrote this work, and I have decided to find him not an anti-Semite, but a writer
exhibiting and dissecting anti-Semitism. No other of his plays confronts so powerfully
the sociology (and economics) of discrimination that still plague our society. Below I will
try to show briefly how a teacher can get beyond the simplistic answers to the troubling
questions at its heart, but first I want to testify to the play’s surprising effect onstage.
Over the years I have taken groups of students (with few if any Jews among them) to
productions that varied widely in their treatment of the Jew – among them, Patrick
Stewart’s tough, chain-smoking wheeler-dealer; Anthony Sher’s extremely exotic and
angry ethnic; and Dustin Hoffman’s bitterly wry logician. Though I cannot know how
much my Jewish presence might have affected our discussions afterwards, I have always
been surprised by the level of their sympathy for Shylock and their hostility towards such
characters as Antonio, Bassanio, Lorenzo, and Gratiano. Since Edmund Kean’s 1814
portrayal of Shylock as a man with just grievances, actors have been playing the character
as a victim, but the last few decades have seen less sentimental Shylocks. Sher’s Jew
delighted in his hatred of Gentile society and was bloodthirsty for revenge, and John
Harrell’s confrontational Shylock in the recent ASC production was chilling; and yet
those productions provoked as much sympathy from students as have tamer, more
accommodating Shylocks. My experience, then, is that something in the dynamics of the
play as theatre, something obscured in a reading, undermines the anti-Jewish assumptions
of the play’s Gentile characters.
This ‘subversive’ effect lies partly in the character of Shylock’s enemies, the Gentile
society in the play. Shakespeare brings into collision the two worlds of Antonio and of
Shylock. The glimpse we get of Shylock’s world is not warm or cheerful: it is a severe
world hemmed in by the rules of his religion as much as by the enmity of Christian
Venice. Few could argue with Jessica’s desire to escape a life like that by the simple
expedient of ‘becoming a Christian’. (And what teenage member of an oppressed
minority hasn’t wished to be one of the crowd?) After all, Antonio’s Venice appears a
place of festival and plenty, an open and spacious world where friends can meet on the
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The Merchant of Venice
Rialto (but where Jews are kicked and spat upon). But when we look closer, something is
wrong with Antonio and his world.
The play opens on a melancholy note when Antonio, who is, in fact, the ‘merchant’ of
Venice, complains, ‘I know not why I am so sad’ (1.1.1). What Shakespeare shows us in
that first two minutes of the play is a wealthy man with two sycophants who suggest that
he is worrying about his money. Soon Antonio’s dearest friend, Bassanio, enters and
underscores the connection between Antonio and his companions: Bassanio wants to
borrow money so that he can compete for the hand of Portia, ‘a lady richly left’ (1.1.161).
Her money is not her only virtue, but it is the first thing that Bassanio mentions, and in
the first half of the play Shakespeare stages that attraction by putting her suitors onstage
with the three treasure chests from which they must choose. Shakespeare further
underlines the issue of marrying for money during Lorenzo’s elopement with Jessica. The
scene begins like the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and quickly turns into the
Brinks Robbery (‘Here, catch this casket . . . I will make fast the doors and gild myself /
with some more ducats’ [2.6.49–50]), a despicable act by Jessica that wins the ultimate
seal of approval from Gratiano – ‘a gentile and no Jew!’ (2.6.51). For the Jew-baiting
Gratiano, theft from Shylock is ‘Gentile’.
The materialism of Christian Venice comes to a head in the courtroom scene, where
Shylock’s refusal to ignore his ‘oath in heaven’ for any amount of money contrasts starkly
with the friends of Antonio, who turn on Shylock and gleefully take his money.
duke
For half thy wealth, it is Antonio’s;
the other half comes to the general state . . .
(4.1.368–9)
But the problems of Venetian society run deeper than materialism. Antonio never
explains the source of his melancholy, but Shakespeare does. As soon as they are alone he
asks Bassanio:
Well, tell me now what lady is the same

to whom you swore a secret pilgrimage,
that you to-day promised to tell me of?
Antonio is in love with Bassanio. Look at the description of Antonio’s farewell to Bassanio
leaving to woo Portia:
. . . his eye being big with tears,

turning his face, he put his hand behind him,
and with affection wondrous sensible
he wrung Bassanio’s hand; and so they parted.
(2.8.46–9)
And listen to Antonio as he speaks what he thinks will be his last words to Bassanio:
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Commend me to your honourable wife . . .

say how I loved you, . . ., bid her be judge
whether Bassanio had not once a love.
(4.1.271–5)
Antonio is homosexual. So what? After all, it makes his character even more
admirable; he gives his financial support and risks his life to help the man he loves to
a wife. Why, then, does this particular character stroke matter? Because it reflects
on Antonio’s treatment of the Jew. Antonio has cause to be sympathetic to Shylock’s
otherness. They are both outsiders, but Shylock cannot, as Antonio does, keep his
otherness in the closet. Shylock must wear his badges of difference, his Jewish gabardine
and his skullcap, which he embraces with pride. By contrast Antonio hides who he
is, which gives the vehemence of his hatred of Shylock seem a symptom of self-
loathing.
But the character who brings Shylock to his knees is Portia. Portia is the audience’s
avatar. She is the champion of the Gentile world, and her character is the only one that
can counterbalance the theatrical weight of Shylock. It matters, then, what Shakespeare
lets us know about her. She is smart, she is generous with her money, she is assertive, and
she is – even leaving aside her anti-Semitism – a racist.
On this last point Shakespeare is clear. When Morocco comes courting, his first words
to Portia confront the issue of race: ‘Mislike me not for my complexion’ (2.1.1). Morocco’s
defence of his blackness – ‘I would not change this hue, except to steal your thoughts’
(2.1.11–12) – is as direct as it is affecting. More than that, Morocco’s speech presents the
question of race in the same terms as the lesson of the caskets: do not judge content by
appearances; do not let my outside obscure the truth of my inside:
Bring me the fairest creature northward born,

where Phoebus’ fire scarce thaws the icicles,
and let us make incision for your love
to prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine.
(2.1.4–7)
When Morocco chooses the wrong casket and fails the test devised by Portia’s father, so
too does Portia, who reveals that she does not want to look beyond the colour of any
black suitor’s skin: ‘Let all of his complexion choose me so’ (2.7.79). Thus, Portia ‘mislikes’
Morocco precisely for the reason he argues against in his opening line – for his
complexion. Portia judges by appearances – surely the point of the caskets and just as
surely the definition of prejudice.
Whatever Shakespeare may have thought of such bigotry, he has contrived his
play in a manner that highlights the fault in Portia, the voice that most effectively
champions Venetian attitudes. He forces us to read into her character a certain amount
of intolerance, an unfairness of mind, which cannot but comment on her later treatment
of the Jew.
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In terms of entertainment, The Merchant of Venice gives us gripping theatre with

romance, soaring language, high and low comedy, big characters, and perhaps the
most famous trial in all of theatre. In terms of food for thought, it stages a contest
of the Old Testament (Law) and the New (Love) with charismatic but deeply flawed
champions. The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare’s best and most troublesome
plays.
Ploys
A. Tipping off Bassanio
Scripts: MV 3.2
Prep: Finding boxes and prizes
In class: 3 minutes per pair + discussion
Volunteers: 2
Props: 3 boxes, prizes
Portia may be bound by her father’s will to take the man who chooses the right casket,
but she does not appear bound to play fair. She does not stand helplessly by when
Bassanio is making his choice. She gives him clues. As it transpires, the lead casket is the
right casket, and it bears the inscription, ‘Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he
hath’ (2.7.16). In her opening line to Bassanio before he makes his selection, she identifies
the casket by saying the key word: ‘pause for a day or two / before you hazard . . .’ (3.2.1–
2). And while he is choosing, she sings – as she has not before – a song whose first three
lines end with a rhyme for ‘lead’ (‘bred’, ‘head’, and ‘nourished’) and asks for a ‘reply’.
But these are merely the hints we can see in the text; let your students explore how
many other ‘silent’ ways a Portia could help Bassanio to find the right casket. To do that:
1. Choose a Bassanio and send him out of the room.
2. Arrange three boxes in front of the room. Differentiate the boxes in some way
– number them, put pictures on them, colour them, make them different sizes.
3. Put booby prizes in two of the boxes and a real prize in the third.
4. Choose a Portia and instruct her to do all she can – without making a sound or
gesturing to the right box in any way – to help her Bassanio make the right
choice. A variation on this game is to let her sing a song of her choice (but she
may not change the words) while her Bassanio is choosing. Her classmates may
disqualify her if she chooses lyrics that are too specific (for example, if you have
coloured the boxes, she cannot sing Taylor Swift’s ‘Red’).
5. Call your Bassanio back in the room and give him one or two minutes to make
the right choice.
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Repeat this exercise using several pairs of students (each Portia finds new ways to
cheat, and make sure the prize doesn’t necessarily stay in the same box). Let your students
discuss the value of each solution. How does it work theatrically? If she or he did use
those choices, how would they fit with the text? with the other things we know about
Portia and Bassanio in the rest of the play?
B. The second bananas get their say
Prep: Prior intro, names to draw from hat

Homework: Creative writing (300 words)
The actor Gareth Armstrong has written a fine one-man play called Shylock, in which
Shylock’s fellow Jew, Tubal, explains how important his part is despite the fact that he has
only 14 lines in the entire play. To help your students get at the richness of Shakespeare’s
characterization and the possibilities for a variety of viewpoints, have them prepare two-
minute monologues (about 300 words) in which lesser characters tell the story from their
perspective.
Put three copies each of the names of Nerissa, Jessica, Old Gobbo, Solanio, Tubal,
Lorenzo, Launcelot Gobbo, Gratiano, and the Duke into a hat and have your students
pick a name. They are to write modern prose monologues in which they tell the story of
The Merchant of Venice from their points of view. Stress to them the following:
(a) The monologue must make the speaker central to the story.
(b) The monologue should stress moments staged in the play, but from the
perspective of the speaker.
(c) The monologue should reflect something we know about the character. For
example, we know that Old Gobbo is blind, we know the Duke has power, we
know that Jessica is sheltered.
(d) When the monologue refers to another character’s words, it must do so by
quoting directly from the play.
You can require that all of the students perform their monologues, or you can read
them over in advance and choose your favourite for each character. You may make it
more of a project by having students wear costumes.
Scenes to stage with Good Jews and Bad Jews

To illustrate how pivotal the character of Shylock is, stage one or more of the following
scenes twice: once with a ‘bad’ Jew and once with a ‘good’. You may want to cast different
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Shylocks for the alternative readings, and you can amuse your students with the cliché of
a visual aid – a black yarmulke for the bad Shylock and a white one for the good.
A. Shylock makes the bond with Antonio Act One, Scene Three, 39 (‘This is
Signior’) to 158 (‘of this bond’). Three speaking parts. (The scene is a long one, and you
may wish to trim it. If so, use liposuction not amputation.)
In this scene, Shakespeare shows the deal that Shylock strikes with Antonio, and he
gives plenty of material to both good and bad Jew readings of the scene. On the one
hand, the bad Jew tells the audience that he hates Christians, makes it clear that he doesn’t
want to do his persecutors any favours, and comes up with a grotesquely bloodthirsty
financial arrangement. On the other hand, the good Jew argues cogently for the idea of
charging interest, describes some pretty awful treatment at the hands of Antonio, and
offers Antonio what amounts to an interest-free loan, since there seems to be no doubt
that Antonio’s ventures will succeed. Do the scene twice.
In the first version, stress the evil Jew and help that characterization by having the
Gentiles be gentle. In the second version, play the Jew more sinned against than sinning
by having him be appealing and the two Christians nasty. Discuss with your students and
consider a third version that mixes some of the first two.
B The last scene between Shylock and his daughter Act Two, Scene Five, in its
entirety (56 lines). Three speaking parts.
Again, the passage offers evidence for two different Shylocks. One is a stern, unloving
disciplinarian; the other is an over-careful father. What’s more, the scene gives us a
momentary glimpse of Shylock’s feelings about Launcelot, who is leaving his service. Has
he only contemptuous feelings for him, as when he calls him ‘that fool of Hagar’s offspring’
(2.5.43)? Or is there reason to believe that he cares for Launcelot (‘the Patch is kind
enough’ [2.5.45]) and is hurt to see him leave? Remember for clarity’s sake to stage the
unsympathetic Shylock with a sympathetic Jessica and Launcelot and vice versa.
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THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR
Comments
I do not like knowing that Shakespeare wrote Merry Wives of Windsor. In my mythology,
this is the play for which Shakespeare would like a do-over. He can excuse the faults of
other bottom tier plays (the Henry VI plays, Two Gentlemen of Verona, King John, Troilus
and Cressida, Timon, Pericles, Henry VIII) as a matter of his learning his trade,
experimenting, and/or collaborating (or all three). His only excuse for Merry Wives
might be ‘she made me do it’ – ‘she’ as in Queen Elizabeth I, who, by eighteenth-century
legend, notified Shakespeare that she’d like a play about Falstaff in love, so he wrote one
in two weeks. Whether that’s true or not, this play looks like something Shakespeare did
for money and not for love. But whatever money or advancement he might have earned
for writing this play, he must (I hope) have felt something of a whore for having turned
the Falstaff of the two Henry IV plays – by consensus one of his great creations – into the
sitcom lothario of Merry Wives.
A situation comedy is what Merry Wives most resembles. You can even imagine
this play as the pilot for a series, The Housewives of Windsor. The regulars on every
episode would be the two middle-class husbands, the level-headed and genial Page
and the paranoid and erratic Ford; the two wives, both a little smarter than their
husbands; and Falstaff, the fat, good natured, lecherous, but harmless drunk who
fancies himself a knight and a ladies’ man. The show would occasionally include the
slightly confused and easily ruffled Welsh pastor; the hot-tempered French doctor
(who would mispronounce words in naughty ways); the romantic young couple
who will someday get married; Fenton (a hipster) and Anne; Mistress Quickly,
the mischievous lower-class housekeeper with the heart of gold; the sullen pre-teenager
Will; and Pistol, Bardolph, Nim, and Robin, the fat knight’s ne’er-do-well entourage.
The storyline for every episode is always the same: Falstaff gets up to some tomfoolery
that temporarily disturbs life in the town, and then the Housewives of Windsor sort
things out.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Not every play has to open new worlds
or wrestle with the nature of theatre or explore our common humanity. Just
Shakespeare’s, and, in my mind, this is the one play he wrote that cannot claim to do any
of that.
We can learn a lot about what makes great art by looking at the ways in which an artist
falls short. So I recommend that you use this play to explore Shakespeare’s art by looking
at how it compares to his other plays.
Falstaff
The most obvious place to begin is with a comparison of the mediocre Falstaff in Merry
Wives with the remarkable Falstaff in the Henry IV plays. Here, for example, is the
comparison that Harold Goddard makes in The Meaning of Shakespeare:
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The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Falstaff we admire [in 1 and 2 Henry IV] is an incarnation of readiness; this
one (in Merry Wives) of helplessness. Nothing is too much for the former. Anything
is too much for the latter.25
You can compare the two Falstaffs from a number of perspectives. How does each
interact with his posse of disreputables? How does each see himself as a lover? What
does each Falstaff want most? How different are the ways in which they boast? complain?
How is
Eight yards of uneven ground is threescore and ten miles afoot with me;
and the stony-hearted villains know it well enough: a plague upon it when
thieves cannot be true one to another!
(1H4 2.2.24–7)
different from
’Sblood! The rogues slighted me into the river with as little remorse as they would
have drowned a blind bitch’s puppies, fifteen i’ the litter: and you may know by my
size that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking.
(MW 3.5.8–12)
What’s the difference between a comic monologue by the Henry IV Falstaff and one by
the Falstaff in Merry Wives? Both are good; both are entertaining. But they are different
and their differences teach us something. Which is more internal? Which is more about
what is going on in the present, which the past? Which is working for the moment?
Which is working for the joke? All such questions will help to bring both Falstaffs into
better focus for your students.
Middle-class world
The social structure of Merry Wives is unlike any other of Shakespeare’s plays. While the
other plays in Shakespeare depict a world run by the wealthy or by nobility, socially
the highest character in Merry Wives is Sir John Falstaff, a fallen aristocrat, and he is the
parasite in the community. The people in this play work for a living. How does that fact
distinguish the motivations and concerns of the characters in Merry Wives from those of
the characters in the world of Comedy of Errors or Merchant of Venice or As You Like It
or Twelfth Night, all places where we see the nobility in control? What comedy in
Shakespeare comes closest to the socio-economic world of Merry Wives? Does that make
it similar in other ways?
25
Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960),
page 182.
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Mostly prose
Only five of Shakespeare’s plays have more prose than verse: Much Ado (72.5 per cent),
Twelfth Night (61.2 per cent), As You Like It (56.4 per cent), 2 Henry IV (51.3 per cent),
and this one. But Merry Wives, with 87.8 per cent, is the prosiest play Shakespeare wrote
by a wide margin. How does this difference change the nature of the play? What
correlation can you and your students find between this statistic and the middle-class
characters and setting of the play? How does this preponderance of prose relate – or not
– to the narrative? Since only 12.2 per cent of the play is in verse, Merry Wives is a good
place to track down the relatively few things that Shakespeare felt ought to be in verse
and consider why.
Middle-age female buddies

The title characters, Mistress Meg Page and Mistress Alice Ford, are another pair of
strong and mutually supportive female friends in Shakespeare, but it’s worth discussing
the many differences between them and other duos. These two are less privileged, older
(one’s the parent of a teenager), and married, so it’s worth considering how those
distinctions show up in their relationship. How are they different from such friends as
Portia and Nerissa or Rosalind and Celia or Hermia and Helena? in their view of men?
in their familiarity with one another? in their ambitions?
The jealous and possessive husband

The jealous husband, mistrustful of his wife and terrified of being thought a cuckold, is a
character that Shakespeare explored in depth, most notably in Othello, Posthumus, and
Leontes. Master Ford, however, gives us an opportunity to look at what Shakespeare does
with this familiar figure in a comedy. What makes Ford ridiculous is that, out of fear of
being thought gullible, he insists to anyone who’ll listen that he is a cuckold. This
connection between jealousy and reputation – not the hurt of one’s beloved loving
elsewhere but the more superficial pain of how one looks to others – becomes comic
when Ford, to prove to his neighbours his suspicion that he is a cuckold, brings half the
town into his house to witness his humiliation. He begs his friends
Help to search my house this one time. If I find not

what I seek . . . let me for ever be your table-sport;
let them say of me, ‘As jealous as Ford’.
(4.2.151–4)
Funny stuff, but compare it to Othello’s instruction to Iago:
Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore,

be sure of it; give me the ocular proof.
(3.3.362–3)
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Or to Leontes’ need to have a trial and make his worst thoughts about his wife the most
public event possible.
Teaching and learning

One of my favourite scenes in this play is Act Four, Scene One, in which Mistress
Page, concerned that her ‘son profits nothing in the world in his books’ has what
amounts to a parent–teacher meeting with Parson Hugh Evans, and the parson gives
her son William (interesting name, that) a Latin catechism there on the spot. With
Princess Kate’s English lesson in Henry V, this is one of two language lessons in
Shakespeare, but in this one we get a glimpse of what school might have been like in
Shakespeare’s world. In it William has to show that he knows his Latin noun declensions,
the common exercise out of Lily and Colet’s Grammar, the standard textbook in
English grammar schools when Shakespeare might have been seen ‘creeping like snail
unwillingly to school’. And, to judge by this Latin lesson, no wonder he crept. However
boring the lesson, Shakespeare makes the scene a delight by having Mistress Quickly
there to misinterpret the Latin. Productions too frequently cut this scene for fear of the
Latin, but you need no more Latin to enjoy it than you do French to enjoy the English
lesson in Henry V.
The two language scenes offer opportunities for comparison and some pretty good
insights on education. What are the motives of the two tutors? On the one hand, the
officious schoolteacher answering to a dubious parent and wanting his reluctant pupil to
show well; and, on the other, the Princess who wants the lesson and asks her attendant
(Nurse) to help her learn the language of the invading English. Why does the one lesson
seem to fail and the other to prosper?
Though I think Merry Wives is bad Shakespeare; I don’t think it’s a bad play. In fact,
there have been a remarkable number of entertaining productions of Merry Wives. One
outstanding example is Bill Alexander’s 1985 RSC production, set in the 1950s, with
Mistress Page and Mistress Ford as two wisecracking, cigarette-smoking housewives
hatching their plot against Falstaff under hairdryers. Perhaps the cumulative effect
of the ways in which the play seems ordinary – the redundant plot, the absence of
soaring language or a memorable speech, the flatness of its characters, and the reduction
of Falstaff from an irresistible force of nature to a dramatic puppet – lure directors
to come to its rescue. Uninhibited by a deference to the work, they meddle with it in
creative ways.
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Ploys
A. Mistress Ford and Mistress Page texting
Scripts: MW 2.1.27–96
Prep: Prior intro, handouts, scripts
Homework: translate passages
Players: 2
Tech: 2 mobile phones
The relationship between Mistress Page and Mistress Ford is a special feature of this play,
and the scene in which they compare the love letters that the self-delusional Falstaff sent
both of them translates itself into any age. To test that theory, have your students stage
their conversation via text message.
Set-up
1. First, break the exchange of the two friends – Act Two, Scene One, 27 (‘Mistress
Page, trust me’) to line 96 (‘consult together’) – into forty or more independent
clauses, clauses short enough to translate into Twitter-size messages.
2. Number each of the clauses with its speech prefix (‘Mistress Ford’ or ‘Mistress
Page’) and hand out that sheet of numbered clauses, assigning two if possible to
each student.
Homework
1. Have them read the entire passage.

2. Have each translate their assigned clause into a short text message of 140
characters or fewer that captures what Shakespeare’s character is saying. For
example, Mistress Page says, ‘What? thou liest! Sir Alice Ford! These knights will
hack; and so thou shouldst not alter the article of thy gentry.’ The first full
thought – ‘What? thou liest! Sir Alice Ford!’ – is fairly simple and might translate
into this text: ‘OMG ! You’re full of it! Dame Alice!’ The second full thought
– ‘These knights will hack; and so thou shouldst not alter the article of thy
gentry’ – is more difficult, so give your students some leeway. A text adaptation
could be ‘Dirty old men lie; so don’t give anything up.’
3. Have them text their translated clauses – each with the number you gave it – at
least a day before class.
4. Create a new script out of their texts. Make sure the script you assemble shows
the assigned numbers with each quotation.
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In class
1. Seat two student volunteers in chairs in front of class and have them read the
scene in the original.
2. Now give your two ‘wives’ the script you’ve assembled from your students’
translations and have them play the scene with those. To keep anticipation high
do not hand out the tweet-translated script to the class until after the two
volunteers have read it. (If you’ve made emoticons part of the assignment,
include them in the script.)
3. Hand out the script you’ve assembled to the entire class.
Discuss with the students what they liked best about the scene. How well do they
think the scene translates into contemporary terms? Which ‘tweet translation’ do they
like best? What are the advantages and disadvantages of conversations via text message?
Run the scene again, using two other volunteers to play the two women and take
suggestions from your students for any alterations in the staging.
B. What’s funny about Falstaff behind the arras?
Scripts: MW 3.3.80–127
Prep: Scripts
Players: 4
Props: curtain/arras, large basket
This ploy requires a curtain or arras for Falstaff to hide behind in the front of the class.
Two sheets draped between well-secured hat racks will serve. You’ll also need four actors
to play Robin, the two wives, and Falstaff.
In Act Three, Scene Three, Mistress Ford has Falstaff hide behind an arras to keep
from being ‘discovered’ by Mistress Page, who is in on the joke. Mistress Page comes
in feigning distress that Ford, with a posse of citizens, is coming to search his house.
The object of this ploy is to decide on the funniest choices the actor playing Falstaff
can make while he is behind the curtain as he hears the two women describe the
ensuing disaster.
First, give your students a handout with the lines from Robin’s entrance at line 80
(‘Mistress Ford, Mistress Ford’) to Falstaff ’s getting in the basket at line 127 (‘Follow your
friend’s counsel. I’ll in’). Have the actors simply do a standing reading of the lines and
have your students decide on the five or six most frightening things Falstaff would hear.
Now play with the Falstaff behind the arras and experiment – concentrating on these five
or six key moments – to decide which wordless responses work best as the two women
deliver their lines. Make sure all your students weigh in on what works best and/or on
other possibilities. Here are some suggestions to get you started:
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● Falstaff coming entirely out of the arras (unseen by Mistress Page)

● Falstaff peeking out of the arras
● the arras occasionally shaking
● the arras bulging in places
● groans.
This ploy gives students who haven’t done theatre a good idea of the infinitude of
choices an actor – even one without lines – has to make. You can add to the fun by providing
a large cardboard box as the ‘buck basket’ that Falstaff jumps into on his final line.
A. Justice Shallow wants his nephew Slender to go courting Act One, Scene
One, 191 (‘Come, coz, come, coz’) to 241 (‘Here comes fair Mistress Anne’). Three
speaking parts (Shallow, Evans, and Slender).
Justice Shallow, abetted by his friend, Sir Hugh Evans a Parson, wants Shallow’s
nephew Slender to vie for the hand of Mistress Anne Page, but Shallow is an idiot. These
readings provide two versions of that idiocy
In the first version Slender is simply a shy, inexperienced, and ignorant dunce. In this
version, his uncle Shallow and Parson Evans are concerned for his happiness and are just
trying to encourage him. In the second version Slender is also inexperienced and ignorant,
but he’s an arrogant ass as well. In this version, the two old men are disgusted by his
stupidity and put up with him only because Shallow wants the financial and social
benefits of the marriage of his nephew to Mistress Anne.
B. Ford (disguised as Brook) discusses Falstaff’s seduction of his wife Act

Three, Scene Five, 57 (‘God save you, sir’) to 129 (‘you shall cuckold Ford’). Two speaking
parts for good actors. (This passage is long; you may wish to do some liposuction.)
This scene in which the jealous Ford, to prove his wife cheats on him, disguises himself
as ‘Brook’ and asks Falstaff to seduce her is a fine example of how dramatic irony works
onstage.
In the first version have your actors stand during the scene and exaggerate everything
they do. Falstaff might illustrate his words as follows: ‘the peaking Cornuto [makes
cuckold’s horns on his forehead] her husband, Master Brook, dwelling in a continual
‘larum of jealousy [holds his face in hands in terror á la Munch’s ‘Scream’], comes me in
the instant of our encounter [thrusts his groin], after we had embraced [demonstrates
embrace], kissed [demonstrates in detail] protested, and, as it were, spoke the prologue
[makes air quotes] of our comedy [more air quotes]’. For his part, Ford, every time he
hears something that enrages his jealousy, turns to the audience – even walks towards
them – and makes pained faces.
In the second version give your actors chairs to sit in and have them do the scene as
naturalistically as possible, as if they are sitting in a pub. Falstaff just tells his story and
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relishes using only words to do so, and Ford shows his pain not with takes to the audience
but by trying to hide his feelings as Falstaff talks about trying to bed his wife.
If your actors have studied their text and are talented, they will be showing your class
the two poles of comedy – physical and external, psychological and internal. Here the
order of the two versions is crucial. Having the actors do the overstated version first will
help your students enjoy the understated version.
245
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Comments
Shakespeare wrote many more thoughtful plays, deeper and broader works of greater
wisdom, but he never wrote a more perfect gem than the fairy tale he called A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. Written around 1595, perhaps for a lord’s wedding, Dream is the closest
thing to a foolproof piece of theatre that I know. Two things make it invulnerable to bad
productions: the dream process buried deep in its structure and the inspired idiocy of
‘Pyramus and Thisbe’.
Shakespeare has built his play like a dream. To understand how Dream imitates
dreaming, conceive of sleeping as a sphere of multiple layers like an onion, beginning
with the surface level of consciousness and moving to the core of deep, unconscious
dreaming. The play begins with the theatrical equivalent of the totally conscious
state, heroic drama set in Athens and featuring mythical heroes: Theseus, ‘Duke’ of
Athens, and Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. The occasion is high (the marriage
of two legends) and the language is formal. But no sooner does an audience settle
down to the job of accepting the story before it, when newer, barely related matters
interrupt the heroic drama with the romantic comedy of Hermia, and her two suitors.
Like a waking person who relaxes his conscious thought from business to think about
pleasure, we hardly notice that our minds are now on newer, more cheerful, more
energetic material.
We expect to follow these young lovers into the woods, when Shakespeare accelerates
our journey away from the rational by introducing the ‘rude mechanicals’, tradesmen
who have met to produce a play for Theseus on his wedding day. Say what? This slightly
plausible but highly unlikely new business might seem a challenge to our skills as an
audience, but we manage without effort the sudden climb – or descent – from one level
(young people in love) to another (working blokes putting on a play for a royal wedding).
Unconsciously enlarging our capacity for belief to include Bottom and Company and
this third plot, we might expect to have Shakespeare take us to the woods and resume the
Hermia–Lysander plot. Instead, he sends onstage new matter: a hobgoblin named Robin
Goodfellow and a Fairy. The play has now left the realm of the real as easily as we slip into
dream, and Shakespeare pushes us even deeper into a dream state when Puck and the
Fairy direct our attention to something yet more fantastic than themselves: Oberon and
Titania, King and Queen of the Fairies, squabbling over a half-human boy, whom we
never see. At this point, Oberon becomes the ringmaster of sleep, and with ‘a little western
flower’ and Puck’s connivance sets up the play’s most anarchic and irrational moment, a
sexual encounter between the world of man (Bottom), of beast (Bottom as ass), and of
the supernatural (Titania).
Thus Shakespeare spins his audience ever further from the play’s first moment of
formal theatricality and ever deeper into the realms of irrational dream. To retrieve us
from this state without breaking the spell, he takes us to Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding
feast and merges us with the lovers as an audience for ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. Every play is
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream
a kind of collective dream, but most end abruptly when the story – the fictive world
onstage – goes its way, and we as audience go our way. But in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, Shakespeare keeps the first dream intact by having the characters in it go to a
play with us. When the mechanicals put on ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, our fellow playgoers
are Hippolyta, Theseus, and the four lovers. They are in the audience and we are equally
in their world. When Bottom and his friends finish the show, our new royal friends leave
for bed under the watchful eye of Oberon, who gives his assistant Puck the chore of
waking the audience:
If we shadows have offended,

think but this, and all is mended –
that you have but slumb’red here
while these visions did appear,
and this weak and idle theme,
no more yielding but a dream . . .
(5.1.417–22)
When we see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we enter a multi-layered bauble that

Shakespeare has constructed to play tricks with our conscious minds no matter how bad
the acting or production choices. And since ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, which actually thrives
on amateurishness, essentially ends the play, audiences go away from the play in some
state of enchanted wakening.
Beyond Shakespeare’s brilliant manipulation of audience, the play boasts one of his
most unforgettable characters and my own favourite. Bottom, the weaver, has an appetite
for life that makes Zorba the Greek look like a picky eater. Bottom wants to get on with
things, he wants to play all the parts. And Bottom copes. When his friends run away from
him in the forest, he decides, ‘I will walk up and down here and I will sing’ (3.1.116–17).
A moment later, confronted in the woods at night by the Queen of the Fairies, who tells
him that she loves him at first sight, he replies modestly: ‘Methinks, mistress, you should
have little reason for that’ (3.1.136–7). Always his instinct is to put others at ease: when
he meets Titania’s attendant fairies, he makes a little pleasantry with each of their names;
when he gets back to Athens, he has no reproaches for the friends who abandoned him
in the woods but greets them with ‘Where are these lads? Where are these hearts?’
(4.2.25); and when he thinks that Theseus is confused about a point in the play, he steps
out of character to reassure the legendary ruler of Athens.
Shakespeare makes Bottom, whose name indicates his station in the society of the
play (as well as reinforces the ass joke), the main repository of the play’s wisdom, both in
what he says and in what he is. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about the irrationality of
love, and it is Bottom, trying to understand how Titania might be in love with him, who
voices the closest thing to the play’s message: ‘to say the truth, Reason and Love keep little
company together nowadays’ (3.1.137–8).
In a play about the magic of theatre and dream in our lives, Bottom is the character
who lives most fully in both those realms and whose life is, accordingly, most full.
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Ploys
A. Hold a ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ competition
Scripts: MND 5.1.108–350

Prep: Prior intro, rehearsal periods, scripts
Players: 3 groups of 6
I would guess that being involved in a production of this play-within-the-play has helped
more students ‘see the fun in Shakespeare’ than any other theatrical experience. (YouTube
has a pretty good version starring the Beatles.)
Announce this event well beforehand, choose three companies of six players; you and
selected students will read the lines of the royals. You may not want to require them to be
‘off book’ (ingenious ‘cheat sheets’ hidden in sleeves, hats, shoes, and so on, can add an
appropriate homemade hilarity to a production), but you should urge them to make
their productions ‘big’ with costume and props. Give your three ‘P&T’ companies a
definite rehearsal schedule. Make the day of the productions a big occasion, inviting
other teachers and students, even arranging an award ceremony afterwards in which you
present ‘Willies’ for such things as ‘Best Roar’,‘Most Convincing Wall’, ‘Most Embarrassing
Overacting’, and so on.
Make sure you schedule time, in the next class meeting if necessary, for a discussion
of the things your students liked best about each of the productions. Press them to be
specific about why they liked what they liked. In that way, you will soon be talking about
principles of comedy, of parody, and of character.
B. Do a parody in the style of Pyramus
Scripts: MND 5.1.168–79

Prep: Intro, tragedy suggestions
Groups: 3
Props: found in class
Shakespeare makes fun of romantic tragedy throughout A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

but never more than in the language of Pyramus and Thisbe, which captures and
exaggerates the purple speech of lovers. Have your students – once they’ve studied
Dream – compose a three-minute parody of one of Shakespeare’s other tragedies (Hamlet
or Macbeth would be the most likely).
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1. Divide your class into three groups.

2. Clear three small areas for them to work in a circle.
3. Hand each group two small editions of the tragedy you’ve decided on and tell
each group to put together a three-minute version of the play.
4. Their show must:
● include two speeches in comic style – for example, using the rhyme style of
Pyramus or of rap or of a nursery rhyme – that is recognizably a version of a
famous speech in the real play (e.g. ‘To be or not to be’ or ‘Tomorrow and
Tomorrow’)
● have everyone in the group speak (even if it’s in unison)
● use two props they find in the classroom
● include a death scene at the end.
5. After ten minutes check in separately with each group to see if they have
questions and to encourage them. Remind them that you are not looking for a
‘good’ work, you are looking for a ‘ridiculous’ play.
6. After fifteen more minutes give them a three-minute warning to showtime.
7. Put on their shows.
8. Stupidest tragedy wins.
C. Write to ‘Dear Abby’ as one of the lovers
Prep: Character assignments

Hand out at random to your students the names of the eight lovers in the play (Oberon,
Titania, Theseus, Hippolyta, Hermia, Lysander, Helena, Demetrius), and instruct them to
write to a lonely hearts column in the person of the character they received. Making
certain that no one gets his or her own letter, shuffle the letters that come in, hand them
back to your students, and instruct them to answer the letter as though they were the
columnist. Read some of the best to the class or collect them (the best or all of them) into
a book. You may want to discuss the results with your students, but the point of this
assignment is really just to get them involved in the issues of the characters.
A. The initial confrontation of Oberon and Titania Act Two, Scene One, 60 (‘Ill met’)
to 145 (‘longer stay’). Two speaking parts, possible addition of fairy attendants as listeners.
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Have your actors playful and loving in the first version, angry and dangerous in the
second version. Discuss which works best for your students. You may wish to condense
Titania’s speech about the weather (81–117). In a third version, you might try doing the
same scene with the couples’ fairy attendants. If you do, then have the attendants – or the
whole class – vocalize (but not verbalize) responses cheering on either Titania or Oberon
and jeering at their opposite.
B. Lysander and Hermia on lying down Act Two, Scene Two, 34 (‘Fair Love’) to 64
(‘be pressed’). Two speaking parts.
Many of your students will recognize this conversation in which Lysander tries to
sleep next to Hermia and she says ‘no’. Do the first version with a totally sincere and
innocent Lysander and a somewhat overly tart and suspicious Hermia; do the second
version with a slick Lysander ‘on the make’, and an innocent and nervous Hermia; do the
third version with a horny Hermia saying the opposite of what she means, and a shy
Lysander.
Discuss how each of the three different versions would influence the overall play.
Invite a fourth version.
C. Titania’s first meeting with Bottom Act Three, Scene One, 114 (‘I see’) to 153
(‘spirit go’). Two speaking parts.
The Victorians made this scene all about getting married; I think it is much more
about getting laid. Do both versions: the first version in which Titania is a lovesick, but
virginal, goddess, and Bottom is a bluff, assured man about the woods; and the second
version in which Titania is a horny earth mother, and Bottom feels almost sexually
assaulted. Note the parallels of this scene with B above. (Before attempting this second
version, you must be certain that both students have agreed on the physical contact they
will use.)
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Much Ado About Nothing
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
Comments
Under the spell of Judi Dench’s performance as Beatrice in the 1977 Trevor Nunn
production of Much Ado about Nothing at the Aldwych Theatre, I discarded any
remnants I had left of the notion that Shakespeare’s comedies weigh less than his
tragedies. Through her Beatrice I felt the heaviness of a world where shallow men
have power; a world where the obsession with ownership of a woman’s body blinds
men to sense and to love; a world where no marriage at all is a better choice for
an intelligent woman than marriage to a man – even a bright man – who cannot see
through a woman’s eyes. By the end of the play, Shakespeare gives us in Beatrice and
Benedick two strong individuals made better for being a duo and enlarged rather than
diminished by their coming marriage. To clarify what this couple represents, Shakespeare
stages their story against the background of traditional young romance: the story of
Claudio, a suitor who loves at first sight and says to his beloved, ‘I give away myself for
you and dote upon the exchange’ (2.1.290–1), and of Hero, a sweetheart so demure that
‘she tells him in his ear that he is in her heart’ (296–7). The juxtaposition of the
young Claudio and Hero, one quick to dote and the other to submit, with Benedick
and Beatrice, neither of whom is quick to dote or to submit, produces Shakespeare’s
sharpest essay on love.
In Much Ado about Nothing Claudio and Hero are figures of the conventional
romantic notion of ‘falling’, unwilled, in love; while Benedick and Beatrice suggest that
love is an act of faith, a decision to believe. In exploring these differences, the play
works along a double pole – men and women, young and old – and Benedick is its
fulcrum. His choice on the one side is career and comradeship as a member of the
three musketeers with Don Pedro and Claudio, and on the other side is an intelligent
woman angry at the world of men and determined that any man she loves must
also be her friend. Benedick’s decision means that in choosing to love Beatrice – ‘I
will be horribly in love with her’ (2.3.225–6) – he is also choosing to have faith in
her, to be ‘engaged’ to what Beatrice ‘think[s] . . . in [her] soul.’ To do that Benedick
will more or less sever the other ties in his life, the hard choice that grown-ups
make when they marry.
Much Ado also argues that manhood means growing up. For the first half of the play,
while Benedick is resisting love and marriage, the meaning of manhood grows out of an
apposition with womanhood. Benedick virtually equates his manhood with his
independence from women:
Because I will not do [women] the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the
right to trust none; and the fine is (for which I may go the finer), I will live a
bachelor.
(1.1.229–32)
251
And Beatrice most powerfully points at the man/woman binary after she asks
Benedick to kill Claudio – ‘O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market
place’ (304).
Initially, Shakespeare works the idea of boyhood versus manhood around the figure of
Claudio, ‘a young Florentine’ and ‘young start-up’, and especially at his youthfulness when
he falls in love – he seems to require Benedick’s approval, he is afraid of being teased, he
is too shy to broach the subject himself either to Leonato or Hero, and he is utterly tongue-
tied once the marriage to Hero is arranged. Closely linked to our sense of Claudio’s
youthfulness is his relationship with the other musketeers. Like schoolboys, they tease
one another about their susceptibility to love: ‘Yet say I he is in love’ (3.2.28), ‘If he be not
in love with some woman, there is no believing old signs’ (37–8), ‘Conclude, conclude, he
is in love’ (57). One of Shakespeare’s funniest stage moments is the trick the men play on
Benedick to ‘make’ him fall in love with Beatrice, but that entire practical joke – a kind of
adolescent prank – is an odd enterprise for grown men of their position: a Prince, his
lieutenant, and their senior host. Their love prank makes these men seem like members
of a no-girls-allowed club chanting: ‘Claudio and Hero sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g!’
Shakespeare shifts the apposition of manhood from gender to age in Act Five,
Scene One. To do that he fashions a scene in which the two old men in the play confront
Claudio and Don Pedro. The scene begins with Leonato’s brother, Antonio (who seems
created for the purpose of this scene) advising Leonato to stop bewailing Hero’s
humiliation – ‘therein do men from children nothing differ’ (5.1.33) – and instead to
‘make those that do offend you suffer too’ (40). When Don Pedro and Claudio enter,
Leonato makes clear his anger about what they did to Hero at her wedding, and the two
young men deal condescendingly with their elders. Don Pedro makes that condescension
about their age – ‘Nay, do not quarrel with us, good old man’ (50) – a theme that Claudio
echoes – ‘beshrew my hand / if it should give your age such cause of fear’ (55–6). Their
thinly concealed contempt for age breaks into clear view when Don Pedro, called a villain
by Leonato, replies, ‘You say not right, old man’ (73).
The old men respond to this contempt for age with the ‘B-word’ – Claudio and Don
Pedro are not men, but ‘boys’:
leonato
If thou kill’st me, boy, thou shalt kill a man. (79)
antonio
Come, sir boy, come follow me. (83)
Boys, apes, braggarts, Jacks, milksops! (91)
I know them, yea,

and what they weigh, even to the utmost scruple,
scambling, outfacing, fashion-monging boys,
that lie and cog and flout, deprave and slander . . . (92–5)
252
Then Benedick enters. He challenges Claudio, and, when Don Pedro and Claudio try to
banter and tease in the usual way with their friend, Benedick picks up the ‘B-word’ refrain
when he says to Claudio: ‘Fare you well, boy; you know my mind’ (181). In taking his
leave of Don Pedro, he says:
You have among you killed

a sweet and innocent lady. For my Lord Lackbeard there, he and I
shall meet; and til then peace be with him.
(186–9)
Benedick has reversed the terms of manliness. Literally, Benedick, who has just shaved
for the love of Beatrice is a ‘lackbeard’, but in applying the word to Claudio, who has
renounced his love of Hero, he hits not only at Claudio’s age but at his maturity. Being a
man in Much Ado about Nothing means leaving the ‘boys’ and attaching yourself to a
woman.
What Benedick and the audience learn about love and marriage makes the ending of
this play uncomfortable. Knowing what we know about Claudio, how can we be happy
about his eventual marriage to Hero? How can we accept the apparent reconciliation of
Benedick and Beatrice with this ‘fashion-monging boy’? Shakespeare may have answered
that earlier in writing The Taming of the Shrew, where Petruchio and Kate, their private
world assured, can deal with society without anger, by being a part of society but apart
from it – ‘If she and I be pleas’d, what’s that to you?’ (2.1.297). That may be one of the best
rewards of marriage.
Ploys
A. Explore Dogberry’s malapropisms
Scripts: MA 3.3, 3.5, 4.2, 5.1

Homework: (Optional) 10 ‘bonaprops’
In my comments on the play I have slighted the comic subplot, which features Dogberry,
the ‘malappropriate’ constable, who in fact saves the day and lets the play have a ‘happy
ending’. Shakespeare certainly means for the audience to laugh at Dogberry’s misuse of
language, but he just as clearly puts the audience on Dogberry’s side when, at the end of
the play, we are all hoping that Leonato and the others in authority will have the sense to
understand his malapropisms and listen to him. As Borachio says, what educated and
powerful Messinans ‘could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light’
(5.1.224–6).
253
Dogberry’s use of language is the reverse of the establishment’s: while everyone else
in the play says the things he or she doesn’t mean, Dogberry means the thing he doesn’t
say. But Dogberry’s malaprops (1) manage to convey his intended meaning and (2) make
literal sense in another way. In other words, Shakespeare has made Dogberry’s malaprops
appropriate.26 For example, during the examination of Conrade and Borachio, Dogberry
says, ‘come, let them be opinioned’ (4.2.66). An audience knows that what he means to
say is ‘let them be pinioned’, but what makes the mistake funny is that forming an ‘opinion’
of the defendant is precisely what interrogation should do.
Let your students go on a ‘bonaprop’ hunt by (1) searching for Dogberry’s misused
words, (2) deciding what he meant to say, and (3) suggesting how the word he uses is
somehow apt. If you do this assignment in class, you can have them look for a single
example; if you have them do it out of class, you may want them to compile a list of up to
ten ‘bonaprops’. If you want to add some creativity to the assignment, challenge your
students to make up an ‘bonaprop’ of their own and put it in a sentence – for example, ‘I
found the teacher’s assignment too muzzling.’
B. Q&A with Margaret
Prep: Ballots, cards (one marked with X)

Players: 3
Margaret is simply described as a ‘waiting gentlewoman attending on Hero’, but she is

much more of a puzzle. Borachio uses his ‘friendship’ with Margaret to persuade her to
pose as Hero on Hero’s balcony and to call Borachio ‘Claudio’. Margaret’s complicity
causes Claudio to break his engagement to Hero by humiliating her at the wedding. Yet
at the end of the play, Leonato dismisses her part in this nasty trick with, ‘Margaret was
in some fault for this, / although against her will, as it appears . . .’ (5.4.4–5). I want to
know more about Margaret and so will your students.
Have three volunteer students in front of the class to answer questions as
Margaret posed to them by their classmates. The idea is for each of your Margarets to try
to persuade the class that she or he is the ‘real’ Margaret. Have your class asks such
questions as:
● What is your relationship with Hero?

● What is your relationship with Borachio?
26
Sheridan’s Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals (1775) is the character who gave her name to ludicrous misusages, but
her mistakes are funny only for being wrong, not, like Dogberry’s, for also being right in some surprising way.
You might use her malaprops to contrast to Dogberry’s.
254
● Did you know that Claudio was watching?

● What kind of pressure were you under?
● Did you like Hero? Beatrice? Benedick? Borachio?
● When you heard what happened, why didn’t you try to clear Hero?
After your three Margarets have dealt with these and other questions – your class
will have some, too – ask the class to vote with secret ballots for the ‘real’ Margaret.
Count the ballots yourself, mark one of three cards with an X, and hand a card to each
of your volunteers (make certain that the ‘real’ Margaret has the card with the X).
Then you can use the line from the old quiz show: ‘Will the ‘real’ Margaret please stand
up?’ Finally, open class for discussion with ‘why did you vote for your particular
Margaret?’
A. Dressing for the wedding Act Three, Scene Four, 6 (‘Troth, I think’) to 87 (‘a false
gallop’). Three speaking parts.
This scene is one of Shakespeare’s impressionist paintings, where he uses a few strokes
of dialogue to make us feel we know these characters. Because this scene is short and has
three parts, it lends itself easily to three versions differentiated by the objectives each
actor chooses.
The first version: Hero’s objective is simply to get dressed; she’s worried about the time;
and she’s vaguely annoyed with the other two women for not helping her get ready.
Margaret’s objective is to tease the two sentimental women who believe in love; she
doesn’t believe in love and wants them to know it. Beatrice’s objective is to find some
sympathy for her new state of lovesickness.
The second version: Hero’s objective is to get some information about men and sex
from the worldly Margaret; she wants to be one of the girls; she wants to know how to be
sassy like her two friends. Margaret’s objective in this version is to make it up to the other
two – and especially Hero – for the prank she played last night; she wants to make sure
they still like her. Beatrice’s objective is to pretend that she hasn’t been crying all night
over Benedick; she’s trying to act as normal as possible.
The third version: Hero’s objective is to show she’s grown up enough to be married;
she’s trying now to make it clearer that she’s the lady and Margaret is her maid. Margaret’s
objective is to get Hero and then Beatrice to know themselves better, to help them ‘get in
touch with their feelings’. Beatrice’s objective in this version is simply to help her cousin
get ready. She just wants to pay attention to Hero without losing her temper with
Margaret.
In the fourth version ‘mix and match’: have your students choose from the three
versions the acting objective they like best for each of the characters. Have the actors do
it one last time, and discuss what you learned about the scene and the play from that
fourth version.
255
B. The ‘Kill Claudio’ scene Act Four, Scene One, 254 (‘Lady Beatrice, have you’) to
333 (end of the scene). Two speaking parts.
I believe that the ‘Kill Claudio’ scene between Benedick and Beatrice is theatre’s most
meaningful love scene. By the end of this scene the two lovers, confronted with a world
of trouble, understand that saying ‘I love you’ is a responsibility. The depth of the play
depends on the choices the actors make in this one scene.
What makes the interpretation of this business so crucial is the question of the
relationship between Beatrice’s claim that she loves Benedick and her request that he kill
Claudio. Some productions play ‘Kill Claudio’ for laughs (fair enough in a comedy) by
making it seem that all Beatrice’s talk of love is just a matter of setting a trap for Benedick;
‘Kill Claudio’ is the trap springing shut. Other productions try to separate one issue from
the other with a Beatrice who is just confused: on the one hand she loves Benedick; on
the other she wants someone – anyone – to kill Claudio.
The first version: Benedick is macho stupid and says his opening line in actual surprise
– ‘Lady Beatrice, have you wept all this while?’ He is embarrassed at being in love, and his
tone is generally boastful. Beatrice is playing on his male vanity and is goading him with
lines such as ‘it’s a man’s office, but not yours.’ She pounces with her ‘Kill Claudio’ line, and
when Benedick resists, she plays unashamedly on his male ego by questioning his
courage. Benedick accepts the ‘engagement’ to prove he is tough.
The second version: Benedick is horrified by what he saw Claudio do, and his question
‘have you wept all this while?’ indicates his concern for both Beatrice and Hero. His next
few lines are attempts at showing, rather than saying, how he feels about Beatrice. Beatrice
in this version is also in love, and her reticence in admitting it – ‘but believe me not; and
yet I lie not’ – is her fear of betrayal if the man she loves will not avenge her cousin. Her
intention in this version is to shield Benedick from the responsibility of being loved by
her. She is earnest when she says, ‘I protest I love thee.’ Her ‘Kill Claudio’ is not a trap
springing shut; it is her statement of what her love requires. Benedick’s initial refusal of
her request ‘kills’ Beatrice because he is the man in the world she wants most to
understand Claudio’s perfidy. And, above all, Benedick’s question, ‘think you in your soul
the Count Claudio hath wronged Hero?’ is the result of his decision that loving Beatrice
means thinking with her soul.
For me, the second reading explains the play, but you will probably find that your
students prefer reading number one because of the comedy. Your job is not to sell them
number two – as I have tried to sell it to you – but to raise questions about the effect of
each version on the rest of the play.
256
Othello
OTHELLO
Comments
Whenever I’m at an amusement park with a rollercoaster called something like The
Sky Screamer or The Pukeblaster, I feel obliged to ride the thing or miss what the
amusement park is really all about. I stand in line completely miserable, asking myself
why human beings spend money to go through the sort of experience that in real life
we’d do anything to avoid. ‘Just get out of line,’ I say to myself, but then I am shamed by
the courageous nine-year-olds around me. Strapped in the death car, I feel the
irreversibility of the journey grip me with helplessness. Afterwards, when everyone else
is laughing about the ride, I’m too drained even to smile. If someone were to ask if I
thought it was a great ride, I’d have to say ‘yes’; if they were to ask if I liked the ride, I’d
have to say ‘no’. Those are the same feelings I have when I see Othello. The only pleasure
I take in the ride is an admiration of the sure efficiency with which Shakespeare runs his
terror machine.
Shakespeare’s other tragedies may make the world look darker to me, but they also
make it look more spacious. Othello, in hard, clear strokes, constricts the world and
suffocates me. Gerald Eades Bentley, in his introduction to the play in the Pelican
Complete Works,27 attributes this effect to the play’s short timeline and the ‘unusual
concentration of action in the three main characters’. To those features of the play I
would add two more reasons for the sense of constriction: the setting and the colour of
Othello’s skin. By the end of this play, we are trapped in both.
The play begins in Venice in the dark, and Othello is in two kinds of trouble, personal
and professional. The personal trouble? His new father-in-law wants the Doge and the
Senate to punish him for marrying Desdemona; Desdemona and the Senate’s need of
Othello’s skills gets him out of that trouble. The professional trouble? He is responsible
for defeating the great Turkish force threatening Cyprus; Shakespeare gets him out of
that trouble. The playwright has a storm on the Mediterranean miraculously sweep away
the Turks, which leaves Othello to arrive on the beautiful island of Cyprus, where he will
have time on his hands and a new bride to help him find diversions.
Shakespeare works overtime making clear how propitious the time and the place are
to Othello; the weather is good, the war is over, and his enemies are ‘drown’d’, Othello
recognizes the Eden before him:
O my sweet,
I prattle out of fashion, and I dote
in mine own comforts.
(2.1.207–9)
27
William Shakespeare: the Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage, Revised Edition (Baltimore: Penguin
Books, 1970), page 1018.
257
It is against this outward promise of a spacious world that Shakespeare pits the shrinking
internal world of Othello:
I had rather be a toad,

and live upon the vapour of a dungeon,
than keep a corner in the thing I love
for others’ uses.
(3.3.274–7)
Othello’s first moments in Cyprus are outside, sunlit, and appropriately public;
whereas his last moments are inside (his bedchamber), torch-lit, and inappropriately
public. The suffocating ‘ride’ I feel is that this journey goes from the happy stage picture
Shakespeare gives us of Othello’s admirers in Cyprus looking outwards towards the sea
to the final scene of horrified officials staring inward at Othello’s marriage bed and at its
‘tragic loading’.
But the most claustrophobic aspect of Othello is that Shakespeare uses Othello to
show us how we are trapped inside ourselves, and he does that by making the play about
Othello’s skin. You can find a shelf-load of books and essays that debate the question of
Othello’s race – he’s Arab, he’s African, he’s Turk. All of them are bunk. The one crucial
point about Othello is that his skin is dark, and, for Shakespeare’s purposes, the darker
the better. ‘Black,’ says Iago, ‘black’ and again ‘black’, says Othello himself.
Othello’s skin is black. The various political and social meanings of blackness to
twenty-first-century Americans were simply not available to Shakespeare. With that in
mind, I have tried to teach this play without dealing with race, but I keep bumping into
words such as ‘light’, ‘bright’, ‘dark’, ‘white’, and, of course, ‘black’. The harder I try not to talk
about race, the more quickly the impression grows that our entire language is made up
of two interconnecting sets of white and black and their synonyms – as though that
opposed pair and their satellites completely compose our world. And so they do, and, of
course, so they did; and Shakespeare, who, as we all know from our term papers, wrote
plays built out of ‘Light and Dark Imagery’, found in the marriage of Othello and
Desdemona an embodiment of this eternal duality and decided to explore the limits of
its meaning.
What does a black skin mean? Driven by her racist father, the question the first three
scenes pose is how is it possible that a white woman in a white society can love a man in
a black skin, someone she had ‘feared to look on’? The answer Shakespeare gives us is that
a black skin is not some kind of metaphor for spiritual or moral ‘blackness’, that Othello’s
appearance to the white world is no indication of a lack of goodness: Desdemona falls in
love with Othello for his words (‘I saw Othello’s visage in his mind’ [1.3.254]), and the
powers of Venice value him for his deeds. The Duke’s conclusion that Othello ‘is far more
fair than black’ (292) – however racist it sounds to us – is an attempt to assert Othello’s
inner beauty.
This view is what we might expect from the man who wrote The Merchant of Venice
and whose plays as a whole challenge the connection between appearance and reality.
258
Othello
But Shakespeare’s language, our language, seems to have Shakespeare imprisoned in

racism, and in the rest of the play we can almost see the contortionist trying to wriggle
free. One manoeuvre Shakespeare uses is to implicate ‘white’ in evil, first through the
word ‘light’ with its meanings of unsubstantial and promiscuous, and second through the
familiar Renaissance emblem of ‘the whited Sepulchre’. The embodiment of these
negative ideas of ‘white’ is, of course, Bianca – Italian for ‘white’. That name appears
frequently in Renaissance drama as the name of a prostitute, with the implied irony that
however ‘fair’ – beautiful and white – a Bianca may be, her profession is foul and thus
makes her ‘black’.
These are the complex of meanings of ‘white’ that inform Othello’s speech at the bed
of the sleeping Desdemona:
Yet I’ll not shed her blood;

nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
and smooth as monumental alabaster.
Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.
Put out the light, and then put out the light . . .
(5.2.3–7)
But when Othello compares Desdemona to an alabaster monument, implying that

her inside is foul, not fair, the audience knows that he is wrong. Since the black man is
doing the ‘dark’ thing and doing it in the dark, all of the bad meanings of ‘black’ crowd in
and leave Othello not only trapped in his skin (as everyone is), but also trapped in
‘blackness’.
The difficulty we have in liberating Othello/Othello from the unpleasant racial
implications of such a reading is one source of the play’s suffocating effect. In Othello the
metaphor of ‘black’ engulfs Othello and transforms him into its own likeness. Before Iago
begins to work his poison, Shakespeare is absolutely clear on Othello’s virtue; we have
not only the Duke’s and Desdemona’s testimony, but Iago’s as well: ‘The Moor is of a free
and open nature’ (1.3.397). Shakespeare stages Othello’s painful transformation, and at
the beginning of Act Four we see Othello fall into a trance with all the quaking that ever
attended Lon Chaney’s Werewolf agony under a full moon.
othello
Lie with he? lie on her! We say lie on her, when they
belie her. Lie with her! that’s fulsome! – Handkerchief-
!confessions! handkerchief! – To confess, and be hang’d for
his labour! First to be hanged, and then to confess: I
tremble at it. Nature would not invest herself in such
shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words
that shake me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips. Is’t
possible? Confess! handkerchief! O devil!
Falls in a trance
259
iago
Work on,
my medicine, work! (4.1.35–45)
The ‘medicine’, of course, is sexual jealousy, and Iago’s application of that medicine is
expert; he gives Othello vivid pictures of the outsides and the parts (‘noses, ears, and
lips’) of his wife and his friend. Sexual jealousy, after all, puts a premium on the activities
of the skin. Othello, obsessed with his imaginings of her body (appearance), cannot hear
Desdemona’s words (reality), and the concomitant effect of such thinking is that he
begins as well to view himself from the outside.
Haply, for I am black,

and have not those soft parts of conversation
that chamberers have . . .
(3.3.267–9)
Self-devaluation here is closely linked to his colour, the value of which becomes ever
more negative:
I’ll have some proof: her name, that was as fresh

as Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black
as mine own face.
(3.3.389–91)
By this time in the play, Othello is seeing himself from the outside as a racist might see
him and as he imagines his white wife sees him – the colour of his own skin appearing
as a kind of stain. In hating his own black skin he is becoming the monstrous metaphor
Iago invented for him, and this vicious circle of jealousy, self-loathing, and racism
smothers the Othello we see at the beginning of the play.
At the end, when the truth of what he has done dawns upon Othello, when he
realizes that Iago has ‘ensnared my soul and body’ (5.2.301), he cries out for a skin-
destroying exorcism: Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!’ (5.2.279–80).
Finally, in a fit of racism against ‘malignant’ and ‘turbaned Turk[s]’, the formerly
human Othello takes Othello the stranger by the throat and kills ‘the circumcisèd
dog.’28
Here is the ultimate claustrophobia. What smaller prison is there than our own skins?
Othello’s murder of the monster in his own skin is the act of bigoted self-hatred that frees
him from himself and releases us from Shakespeare’s terrifying machine.
Great ride, Will. Thanks a lot.
28
Othello is full of echoes from The Merchant of Venice. These lines give us a black man ‘misliked for his com-
plexion’ and a circumcised man who see himself as a dog in others’ eyes.
260
Othello
Ploys
A. Imagination versus illustration in Othello
Prep: Illustrations, handouts

Tech: AV equipment
This ploy, suggested to me by Libby Page in Mary Baldwin University’s Masters of Letters
programme, is an excellent one for all of the plays. The idea of the ploy is to have your
students imagine a scene from the play and then compare their ideas to that of an artist
who has illustrated it.
1. You will need an illustration of a famous scene from the play to project on the
screen. Doing this is easy. Othello has inspired three centuries of engravings and
paintings, and you can quickly find some of them on the Web. If you can find a
second illustration of that same scene by another artist, download that one as well.
2. In class have your students look at the scene and read aloud the passage on
which the illustration you have selected (but not yet shown them) is based.
3. Now ask your students to envision the scene and draw it. It doesn’t matter at all
how poorly they draw. Stick figures are fine, but they should make clear where
they imagine the people are in the scene and any details they want to add.
4. Now show the artist’s illustration you have selected.
5. Ask them the following questions:
● What details of the artist’s rendering come directly from the text?
● What are the most surprising details in the artist’s rendering? Why?
● How is (are) the character(s) depicted in relation to things around them?
● What seems to matter most about the moment to the artist?
● How does the artist’s understanding of the scene differ from theirs?
● What do they like about the artist’s vision? What do they dislike?
6. If you have a second illustration of the same moment, now show your students
that one, and, in addition to the questions above, ask them how the two artists
differ in their vision of the scene.
The two main virtues of this ploy are, first, that it gets your students thinking about
the infinite number of details that go into an interpretation of the lines and, second, that
it makes clear how different every interpretation can be. Because you are dealing with
visuals that they all can see, you will discover that even your most reticent students will
feel free to speak up about things that they notice.
261
B. Attack the plot
Prep: Examples of plot problems

The seventeenth-century critic Thomas Rymer, in A Short View of Tragedy (1693), reduces
the plot of Othello in this manner: ‘Desdemona dropt her Handkerchief; therefore she
must be stifl’d.’ Something about the infernal machinery of Shakespeare’s play makes us
suspicious about the inevitability of its tragedy. Take that handkerchief, for example: how
lucky for Iago that Desdemona drops the handkerchief; how lucky for Iago that Emilia is
too frightened or obtuse to see the connection between Iago’s request and Othello’s
jealousy; how lucky for Iago that Bianca returns the handkerchief to Cassio in public so
that Othello may see it.
1. Ask your students to name as many such problems in the plot of the play as they
can.
2. Discuss each instance they give with a view to categorizing the kind of plot
problem – chronological, motivational, logical – they have found.
3. When you have listed six or more ‘mistakes’, open the discussion to a
consideration of each problem from a writer’s point of view.
● Why did Shakespeare make that writing choice?
● Did he forget his own time scheme?
● Did he simply mess up?
● What other choices might he have made?
● What are the drawbacks to any alternatives?
● How would other choices affect character or theme?
4. Then discuss the problems from the point of view of the audience.
● Would they notice the ‘mistake’?
● How would alternative choices affect the impact of the play?
If this discussion seems fruitful, you may wish to turn your students’ ‘improvements’
into a revision by having them actually rewrite certain passages. Such an exercise will not
so much ‘level’ Shakespeare as elevate your students by letting them be his collaborators.
A. Iago kidding around with Desdemona and Emilia watching Act Two, Scene
One, 109 (‘Come on, come on . . .’) to 162 (‘be thy husband’). Three speaking parts.
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Othello
In the first version, Iago’s evil nature is completely hidden, and he is respectful of
Desdemona; Desdemona is playful but prim.
In the second version, Iago is leering and sinister; Desdemona is flirtatious and
suggestive. In both versions, Emilia’s performance must be constant. She can be as bawdy
and mischievous in her one line as blocking and inflection can make, or she can be
shocked, but she must try to ‘hold’ her interpretation in the same place.
Have your students discuss how these two scenes set up the rest of the play. In the first
version, Iago’s ease at disguising his nature certainly makes clear how he might fool
Othello, while Desdemona’s clear innocence together with her courteousness in playing
Iago’s word games make her more entirely the victim. In the second version, the play
between Iago and a more worldly Desdemona could help to establish motive for Iago and
make somewhat clearer how she might give Othello reason for concern.
Ask your students to notice how Emilia’s presence and reactions affect the scene. Why
did Shakespeare put her there? What is her relationship to the audience? How would the
scene be different without her? Now ask the actress playing Emilia to choose the versions
that worked best for her, and do a third version making any choices she likes to enhance
the ‘Celia effect’ (see Scene A in the As You Like It section).
B. Bianca and Cassio Act Three, Scene Four, 169 (‘Save you . . .’) to 203 (end of scene).
Two speaking parts.
Cassio calls Bianca his ‘bauble’; she appears to be a woman of ill-repute, a mere
diversion for Cassio. Her name, as I suggest above, was traditionally used to suggest the
woman whose beauty is only as deep as her make-up and whose virtue is nil. Most
productions make her simply a tart, but the lines that Shakespeare gives her in this scene
are not unlike the lines he gives Rosalind when she complains about tardy lovers in As
You Like It, and you could hardly call Rosalind a whore.
First version. Do the scene once with Bianca as an aggressive and playful prostitute – a
Mistress Overdone – and in that reading have Cassio treat her as though he were
completely in her control.
Second version. In the second reading have the actress play Bianca simply as a young
woman who is truly in love with Cassio and truly jealous of his favours – a Helena or a
Hermia, perhaps – and have Cassio treat her with disdain.
Have your students discuss which of the two readings makes more sense in terms of
the play’s themes. Why do most productions let Cassio off the hook by making Bianca
blatantly sexual (and occasionally dim-witted)? What happens to our opinion of Cassio
when we listen to Bianca as a woman seriously in love? How does such a reading affect
our view of the other men and women in the play? These alternative readings should
produce some rowdy discussions about the double standard.
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PERICLES
Comments
Pericles feels un-Shakespearean, and it partly is. A younger playwright, a rather sketchy
innkeeper named George Wilkins, may have been responsible for the first half of it, and
this fact has led to speculation that he started the project and then had Shakespeare
rescue it.
But another, equally plausible, narrative is that Shakespeare, in a funk after finishing
King Lear, was at Wilkins’ inn – a place of some ill fame – and idly asked what Wilkins
was working on. ‘I’m doing a kind of Odyssey thing,’ Wilkins said, ‘where the Prince of
Tyre roams all over the Mediterranean in search of a wife, finds one, loses her in a storm,
leaves their baby daughter in the hands of an Evil Queen who gives her up to pirates,
hears from the Evil Queen that the girl is dead, and goes into a major depression until he
finds her again – oh, and he also finds out his wife isn’t dead but living in the Temple of
Diana. Pitched it to Disney, but they thought it was too far-fetched and didn’t like the
incest material.’ ‘Ah,’ said Will, ‘shipwrecks, storms, depression, father–daughter separated,
then reunited, pirates, and incest material: tell me more.’ Then Shakespeare glanced
around Wilkins’ tavern at some of the romantic transactions taking place and smiled.
‘Maybe we could have the daughter living in a brothel.’ Then he looked at Wilkins, ‘With
a comic pimp.’
Though this work is a collaboration with a more episodic structure than his other
plays, in its themes, in the exquisite language of the last half of the play, and in the
magnificent reunion of father and daughter, Pericles is nonetheless Shakespearean.
However Shakespeare got involved in the project, Pericles seems to have been a
turning point for him, a transition into the genre of tragicomedy, made fashionable by
King James’s taste for happy endings and by the success of his colleagues Beaumont and
Fletcher in providing those endings no matter how perilously close their plots had come
to death and despair. Shakespeare’s next plays – Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The
Tempest – all admit the miraculous into their worlds.
Here are four interesting things about Pericles:
It has a narrator, and not just any narrator, but the fourteenth-century poet John
Gower, who wrote the Confessio Amantis, the source material for the play. Gower speaks
in the regular iambic tetrameter – sometimes rhymed – that was typical of early English
plays. In this episodic work covering a wide expanse of time and territory and continually
introducing new characters, a narrator helps to hold the story together, something
Shakespeare did with the Chorus in Henry V.
It has a masque. The Early Modern masque was like a Super Bowl halftime show: too
long, too overwrought, too empty, and too expensive. Masques – primarily dance and
song, supported by a feeble storyline – gave the aristocracy an excuse for a party where
actors would perform songs and dances on an elaborate set and members of the court
might participate in fantastic costumes. Though Elizabeth I’s court enjoyed masques, the
masque came into its greatest popularity under the extravagant King James I and his
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Pericles
wife, Anne of Denmark. Notable playwrights such as Beaumont, Chapman, Middleton,

and, especially, Ben Jonson wrote masques and curried favour at court; and it became
common for playwrights to put some form of masque into their plays.
Shakespeare did not seem caught up in the masque fad. In Midsummer Night’s Dream
he has the rude mechanicals perform a play at Theseus’s court, but Philostrate explicitly
calls it a ‘play’. Only in Love’s Labour’s Lost, among his earlier works, does he stage a
masque and that event, ‘The Masque of the Nine Worthies,’ descends quickly into chaos.
He also gestures at the form with the procession of kings in Macbeth, but not until the
company started playing the Blackfriars, an indoor space that resembled a royal hall,
does Shakespeare go all in on the masque. In Cymbeline, Posthumus’s dream of his
parents and Jupiter is masque-like in its production values; the sheep-shearing scene in
Winter’s Tale is a kind of anti-masque; and Prospero’s wedding entertainment in The
Tempest is explicitly a masque. In Pericles the competition of the princes for Thaisa in 2.3
that ends in a dance is a masque that weaves the form tightly into the narrative.
Like Winter’s Tale, Pericles has a resurrection. In these two of his last plays characters
in Shakespeare appear to have died and come back to life. Yet he is careful to make the
agents of these ‘miracles’ humans and not gods. Paulina, who makes clear that she has
been sheltering the Queen, stages the resurrection of Hermione. Similarly, Shakespeare
is careful to make it clear that Thaisa’s revival is the work of Cerimon’s medicinal skills
and not divine intervention. Cerimon, explains that occasionally
Death may usurp on nature many hours,

and yet the fire of life kindle again . . .
(3.2.84–5)
He tells us that Thaisa has ‘not been entranced above five hours’ (96) and cites a specific
case of ‘an Egyptian that had nine hours lien dead’ (86–7) and been revived. He ministers
to her with applications and fire and, of course, music (Shakespeare’s cure-all); and his
impatience with the musicians – ‘The viol once more! How thou stirr’st, thou block! The
music there!’ (92–3) – shows that time is crucial. In other words, he can only help before
she slips all the way into death. And when she starts to breathe, Cerimon, says that the
‘Queen will live’ (94). Not that she will live again.
If we see Shakespeare as a humanist, as I think we should, then it matters that in these
last plays the restitution of happiness comes not through divine but through human
agency.
It has incest. Pericles’ first adventure is to compete for the hand of the daughter of
King Antiochus by solving a riddle. The catch is that failing to solve the riddle means
death. The answer to the riddle is that the King and his daughter are in an incestuous
relationship. Pericles solves the riddle and then figures out that Antiochus won’t want
him alive for discovering the truth (Pericles is not Shakespeare’s brightest bulb). Nothing
about this episode is essential to the rest of the story, but because it opens the play it casts
the shadow of incest on everything that follows. In that shadow we watch Simonides’
tournament for his daughter Thaisa’s hand more warily and are all the more charmed by
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his delight in her love of Pericles and the good-natured teasing he does of the couple.
And in the last act the idea of incest hovers over the reunion of Pericles and Marina,
because (1) we know they do not know they are related and (2) she’s brought as a comfort
to him from a brothel where the usual comfort a woman provides is sex.
Why does Shakespeare toy with this subject?
Plays about the taboo of incest were trending on the Jacobean stage,29 but
Shakespeare’s interest seems to have gone beyond box office to the nature of love,
particularly a father’s for his daughter. The physical bond between mother and son is a
literal one: a son is of his mother’s flesh in a way that a daughter is not of her father’s.
What, then, is the nature of the bond between them? What makes it tender (Prospero,
Simonides); what makes it makes it cruel (Egeus, Brabantio); and what makes it both
(Baptista, Capulet, Shylock, Leonato, Duke Frederick, Lear, Leontes)? Certainly we
understand the socio-economic, patriarchal, and misogynist forces at play in the cruelty
of these fathers, but what is there in a father’s tenderness of a more visceral impulse to be
close with a daughter? What about touching? What about embracing? Why is that
different from mothers and sons?
The way that Shakespeare answers that question is to stage the reunion of Pericles and
Marina in a context that forces us to be aware of male sexual desire and to distinguish
this love from that. Shakespeare is ‘pairing’ again: this time the physical relation of an
incestuous father and daughter in the first act helps us see more clearly the scene before
us of the beautiful longing of a father to hold his lost daughter in his arms.
Ploys
A. Design a crest and make a ceremonial shield
Scripts: Per 2.2

Prep: Prior intro, examples of coats of arms
Homework: Design coat of arms
Act Two, Scene Two has a ‘triumph’ in which the knights display their shields with their
heraldic devices as they pass by the tournament stand where Simonides sits with his
daughter Thaisa. Shakespeare was more than a little interested in heraldry. When he was
thirty-one, his father’s long deferred application for a family coat of arms was
controversially approved. In a clear reference to the family name, the crest features a
29
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (both playwrights for his company) wrote the remarkable King and
No King entirely about incest; Thomas Middleton had fun with it in Women Beware Women; and John Ford
turned Romeo and Juliet into ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, which could equally be titled ‘ ’Tis Pity They Are Brother
and Sister.’
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Pericles
falcon brandishing a spear with one of its claws and bears the somewhat defensive motto
‘non sanz droict’ (‘not without right’). Pericles’ shield, discovered by the fishermen who
saved him, has a ‘withered branch that’s only green on top. / The motto, In hac spe vivo’
(42–3). Simonides interprets for Thaisa:
From the dejected state wherein he is

he hopes by you his fortunes may flourish.
(45–6)
Have your students individually design a coat of arms to be displayed on a shield for
an in-class ‘triumph’. You can make it about the play itself by having the students create
the coat of arms for a character from Pericles. You can apply the assignment to all of
Shakespeare and have them create a coat of arms for their favourite character in any
of the plays. Or you can just make it an entertaining event, and have them create a
coat of arms for themselves.
The coat of arms must have, reading from top to bottom:
a) a slogan or battle cry
b) a crest on a helmet
c) a shield with a background of red, black, blue, green, or purple
d) an emblem on the shield in one of those colours
e) a pattern (e.g. a chevron) on the shield, also in one of those colours
f) a motto.
They can design this coat of arms themselves or they can use one of several free websites
that help generate them.
You can make this as serious an assignment as you wish, but to me there’s something
inherently amusing about such insignia (Ben Jonson parodied Shakespeare’s as ‘not
without mustard’), and I would let it all be in fun. And to make it a really visual event,
have them attach the coat of arms to a large handmade shield.
B. Pirates of the Mediterranean contest
Scripts: Per 4.1.70 to end

Prep: Prior intro, teaming up
In class: Full class, teams of three in pirate costumes
Tech: Pirate soundtrack, large skull and bones flag
When Shakespeare got into a plot jam, he would use pirates (2 Henry VI, Hamlet) or bandits
(Two Gents) to rescue him. In Pericles, Leonine, the henchman of evil Queen Dionyza, is about
to murder Marina, when – glory be – three pirates enter and save her. This ploy is meant to
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underscore the randomness of this moment and to celebrate pirates giving your class
something of a pirate party.
1. Without saying why, have your class divide themselves into teams of three. If the
division doesn’t come out exactly, allow a team or two of four.
2. Tell them that they are to come to the next class costumed as the three pirates in
the play and that each team should coordinate their look. If they want, they can
mimic famous pirates (Captain Hook, Long John Silver, Jack Sparrow), or they
can come up with original ideas.
3. Tell them what the prize is and make it something appealing (movie tickets,
pizza, pirate T-shirts).
4. If they are game for it, encourage them to wear their costumes to school (why
not advertise how much fun your class is) otherwise . . .
5. Allow class time on ‘Pirate Day’ for them to get costumed and made up.
6. Choose an order and have each team take centre stage in your Elizabethan
theatre (see the Fourth Do).
7. Use an imaginary ‘applausometer’ to decide on three teams in the finals.
8. Now choose a Marina and a Leonine, hand out the scripts, and perform it three
times using each of the three teams.
9. Let the rest of your class vote by secret ballot on the winning team.
10. Give the pirates their prize.
Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!
A. King Simonides kids Thaisa and her new boyfriend Act Two, Scene Five, 14
(‘now to my daughter’s letter’) to line 23 (‘dissemble it’) and lines 37 (‘Sir, my daughter
thinks very well of you’) to end of scene. Three speaking parts: two males, one female.
Having started Pericles’ adventures with a competition for a bride arranged by a father
who is an incestuous murderer, the play now gives us a second competition for a daughter.
This time the father is a good guy, but Pericles doesn’t learn that until this scene in which
Simonides entertains himself by pretending to disapprove of the marriage.
In the first version your Simonides will not provide the audience with the set-up (lines
14–23) nor his asides (57 ‘Now, by the gods, I do applaud his courage’; 73 ‘I am glad on’t
with all my heart’; 77–9 ‘who, for aught I know . . . As great in blood as I myself ’). Until
he says ‘man and wife’ (83), he is seriously disapproving and making it clear that any man
who messes with the princess is a traitor into the bargain.
For the second version give back lines 14–23 and have Simonides let the audience in
on the joke. In this version he’s positively giddy with his pleasure in teasing the two by
pretending to be against their union. He can hardly contain his delight and to hide it is
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Pericles
repeatedly turning his face away from Pericles and, later, Thaisa. He is overacting the
angry father so much that Thaisa is really confused and Pericles suspects he’s fallen in
love with the daughter of a maniac. When Simonides springs his happy surprise, Pericles
is stunned and delighted, but Thaisa’s response makes it clear that her father has always
been a tease.
These two alternatives give your students an opportunity to consider whether
knowing what will happen in advance does or does not ‘spoil’ a narrative. What is the
balance between the enjoyment of watching characters respond to a situation you know
in advance and the enjoyment of being surprised?
B. The recognition scene between Pericles and his daughter Marina Act Five,
Scene One, 135 (‘Tell thy story’) to 180 (‘if good King Pericles be’) and lines 191
(‘O, Helicanus, strike me’) to 213 (‘thou art my child’). With this cut, two speaking parts,
one non-speaking part. (Gender matters here and try to cast a mature-looking Pericles
and a young-looking Marina.)
In the first version Pericles, like Lear waking, is in a dreamy disconnected state of
mind. Focused on himself and barely caring about the young woman speaking to him, he
says, ‘tell thy story’, as though he’s simply looking for another distraction. In this version,
Marina speaks to him with the solicitousness of a hospice nurse. He keeps asking her
questions because he’s enjoying the fairy tale. Whenever he gets agitated and challenges
her, her response is always to calm him down, never to take umbrage or argue with him.
Helicanus is worried about Pericles’ blood pressure, not the girl’s tale.
In the second version Pericles is perfectly awake – depressed and fed up, but completely
clear of mind. Marina is familiar to him in a way that makes him want to talk to her and
know her story but also makes him suspicious of some scam. This Marina is more
straightforward. She’s interested in this odd old man and glad of a chance to tell her story,
but she doesn’t like the way he doubts her story, and she means it when she says she’ll
stop talking. By the time she says she was born at sea, Pericles guesses this is his daughter
but he presses on partly to test her character. As Helicanus listens to this exchange, he
knows as early as he hears her name that this is his friend’s lost daughter, and shares her
annoyance with the continued questioning.
Discuss with your students the way Shakespeare defers the moment when Pericles
accepts that he has found his daughter. Ask them which of the two Marinas they prefer
and which Pericles. Mix and match in a third version.
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KING RICHARD II
Comments
I recommend Richard II at the high school level for advanced students only. It has less
sex, less comedy, and less action than any other Shakespeare play; and, to make matters
worse, its subject – fourteenth-century English history and the issue of the divine right
of kings – is not currently stirring the blood of adolescents. Those are formidable barriers
to overcome, and yet I have frequently been surprised at how my college students take to
this odd play. A good number of them, confronted by whatever rhythms Shakespeare
was seeking at the cost of more exciting theatrical fare, are willing to listen to its different
music. For myself, I first heard that music on the stage in my first visit to Stratford and
my first attendance at a production of the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was the single
most transforming moment I have known in the theatre.
The year I began teaching at James Madison University, my wife and I made our first visit
to Stratford-upon-Avon. As a measure of how little I was concerned with Shakespeare as a
playwright, I confess that only as an afterthought did I go to the box office of the Memorial
Theatre to see what was playing on our one night in town. The show was Richard II, and
there were only two seats left – two second-row, top-price £10 seats. Big decision, because in
1974 $24 per ticket was over budget for a new assistant professor. I reported back to Judy.
‘Richard is a good read,’ I told her, ‘but a lot of speeches; and no theatre.’ ‘We’re in Stratford,’
she said, ‘we should see a play.’ ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but if the costumes aren’t great, we’ll be in for a
long evening.’ So I was outraged when the show began and about a dozen actors in turtlenecks
and chinos wandered, chatting with one another, onto the huge bare stage. Without the least
bit of irony, I whispered to Judy, ‘I didn’t come all this way to see a fucking rehearsal.’
From upstage a tall, lean, white-bearded man came on and joined Ian Richardson and
Richard Pasco in their chinos and turtlenecks. The old man flipped a coin. Ian Richardson
called ‘heads’. It was tails. The man with the beard turned to Richard Pasco draped a gold
lamé around Pasco’s shoulders. Simultaneously, the house lights went out, a huge gold lamé
disc, of the same material as the robe, dropped from above, and a gold throne suddenly
rose from below stage. Pasco stood before it, his back to the audience. That night he won
the toss and would play the King and Ian Richardson would play Henry Bolingbroke.
Clearly, it might have been the other way around. The actors knew both parts but not which
they would play that night. This was theatre. Judy and I were glued to John Barton’s
production of Richard II, and I would never think about Shakespeare as a book again.
The entire production was designed to make the audience listen. Although the
costumes became increasingly elaborate, the stage design did not. The Royal Shakespeare
Company was trusting to the words, and the words had come through so well that, at the
curtain call, the audience, before it could collect itself for the ovation, sat silent so long
that I thought that perhaps only I had been swept away.30 Then the dam burst.
30
I have experienced that awed silence in the theatre only once since then: for Trevor Nunn’s 1977 Macbeth
with Judi Dench and Ian McKellen.
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King Richard II
I find two contradictory lessons in the wonder of that production: the first is that
Shakespeare’s work is fundamentally theatrical – it must be staged so we can see it; the
second is that we must see it in a way that makes us listen. When I said to Judy, ‘a lot of
speeches; no theatre,’ I was missing the essential Shakespearean point, and especially the
point of Richard II ’s play, in which speech is theatre.
Richard’s glory and his great failing is that he lives entirely in his language. Where
others use language primarily to react to the reality of the world, Richard uses it to make
a world, to create and re-create his own story. Until The Tempest, Richard II is as close as
Shakespeare comes to a play in the first person; he translates everything that happens –
even his deposition – into the Poem of Richard. The result is a play at odds with its own
dramatic possibilities. For example, the play opens with the promise of an exciting
physical contest, a joust to the death between Mowbray and Bolingbroke. That is a
spectacle an audience would want to see, and when Richard in that first scene decrees the
trial by combat, Shakespeare ramps up that desire. Then he uses over 100 lines of
ceremony to build the anticipation of the combat, only to have Richard deflate the
moment, banish the two men, and steal their big scene – from the audience as well as
from Mowbray and Bolingbroke.
Shakespeare’s fascination with Richard’s penchant for stealing the scene and foiling
the drama applies to the play’s most famous scene, the deposition: Bolingbroke never
actually takes the crown; Richard’s poetry gives it to him. Again and again, Bolingbroke
protests his allegiance to Richard and assures him that he comes ‘but for my own’
(3.3.196) inheritance. But Richard stage manages his own deposition – ‘Your own is
yours, and I am yours, and all’ (197). Historically, the political reality of Bolingbroke’s
victory certainly meant that Richard would lose the crown, but Shakespeare’s play mutes
that reality and shows us Richard’s giving the crown rather than Henry’s taking it. The
scene, the act, the language, and the play are Richard’s.
For your students to enjoy this play, they must surrender to Richard’s language. There
is little colloquial English in the play, everyone in the play, including the gardeners,
speaks in verse, so students find the language accessible. Your job is less a matter of
helping them understand the content of Richard’s language and more a matter of helping
them appreciate it and how it reveals Richard’s character.
Even when he is a self-pitying drama queen, his language is rich and clear.
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,

make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
write sorrow on the bosom of earth.
(3.2.145–7)
Notice how plain the first line is. A simple invitation to a conversation . . . about death. All
three nouns are simple words; each is about a different aspect of death. ‘Graves’ speak to
the geography of death, where you are buried. ‘Worms’ speak to the biology of death,
what happens to your body. ‘Epitaphs’ speak to the biography of death, what becomes of
your name.
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But the sentence has just begun, and we discover that ‘talk’ is only the first of a trio of
verbs and that Richard is also inviting us to do two other things. Here begins a remarkable
metaphysical conceit in which we ‘write’ our sorrow by dropping tears in the dust, which
we ‘make’ into our writing paper. Please note that there is not a single difficult word in
that image. You will not have a student who doesn’t know the meaning of ‘dust’, ‘paper’,
‘rainy’, ‘eyes’, ‘sorrow’, ‘bosom’, or ‘earth’. The image is surprising and brilliant and – as your
students will readily agree – over the top. It’s too clever, too artificial, and too surreal for
us to trust the speaker. And when, later in the speech, he invites his lords to ‘sit upon the
ground / and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings’ (155–6), he confirms our sense of
Richard having a pity party.
But from that moment on, something more admirable enters Richard’s speech, as
through his poetry he begins to wrestle with the fact that all kings are mortal – indeed,
according to Richard, ‘All murdered’ (160). He backs up that remarkable assertion with a
chilling and amusing image of the way Death sits, like a court jester, in the head of every
king, laughs at the king’s pretensions to importance, and then, seemingly out of boredom,
kills the king.
Within the hollow crown

that rounds the mortal temples of a king
keeps death his court; and there the antic sits, [a jester]
allowing him a breath, a little scene,
to monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks;
infusing him with self and vain conceit,
as if this flesh which walls around our life
were brass impregnable; and humoured thus,
comes at the last, and with a little pin death comes
bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
(160–70)
Richard works his way through these thoughts to this conclusion:
I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief,

need friends. Subjected thus,
how can you say to me I am a king?
(175–7)
The absence of artifice in that first sentence is disarming. Read it aloud; your students
will hear the power of its plainness and its honesty as well as I heard it in Stratford. Here
is a man coming to terms with the limits of kingship – a man well on the way to his final
wisdom: that ‘I . . . with nothing will be pleased till [I] be eased / with being nothing’
(5.5.40–1). Here, too, is a playwright who is already on his philosophical journey to King
Lear.
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King Richard II
Ploys
A. Prepare political campaigns for Henry and Richard
Prep: Assigning parties and committees

In class: 1.5 classes – 20–30 minutes Image Committee meeting; 1 class campaign
presentations and voting
Groups: 2 groups (Henry and Richard parties), 6 committees per party
Props: coin, AV equipment for presentations (optional), ballots
Richard and Henry are politicians who both want the same office. To give your students
a clearer sense of the issues of character and policy that attach to their struggle, divide
your class into two parties, and have them decide on a name for each party. Then flip a
coin and let the team that wins choose Richard or Henry as their candidate. Subdivide
each party into the following committees: the Image Committee, the Logo and Bumper
Sticker Committee, the Slogan Committee, the Platform Committee, and the Dirty
Tricks Committee. Their duties are as follows:
The Image Committee meets immediately in class to come up with the salient
points of the candidate’s image as based on the facts in the text. Each member of
this first committee becomes an ad hoc member of the other committees.
The Logo and Bumper Sticker Committee designs a bumper sticker whose
colour and style fits the image of their candidate and a symbol (rose, donkey,
elephant, and cross are already taken) for the candidate and his party.
The Slogan Committee is responsible for coming up with a catchy slogan for the
candidate that takes into account the campaign image and is based on the text
(Richard’s might be ‘High be our thoughts’ or ‘From the teeming womb of royal
kings,’ and Henry’s ‘A true-born English man’ or ‘Against the envy of less happier
lands’).
The Platform Committee puts together the planks in the candidate’s platform for
election. Each member of the committee is responsible for a plank in that platform
named for them (‘the Jalen plank,’ ‘the Jennifer plank’). Though the platform need
not use the exact text, something in it must be linked to a speech in the play. For
example, Richard might run on a platform of restoring order, or belief in the
divinely ordained monarchy; while Henry might run on a platform against taxation
and corruption.
The Dirty Tricks Committee is responsible for the most fundamental part of any
modern election, the negative campaign. It must come up with attacks based on the
text against the other candidate. For example, ‘All Richard does is spend and tax,
tax and spend’ or ‘Bolingbroke isn’t qualified for the job.’
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On an appointed day, the two groups present to the class – in the order of their listing
above – their campaign programme. After both presentations, hold a secret ballot and let
the class decide who would win the kingship. Obviously, this exercise means some work
out of class, and, just as obviously, you must provide a grading system that encourages
and rewards such work. But this exercise pays good dividends, because it clarifies for the
students how character and policy are connected in Shakespeare as well as in society; it
makes them mine and adapt the language of the play; and it shows them the way image
takes priority over reality.
B. Compose an editorial backing or attacking Henry or Richard for their

problem-solving ability
Prep: List of questions to consider

In class: 1–2 class periods (optional as homework assignment)
Prize (optional)
Have your students write an editorial supporting or attacking Henry or Richard for the
way each would handle a modern problem. Which of the two men would invade another
country? Which of the two men would protect the environment? Which of the two men
would oppose same-sex marriage? Which of the two men would raise taxes? Which of
the two men would support the arts? In writing their editorials, your students must use
actual quotations from the play.
This much alone will have made your students think about the play, but if you want to
take it to another level, collect the editorials (in hard copy or online), and have your class
read them all. Then have your students discuss the ones they liked best and have them
award a ‘Pull-It-Sir’ Prize31 for journalism to the editorial.
A. Gaunt’s speech Act Two, Scene One, 31 (‘Methinks I am’) to 68 (‘my ensuing
death’). One speaking part and some sort of couch.
The most famous speech in the play is John of Gaunt’s description of England, in
which he bewails the fact that Richard has ‘leased’ out the realm. For the first version, have
your actor take his cue from the opening lines, ‘Methinks I am a prophet new inspired’
(31), and do the speech standing up and full of almost mystical power. He (or she) might
even try for the echo chamber voice that some preachers achieve. Only at the end of the
speech – ‘ah would the scandal vanish with my life . . .’ (67) – should his strength give out.
31
I elsewhere admit my weakness for puns.
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King Richard II
In the second version, have your Gaunt seated with a lap blanket, and instruct him to
do the speech as if struggling for air, as if the very act of giving that speech were draining
him of life. Then let your class discuss which of the two versions was the more powerful,
and which of the two better fits the context of the rest of the scene and the rest of the play.
B. The crown passage in the deposition scene Act Four, Scene One, 180 (‘Give me
the crown’) to 221 (‘of sunshine days’). Two speaking parts and one crown.
Richard II was powerful political theatre when Shakespeare wrote. The idea of an
ineffectual monarch being deposed by a popular young claimant did not sit well with the
ageing Elizabeth: ‘I am Richard II ,’ she said, ‘know ye not that?’ The scene that would
most distress the Queen’s censors was the deposition scene in Act Four, Scene One, and,
accordingly, 160 lines of that scene were cut from the published version of the play.
Beyond its historical interest, it shows Richard in his most inventive self-dramatizing
role.
Start with Richard’s lines, ‘Give me the crown’ (you will need a crown) and his
insistence that Henry hold the other side of the crown. In the first version, have the actor
playing Richard (male or female, it doesn’t matter) be as whiny and pathetic as possible,
while Henry, a kind man, is doing his best to console him. In the second version, Henry is
disgusted and impatient with Richard, and this Richard is enjoying Henry’s displeasure.
He does not take Henry seriously and is teasing him with the melodrama of the moment.
How does the first Richard square with the man who fights so well to defend himself at
the end of the play? How does the second Richard fit the easily dejected Richard who sits
on the ground to tell sad stories of the death of kings? Mix and match in the third version.
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KING RICHARD III
Comments
The Tragedy of Richard III is the final play in Shakespeare’s first series of history plays, the
four-part story of the Wars of the Roses. Its title character, Richard, Duke of Gloucester,
bragging that ‘I can smile, and murder whiles I smile’ (3.2.182), emerges full-blown from
the chaos of bickering Yorks and Lancastrians in The Third Part of Henry VI. I imagine
that Shakespeare, up to that time working through his adaptation of Holinshed’s
Chronicles, watched the development of this new character with growing pride and
rushed to finish Henry VI and begin Richard’s own play. For that is what Richard III is: a
one-man show, presided over – with a third of the play’s lines – by Richard the ‘poisonous
bunch-backed toad’ (1.3.246).
The play was Shakespeare’s first ‘blockbuster’. According to a lawyer writing more than
a decade after the play opened, though Richard Burbage had played every leading part
(including Hamlet) in Shakespeare’s plays, he was still identified with the role of Richard
‘Crookback’. Though your students might find the large cast of characters (many with the
same first names) daunting, with a plot summary to keep score, they will enjoy one of
the best bad guys in literature. Richard combines the ruthlessness of Al Capone and the
charm of Dracula, in a play with the double appeal of the gangster movie and the horror
film.
Like a gangster movie, the play is about a killer trying to enlarge his ‘turf ’ to get to the
top of the pyramid of power, and he engineers his rise ‘in the organization’ by his sudden
brutality to any opposition and his willingness to double-cross his friends. Once on top,
he maintains his position by terror. Finally, the trail of victims he leaves in his wake, the
living and the dead (who give their ghostly blessings to the forces of law) defeat the killer,
who, after a bout of remorse, dies a brave but friendless death. This is the same pattern
that emerges in Public Enemy and Scarface and, to some extent, in The Godfather.
And like a horror film, Richard III boasts a supernatural fiend. Beyond his physical
deformity, Richard is a monster in the sense of being something ‘other’: on the one hand,
a beast – ‘chameleon’, ‘spider’, ‘toad’, ‘dog’, ‘hedgehog’; on the other hand, something
supernatural conjured up by Margaret’s curse – ‘scourge’, ‘devil’, ‘hell-hound’ – whose very
presence causes his victim’s wounds to bleed afresh. Shakespeare stresses Richard’s
bestiality by linking his killing to sex (vampires, Norman Bates) and to food (vampires,
werewolves). His wooing of Anne is essentially murderous (‘I’ll have her but I will not
keep her long’ [1.2.234]), and her acquiescence seems a death wish. When he sues to
Queen Elizabeth for her daughter’s hand, he connects death closely with sex (‘In your
daughter’s womb I bury them’ [4.4.423]). He has, quite literally, an appetite for murder:
in ordering Hastings killed, he swears he will not dine until he sees his head – an hors
d’oeuvre? – and he tells Tyrrel to give him the details of the princes’ murder ‘after supper’
– a dessert?
Beast though he is, in the best tradition of the horror genre, Shakespeare’s monster
is the more frightening for being recognizably human. ‘Slasher’ movies and movies
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King Richard III
about demented cockroaches may scare us, but the horror movies that furrow our souls
are the ones that show us our bond with the monster by putting us in his mind. From the
start, Richard, alone on the stage, asks for our sympathy and shows us how dazzling evil
can be:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover

to entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determinèd to prove a villain . . .
(1.1.28–30)
His plot is our play; he sets up the goal of the game – to win the crown – and the
success of his serial murders is necessary to our entertainment. We become his
accomplices. For his villainy he wins a kingdom; we win a show. Beyond that, he is the
play’s most intelligent, charming, and funny character, and though he may not be nice
to brothers, nephews, wives, friends, or henchmen, he is the soul of courtesy to us
the audience. He explains the situation, introduces us to other characters (‘here
Clarence comes’ [1.1.41]), and self-mockingly comments on his triumphs (‘Was ever
woman in this humour won?’ [1.2.233]). Slowly, he implicates us: he may not love Anne,
but he loves us, so we watch her seduction as though he were our champion. Above all,
his language is the untrammelled stuff of our ids: ‘Chop off his head’ (3.1.193), ‘Off with
his head’ (3.4.76), ‘I wish the bastards dead’ (4.2.18), ‘I am not in a giving vein today’
(4.2.116).
In watching him mesmerize others, we are ourselves mesmerized into complicity
and then into victimhood. Like Buckingham, who felt he was Richard’s partner and who
took delight in playing his game, we feel our ‘kindness freeze’ when ‘our’ monster –
without his usual delight in telling us his plans or any warning at all – turns his deadly
gaze on the princes. Lulled into a false sense of control by his confidences, we shrink
from the creature with whom we had identified. And all the while Shakespeare shows
us the logical extension of our own evil, an evil that culminates in Richard’s ghastly
proposition to the mother of the children he has murdered for the hand of her daughter
in marriage:
If I have killed the issue of your womb,

to quicken your increase I will beget
mine issue of your blood upon your daughter . . .
(4.4.296–8)
Then, more graphically – almost pornographically – this:
. . . in your daughter’s womb I bury them,

where, in that nest of spicery, they will breed
selves of themselves to your recomfiture.
(423–5)
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Shakespeare understood both the thrill and the dread of seeing the embodiment of
our own worst selves. It’s fun because the reassuring black and white extremes of
propagandistic Tudor history make this story of Richard feel like a graphic comic, but
when Shakespeare returns to the question of evil in Iago and Macbeth, he will not let us
so easily off his hook.
Ploys
A. The final insult
Prep: Prior intro

Homework: 4 insults
Prizes
Something about Richard inspires those around him – especially old Queen Margaret –
to the heights of name-calling. Have each of your students bring his or her four favourite
insults from the play to class. No insult can exceed ten words. You bring with you two
prizes of some sort: a book you love, a T-shirt, a gift certificate for a pizza. Ask for a
volunteer to get things started and have that student stand and address one of those
favourite insults to the class in general. At that point, whoever wishes should stand and
hurl his or her favourite insult at the first student, who then sits down, while a third
student rises and insults the second student, and so on.
The rules:
1. The insulter stands to deliver the insult.
2. The insulter continues to stand until after someone else has stood to give him or
her an insult and then, once insulted, sits.
3. No one can repeat an insult someone else has used.
4. The insult must be ten words or fewer.
5. The insult must be in exactly the word order Shakespeare uses.
6. The winner is the last student to give his or her insult.
7. He or she gets to choose one of the two prizes you have brought to class.
8. The other prize goes to the next-to-last insulter.
Here’s the problem you’ll run into: students will try to hang back so that they can be
the last one. So whenever there is a pause, say very slowly, ‘Going . . . going . . .’ with the
implied threat that if you say the word ‘gone’, the prize goes to whoever is already the last
insulter – no matter how few students have used their insults. That little trick forces
students to keep the game going.
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Once the game is over, explore the reasons for their choices, and discuss the features
of Shakespeare’s language that make his insults memorable. How do those insults
contribute to the atmosphere and the meaning of the play?
B. ‘Editors, Purists, and Publishers’ tangle over the text
Prep: Handouts of two speeches

Groups: Teams of 3
This exercise, a game called ‘The Editor, the Purist, and the Publisher’, is to make your
students aware of how every word matters and how well Shakespeare used them. Here’s
how it works.
1. Divide your class into teams of three.
2. Tell them that they work for a Shakespeare company that is putting on Richard III
and that the company is committed to keeping the show to two hours. Richard III,
however, is Shakespeare’s second longest play, so the production must be cut.
3. Hand out double-spaced copies of two speeches of twenty-five to thirty lines by
two different characters.
4. The task of each team is to get rid of one-third of one of the speeches. Name
exactly the number of lines they must cut.
5. Give the teams ten to fifteen minutes to make their cuts on the passage they
chose.
6. Now place six chairs – three on one side, three on the other – in front of the
class and have two of the teams come and take those chairs. One group you call
the collective ‘Editor’ and the other group you call ‘The Society of Purists’.
7. Have one student as timekeeper.
8. The ‘Editor’ group has three minutes to present its cuts and its reasons for those
cuts to the rest of the class. Each member of the group must speak at least once.
9. Then ‘The Society of Purists’ has three minutes to explain why such cuts
ABSOLUTELY RUIN THE PLAY ! Again, each member of the group must
speak at least once.
10. Then turn the discussion over to the class. Allow 1 minute for those who agree
with the ‘Editor’ and 1 minute for those who agree with ‘The Society of Purists’.
11. Finally the ‘Publisher’ – that can be you or it can be the class as a whole – decides
whether or not to accept the cuts.
12. Whether the vote is ‘no’ or ‘yes’, move ‘The Society of Purists’ into the ‘Editor’
chairs, have another group come up as the Purists and begin the process again.
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The remarkable thing about this exercise is that students become invested ‘experts’ on
the text and begin to discuss the importance of such things as sound, transitions, imagery,
plot requirements, and so on. They learn the important lesson that the text is not
sacrosanct, that cutting lines from Shakespeare creates no seismic activity in Stratford-
upon-Avon, but that Shakespeare’s talent makes it hard to cut his lines.
A. The wooing of Anne Act One, Scene Two, 29 (‘Come now’) to 151 (‘fouler toad’).
Two speaking parts for good actors; a ‘sword’ (a dowel) in the first reading; add nine non-
speaking parts, two ‘halberds’ (brooms will work) and a ‘corpse’ in the second reading.
The first version: Do the scene with just Anne and Richard and without regard to the
fact of a dead body. Try to get at how two actors could make Anne’s change of heart
believable. Is she hypnotized? Is he sexy? How does he use his deformity? Is his tongue
in his cheek?
The second version: You’ll need to clear a lot of space at the front of your classroom.
You can use a stretcher with a cloth over it (and a body under the cloth). This time decide
how many attendants would be with Anne: at least six pallbearers to carry the coffin, at
least two soldiers with ‘halberds’, and ‘Tressel and Berkely’. But your students can add to
that if you like. Because all the ‘attendant’ parts have no lines at all, this is an ideal scene
for getting shyer students on their feet.
The class is to decide how these attendants react after the entrance of Richard and how
their presence changes the first reading. How do they feel about Anne? How do they feel
about Richard? The odds against Richard are at least nine (some armed) to one; how is he
able to get them to do what he wants? What does the stage picture of a cripple pushing
around able-bodied men tell the audience? Where do attendants go once they put down
the corpse? How do they react as the scene goes along? Where are they shocked? Where
embarrassed? How does the scene change for the actors playing Anne and Richard?
B. The two murderers Act One, Scene Four, 99 (‘What, shall’) to 159 (‘with him’). Two
speaking parts, and a sleeping Clarence; two ‘daggers’ (wooden rulers).
Although these two characters are nameless, their scene is a fine mini-drama whose
subject, justifying acts of murder, seems permanently in the news: the claims of the
individual’s conscience against the claims of authority.
The first version: Try it with a slight actor as Murderer No. 1 and a burly actor as
Murderer No. 2.
The second version: Have them switch roles. How does this change in casting affect the
meaning of the scene?
The third version: Try it with women as the murderers (your students will love such
lines as the First Murderer’s claim to be ‘a man, as you are’). Is the idea of women as
murderers more or less frightening than the idea of men? How are our stereotypes of
men and women tied to our sense of the capacity for evil? How does Shakespeare use
these assumptions in the play as a whole?
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Romeo and Juliet
ROMEO AND JULIET
Comments
From a teenager’s perspective, Romeo and Juliet is easily the most accessible play in the
canon. Shakespeare dishes out all the problems of being underage – sex, peer pressure,
violence, and parents – and along the way he gives us some of the world’s most famous
love poetry.
My students have a tendency to get swept away by their natural sympathy for the title
characters, so I spend a lot of time bashing Romeo. We first see Romeo completely
lovesick, and it comes as something of a surprise to my students that the object of all that
sighing is not Juliet, whom he has not yet met, but Rosaline, a character who never
appears in the play. His lovesickness, moreover, savours of something more than pure
love when he complains that Rosaline will not open ‘her lap to saint-seducing gold’
(1.1.214). Romeo has some rather profane ideas about saints (as his opening lines to
Juliet will show). Judging from what Benvolio, Mercutio, and Friar Lawrence say, Romeo
has not only been in love with Rosaline for some time, but he has also made himself a
nuisance to all around him by displaying all the worst features of the lover. He has been
moody, absent-minded, and a general wet blanket. He is also guilty of some cringingly
bad verse: ‘Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs; being purged, a fire sparkling
in lovers’ eyes . . .’ (1.1.190–1). All for love of Rosaline. And for love of Rosaline he goes to
the Capulet party, where, after one look, he is in love with Juliet. Not even Oberon’s nasty
‘little western flower’ that can make a man ‘madly dote / upon the next live creature that
it sees’ has the power to change a lover’s mind so quickly.
One may suspect that Romeo is in love with being in love and, in the shadow of such
a suspicion, view with less enthusiasm his effect on the thirteen-year-old Juliet.
Shakespeare stresses Juliet’s age repeatedly, as if to remind us that Juliet, however bright
she may be (and she is much smarter than her lover), still has a child’s vulnerability. In
the world’s most famous love scene, the balcony scene, Romeo dwells on what he sees, on
images (‘The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars . . .’ [2.2.19]); but Juliet, at
the same time, is grappling with ideas (‘What’s in a name?’ [2.2.43]). We do not know
exactly what ‘satisfaction’ he is seeking when he climbs the garden wall, but we may
remember that he was sexually frustrated by Rosaline’s rejection, and we know for sure
what Mercutio thinks Romeo is after. Imagine his surprise when Juliet innocently
proposes the only remedy she can think of for people in love: marriage.
Romeo agrees to that notion, they get married, and Romeo’s resolve to live at peace
with Juliet’s family lasts about five minutes: he kills Juliet’s cousin Tybalt and rushes
offstage screaming, ‘I am fortune’s fool!’ (3.1.137). Somebody’s, anyway. He hides in
Friar Lawrence’s cell, where he throws a temper tantrum – ‘with his own tears made
drunk’ (3.3.84) – and has to be shamed out of it by the Nurse and enticed out of it by
the Friar.
We next see him waking in Mantua, full of good premonition, but, on receiving the
false news of Juliet’s death, he typically ignores his intuition in favour of rash action. He
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rushes to Verona to ‘lie with’ his Juliet, threatens his attendant Balthasar with murder,
breaks into the Capulet monument, kills Paris, and then poisons himself – seconds
before Juliet awakes. If tragic literature can boast of a more addle-pated lover, I have not
met him.
The purpose of this synopsis of Romeo’s behaviour in the play is to get students
thinking more critically about a play that they are likely to have pigeonholed as a tragedy
about two victimized young lovers. Another way to put the play into perspective is to
show them its similarities to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, another play about young
love, written within a year of Romeo and Juliet. Young lovers thwarted by parental
authority, lots of falling in love at first sight, and a little falling out of love at first sight.
Beyond the parallels in their main plots, the broad lines of the plots of ‘Pyramus and
Thisbe’ and Romeo and Juliet look very alike: Two young lovers kept apart by their
parents’ feud plan to run away; the young man, thinking that his sweetheart is dead, kills
himself; and the young woman, finding him dead, stabs herself. Even the language of the
tragedy and of the farce are teasingly similar:
romeo Eyes, look your last!

(5.3.112)
pyramus Eyes, do you see?

(5.1.273)
romeo Arms, take your last embrace!

(5.3.113)
pyramus Tongue, lose thy light . . .

(5.1.298)
thisbe Tongue, not a word.

(5.1.337)
romeo Come, bitter conduct, come unsavory guide!

(5.3.116)
pyramus Come, tears, confound.

(5.1.289)
thisbe Come, trusty sword, / come, blade, my breast imbrue

(5.1.338–9)
romeo Thus with a kiss I die.

(5.3.120)
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Romeo and Juliet
pyramus Thus die I, thus, thus, thus.

(5.1.294)
thisbe Thus Thisbe ends.
(5.1.341)
Shakespeare probably wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream after he wrote Romeo and
Juliet. If so, he was clearly able to laugh at the kind of self-dramatizing language he has
already given to Romeo. This fact should help remind students that though there is
something pitiable about Romeo, there might be something laughable too.
Ploys
A. Cast the play two ways (see Chapter Five, ‘Making connections by
casting a movie’)
Prep: Character list

Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s teen-exploitation work, and for that reason your
students, familiar with teen film genres, will particularly enjoy the casting exercises
described in Chapter Five. I recommend that you organize your class discussion around
two different casts. To get at the problem of blame and the generation gap, start with a
cast that makes the lovers and their friends delightful and the older generation unbearable.
In such a cast, Capulet, Lady Capulet, and the Prince should be played by actors of
advanced age who are good at being nasty grouches or devious autocrats. The Nurse
should be laughably silly, even addled, and Paris should be played by some complete nerd
or prig whom only the most unfeeling parent would consider marrying to a daughter. In
choosing the younger generation for this first cast, your students should settle on the
most sympathetic and attractive young actors (and/or rock stars, athletes, and so on).
Discuss the implications of this casting and then reverse the field with a cast in which the
older generation is ‘cool’ – a Paul Newman as Capulet, a Sigourney Weaver as Lady
Capulet, a George Clooney as the Prince, and a Bette Midler as the Nurse.
Most interestingly, choose a Paris for the second cast who is really a better catch in every
way than the Romeo. Too frequently directors make Paris into a priggish sort of Uriah
Heep, and, in so doing, obscure the point that a desirable young man, who has come to the
Capulet vault on a romantic impulse to mourn his beloved, becomes yet another victim of
Romeo’s self-indulgence. Your students will see this better if they cast a heartthrob as Paris
and give the part of Romeo to someone with some negative qualities. Benvolio and Mercutio
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should also be cast as unpleasant types, and if the Juliet is someone with an unsympathetic
side – snobbish, stubborn, moody – then right and wrong in the play will shift a bit and
allow your students to see more clearly the issues Shakespeare is raising about young love.
B. Compile a pop soundtrack
Prep: Prior intro

Homework: Compile music
Tech: Audio equipment
A week in advance, assign to each student the task of finding appropriate soundtrack music
for the opening or the closing of the twenty-one scenes (thus forty-two students can have
an assignment) and tell them to bring to class the title, the artist, a written version of the
pertinent lyrics, and up to but no more than a 20-second sample of the piece set to be
played and amplified on their device or a CD easily cued. Going through the scenes in
order, have each student introduce his or her piece, play it, and then briefly explain the
reasons for the choice. Before going on, have the class comment on the appropriateness of
that selection. When you have completed the play, have your students discuss which of the
songs to choose as the ‘play’s theme’. You may then, if you like, compile a playlist of your
class’s soundtrack for Romeo and Juliet and, if you’re tech savvy or have a volunteer who is,
make a mix.
A. Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech Act One, Scene Four, 53 (‘O, then’) to 96 (‘of
dreams’). Two speaking parts; later add in ‘Benvolio, with five or six other masquers’ and
two torchbearers. (Lone Ranger masks and something to represent torches.)
This odd moment in which Mercutio gives his theory of the origins of dreams has
become a famous set piece for actors. He is making fun of Romeo and people who take
dreams seriously, but the speech seems to run off the rails. What point is Shakespeare
trying to make about Mercutio’s character? and what is the point of having a character
like that in the play?
To get at these questions, do the scene in the first version with a Mercutio disgusted at
the silliness of dreamers and showing off his wit. In the second version, do it with a
Mercutio who was once like Romeo, who was hurt, and who gets out of control when he
deals with that side of himself.
Then, in the third version, to show your students the importance of context, put on
‘stage’ with Romeo and Mercutio a Benvolio and eight other students, two of whom are
holding some representation of torches, and repeat either of the two versions. Bring
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Romeo and Juliet
some simple Lone Ranger-type masks for all but the torchbearers to wear. Because they
have no lines and the added protection of masks, this is a good exercise to get shyer
students on your classroom stage. Instruct the other students to respond in non-vocal
ways to Mercutio’s oration. Remind the class and the torchbearers that no one in the
scene can see without torchlight and let the two torchbearers (who are lowly servants to
the rich young men) figure out where to cast their light.
How do the masks affect the scene? How do silent people in masks express reactions?
How does it change the scene to be reminded constantly by the torchbearers that it is
dark? How does the assembled piece speak to the play as a whole?
B. Romeo and Juliet’s sonnet plus Act One, Scene Five, 93 (‘If I’) to 110 (‘th’ book’).
Two speaking parts for un-bashful actors.
Review with your students the format of a sonnet and its rhyme scheme. Remind your
students that the sonnet was all the rage during the early 1590s and that many in
Shakespeare’s audience would have been as alert to the rules of a sonnet as we are to
those of a knock-knock joke. When the world’s two most famous lovers meet, they do the
occasion justice by addressing each other in sonnet form. Romeo starts with the first
quatrain; Juliet answers with a quatrain of her own; they share the next; and they split the
couplet – surely a match made in Parnassus.
The first version: To get at the basic sense of the moment, set the scene in the
ante-bellum South and have your actors do it in honey-sweet Southern accents; your
Juliet is coy (but not displeased), and your Romeo is all gentleman (and a bit frustrated).
When she says, ‘You kiss by the book,’ she means, ‘You kiss like someone who kisses
perfectly.’
The second version: For contrast, do the scene in a pub on a Saturday night. In this
version, the Juliet will be sexually more aggressive than the Romeo. When she says, ‘You
kiss by the book,’ she means, ‘You kiss like someone who’s learned his limp techniques
from books.’
The third version: Now revisit the meeting of Romeo and Juliet. When Romeo walks
up to Juliet and delivers a quatrain, it’s akin to a kid with a guitar at a party walking up to
a girl and showing off with a Jimi Hendrix riff. And when she replies with a quatrain of
her own and even picks up his rhyme, it’s as though she’s taken the guitar out of his hands
and come back at him with an even more complicated Hendrix riff. Or, to use an analogy
less handy to your students but one they should know, it’s as if Fred Astaire presents a
woman at a party with his most complicated piece of tap dancing, and discovers – when
she repeats his moves and adds to them – that she is Ginger Rogers.
Have your actors, as they play the scene, respond to one another’s verbal dexterity. Ask
them to figure out ways to make the competition between them clear. When are they
throwing down the gauntlet? When are they impressed? How do they both move things
along to the kiss? How many kisses are there? Two or three?
C. The Nurse’s advice to Juliet Act Three, Scene Five, 204 (‘O God!’) to 234 (‘wisely
done’). Two speaking parts.
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At this crucial moment in the play, the Nurse tells Juliet to forget Romeo and submit
to a marriage with Paris, and Juliet realizes she must face her future alone. In the first
version, the Nurse is a coarse buffoon who is okay with her marrying Paris because he’s
just as much of a hunk. Juliet in this version is shocked by the Nurse’s betrayal of Romeo,
and she makes her decision to stand alone with great sadness.
In the second version, the Nurse is an intelligent woman who understands that Juliet’s
marriage to Romeo is doomed and who gives her advice soberly and in the deep hope
that she might somehow save her beloved mistress. This Juliet, however, is both more
petulant and ironic than the first, and she makes up her mind to go it alone like a child
who is going to run away from home. Discuss discoveries and invite a third version.
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The Taming of the Shrew
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
Comments
Written early in Shakespeare’s career, perhaps as early as 1593, The Taming of the Shrew
has many of the classic farcical elements of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The
Comedy of Errors, but you can also see Shakespeare complicating plot and structure and
turning his attention to character and theme. Accordingly, the structure of The Taming of
the Shrew is episodic, with a prominent subplot (and a sub-subplot, if you count Sly), and
the play is peopled with more interesting and unpredictable characters. Petruchio’s
servant, Grumio, bears some likeness to classical tricky servants such as Launce and the
Dromios, but in his cranky-affectionate relationship with his master and his fellow
servants he is an original. On the stage Shrew is still one of Shakespeare’s most popular
works, but the feminist movement has made The Taming of the Shrew one of Shakespeare’s
most controversial plays. It’s a play I used to avoid teaching because I, like many, found
its sexual politics, expressed in Kate’s final speech, unpalatable.
It never made sense to me that the creator of Portia, Rosalind, Beatrice, and Cleopatra
would endorse gender politics so at odds with them. Finally, one year, when an expanded
Shakespeare curriculum at my university required me to teach the play, I found a key. It’s
the same one Shakespeare gave his audience: the Induction, that two-scene preface to the
play in which an English lord comes across Christopher Sly, a tinker, passed out in the
road, takes him home, bathes him, dresses him, and tries to persuade him that he is a lord
who has been out of his mind for fifteen years. This odd introduction is odder still
because once Sly has watched two scenes of the play he disappears wholly from the work.
The inescapable question is, ‘What do these two scenes about a practical joke on a
drunken Englishman have to do with the ensuing story of Kate and Petruchio?’ The
connection is that in both stories the following happens: (1) The power structures of
society (in the Induction, the English aristocracy; in Shrew proper, the patriarchy)
contrive to persuade an unruly person without authority to accept a reality at odds with
his or her own. (2) By appearing to submit to that reality, both ‘victims’ secure food,
clothing, shelter, sex, and social status (for Sly, the wealth, wife, and position of a lord; for
Kate, the material, sexual, and social benefits of being Petruchio’s wife). (3) Although
both characters give a speech (Sly’s ‘I am a lord indeed’ [Induction.2.72]; Kate’s ‘place
your hands below your husband’s foot’ [5.2.178]) that appears to accept the world-view
imposed on them, neither the community in the play nor the audience can ever know for
certain whether the subject has given a truthful speech or is getting the last laugh.
At the heart of that last possibility is the sanctity of the private self, the self that can
say one thing and mean another, and what makes Shrew work so well for me now is that
Petruchio, the supposed tool of a paternalistic society, is also the high priest of the private
self and, by extension, of the privacy of married love.
I think Petruchio needs a new PR firm. After centuries of being depicted as a bully –
with a whip on book covers, spanking Kate in posters for Kiss Me Kate – he needs
someone to remind us that nowhere in the text does Petruchio ever hit anyone. True, in
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a comic quarrel with his ‘ancient, trusty, pleasant servant’ (1.2.46), ‘[he] wrings [Grumio]
by the ears’ – a distinctly comic ‘Three Stooges’ stage business. And true as well that when
Kate hits Petruchio at their first encounter, he says, ‘I swear I’ll cuff you if you strike again’
(2.1.219), but she takes his warning to heart, and the subject does not come up again.
Like Hal, Hamlet, Rosalind, and Edmund, Petruchio is a theatrical improviser whose
basic strategy in ‘taming’ Kate and in ensuring his individuality (and hers) is to make-believe,
to say the thing that is not – in short, to employ Shakespeare’s own profession of making
things up and acting as if they were true. He reveals precisely this approach to the audience
about his dealings with Kate – ‘If she do bid me pack, I’ll give her thanks / as though she bid
me stay a week’ (2.1.178–9). He inverts reality for everyone around her: he claims she and he
have agreed to be married the next Sunday, that she hung about his neck and kissed him; on
his wedding day, he pretends a private reason for his outrageous dress; he assures Baptista
and the wedding guests that his business will not let him stay for the feast, and he pretends
that he is rescuing her from an assault by them when he abducts her from the festivities.
When he is not simply lying to them, he is telling them to mind their own business:
If she and I be pleased, what’s that to you?

(2.1.297)
. . . what a fool am I to chat with you
when I should bid good morrow to my bride.
(3.2.121–2)
Be mad or merry or go hang yourselves.
(3.2.225)
The contempt Petruchio has for Kate’s status-conscious and paternalistic society is a
much-overlooked point of the play. They see him as a shrew tamer (and he encourages
this, giving his line, ‘For I am he am born to tame you, Kate’ [2.1.270] after Baptista and
the other suitors are in earshot), when he is in fact demonstrating to her a tool for
preserving her individuality in a world of Baptistas, Biancas, and Gremios. Before
Petruchio, Kate seems to have fought for her integrity by playing exactly the role of shrew
they cast her in, but Petruchio shows her how easy – and profitable – it is to make up
other realities. He demonstrates his own contempt for appearance by his attitude to dress
– his bizarre wedding outfit (‘to me she’s married, not unto my clothes’ [3.2.117]), the
soiling of her wedding clothes, his destruction of the dress for her sister’s wedding (‘’tis
the mind that makes the body rich’ [4.3.170]) – and he teaches her from the moment
they meet (‘hearing thy mildness praised in every town’ [2.1.192]) that one’s speech and
reality need not be connected.
This lesson gets more and more outrageous. He tells her it is seven in the morning,
when she knows it is two in the afternoon. Next, he tells her that the sun that shines
incontrovertibly above them is the moon and insists she agree to that proposition. The
crux of the lesson is not that she must believe that the sun is the moon, not even that he
believes that the sun is the moon; the crux of his lesson is that she is free to say what she
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likes and enjoy doing it. And she takes the lesson to heart. When he next tells her to greet
as a young woman an old man, she goes him one better and plays the game more skillfully
than he: ‘Young budding virgin,’ she begins, and concludes with congratulations for ‘the
man whom favourable stars / allots thee for his lovely bedfellow’ (4.5.36, 39–40).
The example of Sly in the Induction, Petruchio’s own example, and his lessons about
make-believe are the context in which Kate gives that final troublesome speech. We
cannot know whether or not she believes what she says (or whether Sly believes he is a
lord); only she knows, and that may be the point. The play is not about man against
woman, but about the individual against society, about the final inviolability of self.
When Petruchio and Kate go offstage ‘to bed’, they leave behind a bewildered Padua.
Though Hortensio invokes the play’s title to draw the play to an easy conclusion when he
says that Petruchio ‘hast tamed a curst shrew’, Shakespeare does not let him have the last
word, but instead has Lucentio – the young man who came to Padua to learn something
– make the much more ambiguous observation that ‘’Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will
be tamèd so’ (5.2.190).
In challenging a literal reading of the title, Lucentio’s lines suggest that we ought to
resist too simple a reading of the play.
Ploys
A. Decide what to do with Sly
Prep: Discussion to determine scene selections

Volunteers: Sly, others based on discussion
At the end of the Induction, Sly and the Page, dressed as a woman, sit and watch as the
play proper begins. After the first scene, Sly, who has to be wakened out of a snooze,
expresses some impatience with the show (‘would it were done’) and has no more lines in
the play. A few productions leave him to watch the entire show; most, making efficient use
of the acting personnel, find a way to get him and the Page back into the play as different
characters. Your students will enjoy a discussion of this production problem. Start with
the hypothesis that he remains a spectator. Where would he sit? How would the production
deal with his silence? Is he asleep for the entire show? Does he interact with the ‘real’
audience?
Now move to the idea that he stops spectating, and the actor playing his part comes
on as another character. How do you get rid of him? Does he just quietly leave? What
pretext could there be for his leaving (with the Page) without a word? What part(s) might
the actor playing Sly take when he returns to the stage? Why that (those) particular
part(s)? Try each of these versions out in front of the class.
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B. Work Gremio’s description of the ‘wedding’
Scripts: TS 3.2; 5.1

Prep: Finding props
Players: 5+
Props: book, cups
Shakespeare does not stage the wedding ceremony of Petruchio and Kate but has Gremio,
a nasty old man, give a 25-line description of it to Tranio. Discuss what the actor playing
Gremio should do to make the speech interesting and in character. Try out your class’s
suggestions.
Next, while your Gremio speaks his lines, have other students follow the stage
directions provided by Gremio’s speech. You can use as few as four – Kate, Petruchio, the
Priest, and the sexton – but you can also add in all the other characters who would have
been at the wedding. Also provide the props that the text mentions, a Bible and a wine
glass (which, for hilarity’s sake you might put water in as the sops that Petruchio tosses
at the sexton). How does each of them react to Petruchio’s antics during the scene?
Now consider the end of Act Five, Scene One, where Petruchio says, ‘kiss me, Kate’
(135). In how many ways is this kiss different from the one Gremio describes? Why does
Shakespeare stage this second kiss in ‘the street’? Why does he stage it at all?
A. Grumio and Curtis Act Four, Scene One, 1 (‘Fie, fie’) to 79 (‘comes home’). Two
speaking parts.
Explore the reasons for this interlude in which Shakespeare gives the stage over to
these servants of Petruchio’s: in the first version, use a grouchy Grumio and a frightened
Curtis, then, in the second version, use a gruff, warm-hearted Grumio and a Curtis who
loves to give him grief. How do they feel about Petruchio? Are their feelings the same or
different from the first version? What does the scene say about the servants in Petruchio’s
household?
B. The speech Act Five, Scene Two, 137 (‘Fie, fie’) to 181 (‘me, Kate’). Two speaking
parts.
The biggest hurdle for any Kate is this final speech. The first time I did this exercise in
class was a revelation, so much so that it led me to direct a complete production of the
play and from there into one misadventure after another.
I had my volunteer actress, Elena Rimson, work on the speech two ways. In the first
reading she did the speech seriously without reference at all to Kate’s character earlier in
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the play, as though she were the most fervent adherent of a patriarchal faith – a
fundamentalist Christian, Muslim, or Jew. The effect was chilling. And disturbing,
because it made no sense at all in terms of Petruchio’s interest in Kate. From his first
altercation with Grumio, he is clearly a man who enjoys a good fight, and after the
ferocity of their first encounter, he calls their battle a ‘chat’ and tells Kate that he is ‘a
husband for your turn’. For such a man, the submissive fawning of a wife who follows the
precepts of Kate’s speech would be death by boredom.
Her second reading was a Kate who did not believe a word of her speech. Her message
to Bianca and the Widow was ‘wink, wink, nudge, nudge: don’t believe a word of this’.
Such a reading shows a Katherine who has simply assumed Bianca’s methods of dealing
with men: flatter them by pretending to love and obey them. Kate quite clearly despises
this approach, and her feeling of superiority at the end of the play makes no sense at all
if we assume she has simply ‘bought’ the Bianca world-view.
My class discussed the way both versions of the speech seemed at odds with the rest
of the play. The solution must lie outside a ‘true or false’ approach. But where? Finally, the
class decided that the question the actress has to ask herself is not how she feels about her
speech, but how she feels about her husband. That led to the third reading and the idea
that Petruchio had taught Kate the fun and profit of performance and she’s using it, while
he looks on in amazement.
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THE TEMPEST
Comments
The Tempest was not the last play Shakespeare had anything to do with – he would later
collaborate with John Fletcher on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen – but it is his
last solo effort and, as such, it gives his career a storybook finish. More than any of his
other plays, The Tempest seems to be a personal statement, and it’s tempting to think that
Prospero the magician saying goodbye to his magic and his island is really Shakespeare
the playwright saying goodbye to his profession and the stage. This essay succumbs
entirely to that temptation.
The Tempest makes a satisfying final play for reasons beyond its autobiographical
qualities. For one thing, the main business of the play resolves matters that have many of
the tragic overtones of earlier plays. Prospero pretends the sort of opposition to Miranda
and Ferdinand’s love that we saw in Romeo and Juliet, he confronts a usurping brother
like Claudius in Hamlet, and, above all, his relationship with Miranda seems an echo of
Lear and Cordelia. Like Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony, Shakespeare seems to be
tying up loose ends and doing so in a work that affirms life.
The accepted view is that The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s masterpieces. The
twentieth-century literary critic Northrop Frye calls The Tempest ‘an inexhaustibly
profound drama’.32 ‘Profound’ – yes; ‘drama’ – not so much. I have seen some thirty
productions of The Tempest (not including film versions) and directed the play (2002),
and I am convinced that the work, however beautiful and profound, is not particularly
good drama. In fact, in some ways The Tempest is a bad play, and that is precisely
Shakespeare’s point. I suggest – nearly seriously – that he wanted his final work to be a
bad play. To understand why, we need to look closely at what the play means.
Near the end of King Lear, when Edmund holds Lear and Cordelia prisoner, Lear tries
to console his daughter by sharing with her every father’s fantasy:
Come, let’s away to prison.

We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
and ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
at gilded butterflies . . .
and we’ll wear out,
in a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones
that ebb and flow by th’ moon.
(5.3.8–19)
32
In his introduction to the play in the Pelican edition of the Complete Works (1969), page 1372.
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The Tempest
That’s a pretty good description of the status quo for Prospero and Miranda when The
Tempest begins. Prospero has found the perfect ‘cage’ for himself and his daughter,
a haven from the ups and downs of outrageous fortune, a place where they can ‘laugh
at gilded butterflies’, an island where he can rule the very weather. What father would
want to remove his daughter from such a safe place and subject her to the vagaries of
real life?
The answer this play gives is a good father, a wise father, an unselfish father. For
himself and for his daughter, Prospero chooses humanity and all that comes with it – joy,
love, laughter, and success, but also pain, failure, sickness, and death. In The Last
Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis suggests that the one thing that could come
closest to tempting Jesus from his divinity was the beauty and wonder of living a human
life. That is Prospero’s gift to Miranda.
This choice of life over a magical paradise makes The Tempest an extraordinary
affirmation. If we are to equate Prospero leaving his island with Shakespeare leaving the
stage, then we the audience are his Miranda being returned to the real world. So
Shakespeare’s task is to write a play that shows us the delights of the island even as it
shows us why we shouldn’t want to stay there. Shakespeare does that by having Prospero,
the playwright figure, preside over a play that keeps falling short as drama.
He starts, however, with real-world turmoil. What an opening! ‘A tempestuous noise of
thunder and lightning heard’, and immediately the stage is a ship in a storm and the
Shipmaster and the blunt-speaking Boatswain are trying to save the ship and keep the
royal passengers on board out of their way – ‘Keep your cabins; you do assist the storm’
(14). The scene has a triple conflict (the sea versus man, sailors versus aristocrats, and
Gonzalo trying to keep peace), it has danger (‘we split, we split, we split’ [62]), it has
philosophy (‘What care these roarers for the name of king?’ [16–17]), it has humour (‘if
you can command these elements to silence . . . use your authority . . .’ [21–3]), it has
pathos (‘Farewell, my wife and children’ [61]), and it has all sorts of sound effects and
action. Thus, Miranda speaks for the audience when she appears in the second scene and
says, ‘O, I have sufferèd with those that I saw suffer!’ (5–6).
Forget about it. Prospero tells her (and us) that ‘there’s no harm done’ and that he
has ‘safely ordered’ the ‘direful spectacle’. What we have just seen was merely his
magical art and all is in his control. The good news is that the people that we liked in
the first scene are not dead; the bad news is that on some fundamental level the play
is dead – precisely because the master magician is entirely in charge of the outcome.
And this master magician can be tiresome. His exposition to Miranda of their past
history is so laborious that three times Prospero fears he’s lost his daughter’s attention
(much less ours): ‘Dost thou attend me?’ (78); ‘Thou attend’st not?’ (87); ‘Dost thou
hear?’ (106).
And, again, we cannot miss the connection between the art and the artist – between
Prospero’s long, self-promoting, and sometimes defensive narrative and Shakespeare’s
use of that narrative as exposition – a lazy device for which Will would get an F grade in
any self-respecting playwriting course. He did the same thing with The Comedy of Errors,
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but that was at the beginning of his career and, besides, Egeon’s story is so preposterous
and so clearly calculated to set up the rest of the play that we find a kind of authorial
mischief in it. In The Tempest Shakespeare’s mischief is subtler, more subversive, and less
entertaining, but in the service of a larger scheme.
I’m not going to deny that there are some wonderful things in The Tempest, but I am
arguing that Shakespeare undercuts those wonderful things with the play’s overall
premise: that everyone, every thing, and every event is subject to Prospero the master
magician (in exactly the way that the play itself is subject to the playwright). Ariel and
Caliban are fabulous inventions and interesting when they fight against Prospero’s
control; but the audience is never in doubt about the odds against them. Miranda is
charming and Ferdinand endearing in an addled sort of way, but the young lovers in this
play are puppets to Prospero, who, when he sees them falling for one another, tells us that
‘It goes on, I see / as my soul prompts it’ (1.2.420–1).
The one action Prospero seems slightly unaware of is the conspiracy of Caliban and
the two clowns, but no audience would ever expect success for this insurgency. Even
savage, uncouth Caliban soon finds that his human recruits are not up to the challenge.
For Prospero, the Caliban uprising is merely a slight annoyance, and he has all the
important matters – the marriage of his daughter to the Prince of Naples and the capture
and disposition of his brother and his other enemies – well in hand from start to finish.
There are no odds against Prospero
Then there’s the masque in Act Four.
Masques were elaborate court entertainments – part verse, part song, part music, and
part dance – that generally dealt with supernatural and allegorical figures and were
staged in honour of some great personage or on an occasion involving great personages.
These shows were high on production values and low on dramatic content. James I loved
masques; they were his favourite entertainment. So when he came to the throne in 1603,
masques with their mythological personages, elaborate costumes, painted sets, and
moving contraptions became the rage.
As for Shakespeare, he had always written for the ear first and the eye second. His was
a theatre of words and imagination; while masques, with their emphasis on spectacle and
special effects, were a theatre of illusion. In some way, then, the rise of the masque meant
the fall of Shakespeare’s star. You can see him trying to keep up with the changing times.
He put the witches in Macbeth and wrote in a procession of kings to flatter James I. He
puts a dance of Amazons in Timon. He gives Pericles a ‘triumph’, a kind of parade of
knights, and he gives The Winter’s Tale its sheep-shearing scene with ‘a dance of Shepherds
and Shepherdesses.’ Here he creates his first masque.
Blah. As I’ve said, I’ve seen twenty productions of this play, and I’ve yet to see a
production where I wasn’t eager for the masque to end. Shakespeare indicates a similar
attitude through one little stage direction at the end of the masque in The Tempest:
Enter certain Reapers, properly habited: they join with the Nymphs in a graceful
dance, towards the end whereof Prospero starts suddenly, and speaks . . .
(4.1.138)
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The Tempest
‘Prospero starts suddenly’ – why? I am suggesting that it’s because Shakespeare, in a

comment on masques, has had him fall asleep at his own show. Then Prospero shoos
away the actors in the ‘baseless fabric of this vision’, forgives his enemies, and asks the
audience to help him leave his island.
The real drama in this play is Prospero’s coming to terms with taking his last bow. It’s
Shakespeare’s as well.
Listen to the Epilogue at the end of the play. Hear in it Shakespeare’s walking away
from his great and easy gift of making plays. Hear him complain of being trapped. Hear
him ask the audience for applause one last time. Hear him also pray indulgence for his
‘faults’ and wonder with me – with anyone immersed in his plays – what he possibly
could have meant by ‘crimes’.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,

let your indulgence set me free.
(Epilogue 19–20)
Ploys
A. Create a class Caliban
Scripts: Tem 1.2, 2.2, 3.2, 4.1, 5.1

Prep: Prior intro, in-class prep time
Players: 4
Groups: 4 teams of 5–8 each
Equipment: 4 screens, camera (optional)
Caliban is one of Shakespeare’s most curious creations. He’s a monster, he’s a victim, he’s
a dreamer, he’s a servant, he’s a rebel. If you know The Tempest and go to see a production,
one of the things you’re most interested to see is how the show represents Caliban. This
ploy puts that decision in your students’ hands.
Set-up
1. Tell the class that you want to have a class Caliban and that the team that creates
the most popular Caliban will get extra credit or whatever other bribe (a prize,
an exemption from a quiz or paper) you can come up with. You will need four
teams, and each team should have
a. an actor to ‘play’ Caliban
b. at least one costumer
c. at least one make-up person
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d. at least one producer to organize things

e. and at least one dramaturge to find textual support for the team’s choices.
2. Give the teams twenty minutes of class time to decide on who will play Caliban
(which is to remain a secret from the rest of the class), to assign the other jobs,
and to organize how they will proceed.
3. Set the contest day for about a week later.
In class
1. On the day itself, each team is to bring whatever costume pieces and make-up,
they need in a carry-on size suitcase, and each Caliban is to come incognito in
regular school garb.
2. Prior to class have each corner of your room screened or curtained off (sheets will
work well). Tell the teams to go behind the screens, and give them five minutes to
prepare their Calibans. When the time is up, have all the students except the
Calibans (who remain hidden behind the screens) return to their seats.
3. Draw straws and have the first Caliban come out and move around the room.
4. Wait for the uproar to die down, and then have the team dramaturge(s) join the
Caliban and read the passages from the text that inspired the choices – from
casting to movement to costuming to make-up.
5. Repeat with each of the Calibans and their dramaturges.
6. Making clear that students cannot vote for their own Caliban, have the class vote
for the winner.
Later, you can lead a discussion about the process of creating a Caliban. You’ll find
that your students are now experts on that subject, and – because you made them base
their choices on the text – they will also feel comfortable talking about the play.
Remember to photograph the scene and display photos of your four Calibans in your
classroom or post to Facebook.
B. The Tempest soundtrack
Prep: Prior intro, list of themes

Homework: Compile music
Tech: Audio equipment
Caliban says, ‘the isle is full of noises, / sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt
not.’ Challenge your students to create a soundtrack for The Tempest.
This is a graded assignment.
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The Tempest
Set-up
1. The entire soundtrack cannot exceed sixty seconds.
2. The soundtrack must create sounds or music for each of the following and in
this order: a) Storm; b) Miranda; c) Prospero; d) Ariel; e) Caliban; f) Falling in
love; g) Planning murder; h) Getting drunk; i) Dancing; j) Caliban/Ariel/
Prospero (some mix of c, d, and e above); k) Harmonious farewell.
3. Make clear that students can use any kind of sound or music or snatch of song,
as long as they keep to the order above.
In class
1. On the day, have two speakers ready.
2. Bring up the first two students with their soundtracks to each of the two
speakers. Have them cue their soundtracks at their respective speakers.
3. Appoint yourself timekeeper and tell your students that any soundtrack
exceeding sixty seconds is disqualified.
4. Assign a strict order to presentation, so each student knows when he or she is to
come up.
5. After the first student has played the first soundtrack and the applause is over,
that student should sit down and a third student should come up and be cuing
his or her soundtrack while the second soundtrack is being played. As soon as
the second one is finished, the third one commences, while a fourth student is
cuing the fourth soundtrack, and so on.
If things run smoothly, you will be able to play all of the soundtracks, and after about
five of them, your students will begin to relate the sounds they hear in each soundtrack
to the strict order of themes. If you want to make absolutely certain that they get what
their fellow students are trying to do, you can have the student who is playing his or
her soundtrack simply announce each section as it begins: ‘Storm . . . Miranda . . .
Prospero . . . Ariel’, etc.
A. Miranda and Ferdinand meet and fall in love Act One, Scene Two, 406 (‘This
ditty does’) to 460 (‘to dwell with’t’), but leave out Prospero’s asides. Three speaking
parts.
Leaving aside goddesses, The Tempest has only one woman character, and through
that one woman Shakespeare gives us a final look at the subject of fathers and daughters
as well as his last take on young love. Use this passage to explore at least two quite
different takes on the character of Miranda. As much as possible, try to have Prospero
and Ferdinand maintain the same characters.
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In both versions Prospero is stern (without the asides, the actor can hardly help it), and
Ferdinand is a slightly arrogant young man who falls addle-patedly in love at the first sight
of Miranda. In the first version, Miranda is demure, even shy, and obedient to, even afraid of,
her father, and no lust at all intermingles with the feelings of love she suddenly has for
Ferdinand. In the second version, Miranda is bold and saucy and unintimidated by, or even
impudent to, her father. Not only is she aware of her sexual feelings, but she also enjoys them.
Which of these versions works better to delineate the relationship between Miranda
and her father? As usual, make your students adduce evidence from the text. Which of
these versions is funnier? Why? Is there another way to think about Miranda? If your
students think so, stage it.
B. Ariel teaches Prospero humanity Act Five, Scene One, 1 (‘Now does my project’)
to 28 (‘than in vengeance’). Two speaking parts, but three actors, a male to play Prospero
and both a male and a female to play Ariel. One ‘Ariel’ costume piece.
We know that a male actor first played Ariel because males played all the parts, but the
text gives only one clue that Shakespeare intended the character to be male. The stage
direction in Act Three, Scene Three, reads, ‘Enter Ariel, like a harpy, claps his wings upon
the table, and with a quaint device the banquet vanishes.’ That one hint – and, after all,
Shakespeare could have meant that the harpy Ariel plays is male33 – has not prevented a
tradition of female Ariels. This alternative reading gives your students an opportunity to
consider what we gain and what we lose with each choice.
In the first version, give the costume piece to the female actor and have her play Ariel.
Then have your students discuss how that seemed appropriate or not to the text.
In the second version, give the costume piece to your male actor and have him play
Ariel. Discuss the differences with your students.
Ask those who prefer the female Ariel what assumptions they are making about the
character that makes a female a better choice. Ask the same of those who prefer the male.
Then asks what assumptions about gender underlie those preferences. As usual, make
sure your students argue by citing the text.
33
Or maybe Shakespeare didn’t write the stage direction.
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Timon of Athens
TIMON OF ATHENS
Comments
Timon of Athens nearly wasn’t included in the Folio, perhaps because a substantial
portion is not by Shakespeare. (Thomas Middleton contributed about a third of the play.)
And perhaps because, like Troilus and Cressida, it may never have been performed. But
Timon of Athens is a ferocious work – an example of an artist’s flawed work that is more
interesting than some of his more successful ones.
Because it seems the artist was obsessed more with the idea of his work than with a
finished product, Timon reminds me of one of Michelangelo’s unfinished ‘Slaves’ in
Florence’s Accademia. In that unfinished, unpolished piece we can see the artist at work,
pushing against the limitations of his medium, aware – maybe even delighted – that what
he is doing is valuable only to him. Similarly, we can envision Shakespeare scorning, as
Timon does, the way the world will receive what he has done.
Both Timon’s design and its themes are obvious. The play is a two-part essay on man’s
ingratitude and greed for wealth. ‘Money is the root of all evil’ is literalized when Timon,
digging for roots to eat, finds gold instead. The narrative is blatantly schematic. In Part
One, the thesis, we see Timon the philanthropist – the lover of mankind – who lives in a
mansion in Athens and gives banquets and gifts to friends and to acquaintances without
restraint. Alerted by his steward, Flavius, to his depleted fortune, he is confident that
those he has helped will, in their gratitude, now help him. They do not. And that gives us
Part Two, the antithesis, Timon the misanthrope – the hater of mankind – who goes into
the wilderness, lives in a cave, and heaps abuse on friends and acquaintances. Then he
dies. Offstage. Play over. The slight pretence of a subplot, in which Alcibiades is banished
for arguing against the death penalty the senators imposed on a soldier, wouldn’t get a
C grade in a playwriting course.
The second part of the play, Timon in the wilderness, seems even more a sketch than
the first. From the beginning of Act Four, Scene Three – ‘Enter Timon in the woods’ – for
850 lines (half the length of Comedy of Errors) through to the end of the next scene, the
imagined locale of the play does not move from that single spot. A few commentators
suggest that Timon’s cave could have been a structure brought onstage for that purpose,
but the most obvious solution is also the most powerful: Timon’s cave and the place he
‘digs’ for roots and finds gold is inside the stage trap. Nothing else is onstage – simplicity,
simplicity, simplicity for this grumpiest of Thoreaus.
Surrounded by a bare stage, he and his anger live in a hole, where they seem to create
a vacuum that draws to him the world and the characters he means to escape, the good
– his real friends, Alcibiades and Apemantus, and his loyal steward Flavius – and the bad
– his false friends, the Poet and the Painter who opened the play, the senators, and the
three ‘Banditi’. In the second half this bare stage, void entirely of the props and furniture
that filled the scene in the first half, provides a perfect mirror in which it is easy to see
that the one constant magnetic force in the world of this play is gold.
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One of the unfinished things about this play/essay/experiment is that Timon’s death
occurs offstage, though he points to his death in a way that raises our expectations of
seeing him die. We hear him speak twice of his epitaph and of his last will and testament,
but his last half line – ‘Timon hath done his reign’ – amounts to ‘Timon out’. He exits and
the audience is left to wonder how he will die and expects to see or at least hear of the
concluding moment of the title character. But the play confounds that expectation. This
exit is the last we see of Timon and no one describes his death. Once again, satisfying an
audience does not appear to have been the purpose or even a consideration of this work.
In philosophical terms, Timon, by just disappearing from the play, achieves the perfect
death, consistent with his nihilist vision.
As to Shakespeare’s talent for creating realistic characters, Timon excepted, all the
other characters in the play are lightly chiselled types. Apemantus is The Cynic and as
much a ‘humour’ character as any of Ben Jonson’s characters; he is in the play to be a
cynical foil to Timon in the first half, and ‘told-you-so’ in the second. Alcibiades is The
Virtuous Public Man; Flavius is the Loyal Selfless Servant. Ventidius, Lucullus, Lucius,
and Sempronius are the Flatterers and False Friends; each reacts according to that type
in precisely predictable ways. Poet, Painter, Jeweller, and Merchant don’t have names, just
professions; and the three Thieves and three Strangers get only numbers. Timon is not a
one-man play, but someone ought to try doing a two-handed version in which one actor
plays Timon and another plays all the rest.
So that leaves Timon, the one character in the play who seems more than an idea. In
fact, he represents two ideas: The Philanthropist in the first half of the play and The
Misanthrope in the second half. When we meet him in Act One, he is hosting a banquet
for his friends with words like these:
We are born to do benefits: and what better or

properer can we call our own than the riches of our
friends? O, what a precious comfort ‘tis, to have
so many, like brothers, commanding one another’s
fortunes!
(1.2.102–6)
But his tone about those friends at the second banquet in Act Three changes to this:
Live loathed and long,

most smiling, smooth, detested parasites,
courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears,
you fools of fortune, trencher-friends, time’s flies,
cap and knee slaves, vapours, and minute-jacks!
(3.6.90–4)
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Nor does Shakespeare try to reconcile these two polar extremes by staging the transition
from one to the other. At the end of Act Two he still holds to his belief in his friends,
exiting with this couplet to his servants
Ne’er speak, or think,

that Timon’s fortunes ‘mong his friends can sink.
(2.2.235–6)
And the next time he appears – 200 lines (10 minutes) later – he is furious
What, are my doors opposed against my passage?

Have I been ever free, and must my house
be my retentive enemy, my gaol?
(3.4.79–81)
I suggest that what makes Timon so real to us is that the gulf between his two extremes
is so wide and the transition between them so absent that the gap draws us in and we fill
it with what we know of our own hearts, the mixture we are of both good and ill will.
I’ll end my essay on Shakespeare’s essay with three prayers. The first of those is
Apemantus’s prayer before Timon’s lavish first banquet. Apemantus himself announces it
as ‘Apemantus’ Grace’:
Immortal gods, I crave no pelf;

I pray for no man but myself.
Grant I may never prove so fond,
to trust man on his oath or bond;
or a harlot, for her weeping;
or a dog, that seems a-sleeping:
or a keeper with my freedom;
or my friends, if I should need ‘em.
Amen.
(1.2.63–71)
The sing-song iambic tetrameter doubles the satiric effect: not only does the verse mock
the banquet and the banqueters, it also mocks prayer. In fact, that is the transgression
that makes the moment riveting – prayer as satire.
Then a second prayer is when Timon appears to lead grace before his mock banquet
and before any of his guests know that the banquet is a sham. It begins innocently enough
with, ‘The gods require our thanks’ (3.6.67–8). The next sentence is also appropriate to a
prayer: ‘You great benefactors, sprinkle our society with thankfulness’ (69–70). The first
hint of cynicism comes two lines later – ‘For your own gifts, make yourselves praised: but
reserve still to give, lest your deities be despised’ (70–2) – raising the idea of ingratitude
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in others. But it settles back into a seeming piety for two lines before Timon clearly
unleashes his prayer-lampoon:
Make the meat be beloved more than the man

that gives it. Let no assembly of twenty be without
a score of villains: if there sit twelve women at
the table, let a dozen of them be – as they are . . .
For these my present friends, as they are to me
nothing, so in nothing bless them, and to nothing
are they welcome.
(74–82)
The third surprising moment of ‘prayer’ does not reveal itself as such until the final
word. That is Timon’s 40-line jeremiad outside the walls of Athens (4.1, see Ploy A), when
he calls down every kind of societal decay on the city before stripping himself like Lear
– ‘Nothing I’ll bear from thee / but nakedness, thou detestable town’ – and asking in his
final couplet that ‘his hate may grow/ to the whole race of mankind, high and low.’ That
rhymed couplet would normally cue Timon’s exit, but he hesitates, perhaps starting to
exit and then turning back, adds one word: ‘Amen.’
In so doing, he turns the vision of a hellish world that he has wished on Athens into a
prayer. By attaching to this catalogue of curses that one word, he tricks the listener into
thinking about divinity, and once again the effect is double-edged because a prayer to
such an end calls religion itself into question. The kind of question we inevitably
encounter when we look deeply into the meaning of our lives on this earth, the kind of
question that can obsess an artist interested in more than a work’s critical reception, and
the kind of question that the artist might refashion when he sculpts King Lear.
Ploys
A. Find and rank the fifteen curses in Timon’s speech in 4.1
Scripts: Tim 4.1

Prep: Handouts
Homework: Paraphrased curses (optional)
Act Four, Scene One of the play is a single speech of Timon – exiling himself from
Athens – in which he wishes a multitude of evils on the city through a series of
apostrophes – addresses to absent people, objects, and concepts. As befits Timon’s
deranged misanthropy, the language of this speech is twisted and complex, and, in
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addressing thirty-four entities – from the wall surrounding Athens to breath of each
Athenian – he calls for fifteen negative outcomes. This ploy asks your students to sort out
the fifteen curses, to put them into their own language, and to rank them in increasing
order of terribleness.
What makes this assignment difficult – and worthwhile – is that he often expresses his
thoughts in contorted syntax that makes it hard to distinguish who or what is being
addressed and to what end.
Some thoughts are simple. For example, in ‘Matrons, turn incontinent’ Timon
addresses ‘matrons’ (older married women) and asks that they become ‘incontinent’,
either lose control of their sexual desires or of their bodily functions. So reasonable
translations would either be ‘Married women, be unfaithful to your husbands’ or ‘Old
ladies, poop in your pants.’ The curse on Athens, in this case, is a world in which mature
women lose control of their private parts.
Some are challenging. For example: in ‘To general filths / convert o’ the instant, green
virginity, do’t in your parents’ eyes!’ Timon is addressing the chastity of daughters (‘green
virginity’) and asking that it transform to overall nastiness and that they have sex in front
of their parents. A translation might be, ‘Young girls, get dirty and screw in front of Mum
and Dad.’ The curse on Athens, here, is to become a city in which daughters care so little
for their parents that they make them watch as they have sexual intercourse.
Set-up
1. Hand out a copy of Timon’s speech, double-spaced to give them working
room. You can tell them to concentrate on the first 31 lines (through
‘merely poison’), but you might want later to discuss the question of whether or
not Timon takes off his clothes and whether there is any other nakedness in
Shakespeare.
2. Explain to the students that they are to identify Timon’s fifteen ‘curses’ on Athens
and paraphrase each.
3. In class, ask someone to identify Timon’s first curse – telling the wall of Athens
to sink and leave the city unprotected from wolves. Have them read aloud
Shakespeare’s words. Then have someone read the second and so on.
4. Next, ask for paraphrases of each. I’d choose students rather than wait for
volunteers; be assured that others will want to read theirs.
5. Discuss the phrasing of a number of paraphrases. Are they accurate? Funny?
Gross?
6. Write the fifteen paraphrases on the board.
The objective of this ploy is an appreciation of how Shakespeare puts into words the
misanthrope’s anger at the world, how he varies it, and how he uses it to surprise and
shock us; but beyond that, you can use it to give your students a sense of how Shakespeare
sees civilization. To help make that happen, have your students rank the curses from least
to most terrible. Have them say why. Ask why they think Timon chose each. How does a
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curse relate to the good or bad of a society? What do they think of the order in which
Timon gives them? Is there any logic to it? Does his language change as he goes along? If
so, how?
B. Serving up a Timon banquet
Prep: Prior intro; placards with line 85

Homework: Find inedible ’dish’
Props: 2 bar tables, 2 screens or curtains, 2 salvers or covered trays, 2 placards
Volunteer: Timer
In Act Three, Scene Six, Timon has a banquet for his ungrateful ‘friends’, and, when they
are all anticipating what delicious meal they will get to have, he uncovers a dish to reveal
. . . warm water. This ploy asks your students to think of some other dish that would be as
disappointing. You will need the following: two bar tables or other high stands, two
covered trays, two folding screens or a curtain large enough for a student to go behind.
Set-up
Tell your students each to bring with them to class, concealed in a bag, a surprise ‘dish’ for
a Timon-style banquet. That ‘dish’ should be something of their choice that is inedible or
horribly unappealing (fishing lures, a mound of cotton balls, a bowl of nails). The point
is for them to bring something that would tell guests how unwanted they are and, of
course, provide the class with a laugh.
In class
1. Have two students come up, give them each a covered tray and have them go
behind the separate screens and secretly place their ‘dish’ on the covered tray.
2. As soon as the students are ready, they should come out from behind the screen,
place the covered ‘dish’ on the table where everyone in class can see them and
then, while reciting in unison these words of Timon (you can have them on a
placard on the table or stand) – ‘May you a better feast never behold, / you knot
of mouth-friends!’ – cover their insulting dishes.
3. Have a volunteer timer. Each set of competitors will have a total of one minute
to get up, go behind the screen, prepare the ‘dish’ on the salver or tray, speak the
speech to the class, and reveal to one another their dish.
4. After the ‘reveal’ and the recitation, you name whatever was on each dish and the
class ‘votes for’ the winner by responding with a ‘yuk!’ The louder ‘yuk!’ wins the
‘dish off ’.
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Timon of Athens
No discussion of this silly exercise is required. Its aim is merely to engage your
students by making a game of Timon’s angry prank.
A. Flavius giving Timon the bad news Act Two, Scene Two, 129 (‘You make me
marvel’) to 190 (‘Servilius’). Two speaking parts.
One of the few affirming things in this play is the fidelity to Timon of his faithful
steward, Flavius. In this scene, Flavius, who has been trying unsuccessfully to warn
Timon about his profligate generosity, does not sugar coat the news.
In the first version Flavius carefully maintains his lower status and couches all the
news and all the criticism in gentlest reproach. Timon is disbelieving, dismissive, and
annoyed; he’s completely confident that everything will come out well.
In the second version, Flavius, at ‘O, my good lord’ (137) begins to abandon the lower
status of a servant and increasingly speaks to Timon as friend and equal. His exasperation
and his disapproval are clear, and he freely mocks Timon with ‘Great Timon, noble,
worthy, royal Timon.’ In this version Timon has always sensed he was spending too much
and his anxiety about his situation increases. He’s initially amazed at Flavius’s tone, then
impressed, and finally, at ‘Come, sermon me no further’ (177), tries to regain his
composure and his rank.
Discuss how status is something we give as well as take. What power is there in a lower
position?
B. Sempronius refusing to help Timon Act Three, Scene Three, 1 to 38 (‘friends are
dead’). Two speaking parts.
You may need to remind students that this scene, which begins in mid-conversation,
is the third instance in which one of Timon’s servants has gone to ask financial help from
a ‘friend’ indebted to Timon. All have said ‘no’, but Sempronius’s rationale for saying ‘no’
– he’s hurt he wasn’t asked first – is the most preposterous.
In the first version Sempronius is not very smart and struggles to come up with an
excuse for not helping. In this version, he stumbles over his rationale starting at ‘Three?
Hunh?’ (11) and then keeps circling back trying to think up supporting points for that
rationale, each time more persuading himself of the insult done to him. In this version
No. 3 Servant sees Sempronius as an idiot and speaks of him with satirical contempt.
In the second version Sempronius is smart and, knowing Timon has sent servants to
ask for help from former friends, already has his excuse planned. So from his first ‘Hunh!’
in line 1, he is already leading the conversation to his rationale that Titus, by not coming
first to him for help, has insulted him. In this version No. 3 Servant sees Sempronius as a
devious conniver and speaks of him as dangerous.
You might want to compare Sempronius’s excuse to those of the other beneficiaries of
Timon’s generosity.
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TITUS ANDRONICUS
Comments
Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays. He had already tried his hand at
comedy (Two Gentlemen of Verona and Comedy of Errors) and at history (one or two
parts of Henry VI), and here he takes on tragedy, specifically a crowd-pleasing, gory
revenge tragedy in the vein of Thomas Kyd’s hit The Spanish Tragedy. Like a kid playing
with new toys, he is finding out what is possible to do with a genre, with a theatre, and
with an audience. Shakespeare never really abandons this habit of mind; almost all his
plays push the limits of their forms and of an audience’s expectations. In Titus he appears
to be testing how many implausible spectacles he could put onstage – how many ways he
could shock an audience.
That shock value is one reason why Titus Andronicus is a luxurious play to teach.
Inured as students may be to the fictional violence of movies and video games, as tough
as they may see themselves, Titus gives teachers a play full of material that will shock
them out of any preconceptions that Shakespeare is boring.
In Titus fans of Game of Thrones will find kingdoms and brothers at war; rape,
torture, hanging; decapitations (two), amputations (three), an elinquation, six sudden
unexpected murders (four in just 20 lines of the last act), and one lingering murder
that will last well past the play’s conclusion. They will find the play’s heroine exiting
the stage with her father’s severed hand in her mouth. They will discover that thirteen
of the eighteen named characters in this play, plus a nurse and a clown, die
violently.
Titus also boasts enough super-villains for a whole summer of blockbusters:
Tamora, the Queen of the Goths; Saturninus, her husband, the Emperor of Rome;
Chiron and Demetrius, her stupid, rapacious sons; and Aaron, her lover, whose last
words are
If one good deed in all my life I did,

I do repent it from my very soul.
(5.3.188–9)
And this list of baddies does not include Titus, who opens the play by sacrificing Tamora’s
son and then killing one of his own. He also kills his daughter Lavinia – for the sake of
her honour, of course – and, afterwards, in revenge for Lavinia’s mutilation and rape,
feeds Tamora her sons, whom he has baked in a pie.
Yummy stuff for your students.
But this is Shakespeare, so the violence and cruelty in the play are more than a
playwright defying the limits of action and spectacle onstage. Shakespeare also frames
this exploration of violence and cruelty in cultural terms. The play pits Rome (for
Shakespeare’s audience, the emblem of organized civilization) against the Goths (the
emblem of barbarism), and it examines the idea of killing and maiming other people in
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Titus Andronicus
the context both of war and of religion. As late in his career as Macbeth, whose title
character is celebrated for ‘unseaming’ an enemy ‘from the nave to the chops’, Shakespeare
forces us to think about the difference between the glory of the warrior who kills in battle
and the ignominy of a murderer.
Titus enters the play with the coffin of a son who died in battle. He has come to bury
him in the Andronicus tomb – ‘sweet cell of virtue and nobility’ (1.1.96) – with twenty of
his brothers. The violence in the play proper begins when this emperor of civilized Rome
decides the ‘shadows’ of his sons ‘religiously’ require the ‘sacrifice’ of Alarbus, the oldest
son of Tamora, captured Queen of the Goths. Tamora pleads to Titus, as one parent to
another, for her son’s life, but Titus ignores her plea. For Titus, killing Alarbus is an
uncomplicated religious act. Twenty lines after Tamora’s plea, we hear that ‘Alarbus’s
limbs are lopped / and entrails feed the sacrificing fire’ (146–7). The matter for Titus is
settled and he gives not another thought to Tamora.
So at the start of this play the audience hears of the killing and dismemberment
of a human being through two different pairs of ears: through the ears of the
Roman Emperor, who listens to the news as the conclusion to a necessary ritual in
honour of a fallen warrior; and through the ears of the Queen of the Goths, who
hears the news as any mother would the death of her child. The play uses her response
to upend an easy sense that the title character is our avatar, and Shakespeare
further distances us from Titus, when, moments later, he kills his own son Mutius
(it’s okay, he still has three sons left). Again, Titus sees the killing as a righteous thing
because Mutius had dishonoured him by challenging his decision to give Lavinia
(Titus’s one daughter) in marriage against her will. But an audience will not see this as a
righteous killing.
For 180 lines (roughly ten minutes of stage time) after she’s heard the gory news of her
son’s killing at Titus’s orders and while she’s watched him kill a son of his own, Tamora
has said nothing. The audience will not hear from Tamora, will not know she is the
vengeful, adulterous, and sadistic villain of this play about human atrocities until late in
the second scene. And as the play unfolds, our moral compasses spin out of control as we
watch murder after murder, horror after horror, until we are watching Titus feed her sons
to Tamora, kill her, be killed by her husband Saturninus, who is then killed by Titus’s son
Lucius. We watch all of this happen in less than a minute and we cannot point to the
villain.
But, wait, yes we can. Marcus, standing in the aftermath of the banquet turned
slaughterhouse, tells us whom to blame:
Chief architect and plotter of these woes,

the villain is alive in Titus’ house.
(5.3.121–2)
A black man made them do it. Shakespeare has given the play its perfect scapegoat,
Aaron the Moor. He’s also given his play its greatest character, the part most remember.
One of the three black characters in all of Shakespeare’s plays, Aaron is neither Goth nor
307
Roman and seems to have stepped out of Marlowe’s world of giants. The white man’s
worst nightmare, he is the virile lover of Tamora, a godless Machiavel so proud of his
villainy that at his lynching he declares:
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things

as willingly as one would kill a fly,
and nothing grieves me heartily indeed
but that I cannot do ten thousand more.
(5.1.141–4)
And yet . . .
Shakespeare has also made Aaron the most tender parent in the play – ‘My mistress
is my mistress,’ he says, ‘this [his baby] myself ’ (4.2.109) – and has linked that parenthood
to his own racial pride – ‘coal black is better than another hue’ (101). In the world
of this play, Aaron’s scenes with his infant son have an oddly cheerful savour of
hope, of another world glimpsed, one neither Goth nor Roman; and whether or not
Aaron has been able to leverage his child’s survival, he goes so calmly and undented to
his death that he destabilizes our view of the play and awakens our delight – even our
admiration.
Shakespeare’s Titus is his tenth shortest play, but it feels wordier than most because of
the extraordinary length of many of the speeches. These long speeches and the play’s
complicated stage action and sparse stage directions make the play a daunting read. That
is a shame because, taken thought by thought, the language of the play is powerful and
clear. Here, for example, is the end of Tamora’s first speech, a plea to Titus not to sacrifice
her captured son:
Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods?

Draw near them then in being merciful:
sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge:
thrice noble Titus, spare my first-born son.
(1.1.120–3)
This speech on Mercy (so like Portia’s in Merchant of Venice) appears long to the reader,
but the thoughts are compact and latch logically to one another. Do you want to be like
a god? ̹ Then be like a god in mercy. ̹ Mercy is the sign of nobility. ̹ Since you are
triply noble, be merciful to my son. The clarity of transition and almost slogan-like
compression – ‘Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge’ – is typical of the pleasures of
language in Titus. But as with all the plays, those pleasures require reading aloud, and
more than with the other plays, those pleasures depend on an awareness of what the
character is seeing or doing.
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Titus Andronicus
Ploys
A. Make a YouTube trailer for Titus Andronicus
Prep: Prior intro, scorecards, ballots

Homework: Film trailer
Tech: AV equipment, access to YouTube
Prizes
Titus has the action and the villains of a blockbuster movie, so why not have your students
make a mock movie trailer for it that they can post to YouTube? The trailer should be a
brief, appealing preview that captures some aspect of the play.
At least two weeks before, take twenty minutes to announce that you are going to have
a Titus Trailer Competition and explain the objective and the rules. Your goal is to have
no more than a dozen entries, so if you have a class of over twelve, then put your students
in teams of two or three. Name each team for a character in the play (you can let your
students choose). Tell them that there will be awards; you can name those awards à la the
Oscars or Emmys or Grammys (e.g. the Ickies, the Grossies). Four categories: Best
Production Value, Best Screenplay, Best Enticement, and Best Overall. Assure them you
will present actual prizes.
Rules
1. Using any combination of images, sounds (music, voiceover, sound effects), and
performance, students are to create a trailer promoting Titus Andronicus.
2. The total length of the trailer cannot be less than twenty seconds or more than
thirty seconds.
3. The trailer must open with credits that include the team’s name and the names
of the students on the team.
4. Not including credits, the trailer itself must contain at least thirty words –
written or spoken – and all the words must be from the play, with no phrase of
fewer than three words in the same order as they appear in the play.
5. The trailer may not use the same material found in any advertisement or
promotion for the play.
6. The trailer must be uploaded to YouTube and made available to everyone in the
class at least 24 hours before the trailer awards class.
In class
1. On the day of the competition, make sure your technology is working so that
you can screen the trailers either directly from YouTube or in downloaded form.
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2. Hand out a score sheet with each team’s name in a column on the left and with
three columns on the right under the categories Production, Script, and
Entertainment.
3. After each trailer is screened, students are to score it from one to four stars for
each of those categories. Give them only about fifteen seconds for this and move
on to the next film.
4. Once you’ve screened all the trailers, students tally their scores for each
category.
5. Now screen the top two scorers in each category and by secret ballot have your
students vote for their favourite in that category and put their vote in an
envelope marked for that category.
6. Have your ‘Price Waterhouse’ committee count the votes for each of the three
categories and put the name of each winner in a sealed envelope. Now have the
class vote (again in a secret ballot) for the Best Overall Trailer and put that
winner’s name in an envelope.
7. The finale is your awards ceremony. Have ready four ‘trophies’ to award (pies
would be funny).
a) Have the second-place winners for each category announce the winner in
another category (for example, second place for Best Overall Trailer
announces the Best Production winner), hand them the trophy, and give the
winners twenty seconds to make an acceptance speech.
b) Whenever an acceptance speech goes long, you can ‘play them offstage’ with a
tambourine.
Afterwards, your task, perhaps while they are eating their pies, is to bring the fun back
to a discussion of Shakespeare on such topics as what made each of the trailers like or
unlike the play. How did the text work out of context? What part of entertainment is
comedy? what part shock? How is that true of Titus as well?
B. The diary of Young Lucius
Prep: 10 minutes prior intro

Homework: Writing, maximum 500 words
In class: Full class period
The two available films of Titus Andronicus (see Appendix) choose to frame the events
through the eyes of Titus’s grandson, Young Lucius. This ploy asks your students to
imagine what Young Lucius would write in a diary after what he sees in each of the five
scenes he is in (3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, and 5.3).
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Titus Andronicus
Set-up
1. Explain to the class that they are inventing entries for this diary.
2. The title of their assignment is ‘Young Lucius’s Diary _____ Years Old’ and they
are to decide what age he is (from seven to thirteen) and fill in the blank.
3. Each entry must confine itself to what Young Lucius sees in the scene.
4. Entries must be no shorter than fifty and no longer than 100 words.
5. They should decide not only how old Young Lucius is but also what he is like – a
boy scout? a brat? a nerd? and so on – and keep that in mind as they write their
version of his diary.
In class
1. While they still have their diaries, ask your students to decide which of their five
entries is their favourite and put a star on that entry.
2. Now have each of them give his/her diary to the nearest classmate.
3. Ask three students who see a star on the 3.2 entry of their classmate’s ‘diary’ to
say how old each of their classmate’s Young Lucius is and then read their entries
in increasing order of age. Briefly discuss the three entries.
4. Repeat this process with the four remaining scenes.
Was there something all the Young Luciuses had in common? What were the main
differences? Which Young Luciuses would give an audience hope for the future of Rome?
which despair? Having students write in the voice of a child is uninhibiting, and hearing
their own prose read reinforcing.
A. Tamora’s plea to Titus Act One, Scene One, 73 (‘Hail, Rome’) to 133 (‘irreligious
piety’). Three speaking parts (Titus, Tamora, Lucius), and non-speaking Alarbus, his
brothers, and as many others as you wish from the stage direction at line 73.
The first version is a ceremonial public occasion in which not only the volunteers you
have onstage but also the rest of the class is the audience. Titus is acting more as a high
priest and judge than as a warrior and a father. His motive is not revenge but merely
appropriate religious duty to the dead. Tamora in this version is shocked, not by his
personal cruelty but by the barbarity of the religion he follows. She makes her plea to him
as a person from a civilized culture trying to explain to a savage a more enlightened way.
Lucius here, is merely doing his best job as Titus’s assistant. Alarbus in this version is
never frightened and certain until the end that Tamora’s plea will free him.
In the second version this event is large but not open to the public – ‘Rome’ here is
Titus’s family and friends only. In this version, Titus’s motive is wholly revenge, and he is
using religion as an excuse to torture and murder one of the Goths. Tamora in this
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version knows exactly what’s going on and, though she is asking for mercy, she is also
warning Titus not to do this thing. Lucius in this version is bloodthirsty and goading his
father on, and Alarbus is terrified from the moment he hears the words ‘eldest son’.
Discuss the implications of these two versions. Which Titus is the more dangerous?
Which Tamora, the most interesting. If you have a student of colour to play Aaron, do a
third version in which he stands to one side observing these crazy Europeans from the
eyes of a foreign culture. He need only choose an occasional moment to turn and give a
sardonic, or sad, or bewildered look to the audience.
B. Aaron meets his son Act Four, Scene Two, 69 (‘Good morrow, lords’) to 109 (‘this
myself ’). Four speaking parts, one for a willing, good, black actor, and black baby doll
swathed in a cloth. A dowel or plastic sword.
The first version is all about the racism of the three white characters. The source of all
the ugly things that the Nurse, Chiron, and Demetrius say to Aaron is an open and
vicious racism. If Shakespeare had known it, they would all be using the N-word. In this
version, each time they insult him is like a lash, and Aaron’s reaction to them is based
entirely on his hatred of white people and on his racial pride. The baby is merely an
emblem for him. The speech he gives about colour is on his own behalf, the product of
years of humiliation.
In the second version, Aaron is used to the racism of the white people, but when he
takes the baby in his arms (at line 89, ‘sooner this sword’), he is overwhelmed by the
unexpected power of his love for his new son. In this version, the speech he gives about
colour is on behalf of his new son, the product of fatherly pride and care.
Discuss which of these your students think best fits the play and the character.
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Troilus and Cressida
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
Comments
Troilus and Cressida, both on the page and on the stage, is Shakespeare’s hardest play, but
for teachers and advanced students it is worth the trouble. I don’t predict that wrestling
with Troilus and Cressida will turn it into your favourite play, but I do predict that it will
help you appreciate the daring of Shakespeare’s art and understand the mind of his age
and – by contrast – the classical and medieval world-views as well. What this means is
that you’ll need to brush up your Homer and your Chaucer, because a knowledge of
Shakespeare’s source material, The Iliad and Troilus and Criseyde will really help put the
play in perspective.
That background is essential not only to understanding what the characters want and
what they are doing, but also to understanding what Shakespeare wanted and what he
was doing. Judging from the textual history of the play, what Shakespeare was doing
seems to have been a question from the beginning – even for his friends, some of whom
might have acted in the play. The title page of the Quarto in 1609 calls it a ‘history’, while
the Folio title page calls it a ‘tragedy’, and an epistle to the Quarto refers to it as a ‘comedy’.
We can see a similar discomfort with Measure for Measure and All’s Well – the other two
plays nineteenth-century critics have lumped with Troilus and Cressida as a ‘problem
play’. For those two plays the only ‘problem’ is they don’t neatly fit one of the three
categories – comedy – mostly because we are not as entirely happy as we expect to be at
the end of comedy. But Troilus and Cressida, based on legendary history and depicting
the death of a great man (Hector), could actually qualify in all three categories. That sort
of genre instability makes an audience uncomfortable.
There is one genre Troilus and Cressida does fit neatly: satire – ‘A literary work in
which human foolishness or vice is attacked through irony, derision, or wit’ (American
Heritage Dictionary). Which is why it’s all the more important that we come to this play
aware of the works Shakespeare had in mind: one, the foundation myth of Western
classical thought; the other, a medieval masterpiece of the courtly love tradition. To be
familiar with the heroic in the former and the romantic in the latter is to grasp the
modernity of Shakespeare’s scepticism in this thoroughly satirical work.
Where Homer’s epic tells us the story of the Trojan War in terms sympathetic to
the mythic human beings struggling with their own natures and with the gods,
Shakespeare removes the gods altogether and reduces the war to Thersites’ judgement
that the Trojan War is just ‘such juggling and such knavery!’ and that the cause is no
more than ‘a whore and a cuckold’ (2.3.70–2). So much for the glory of war, and, as to
the glory of love, where Chaucer’s poem makes clear that Pandarus uses a number of
deceptions to put Criseyde in a compromising circumstance, Shakespeare’s play gives
Cressida more agency. She, not Pandarus, issues (twice) to Troilus the prostitute’s
invitation to customers: ‘Will you walk in, my lord?’ If war in this view of the Iliad
is ‘juggling and knavery’, then love in this version of Chaucer’s medieval romance is
lechery.
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You would expect a play – even a biting satire – by the world’s most famous playwright
on the subject of the Western world’s most famous epic to be a popular treasure of the
stage. Troilus and Cressida is not. Partly, that’s because modern audiences are not familiar
enough with that epic. If one doesn’t know the two armies of characters that populate the
Iliad – if one doesn’t know Homer’s Trojans (Helen and Priam, Hecuba, Hector, and all
their children) or his Greeks (Nestor, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Achilles, Ulysses, Ajax, and
Patroclus) – then it’s hard to enjoy what the satirizing playwright has done to lampoon
them. However, the ordinary man in the lane in Shakespeare’s London would also have
had trouble with the play, and the epistle in the Quarto implies that Shakespeare wrote
this play primarily for a reading audience – that it was ‘never staled with the stage, never
clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar.’
The likelihood that Shakespeare was writing for the reader rather than the playgoer
could explain another problem with the play – its wordiness. This verbosity is not just
a matter of the length of the entire play – only seven plays in Shakespeare are longer –
it’s also about the average length of the speeches. When these classical heroes get
together, they tend to jabber on. To measure their loquacity, I’ve developed a formula
to measure their blather score: TL /NS = BS (the character’s Total Lines divided by
the character’s Number of Speeches = the Blather Score).34 Applying the formula to
Troilus and Cressida, for example, we see that Cressida, with a total number of 301 lines
and 152 speeches, has a Blather Score of 1.94, the twelfth highest score in the play.
The other title character, Troilus, has the third highest blather score with 4.09 (Romeo,
also a lover and co-title character, has a 3.78). Nestor, the old Greek king, is second on
the BS scale with 4.13, and the highest BS score in the play is Ulysses with a remarkable
6.06. To put that in perspective: Hamlet’s BS score is 4.2, Richard II ’s is 4.72, and
Macbeth’s is 4.89.
All these famous characters – both the Greeks and the Trojans – do most of their
speaking in scenes that amount to board meetings on how to resolve the ten-year war.
The speeches they give are models of rhetoric and characterization, but they rarely
advance the action and have almost nothing to do with the story of Troilus and Cressida.
In short, each speech has inherent interest as a set speech (Ulysses’ speech on degree is
the play’s most famous), but dramatically speaking they are unnecessarily long or just
unnecessary in advancing the story of the play.
Though Troilus and Cressida has flaws as a play, as a literary work it is a bonanza.
Reading it again makes me want to do a two-semester course on the play. This course
would make a comprehensive humanities study encompassing some of the largest
questions of Western civilization: the connection between love and war, idealism and
naiveté, scepticism and worldliness, heroism and narcissism, community and the
individual. But I would start the course not with these big questions but with the words.
I would start with one student, on his/her feet, doing the Prologue and with you and your
class taking the time to dig down.
34
To avoid such anomalies as messengers, choruses, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, I apply this formula
only to characters who have at least 25 speeches in the play.
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What is a Prologue? A speech? An actor? An actor simultaneously playing another

role? What other plays in Shakespeare have a Prologue? What do these plays have in
common? How does our reception of the play change because of a Prologue? without a
Prologue?
Now, the first full sentence – ‘In Troy, there lies the scene’ – six words. Shakespeare’s
easy. Have the student try those words as Pandarus. Try them again as Helen. Cressida?
Thersites? Dig down. ‘In Troy, there lies the scene’ – who is the Prologue speaking to?
Why doesn’t he put the words in logical order and say, ‘The scene lies in Troy’? Try it that
way. How does it change the moment? Does he need to point somewhere on the word
‘there’? What’s the difference between pointing backstage or over the heads of the
audience or to the stage itself? Try it all three ways. Where was Troy? When was Troy?
On to the second sentence.
From isles of Greece

the princes orgulous, their high blood chafed,
have to the port of Athens sent their ships,
fraught with the ministers and instruments
of cruel war: sixty and nine, that wore
their crownets regal, from the Athenian bay
put forth toward Phrygia; and their vow is made
to ransack Troy, within whose strong immures
the ravish’d Helen, Menelaus’ queen,
with wanton Paris sleeps; and that’s the quarrel.
(1–10)
This one complete sentence is more than 9 lines long – 70 words. How hard is it for the
speaker to maintain the sense of it being one sentence? Does the sentence break down into
parts for the speaker? Try tweeting it. It has 430 characters or more than three tweets.
Where does it best divide? How few tweets can your students manage? In terms of making
sense to followers, would the last four words – ‘and that’s the quarrel’ – be the shortest?
What about the vocabulary? What are the hardest words – ‘orgulous’? ‘chafed’? ‘fraught’?
‘crownets’? ‘immures’? Are they archaic or are they in current usage? What is the effect of
this inflated vocabulary? Why is it in this speech? How does it match the content? How do
those last four words – ‘and that’s the quarrel’ – shift the vocabulary and the style?
What about the word order? Why is it ‘princes orgulous’ and not ‘orgulous princes’?
Or ‘crownets regal’ and not ‘regal crownets’? Why does it sound official?
What are the proper nouns? What are these places? Where were they on a map? Can
you find them on Google Maps? Who are these people?
Dig down in Troilus and Cressida and, though you may not find a play to put onstage,
you will discover – in its topic, its shifting perspectives, its sources, its themes, its tone, its
sexual politics, and its language – an advanced course in Western culture.
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Ploys
A. Cressida’s blog
Prep: Prior intro, handouts

Homework: Blog entries (100–250 words each)
Tech: Post online (optional)
Shakespeare wrote three plays titled for the couples in them – Romeo and Juliet, Antony
and Cleopatra, and Troilus and Cressida. He gives Juliet and Cleopatra remarkable agency.
These two, a girl and a woman, take charge of their fates. Whether or not we like their
choices, we see them assert themselves and we know what they want. Cressida is another
matter; her will is never clear. Willing or unwilling? In all senses of the word she seems a
hostage to the men around her. We are never sure what she wants. To remedy that, have
your students create a Cressida blog so she can tell us what she feels. You can announce this
assignment any time up to a week before the class, but it would be helpful if your students
knew about it before they read the play so that they can be thinking about the blog.
Set-up
1. The blog will have six entries:
A) After she first sees Troilus
B) Before Troilus’s first visit
C) After Troilus leaves
D) After she learns she is being traded to the Greeks
E) After she meets the Greeks
F) After we last see her with Diomedes.
2. Each entry must be a minimum of 100 words long and a maximum of 250 words.
3. Each entry must mention two characters other than Troilus.
4. Each entry must use at least one five-word phrase in bold from the play itself.
5. Students are to bring to class their six entries.
In class
1. Choose a female student to read a long blog entry for A. Choose a male student
to read a short blog entry for A.
2. Ask if someone else would like to read his or her entry, long or short, for A.
3. Move on to B, this time choose a male student to read the long entry and a
female the short entry. Again, switch the genders for the long (female) and short
316
(male) reading of B and invite a third reading, long or short of C. Repeat,

flipping genders, until you’ve had three readers for all six entries.
In discussion ask your students to describe what sort of Cressida emerged in the
blogs. Without regard for the gender of the blogger, how different were the Cressidas that
emerged? Even though eighteen different people wrote the blogs that were read in class,
did any through line of desire emerge? of viewpoint? of sense of humour or of self-pity?
After discussion, have your students hand in their written blogs.
B. Tableaux vivants of Cressida in the Greek camp
Script: T&C 4.5.14–64

In class: 45 minutes,
Groups: 3, 8–10 students
Tech: Camera, tripod, projection capability
The morning after Cressida and Troilus sleep together and pledge their love, the Trojan
leaders trade Cressida to the Greeks for a Trojan prisoner of war. The most famous scene
in the play is in 4.5 when Cressida comes into the Greek camp and is greeted by the who’s
who of legendary Greeks – Nestor, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Achilles, and Ulysses – all of
whom kiss her before she says a word. Every production has to wrestle with this
disturbing scene, and this ploy asks your students to do so as well by creating and
photographing three tableaux – stage pictures – each depicting the moment differently.
In one tableau, Cressida is frightened and the famous men around her are menacing
and making clear she is their plaything. In another, their greeting is all in good fun and
she is merely being welcomed warmly, which she appreciates. In a third, she is clearly
vamping the men and using the power of her sexuality to get control.
Counting Ajax, Patroclus, Diomedes, and Cressida, there are a minimum of nine
characters in the scene, so you can nicely divide a class of thirty into three teams of ten.
Let each team cast the parts among themselves and give them oversized placards to wear.
Your students will need to differentiate their characters (for example, Nestor is old, Ajax
is big and stupid, and so on). The point is to arrange all the characters around Cressida
so that they can be seen in the photograph. This will take time, but once you’re happy
with the tableau, have them freeze, and take several pictures. Then move on to the next
group and the next version.
When you’re finished, project the best shot of each version on the screen and discuss
it. How does it fit the text? How does it fit the play? How does it change the play?
A. Pandarus introduces Troilus to Cressida Act Three, Scene Two, 38 (‘Come, come,
what needs’) to 97 (‘What, blushing still?’). Three speaking parts, two male actors and
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one female. (The actors playing Troilus and Cressida need to be comfortable with physical
contact.)
In the mores of Shakespeare’s world, bringing together a young unmarried woman
with a man and leaving them alone was being responsible for a sexual assignation. This
scene is Shakespeare’s telling of the event in which Pandarus gave his name to pandering.
The scene has two parts, a prose section of banter35 and a more serious section of verse
in which the two lovers commit to one another. Here we look at the first half, but either
makes a good site for alternative staging.
In the first version Cressida is shy, even frightened. Before his exit, Pandarus is literally
pushing her together with Troilus. She is trying to be brave and assured. Troilus in this
version is a self-confident man-about-Troy, who has frequently had sex. He has been in
this position before, but he is delighted to see that Cressida is as young and beautiful as
her uncle promised. In the second version Cressida is in control and Troilus is nervous
and inexperienced, and he, not Cressida, is the one that Pandarus has to urge on. In the
third version, the two are both equally new at this and actually falling in love, and in this
version Pandarus only pretends to exit when he says, ‘I’ll go get a fire’ and instead watches
impatiently from the behind.
Discuss the three versions. What do they each say about responsibility? about gender
stereotypes? about cultural norms? Mix and match.
B. Achilles and Patroclus visited by Thersites Act Five, Scene One, 1–46 (‘Away,
Patroclus!’). Three speaking parts.
Though he deals with it elsewhere (most importantly in Merchant of Venice), Shakespeare
treats homosexuality more unambiguously in Troilus and Cressida than anywhere else in
the plays. For your students seeing how an early modern play treats the issue is revelatory.
If you are teaching Troilus and Cressida, then the likelihood is that you are working with
advanced students, but be aware that the material here is still radioactive for some students
and their families and requires that you deal carefully with the issues it raises.
In the first version the scene begins with Achilles and Patroclus simply in conversation.
Patroclus announces, ‘Here comes Thersites’ with dread, and he and Achilles move a little
farther from one another. Throughout the scene they behave as if they are not lovers and
Patroclus is particularly sensitive to the gay baiting of Thersites, who delivers his lines to
hurt. Achilles keeps his eyes in the letter to look as though he’s not hearing Thersites’
accusations but apt to kill him at any time.
In the second version, the scene begins with Patroclus leaning against Achilles as they
sit on the floor. They are not the least concerned with the opinion of others and stay in
that position until the end of the scene when Achilles says, ‘Away, Patroclus.’ In his line,
‘Here comes, Thersites,’ Patroclus looks forward to a familiar and enjoyable verbal combat
with an eccentric character. Thersites delivers his lines as part of that familiar game. In
this version Achilles reads the letter with Patroclus still leaning against him and is only
amused by their wit-combat.
35
‘Will you walk in?’ here means into the bedroom and is a phrase that was a prostitute’s euphemism in Shake-
speare’s England.
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Twelfth Night
TWELFTH NIGHT
Comments
The fact that nothing specifically to do with the Christian celebration of the same name
takes place in Twelfth Night is merely the first of a multitude of oddities that make this
play – as its alternative title, What You Will, seems to boast – an enigma. Here are some
questions it raises:
● Why is the play celebrated both as one of Shakespeare’s most joyous comedies
and as one of his most melancholy?
● Why does Viola get included as one of Shakespeare’s resourceful heroines, when
really all she does is hang out in male clothing while time, not she, untangles
things?
● Who is this Fabian guy who shows up without explanation 40 per cent of the way
through the play and acts as if he’s been there all along?
● Why is Twelfth Night rarely included in the school curriculum, even though it is
as popular onstage as Romeo and Juliet, almost as popular as Midsummer Night’s
Dream, and less bawdy than either?
As regards teaching the play, as Stephen Booth points out, Twelfth Night ‘is universally
admired but its admirers have never much cared to say why’.36 I’m going to try to
say why.
The wonder we experience in Twelfth Night is hard to see or describe because the play
makes us participants in it, and that wonder is the pleasure of simultaneously inventing
and comprehending meaning. Shakespeare, who always combined the ingredients of
language, space, and performance in a way that made the audience part of the generation
of meaning, used Twelfth Night to illustrate that process. I’d like to suggest further, mostly
as mischief, that he was also wrestling with his specific profession as a playwright, and in
doing so challenging the currency of words and their value.
To understand this extravagant view, consider the enigma that is the encounter
between Feste and Viola (as Cesario) in the dead centre of the play: Act Three, Scene
One. Each of these two characters has a special relationship with the audience. Feste,
merely by virtue of being the play’s ‘allowed Fool’, its singing jester and professional
entertainer, is the audience’s guide positioned between them and the world of the play.
Viola is the play’s heroine, the unfortunate young woman plucked from the sea,
determined to be cheerful about it, and in love (almost before she meets him) with the
male lead. If the play has an avatar, it’s certainly Viola. Audiences would expect, if not
want, their guide Feste and their avatar Viola to get along. But here Shakespeare seems at
pains to show that they don’t.
36
Stephen Booth, Precious Nonsense: The Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson’s Epitaphs to His Children, and Twelfth
Night (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), page 121.
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Viola (disguised as Cesario) and Feste enter, apparently at separate doors, and Viola
greets him with a pleasantry about his drum.
Save thee, friend, and thy music: dost thou live by

thy tabour?
(1–2)
Feste fends off this pleasantry, ‘No, sir, I live by the church.’ She tries again to be pleasant,
‘Art thou a churchman?’, but Feste deflects her comment by insisting on the meaning of
‘live by’ in geographical terms.
No such matter, sir: I do live by the church; for

I do live at my house, and my house doth stand by
the church.
(5–7)
She then tries again to engage him by making her own joke using his definition:
So thou mayst say, the king lies by a beggar, if a

beggar dwell near him; or, the church stands by thy
tabour, if thy tabour stand by the church.
(8–10)
But, instead of playing with her, he stops the game: ‘You have said, sir.’ The banter between
Feste and Viola-Cesario continues in this disagreeable way until she, still trying to be
nice, says, ‘I warrant thou art a merry fellow and carest for nothing.’ Feste’s reply is
explicitly hostile:
Not so, sir, I do care for something; but in my conscience, sir,

I do not care for you: if that be to care for nothing, sir, I would it would make you
invisible.
(28–31)
Ouch.
How curious that in the one scene when our guide and our avatar are alone
together, the Fool is so mean to our heroine! Productions either edit the passage or try
to explain it by suggesting that Feste is suspicious that this Cesario person is a fraud or
that he is jealous professionally (he seems to have a side gig at Orsino’s offering the same
service as Viola, posing as a male servant who can ‘sing and speak to’ Orsino). But
whatever a production does to explain it, Feste’s unpleasantness in this scene will create
a discomfort disproportionate to the narrative task we assign it and point instead to the
melancholy character of Feste and his job as the Fool. ‘Art not thou the Lady Olivia’s
fool?’, asks Viola-Cesario, to which Feste replies, ‘I am indeed not her fool, but her
corrupter of words.’
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Twelfth Night
This remark of the fool Feste, who works as the ‘corrupter of words’ for the royal
lady, Olivia, in the play, might as easily have come from the playwright Shakespeare,
who also worked as the ‘corrupter of words’ for a royal lady – Elizabeth I. Twelfth Night
is the entertainment that Shakespeare, in his role as word-corrupter, served up to his
queen at Middle Temple Hall in 1602. Shakespeare’s word-craft and his stagecraft were
so closely allied because he used the theatre as a language machine, where fitting the
action to the word and the word to the action is at once the essence of the enterprise
and the model of the way we understand the world. In this Christmas show for the
Queen, Shakespeare continually demonstrates the way our brains make meaning out
of the instability of words, and in doing so reveals to her the heart of his craft – of
his mystery.
Moment after moment in Twelfth Night is about fitting words to actions and vice
versa, and what they all share in common is that meaning – right or wrong – emerges
from a shifting set of variables: the speaker of the words, the hearer of the words, and the
context of the words. Here are a just a few examples.
We watch word-hungry Sir Andrew Aguecheek learn the meaning of the word ‘accost’
after twice misreading it in his introduction to Maria – the comedy of which requires
that we as the audience understand his misreadings through his actions.
We watch Feste, who will later say of words that they are like gloves that can be turned
inside out, use ‘syllogism’ to prove opposites (‘virtue that transgresses is but patched with
sin; and sin that amends is but patched with virtue’) and a ‘catechism’ to prove to Olivia
that she is a fool for mourning her brother’s death. By starting the proof with the assertion
that her brother’s soul is in hell, he creates a high wire moment for an audience whose job
it is to watch the acrobatics of language that will save him.
We watch our heroine Viola read the meaning of the ring Malvolio brings her from
Olivia by recollecting the context – I am in a man’s clothing. Olivia was really looking me
over. She spoke haltingly to me – and put the right words to the action: ‘she loves me sure.’
In doing so she is merely replicating the mental process that we as an audience
experienced in watching their first encounter.
In the play’s most famous scene, we watch Malvolio mistakingly draw from a deceptive
letter the same conclusion we saw Viola rightly draw – that Olivia loves him. What’s
more, we see that the brilliance of the letter is in providing inexact verbal clues that
he must force into the meaning he desires, as when he interprets ‘M.O.A.I. doth sway
my life’:
‘M.O.A.I.’ This simulation is not as the former: and

yet, to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for
every one of these letters are in my name.
(2.5.135–7)
We watch this mental exercise with joy because we know it is a misinterpretation but also
because we do it with him; and part of our joy is the unconscious recognition of the way
our brains work.
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Finally, in the reunion of Viola and Cesario, we watch everyone onstage try to make
meaning by putting words to what they are seeing. The enigma in this stage moment is
how much time it takes for the twins to grasp the moment. Here Shakespeare draws out
the reading and our pleasure – for 46 lines (two minutes) – by having Viola and Cesario
attempt to corroborate the joyous meaning of what they are reading by hedging it in with
name (Sebastian), place (Messaline), time (thirteen years), and physical evidence (mole).
The joy we have is in watching them read what we have ‘pre-read’ since the second scene
when the Sea Captain tells Viola that her brother Cesario might have escaped the
shipwreck.
Called upon to entertain his queen, Shakespeare, the master ‘corrupter of words’,
may or may not have felt some of Feste’s melancholy about his work and about the
instability of meaning, but in writing this play he laid bare the way meaning comes out
of the crucible of actor, audience, and language. We admire this play so much because
the exhilaration we feel at a production of Twelfth Night is the experience of watching the
play illustrate onstage the process of making meaning take place and simultaneously
participating in that process. No play I can think of gives us more.
Ploys
A. Fantasy projections
Scripts: TN 2.3
Prep: Scripts, finding props
Homework: Creative writing
Groups: 9 teams
Malvolio is an easy target for ridicule when Sir Toby, Maria, and the gang (not to mention
the audience) eavesdrop on his deepest fantasies of married life with Olivia. The detail
with which he has imagined life with Olivia makes it clear that he has practised this
daydream before, and we laugh at how thoroughly he has worked out the vision. But he
is not the only character in this play thinking about the future, and a guess at the fantasies
of other characters will help to put Malvolio’s daydreams into perspective. Divide your
class into eight teams and have them use Malvolio’s sort of detail and structure (‘a
morning in the life of . . .’) for fantasies for these nine characters: Orsino, Olivia, Viola,
Sebastian, Sir Toby, Maria, Andrew Aguecheek, Antonio, and Feste. (This can be a
homework assignment.) Have the finished monologue read or acted in class (none to last
more than three minutes) and, after each, open discussion on the accuracy and aptness
of the daydream for the character Shakespeare has given us. How do these imaginary
daydreams of the other characters affect our view of Malvolio? How do they deepen an
understanding of the respective characters?
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Twelfth Night
B. Party on the party-pooper
Scripts: TN 2.3.53–113
Prep: Prior intro, scripts
Homework: Party planning
Players: 3 teams of 4
Prizes: (Optional)
Shakespeare is never more difficult for modern readers than in the play’s colloquial
moments, especially when he stages revelry. We feel like sober latecomers to a wild party
of strangers; everyone just looks a little silly. That’s how we frequently feel in Act Two,
Scene Three, where Sir Toby, Andrew, and Feste wake the party-pooper Malvolio. This
reaction may be exactly what Shakespeare wanted: a normal reaction to forced hilarity.
Or it may be that this scene was funny at the Globe because it included the original
audience by means of topical tunes and references.
To explore those possibilities, give your students an opportunity to be party animals
by staging Act Two, Scene Three, from Sir Toby’s suggestion that they sing a catch (a
round) to Malvolio’s exit (53–113). The entire song, which is not in the text, is:
Hold thy peace

And I prithee hold thy peace
Thou knave
Hold thy peace.
Your students will enjoy the bawdy aspects of the original, but, if you prefer, you can
make the invention of this catch part of the assignment as long as the first line is ‘Hold
thy peace, thou knave.’
Set-up
1. At least a week in advance find three teams of four, whose job it will be to work
up a party (you may need to help them a little with the meaning of words such
as ‘consanguineous’).
2. Tell them that you, as the handiest authority figure, will play Malvolio, a piece of
casting that will delight your class.
3. Encourage your volunteers to memorize their lines.
In class
1. Make it clear that you are looking not for acting but for partying talent. Their job
is to have the best party possible and to get the best of you as Malvolio.
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2. Let the partying begin.

3. The rest of the class is to decide which of the three parties they are most
disappointed to see interrupted. (If the teams hand out printed copies of their
ditties, the rest of the class may also sing along.) Since this exercise requires time
and effort, you may wish to sweeten the pot and heighten the occasion by
offering prizes (have T-shirts made, for example, that say ‘Shakespeare Party
Animals’).
In addition to releasing a lot of energy in your class, this ploy will help your
students get past the colloquialism of the scene to its basic festive dynamic, and that in
turn should make clear Malvolio’s weight in the play. As usual, push your students
hard for their responses. You might want to remark upon the importance of Maria in
this scene. After all, she first comes in on the same mission as Malvolio – to get the
threesome to quiet down – but by the end of the scene she tells Malvolio, ‘go shake your
ears’. What turns her around? What happens to a production if the tipsy trio is really
irritating?
A. Viola’s meeting with Olivia Act One, Scene Five, 161 (‘Give me my veil’) to 292
(‘let it be’). Three speaking parts.
The meeting between Olivia and Viola/Cesario propels much of the rest of the play. In
the original production a boy playing a girl playing a boy woos (on behalf of a third
party) a boy playing a girl. The original gender confusion is three times that available to
us when two women play the parts of Viola and Olivia, but even in its reduced form the
scene raises delicious questions of gender for your students to discuss. In the first version
have your Viola/Cesario read her lines as ‘masculinely’ as possible (you may even want to
cast for this quality), and let your Olivia do her first reading as a sweet coquette who is
obviously falling in love. In the second version, your Viola/Cesario should not try to hide
her femaleness, while your Olivia tries to remain aloof and haughty throughout the
scene. Then discuss with your students these questions:
● Which of the two versions is more plausible?

● Which of the two versions is funnier?
● Which of the two versions most suits the character of Viola?
● Which of the two versions most suits the character of Olivia?
Mix and match or have your students suggest the third version.
B. Viola and Orsino debate gender Act Two, Scene Four, 15 (‘Come hither, boy’) to
41 (‘to perfection grow’) and 81 (‘Get thee to yond’) to 125 (‘brook no denay’). Two
speaking parts (and one singing part, if you put Feste back in).
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Twelfth Night
The male arrogance of the Duke makes this exchange a sure bet to get students
talking. Do the first version with a macho, oblivious Orsino and a Viola so aggravated
by his attitude (that ‘no woman’s heart / [is] so big to hold so much’ love as his, and that
women ‘lack retention’ [2.4.96–7]) that she virtually forgets her disguise in order to argue
with him. Do the second version with an Orsino who is not only bright but also suspicious.
His generalizations about men and women are meant to test Viola/Cesario, who is
desperately in love and is trying weakly to stand up for her sex without contradicting the
man she loves. As in the previous exercise, without a boy in the role of Viola/Cesario, it
is hard to get the full force of the way Shakespeare is confusing the issue of gender; but
your students will still see the way the text tweaks men for their condescension to women,
and you should find some strong views about each gender’s relative capacity for true love.
Mix and match as your students suggest and in the third version cast a boy (preferably
a slight one with a high voice) as Viola, and do the same two versions.
As you can see, I’ve cut out Feste’s part, but if you have a good actor-musician, put him
back in the fourth version; and your students will certainly understand how having that
morose clown in the scene adds to our sense of the other two characters.
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THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA
Comments
The Two Gentlemen of Verona may be Shakespeare’s first solo play, and – starting with his
title – he seems to be building the play out of pairs. Shakespeare was famously interested
in twins. He had twins – a girl, Judith, and a boy, Hamnet – but obviously they were not
identical; and perhaps that’s why this playwright-actor valued pairs both alike and
unalike. He understood that any pairing enlarged each half of the pair. His was an art of
binaries, one in which placing together two things that are similar makes clear the
differences between them and enlarges our understanding of both – for the audience but
also for the playwright. In his first play the recipe called for pairs: start with two young
men; add two young women; add two grumpy fathers; add two ‘Sirs’ (Thurio and
Eglamour); and, of course, top it off with two clowns.
The pairing that has most interested scholars and critics are the two title gentlemen
from Verona, Proteus and Valentine, and much of that interest focuses on the stereoscopic
view the play gives us of male friendship and romantic love, as it weighs and sometimes
confuses the two emotions. That confusion culminates in the much-discussed final scene
in which Proteus attempts to rape Sylvia, the sweetheart of Valentine, following which
Valentine forgives Proteus and offers – in front of her – to give Sylvia to him, while the
play’s heroine, Proteus’s ex-beloved, Julia, watches the whole thing. And then, to critical
astonishment, 55 lines later, the play ends happily ever after. Your class will doubtless
want to talk about the attempted rape, and I have included it as a scene for redirection.
But the pairing I think most interested this novice playwright, as he explored the art
of playwriting and particularly of comedy, are the two clowns, Speed and Lance. For that
reason, Two Gents is a good place for the teacher to overcome one major misconception
bred by ShakesFear – that the comedy in Shakespeare’s plays is of his age and not for our
time. This mistaken belief is responsible for some of the worst modern productions,
where directors and actors, feeling they must overcompensate, turn Shakespeare’s comic
material into ‘inexplicable dumb shows and noise’. In schools that same misapprehension
about Shakespeare’s comedy has meant that we avoid it in the curriculum, and instead of
helping our students delight in what is funny in Shakespeare – when funny is what they
crave – we concentrate instead on what is tragic. But in this play we can see all the
familiar sorts of comedy – word play comedy, deadpan comedy, physical comedy,
character (clown) comedy, absurd comedy, and improv comedy.
WARNING!
The following will not be funny. In the same way that describing exercises will not
help you get into shape, but doing it will; describing comedy will not make you
laugh, but doing it will.
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The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The first scene of the play opens with a sentimental scene in which two best friends,
Proteus and Valentine, part company. Valentine takes his sad leave, and Proteus has just
finished telling the audience that he is ‘heartsick with thought’, when the clown Speed comes
onstage looking for his master Valentine. Speed says ‘twenty to one he has shipped already’
(72) and then makes a bad pun on ‘ship’ (one that depends on pronunciation) and adds, ‘and
I have played the sheep in losing him’ (73). Thus begins a word-comedy routine between
Proteus and Speed – remarkable partly because Speed, merely a servant to Valentine, is
taking liberties to banter with his master’s equal. Speed announces the beginning of the
routine, when he says, perhaps to the audience, ‘that I can deny by circumstance’ (84).
The best way to imagine this comedy is as a vaudeville routine between, say, Lou
Costello (Proteus) and Bud Abbott (Speed),37 in which Speed intends to prove he is not
a sheep and Proteus intends to prove that he is.
speed The shepherd seeks the sheep, and not the sheep the
shepherd; but I seek my master, and my master seeks
not me: therefore I am no sheep.
(86–8)
You (and your students) can glimpse the linguistic comedy in this routine by noticing all
the alliteration and assonance in ‘shepherd’ and ‘sheep’ and ‘seeks’, and the acrobatic
reversal of terms38 (shepherd seeks sheep; sheep seeks shepherd; I seek master; master
seeks not me). What we have here is a tongue twister (e.g. ‘She slits the sheet she sits on’),
and a good clown would know that the funniest way to deal with that is at increasing
speed. Meanwhile, the overriding joke is that the two are treating this silly issue as though
it were an important legal question argued before a jury – ‘therefore I am no sheep.’
Proteus’s response follows both kinds of comedy exactly, and its very exactitude is a
kind of comedy of mimicry:
proteus The sheep for fodder follow the shepherd; the

shepherd for food follows not the sheep: thou for
wages followest thy master; thy master for wages
follows not thee: therefore thou art a sheep.
(89–92)
Here Proteus one-ups Speed by adding the ‘f ’, the ‘l’, and the ‘w’ consonants to increase
the tongue-twister factor, and Speed acknowledges his defeat with a sheep’s bleat – ‘Such
another proof will make me cry “baa”.’
37
I recommend that you show some vaudeville clips to your students, particularly some Abbot and Costello
and some Burns and Allen. To see examples, go to YouTube for Abbot and Costello (https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=kTcRRaXV-fg); for Burns and Allen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jUplYQo9Xg).
38
Antimetabole.
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Throughout this play Shakespeare returns to these vaudeville-like routines, but always
in a new variation. When we first see the two clowns together, Speed is the straight man
(Lou Costello or George Burns) and Launce is the funny man (Bud Abbot or Gracie
Allen). As the straight man, Speed’s job is to ask questions and be bewildered by the
answers.
speed
. . . shall she marry him?
launce
No.
speed
How then? shall he marry her?
launce
No, neither.
speed
What, are they broken?
launce
No, they are both as whole as a fish.
(2.5.13–18)
Speed’s question means ‘are they “broken apart”,’ but Launce misunderstands ‘broke’ to
mean are either of the two lovers in ‘broken in pieces’, and he answers with a proverbial
saying – ‘whole as a fish.’ Today an audience would not hear the proverb, but what they
would hear might be even funnier as a non-sequitur.
Then follows some bawdy erection humour punning on the verb to ‘stand’:
speed
Why, then, how stands the matter with them?
launce
Marry, thus: when it stands well with him, it
stands well with her.
(19–21)
Then there’s a stretch of awful punning (awful puns played for their awfulness are funny)
on the word ‘understand’ to mean ‘stand under’ and the word ‘lubber’ mistaken for ‘lover’
until the two clowns head for the pub. Not one word of this scene advances the plot or
our understanding of character; the entire encounter is another comedy routine. And
Shakespeare saves the best of these duets for last – more than 100 lines of it – at the end
of Act Three, Scene One, after the Duke has banished Valentine. This material, like the
two passages we’ve just looked at, is merely stand-up comedy, disconnected from the rest
of the plot, but somehow, when it comes to the nonchalant exploration of comic
possibilities in a play about young love, these scenes make the play ‘whole as a fish’.
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Which, of course, brings us to the Crab, Launce’s dog. That Two Gentleman of Verona
has a dog in it is what most people know about the play. In the brilliant film Shakespeare
in Love, we see Queen Elizabeth (Judi Dench) utterly bored by the play except for the dog
scene. ‘Love and a bit with a dog,’ says Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush), ‘that’s what they want.’
And it is with the dog Crab that Shakespeare pushes the idea of a comic duo in a vaudeville
routine to new heights (or lows) by giving the funny man a dog as his straight man.
A live dog onstage with an actor – that’s the pairing in Two Gents that is Shakespeare’s
most daring exploration into the nature of his new profession. That is the experiment in
the play that gets at the heart of how theatre works; these are the scenes that most test an
audience’s genius for reconciling the real world with the play before them – their power
of making believe. An audience, an actor, and a dog. One of these things is not like the
other; one of these things doesn’t belong. An actor can pretend to be a wisecracking
servant named Launce; an audience can pretend that they are in Verona, Italy, in the
sixteenth century; but a dog cannot pretend to be a dog. A dog is unalterably of the real
world, and the only way he can be in the fictive world of the play is for the actor to use all
his skill to make what he is saying mesh with what the dog is doing. In theatrical terms
this kind of comedy is called ‘improv’, because the actor playing Launce will have to
improvise, to say ‘yes’ to whatever the dog might give him while he tries to stay on script.
In what might be his first play, Shakespeare is forcing the show beyond the bounds of
the predictable. By inserting the total unpredictability of a dog into a comic duet,
Shakespeare is purposefully yielding control to the actor and the audience. That pairing
– actor and audience – is the theatrical pairing Shakespeare trusted most, and his
willingness to step aside by pushing the show into areas that the script can’t control –
where the work becomes that of the actor and the audience – may explain some of what
is ‘Shakespearean’ about all the plays to come.
Ploys
A. Rehearse with a Crab
Scripts: TGV 2.3.1–31

Prep: Scripts, dog arrangements
Players: 2 humans, 1 dog
Go for it. Stage the first appearance of Launce and his dog Crab in your class.
Set-up
1. Do not tell your class the dog is coming to class. Just tell them a guest artist will
be in class. If the dog comes as a surprise, it completely disarms the class and
opens them up to having fun.
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2. You need a gentle dog, one that is curious but not highly-strung. Make sure
you know the dog or that you have worked with a friend’s dog and can be
sure of the dog’s temperament. If you have the time, you might work
with your local pet shelter and find a dog; one of your students might
like to adopt.
3. Make sure your classroom is in Elizabethan stage configuration (see the Fourth
Do) and there’s playing space.
In class
1. Ask for at least two volunteers to play Launce (you’ll find that as this exercise
goes on, students will be more than usually willing to volunteer).
2. Provide your Launces with a script – Launce’s opening speech in Act Two, Scene
Three. In order to keep your student’s hands free, you can project easily readable
chunks on a screen.
3. Take a few minutes to let your student volunteers get familiar with the dog. Stop
the exercise if the dog shows any aggression. (Have a leash and treats.)
4. Tell the first volunteer Launce that the goal is to give the lines either to the dog
or to the class and to try to make those lines a response to whatever the dog is
doing. For example, when your Launce says, ‘I think Crab, my dog, be the
sourest-natured dog that lives’ and the dog is just lying still with its face on the
floor, then the actor gives the line as if to say ‘see what I mean’. But if the dog is
wagging its tail, then the actor delivers the line as if to say, ‘don’t believe what
he is doing now, he’s just pretending’. The actor’s job is to try to make it look
like this conversation should matter to the dog or, if that isn’t working, that it
would matter to the dog if the dog had any ‘pity’ in him and wasn’t such a . . .
well, a dog.
5. Substitute the second Launce after you’ve given the first one a fair chance to get
laughs. If, after a few lines, you ask for other volunteers, I can almost promise
you’ll get them.
Not only will this ploy entertain your students (and make you very popular), it will
also get your students using the language without fear of it. Discuss what makes the
things that are funny in the exercise funny? How do the words connect to the actions in
the funny moments?
Two mercies, please: (1) Unless you want to detour into a meaningful discussion
on the subject, cut the casually anti-Semitic line ‘a Jew would have wept to have seen
our parting’, or replace ‘Jew’ with a word for someone not giving to weeping, a ‘vice-
principal’ or ‘drill-sergeant’, for example. (2) Don’t make the dog ‘act’ for more than
ten minutes at a time and, if possible, for his sake and for the sake of keeping the
class’s attention during discussion, arrange for someone to pick the dog up after thirty
minutes.
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B. How low will a bro’ go?
Scripts: TGV 5.4.55–84

Prep: Scripts, finding props
Players: 4 (2M, 2F)
Props: foam swords
One of the play’s two leading gentlemen of Verona attempts to rape his best friend’s
girlfriend, and the best friend seems not only willing to forgive him but to prove his
forgiveness by giving him that girlfriend. The object of this ploy is to find staging
possibilities for this problematic scene that help the play to have a happy ending – or not.
Basically, you’re turning your classroom into a rehearsal room and asking your students
to help solve the puzzle of what to do with these 30 lines in Act Five, Scene Four, 55 (‘Nay,
if the gentle spirit’) to 84 (‘Why, boy!’).
Because your volunteers (two male, two female) will need to move around a lot during
this exercise, having them off book will be helpful (work worth some extra credit).
The big questions that your scene needs to answer are: Is Proteus truly remorseful?
Does Valentine truly forgive him? Does Sylvia agree with Valentine that they should
forgive Proteus? How does Valentine mean his line, ‘all that was mine in Sylvia I give
thee’? How does Sylvia feel about that line? What makes Julia faint?
Start with a walk-through of the scene in which your goal is only to have the
students (actors and audience) understand what is being said and be careful in
dealing with any violence or weapons (I recommend foam swords). Then, showing
them both options, have your students decide yes or no on such questions as the
following: Does Proteus have a weapon? Does Valentine have a weapon? Does Proteus
have his arms around Sylvia when Valentine comes forward? Does Valentine separate
Sylvia and Proteus? Does Proteus let Sylvia go? Does Sylvia get away from Proteus
on her own? If so, does Sylvia stand behind Valentine or behind Proteus? Do the two
men struggle physically? If so, does Valentine subdue Proteus or vice versa or is it a
standoff?
Discuss which staging most lays bare the atrocious behaviour of the men and which
most obscures it. Discuss why.
A. Proteus rationalizes dumping his sweetheart and stealing his best

friend’s Act Two, Scene Six, complete (43 lines). One good actor.
In this speech Proteus justifies his falling out of love with Julia and into love with
Sylvia. Then he goes on to justify having his best friend banished so that he might steal
the love of Sylvia – ‘I to myself am dearer than a friend’ (23). The speech is a good
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demonstration that a ‘soliloquy’ is actually an unspoken dialogue with the audience. Use
this reading to show the difference.
In the first version have your actor simply thinking aloud. He’s trying to talk himself
into doing something pretty awful. He shouldn’t look at the audience; he should act as if
they are not there. If he looks in their direction, he should be sure to look at some place
above their heads and behind them. They will simply be hearing what’s in his brain.
In the second version instruct your actor that he’s talking directly to the audience and
that his job is to persuade them that he’s not really a bad guy. Everything he says is trying
to explain himself to them. It’s not his fault he’s breaking his oath; love makes him do it.
He admits that, ‘at first I did adore a twinkling star’, then he explains that that was then,
‘but now I worship a celestial sun’.
In the third version tell your actor that now he’s not just talking to the audience, he’s
talking with them, and require that your students vocalize their responses to each
assertion that he makes. They can support him when they think he’s got a point, but they
need to disagree with him whenever they think he’s wrong.
Not only will your students enjoy the way that they’re included in the speech, your
actor will be amazed at how an audience makes his own arguments more vivid. Warning:
your Proteus will need a thick skin because audiences have no trouble letting Proteus
know what they think of him.
B. Julia discusses with Lucetta her decision to follow Proteus Act Two, Scene
Seven, 1 to 24 (‘the more it burns’), 33 (‘Then let me go and hinder not my course’), and
39 (‘But in what habit’) to 79 (‘when you come to him’). (With this cut, a total of 65 lines.)
Two speaking parts for females.
This scene is one of the many in Shakespeare in which two women deal with a woman’s
situation in a man’s world.
In the first version, Lucetta is an older woman and a servant to Julia. As a matter of
propriety, she disapproves entirely of Julia’s plan, but she knows it’s not her place to say
so blatantly. In this version, Julia is impatient with the advice from the older generation
(and embarrassed by Lucetta’s mention of a codpiece [56]), and Lucetta’s words hardly
make a dent in her enthusiasm.
In the second version, Lucetta is only a little older than Julia and more of a friend than
a servant. She can see how excited Julia is about her plan but is really worried about her
and doesn’t trust Proteus. Julia senses that and keeps trying to put on a brave face, while
Lucetta becomes more and more determined to tease or argue her out of it.
What part does status play in these two versions? How do the two versions cast a
different light on Lucetta’s tactics of persuasion? Why do both fail?
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The Two Noble Kinsmen
THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN
Comments
Until someone discovers a script of the lost play Cardenio, we can say that The Two Noble
Kinsman is the last play that Shakespeare had a hand in writing. The Tempest was the last
play he wrote alone, but, as he had with Henry VIII, Shakespeare collaborated on this play
with John Fletcher, who would become the head writer for the King’s Men. Lois Potter’s
opening sentence in the Arden edition of the play wryly captures the play’s complicated
genealogy:
The Two Noble Kinsman is a Jacobean dramatization of a medieval English tale

based on an Italian romance version of a Latin epic about one of the oldest and
most tragic Greek legends; it has two authors and two heroes.
‘Two’. That number again. In dating the plays, scholars largely agree that Shakespeare’s
works begin and end with two plays whose titles frequently gets confused, Two Gentlemen
of Verona and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Of that earliest play I said, Shakespeare’s ‘was an
art of binaries, one in which placing together two things that are similar makes clear the
differences between them and enlarges our understanding of both – for the audience but
also for the playwright.’ It accounts for their three-dimensionality.
In fact, the technique of making 3D movies requires twoness for its effect. 3D movies
rely on the stereoscopic effect of seeing an image recorded from two perspectives but
projected simultaneously as one. In assembling the two images, the eye has the illusion of
depth perception. Shakespeare uses two perspectives – of words, situations, movements,
stage pictures, persons – and relies on the mind to reassemble that twoness into the
perception of another kind of depth and three-dimensionality. We see one gentleman of
Verona more substantially because of the other gentleman of Verona. The one creates an
umbra for the other that makes us assume – unconsciously – substance in the other. Paris
makes us see Romeo in relief, and Romeo in turn gives Paris substance. Take Lady Macduff
(and her child) from Macbeth and you flatten Lady Macbeth (and her childlessness).
Consider these twos in The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Arcite and Palamon are the noble kinsmen of the title. Which is which? In both
figurative and literal ways they are inextricable, their twoness defines them – a twin
emblem of young, male friendship. Their speeches echo one another and the theme of
twoness.
arcite
Even from the bottom of these miseries . . .
I see two comforts rising, two mere blessings,
if the gods please: to hold here a brave patience,
and the enjoying of our griefs together . . .
palamon . . . Certainly
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’Tis a main goodness, cousin, that our fortunes

were twined together. ‘Tis most true, two souls
put in two noble bodies . . . /so they grow together,
will never sink . . .
(2.2.56–67)
This pledging of their undying love ends when Emilia enters the garden below their
prison windows, and the youths fall instantly in love, a situation that leads to the play’s
central mathematical dilemma – one Emilia, two noble kinsmen. As she says,
emilia Were they metamorphosed

both into one – O, why there were no woman
worth so composed a man!
(5.3.84–6)
Palamon and the Wooer of the Jailer’s Daughter, a twosome by virtue of their position
in a triangle with her, flip the tragic consequences of one woman and two men into a
rough comedy by having the Wooer to the Jailer’s Daughter assume the identity of
Palamon, thereby satisfying the Jailer’s Daughter, winning the Wooer her hand, and
freeing Palamon from her obsession with him.
Emilia and the Jailer’s Daughter are seemingly opposites – the high-born woman
devoted to Diana and the sexually aggressive low-born woman – but, as is so frequently
the case in Shakespeare (or in this case, Fletcher), their age, their gender, and their
romantic connection to one of the play’s heroes twin them, forcing on us a dual prospect
of the two unmarried women. This dual perspective shades into greater substance the
chilly virtue of Emilia and the rash obsession of the Jailer’s Daughter.
Emilia and Hippolyta are a twosome by sisterhood and by their supposed otherness
as Amazonians. We come to the play knowing Hippolyta; indeed, if we’ve been to A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, this will be the second time we’ve been to her wedding. But
we know Emilia in this play only through her pairing with Hippolyta. Nowhere is she
Amazonian or warrior-like in this play, and yet her pairing makes us see the possibility
of the iron maiden, where the text does not present one. And in reverse, we see the Queen
of the Amazons ‘feminized’ by her sister.
Theseus and Creon are a twosome, twinned as two legendary rulers of Athens and
Thebes respectively, and though we never see Creon in the play, the complaints against
him, first from the Greek widows and then from his Theban warriors Arcite and Palamon,
help us define Theseus and even protect him from the ill will he deserves for the play’s
resolution.
The Wedding of Hippolyta and Theseus in Act One and the Dedication to Mars,
Venus, and Diana in Act Five are also a part of the twoness in the play. Stage moments
that are separate and distinct but yet alike, like the twinning of characters, have the effect
– however subliminal – of giving weight and depth to each other. The elaborate wedding
ritual that opens the play establishes a standard of spectacle and creates a tone of
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solemnity that shapes our experience of the play as a whole. The element of interruption
and unresolved outcome of the first wedding ritual lingers over the play and especially
attaches its shade to the ritual in Act Five, which we experience less comfortably, our
trust in ritual undermined by our experience of a disruption connected to war and death.
Beyond the question of how twoness works within a play is the matter of how it works
between plays: The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Two Noble Kinsmen are plays
separated by decades and genres, one distinctly a romantic comedy and the other indistinctly
something other, and yet their titles pair them. The authors of the later play were surely
aware of the echo. It might only have been a marketing ploy to take advantage of the
popularity of the first play (as The Tamer Tamed appears to have done with Taming of the
Shrew), but the authors might also have had in mind that both plays treated male friendship
and that both plays treat badly a woman in love. And regardless of what the authors were
thinking, the two plays, paired by their titles, throw one another into perspective.
One final example of the way that twoness works in The Two Noble Kinsmen: the
‘twoness’ of the play’s authors, William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. This book, like
so many thousands, is dedicated to the singularity of William Shakespeare, and here is a
play that, like his other plays, bears his name, but which, because it also bears the name
of John Fletcher, is distinct. This twoness of the play operates on how we read the play
and on our understanding of the pair of authors. On the one hand, the fact that this play
is not purely the work of Shakespeare may undermine its market value (and may have
done so for Heminges and Condell when they assembled the Folio) and threaten the
romantic narrative of Shakespeare the Artist. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s status as
the nonpareil of playwrights may help us to care about the play and raise our view of
Fletcher as someone he twice thought a worthy partner.
An even richer gift of this twoness is to help us rethink the value of collaboration
and to re-envision the greatness of Shakespeare and the nature of his joy in making plays,
to see him delighting in the stage and the company and accomplishment of fellow
playwrights.
Ploys
A. Rewrite the ending of the play
Scripts: TNK 5.3, 5.4

Prep: Prior intro
Homework: Creative writing (150–200 words)
Neither happy nor unhappy, the ending of The Two Noble Kinsmen leaves us disconcerted
on behalf of all the principal young people. In one way or another they each get what
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they want, but there are multiple catches: the Jailer’s Daughter wants to sleep with
Palamon but gets an impersonator; Arcite prays to win the combat with Palamon but is
thrown from his horse and killed; Emilia prays that she will marry the man who loves
her most but isn’t keen on marriage (‘Is this winning,’ she asks); Palamon prays to marry
Emilia but loses his best friend. For its part, the audience would like to see the culminating
events – the combat between the two friends (5.3) and Arcite’s fatal fall from his horse
(5.4) – but has to settle for reports of them.
Your students can come to the play’s rescue and fix the unsatisfying resolution by
writing a new speech for either the Servant or for Pirithous. Those speeches, each 150–
200 words long, must invent and describe offstage events that are either purely comic (in
which all four characters get a completely happy ending) or entirely tragic (in which all
four characters get a completely unhappy ending).
Assign an equal number of Servants and Pirithouses and divide them into an equal
number of comic and tragic revisions. On the designated day, your students are to bring
their speeches on a ‘scroll’ to class and read the speech to the class. I recommend that you
alternate between comic and tragic readings. Let the class discuss what they have seen
and heard and vote for the two happiest and the two unhappiest endings.
Keep the scrolls to grade or display.
B. Name the Jailer’s Daughter and give her a Facebook profile
Prep: Prior intro, Facebook profile template

Homework (optional)
Groups: 6
For over four hundred years the most interesting character in the play has had no name.
Have your students name the Jailer’s Daughter – first name only – and provide her with
the information she would have on her Facebook profile. That can include age, family
and personal relationships, favourite films, music, books, quotations, a non-photographic
profile picture. That information must relate to the character in the play, her situation,
her words, or her actions.
You can make this an individual homework assignment or a group project in class. If
you make it an individual project, you might want to have the students confine their
profile to a single one-sided sheet that they have formatted to look like a Facebook page.
If you make it an in-class group project, then expect to devote most of a class period
to it. You can shorten that time somewhat if you require the students to bring with them
(a) a suggested name, (b) a twenty-word reason for the name, (c) suggestions for entries
in her Facebook profile, and (d) quotations from the play to support those entries.
1. Start by writing the suggested names on the board.
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2. Give each student thirty seconds to state the reason for her or his suggested name
and one quotation to support it.
3. Divide the class into six groups.
4. Have the groups take ten minutes to choose one of the suggested names and
come up with six entries for the profile page of the Jailer’s Daughter.
5. Give each group one minute to report the name and the profile entries to the class.
6. Have the students vote for the Jailer’s Daughter’s new name and then decide in
discussion on her profile information.
A. Arcite and Palmon: bromantic trouble Act Two, Scene Two, 111 (‘Shall I say
more . . .’) to 179 (‘farewell, Palamon’) minus the lines of Emilia and Woman. Two
speaking parts for men, and two non-speaking parts for women (48 lines, three minutes).
In 2.2, Arcite and Palamon are in their prison cell consoling themselves that their
great friendship will make imprisonment bearable, when they spy Emilia in the
garden below and then the story changes. Since there is no exchange between the two
women and the two men, you can remove the women’s lines and the scene will still make
sense.
In the first version, both men fall into dumfounded love as soon as they see Emilia –
Palamon first and Arcite second. Ask both your actors to commit entirely to stupefied
love, as though Oberon had put the magic potion in their eyes. Once they spy Emilia, this
version should be entirely about how they feel about Emilia, with no trace of their former
thoughts of friendship left for either man.
In the second version, Arcite, once he sees what has so entranced his friend, is more
hurt by losing Palamon’s attention than he is overwhelmed by Emilia’s beauty. In this
version, Arcite’s interest in Emilia is a kind of revenge on Palamon (‘I’ll show you what it
feels like to have your best friend ignore you for a girl’) and he is determined to give
Palamon as much pain as possible.
Discuss how the two versions might influence the tone of the play as a whole. Have
your students suggest another version.
B. The Jailer’s Daughter’s first monologue Act Two, Scene Four, entire. One
speaking part (33 lines, two minutes).
The Jailer’s Daughter’s first monologue has a remarkable degree of audience address
in it, tells an offstage story, and sets up the journey to come of the Jailer’s Daughter; for
all those reasons it is one of the most frequently used audition pieces.
In the first version have your actor musing to herself. In this version she’s a rich prim
Southern debutante (using an accent if she can) who had never ever imagined that she
would be thinking about men in this way, and she is flustered at the unladylike thoughts
that have come into her mind and is trying to resist them.
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In the second version have your actor be speaking to the audience (class). In this
version she’s a tough Jersey girl (using an accent if possible) – think Betty Rizzo in Grease
– who is more disturbed about falling in love than she is about having sexual thoughts,
more amused about Palamon’s upper-class manners than she is impressed by them.
Discuss the two versions. Which is funnier? Which fits best the idea your students
have of the character? How do our stereotypes about women play into the two versions?
Which of these two versions would be more meaningful as the play goes on and the
Jailer’s Daughter slips into madness? Ask for your students’ ideas about a third version.
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The Winter’s Tale
THE WINTER’S TALE
Comments
Three other times in this book I confess to having disliked a play that I later came to love
– All’s Well, As You Like It, and (embarrassingly) King Lear. Now I make my last such
confession. Until I directed Winter’s Tale in 1999, I disliked it. I now count it among my
favourites. What did I so dislike about the play? (1) Its architecture, (2) Act Four, Scene
Four, and (3) Leontes.
As to the architecture of the play, it seemed entirely broken in two. The first three acts
are a raging tragedy set in Sicily until the last scene, and there we watch a nice old man
abandon a baby girl on the shore of Bohemia (which, as Ben Jonson reminded
Shakespeare, actually had no shores) before we see him chased off the stage to be eaten
by a bear. The last two acts, introduced by the character of Time, are a romantic comedy
set in Bohemia sixteen years later. It’s as though Shakespeare, amused by the new rage for
tragicomedy (plays that flirt with death but have a happy ending) had decided to take the
word as literally as possible and make the first half tragic and the second half comic. ‘You
want both?’ he seems to be saying to an audience, ‘Well, I’m giving you both back to back.’
As to Act Four, Scene Four, or the ‘sheep-shearing scene’, it’s the rare scene that I
enjoyed more on the page than on the stage, because in all the productions I’d seen on
the stage, its songs and peasant dances felt to me like an overblown Renaissance Fair – all
hey, nonny, nonny, and jigs.
But mostly I disliked Leontes. About five minutes into the play, the main male
character becomes more jealous than Othello on steroids but without the excuse of an
Iago, a handkerchief, or any other evidence. He decides, against the protestations of every
other character in Sicily, that his wife Hermione has been unfaithful and she is nine
months pregnant not with his child but with the child of his best friend, Polixenes, King
of Bohemia. Accordingly, by the end of Act Three, he has
● tried to have his best friend murdered
● imprisoned his queen
● forced her to give birth to his daughter in prison
● ordered that the infant be abandoned on a distant shore
● made his young son ill to death with fright for his mother
● brought the queen to public trial just hours after she’s given birth
● completely ignored the judgement of Apollo that she is innocent.
After which – don’t mess with Apollo – the news comes first of the death of his son and
then of Hermione, and Leontes finally comes to his senses.
In the last act of the play Shakespeare restores to him his best friend, his daughter, and
his wife. And the play leaves us to decide how we feel about Leontes’ redemption. My
problem was that I was never fully persuaded he’d changed.
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How do you solve a problem like Leontes?

The play is an excoriating examination of sexual politics and of misogyny. All three of
the major roles for women – Paulina, the Queen’s lady in waiting; Perdita, the daughter
of the Queen and King; and especially Hermione, the Queen herself – are paragons of
strength or grace or both. Meanwhile, the men have flaws ranging from naiveté (Prince
Florizel) to fecklessness (Paulina’s husband, Antigonus) to amorality (huckster and thief
Autolycus) to outright cruelty and tyranny (Leontes). Nothing Shakespeare wrote speaks
as eloquently and as decisively to the evils of patriarchy.
My problem was the forgiveness in the play for its awful protagonist, my inability to
believe in his redemption or to want him absolved of his crimes.
Directing the play changed my mind because my actors kept asking me the questions
that Shakespeare, an actor, must have known actors would need to solve.
The first of those questions – a question every production must deal with – is what
happens in the first 150 lines to turn Leontes from a man who ‘cannot show himself
over-kind’ (1.1.21) to his childhood friend Polixenes, into a murderous madman
raging with jealousy who wants to kill him? Actors need to know specifics that readers
don’t need. They have to play the moment. Becky Peters, the actor playing Hermione,
needed to know how flirtatious she is being when she persuades Polixenes to stay;
J. C. Long, playing Polixenes, needed to know when and why he decides to stay. Cliff
Chamberlain, our Leontes, had to know exactly what he saw when, watching his wife
and his friend, he says ‘paddling palms and pinching fingers, as now they are’ (115).
So we rehearsed repeatedly, looking for the moment of an action simultaneously innocent
in public but suspicious enough to transform a man into a monster. Until Becky asked,
‘Are we wasting time looking for a rational explanation for a completely irrational
response?’
We were. And since no moment could explain it better than any other, I told Cliff to
choose any moment as his motivation.
Then this question from the actors playing the Lords: ‘Why aren’t we more afraid of
Leontes? Why do we keep telling him he’s wrong? Wouldn’t he have us killed or
imprisoned?’ The answer lay in Shakespeare’s skill at creating subliminal context for an
audience. The Lords might be afraid of this Leontes, but their resistance makes us feel
that they have been used to saying their minds to some other Leontes. We can see from
their risking themselves that the Leontes they knew before was not a tyrant – with those
few lines Shakespeare suggests a past with the Sicilian court happy with its benevolent
ruler. So in rehearsal we learn that Leontes was someone we could have liked. He was
someone this Hermione could have loved, but an irrational jealousy has so gripped and
changed him that he does things that bewilder but cannot completely cower the members
of his court.
But those things are awful, things so awful that knowing he used to be a good guy and
even knowing his affliction is a random event (‘some ill planet reigns’ [2.1.105]) could
not overcome my reluctance to believe that his repentance is complete, that the sudden
virus that possessed him is entirely gone, and that I can embrace him as Hermione does
at the end of the play.
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The Winter’s Tale
Then Cliff Chamberlain, our Leontes, asked about two words Leontes speaks in Act
Five when we see him for the first time since Hermione’s trial sixteen years earlier. Prince
Florizel, the son of Polixenes, has arrived at the Sicilian court with Perdita. Florizel tells
Leontes that he has come at the command of his father and that Perdita is his wife. At
that moment, a Lord enters and announces to Leontes that Florizel is lying, that he has
‘fled from his father, from his hopes, and with / a shepherd’s daughter’ (5.1.183–4).
Cliff ’s question was about his next line. The line is ‘Where’s Bohemia?’ (184) – meaning
Polixenes, King of Bohemia. Cliff wanted to know if that wasn’t a strange response to the
shocking revelation that the young man standing before him is a liar who has betrayed
his father by running away with a shepherd’s daughter.
And for the second time during rehearsals, I glimpsed the nature of Shakespeare’s
genius. He knew that in this play about forgiveness, audiences who had seen the insane
behaviour of Leontes would need to believe that he had truly exorcized the tyrant he had
become at the beginning of the play. Yes, as soon as Leontes hears the news of his son’s
death and then the report of Hermione’s, his speech is full of ‘shame perpetual’:
Once a day I’ll visit

the chapel where they lie, and tears shed there
shall be my recreation: so long as nature
will bear up with this exercise, so long
I daily vow to use it.
(3.2.235–40)
And, yes, he appears to have remained in mourning for sixteen years, and all in his court
seem to believe that his repentance is real and that he’s done enough to be forgiven. In
the words of one lord:
Sir, you have done enough, and have perform’d

a saint-like sorrow: no fault could you make,
which you have not redeem’d . . .
do as the heavens have done, forget your evil;
with them forgive yourself.
(5.1.1–6)
By every outward sign Leontes is a man who has repented and rid himself of the monster
that possessed him. What Cliff had discovered in that line was the inward proof of his
transformation. Confronted with the information that the young man standing before
him was lying to him, that Florizel had treacherously run away from his father, the King
of Bohemia, and that he was scandalously eloping with a low-born girl – faced with all
that, Leontes’ first thought, his reflexive thought, is of his old friend, the man he’d once
accused of adultery with his wife. That line – ‘Where’s Bohemia?’ – tells us better than all
his eloquent protestations of regret, what is in his heart.
How do you solve a problem like Leontes? You do what all the machinery of the play
instructs you to do: you forgive him.
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Ploys
The Winter’s Tale has two stage events that stand out from the other plays: a bear appears
to come onstage in the middle of the play and a statue appears to come to life at the end
of the play. How did Shakespeare’s company stage either of these moments that leave
indelible marks on an audience’s experience of the play? Here are two ploys – one for
each of these events – designed to help your students explore the staging of these
moments and in the process raise the big questions about the differences between
comedy and tragedy and about the nature of theatrical illusion. For both these ploys you
should set up your classroom as an Elizabethan stage (see the Fourth Do) and this time
devise a curtain at least five feet wide for your discovery space.
A. Bear bait
Scripts: WT 3.3.46–58
Prep: Prior intro, scripts, prop/costume list (see below)
Players: 6 (3 Antigonus, 3 bears)
The most famous stage direction in Shakespeare – Exit, pursued by a bear – is for
Antigonus as he abandons the infant Perdita in 3.3. During his speech a ‘bear’ appears
and chases him offstage. What did that moment look like? I think that an actor in a bear
costume of some type performed the part, but some, knowing of the prosperous
bearbaiting business near to the Globe, suggest the King’s Men used an actual bear.
Though you cannot explore the real bear option, use this ploy to have your students
consider how other production choices – props, costumes, and sound effects – alter the
nature of the scene and, with it, the play.
Below I list those three production elements and a number of options for each.
Basically your job is to rerun the scene while your students mix and match the different
choices, having them debate the differences and talk about what they prefer and why.
Pre-class set-up
1. Explain to your students that you’re going to devote a class to an exploration of
staging the Bear in The Winter’s Tale and assign them 3.3, with special attention
to Antigonus’s lines beginning ‘Blossom, speed thee well’ (46) and ending with
the stage direction ‘Exit, pursued by a bear.’ (58)
2. Look at the production choices I suggest below and make a list of the things you
will need from the underlined and starred items. Hand the list out to your
students and turn your class into a production meeting in which various
members of the class volunteer to provide things from the list. Encourage
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The Winter’s Tale
alternatives with class discussion, but see to it that everyone has some
production responsibility. You might want to appoint ‘select’ committees to solve
the challenge of the two most difficult items – the discovery space curtain and
the full bear costume. Bribe them with bonus points.
3. Choose three students to play Antigonus (more bonus points for memorizing
the 12 lines) and three to play the bear (no lines to remember, no bonus
points).
Set-up
1. Arrange a table at the side of your Elizabethan theatre for props and
instruments.
2. Hand out hard copy of the scene. As always, your students should make their
choices in keeping with what the text suggests; there are clues throughout the
scene for what we might see onstage.
3. Explain that the class will mix and match the choices – props, costumes, sound
effects – for a first version of the scene. Have your students choose an Antigonus
and one of the bear options and make their choices from the menu of props,
costumes, and sound effects. Assign the sound effects to volunteers (or use the
whole class) and practise their cues.
4. Start working your way through the first version. Once you’re done, make the
choices for a second version and stage that.
After two versions, stop and lead your class in a discussion of the pros and cons of
each. Which was scarier and why? funnier and why? sadder and why? more interesting
and why? Keep them aware of the text. What impact do these choices have on the play as
a whole? You will find that everyone wants to talk; your task is to filter that conversation
so that you can do two more versions, or at least one. (Try to use all the articles they’ve
brought to class; that’s their investment in the ploy.)
Stuff you could use:

PROPS Infant Perdita: •A doll* wrapped in a blanket •Just a blanket shaped like there’s
a baby in it •Real infant (only if it’s your own)|Perdita’s treasure: •A plain large ‘heavy’
box*, baby in the box •An ornate small box* with jewels* and letter* in it, baby on the
side •A separate leather pouch* and scroll*, baby on the side|Baby holder: •The large
‘heavy’ box (see above)•A soft cushioned crib* (medium or small dog bed)•No holder
(baby is left on floor).
COSTUME Antigonus: •Yellow fisherman’s raincoat* and hat*• Wool cloak* •No outer
wear|Bear: •Full body bear costume*• Bear mask*, ears*, and/or claws*• No costume –
just the actor impersonating a bear.
SOUND EFFECTS Bear: •‘Backstage’ roar created by student voices •Onstage roar (by
actor) •No roar at all|Storm: •‘Backstage’ thunder created by a thunder sheet* or base
drum*, a rain stick*, and a wind machine* • Human voices making sounds.
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B. Sculpting Hermione’s statue
Scripts: WT 5.3.20–83
Prep: Prior intro, ‘curtain’ for scene
Players: 7–10 (Hermione, Paulina, Leontes, Polixenes, Perdita, Florizel, Camillo)
In the next-to-last scene of The Winter’s Tale, the Third Gentleman reports that
Leontes and his court, including his newly-found daughter Perdita, are going to
Paulina’s house to see a statue of Hermione ‘newly performed by that rare Italian master,
Giulio Romano’ (Shakespeare’s only reference to an Italian Renaissance artist). The
performance of that statue challenges the actor playing Hermione to be motionless for
83 lines – four minutes – from the moment Paulina says ‘behold, and say ’tis well’ (line
20) until she says ‘You perceive she stirs’ (line 103). The object of this ploy is to have your
students explore ways to help the actor create the illusion of being a statue. To do that
they have to balance what they ask of an actor’s body with what they ask of the audience’s
imagination.
Pre-class set-up
1. One help to the actor playing the statue of Hermione is a shortened time, so you
might want to start by having your class edit the lines. You can either make it an
individual homework assignment in which you choose your favourite or you can
use the first half of the class to play the ‘The Editor, the Purist Society, and the
Publisher’ game (see Richard III ploys). Remember that having them debate a
shorter script will take at least half an hour, and you’ll need at least that much
time for this ‘sculpture’ ploy.
2. Tell them to edit the 83 lines to a maximum of 65 lines.
3. In cutting those 18 lines they must be careful not to cut lines that help the actor
by (a) coaching the audience’s imagination or (b) draw the audience’s attention
away from the actor or (c) excuse a lack of stillness (for example, they shouldn’t
want to cut line 64 when Leontes says, ‘Would you not deem it breath’d?’).
Set-up
1. Hand out hard copy of the edited scene.
2. Ask for three volunteers to play Hermione. This should not be hard; she has no
lines.
3. Set up your Elizabethan classroom (see the Fourth Do); it’s going to be crucial to
this ploy.
4. Cast the other parts – you’ll need a strong Paulina and a strong Leontes.
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The Winter’s Tale
5. Discuss where they all should be standing when the scene begins and run
through the 65 lines. Do not stop this first run-through. Let your students work
their way through the text without interruption.
6. Lead discussion of how that initial run-through worked. Ask questions about the
audience response. How much was their attention on Hermione? How were the
sightlines? What might they do to improve them? Should she be on a platform?
Does Paulina’s ‘descend’ mean that? Paulina keeps threatening to ‘draw the
curtain’? Where should it be? Now turn discussion to the actor. Did she try to
keep her eyes closed? What was the hardest part about being still? Not blinking?
Should she keep her eyes closed? What physical position would be easier?
Should she cradle an arm? or fold an arm? Would sitting be easier? or lying
down? How does that match the text?
7. Try out the suggestions alternating your Hermiones.
The obvious goal of this ploy is for your students to figure out the most realistic and
yet practical way to stage Hermione’s statue, but in doing so they will be discovering how
well the words work and developing a sense of ownership of Shakespeare’s language.
A. Hermione’s ‘summation’ at her trial Act Three, Scene Two, 81 (‘You had a bastard
by Polixenes’) to 122 (‘Of pity, not revenge’). Three speaking parts.
Hermione, at her arrest, tells the lords, ‘I am not prone to weeping, as our sex /
commonly are.’ This seems to me an important question not only in the performance of
that part but in the depiction of women in Shakespeare. Tears are everywhere in
Shakespeare associated with being a woman, especially by men who are frequently
weeping themselves.
In the first version, have your Hermione choose three places in her lines to weep as she
speaks. Afterwards, let her explain to the class why she chose those three places and then
let them suggest which of the moments they would like to keep and substitute two
alternative places to weep. In the second version, have your Hermione use the two changes
your class chooses. Then have her say which of the two she liked best and which least
and, if she can, why. Ask the same of the class. Finally, in the third version, have her apply
what she said at her arrest and not weep at all. She can, if she likes, show us that she is
holding back from weeping, but she must in no way weep.
Ask your students what they thought of her in the last version? Don’t yet ask your
Hermione how she felt about it before she has heard the response of the class. You don’t
want her feelings about her work to sway your students before they’ve commented. Did
it make her more or less sympathetic? Did it make her more or less persuasive (which is
not the same thing)? After your students have expressed their views, bring your
Hermione’s perspective to the discussion. Then, ask the student who played Leontes if
there was any difference in how he felt during the three versions.
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B. The Clown describes two disasters happening offstage Act Three, Scene
Three, 81 (‘What ail’st thou man?’) to line 104 (‘he’s at it now’); later to line 116 (‘What’s
within, boy?’). Two speaking parts.
I have said I think that the entrance of the Bear is certain to make an audience laugh
and that this is where the tragicomedy shifts from one to another. One reason I say that
is that the script calls the son of the Shepherd ‘Clown’, but others argue that what the
Clown has to say when he enters – the ocean swallowing a ship of ‘poor souls’ and a bear
eating an old man – is tragic. Yeah, you’d think so, but that’s not actually what happens.
What happens is the sort of dark British comedy that made Alfred Hitchcock famous.
In the first version have only the Shepherd on the stage (no baby), put the Clown
upstage of the Shepherd so that he can more easily seem to be addressing both the class
and his father, and have the Clown tell his story to the class with lots of movement,
energy, and indication. Have the clown stop after ‘he’s at it now’ (108). In the second
version, the Clown is not allowed to move his feet – he can turn at the waist and he can
use his hands – and he must speak more slowly. After he has done those two versions,
discuss with the class which is more ‘tragic’ and which more ‘comic’. Be certain that
neither the Clown nor the class knows that this question is coming.
In the third version have the baby and her box of treasure on the stage and run the
scene through to line 116. In this version, the Clown, basing his choices on what he heard
in discussion, can choose to be as active or as still as he wants to be, but he must not
notice the baby until the Shepherd says, ‘But look thee here, boy’ (there’s no indication in
the text that he has).
End the class with a discussion of how the terms ‘tragic’ and ‘comic’ apply to the scene.
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APPENDIX: A PERSONAL GUIDE TO
SHAKESPEARE ON SCREEN
Like my comments on the plays, these brief reviews are simply the opinion of someone
who cares about three things: Shakespeare, film, and students’ enjoyment of either or both.
My rating system is:
✶ Bad – works against teaching Shakespeare
✶✶ Okay – depending on how you use it, might help you teach aspects of
Shakespeare
✶✶✶ Good – used with care, will help you teach Shakespeare and may even
entertain your students
✶✶✶✶ Excellent – you’ll love it; they’ll love it; they’ll learn something about
Shakespeare (spoiler alert: it’s Shakespeare in Love)
✶✶ Elijah Moshinsky’s 1981 BBC production of All’s Well That Ends Well is valuable.
The feel of Rembrandt lighting and deep-focus Vermeer settings, the tight framing, and
thoughtful touches such as Helena playing at the virginals during her discussion of
virginity with Parolles, add up to an intelligent telling of the story that can provide good
students with an appreciation of the language and the play. One piece of casting that your
students will want to discuss is Angela Downs as Helena. Does her almost homely
appearance in this production play into the way we read Bertram’s resistance to her?
Some quibbles: Paul Brooke’s understated performance and costume as Lavatch fail to
make clear his role as an ‘allowed fool’, and I have no idea why the director decided to
have Donald Sinden’s King end his interview with Helen with a long passionate kiss that
she clearly welcomes. This moment comes out of nowhere and, worse, goes nowhere.
✶✶ Trevor Nunn turned his 1972 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Antony
and Cleopatra into a fairly satisfying TV experience of the play. He uses close-ups and
out-of-focus shots, together with billowing fabrics and a mysterious soundtrack to create
a seductive Egypt. He contrasts that with sharper focus, slight overexposure, and a
starchier look in Rome. Janet Suzman is a first-rate Cleopatra, and your students will
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enjoy Patrick Stewart as Enobarbus. Richard Johnson does okay with the impossibly
difficult role of Antony, and Corin Redgrave is a fine Caesar.
✶ Jonathan Miller’s 1981 BBC version of the play makes you appreciate the spaciousness
of Nunn’s work. Miller tries to give the production a finished look after the style of
Veronese, but the ultimate effect is claustrophobic. And it is almost as if Jane Lapotaire
has shrunk Cleopatra from goddess to gamine to make her fit into Miller’s scheme. Good
mostly to juxtapose to Nunn’s superior version.
As You Like It
✶ Paul Czinner’s 1936 production of As You Like It, with Laurence Olivier as Orlando
and J. M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan) as one of the co-authors of the screenplay, is so
dandified and artificial that it could single-handedly kill any liking for Shakespeare.
Filmed in a murky black and white, the movie seems to be making the point that
Shakespeare is cod liver oil for the terminally pretentious. You may want to use a scene or
two for laughs.
✶✶ Basil Coleman directed the 1978 As You Like It for the BBC series, and he made the
interesting, if not altogether successful, decision to film it outdoors instead of in a studio.
Starring Helen Mirren as Rosalind and the excellent Richard Pasco as a dour Jaques, the
naturalistic look of this version contrasts sharply with the artificiality of the 1936 film
and occasionally jars with the romantic and courtly language of the text. Better than
many of the other interpretations in the BBC series, used sparingly with short clips from
Czinner’s film, it will give your classes a good opportunity to discuss adaptation, realism,
stylization, and so on.
✶ Kenneth Branagh’s 2006 As You Like It is a shame. The man who did so much in the
1990s to popularize the idea of Shakespeare movies (Henry V, Much Ado, Hamlet)
undoes some of that good work in this ill-conceived attempt to transplant the play to
nineteenth-century Japan. Branagh might have intended this film to reach across a
number of cultural barriers, but the result is that this feels more like tasteless cultural
appropriation – Asia invaded by Caucasians and Africans. Again, as it does in other
adaptations, Branagh’s mistrust of Shakespeare’s verbal comedy undermined his project;
he had Alfred Molina ham up Touchstone, and, worst, he shrank Shakespeare’s largest
female role, Rosalind (Bryce Dallas Howard), almost to insignificance.
✶✶ Trevor Nunn’s Royal Shakespeare Company 1977 musical production of the play
sets the action in a Latin American banana republic and puts some of the lyrics to music.
Judi Dench as Adriana and her late husband, Michael Williams, as Dromio of Syracuse
steal the show, but Roger Rees is a memorable Antipholus of Syracuse. As with any video
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recording of a stage production, watching this Comedy of Errors is looking through a

glass darkly, but it makes a valuable resource for showing students the malleability of the
material and what a great actor can do with Adriana.
✶ James Cellan Jones’s 1983 BBC version in which Roger Daltry of The Who fame plays
the Dromios is unremarkable. Like so many of the BBC productions, this one is stagey
throughout and should only be used in snippets to compare one performance with
another. Its use of a single actor (Michael Kitchen) to play both Antipholi and another
(Daltry) to play both Dromios speaks volumes about why this play is meant for the stage
(not the screen) and why Shakespeare is smarter than James Cellan Jones. But you can
use Cellan Jones’s mistake to help you with your discussion of look-alikes.
Coriolanus
✶ Elijah Moshinsky’s 1984 BBC production of Coriolanus is just okay. Moshinsky manages,
despite a sound stage with predictable ‘Roman’ architecture, to get a sense of action in the
first act. Alan Howard, who was a good Coriolanus on stage, here seems flat and his voice
reedy. Irene Worth’s Volumnia is somewhat ladylike. The film preserves a good deal of text
but occasionally rearranges or reassigns speeches. Most interestingly, when the conspirators
murder Coriolanus, the production gives their lines,‘kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him!’ to Coriolanus,
so that he appears to be ordering his own death. Though the longer speeches might be
worth looking at, Moshinsky’s penchant for long pauses ruins most of the dialogue.
✶✶ Acclaimed actor Ralph Fiennes directed and starred in this 2011 adaptation of the play.
The film, set in the present, is realistic in its dystopian way, providing some (too many)
typical shots of modern street combat. (We learn pretty quickly that war is bad.) Where the
production design most succeeds is in its use of the trappings of contemporary politics –
omnipresent TV screens, political spokespeople, talk shows, news anchors, photographers.
The text is severely cut, and though the film runs at just over two hours, it feels longer.
Three excellent performances: Fiennes is first-rate as Coriolanus, looking every bit the
modern warrior; Brian Cox makes Menenius’s lines sound contemporary; and Vanessa
Redgrave’s initially soft approach to Volumnia pays off in her strength at the end.
Cymbeline
✶ In his 1983 BBC production of Cymbeline, director Elijah Moshinsky uses Vermeer–
Rembrandt interiors very like those he used in All’s Well That Ends Well. But Cymbeline
is set in the wilds of Wales with outdoor activities such as hunting, sword fighting, and
large battles with the Romans. The result is that the parts of the play that benefit from a
sense of containment – Posthumus’s bet with Iachimo, Iachimo’s invasion of Imogen’s
bedroom – work well enough, but the parts of Cymbeline that release us from that kind
of confinement to a more spacious world do not. Helen Mirren’s Imogen is steely enough
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to be our heroine. Michael Pennington’s Posthumus has the charm to explain Imogen’s
devotion, and he makes us attentive – even though it’s the last act – to Posthumus’s large
load of monologues. The descent of Jupiter – here merely overhead angles and dark
backgrounds – will disappoint your students.
Hamlet
✶✶ Laurence Olivier’s 1948 production of Hamlet won the Oscar for Best Picture. It
wasn’t – the award should have gone to John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
– but it is impressive in many ways. A restless, wandering camera turns the setting (the
real castle at Elsinore) into a labyrinth that ends on Gertrude’s vagina-like bed (Olivier
had read Ernest Jones’s book Hamlet and Oedipus). Olivier cut the play rather ham-
fistedly and removed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as well as the Hecuba soliloquy.
Students find the acting in the movie old-fashioned, but they like the climactic sword
fight in which Olivier did his own stunts (and broke his arm in his Errol Flynn leap from
the stairs). You might ask them why Olivier, who had made Henry V in colour five years
earlier, chose to do the film in black and white.
✶✶✶ Grigori Kozintsev’s 1963 Hamlet is over three hours long and is in Russian, but it
is also an excellent film adaptation of the play and a good movie in its own right. Also
shot in black and white, the film is full of memorable images, including the special effects
of the Ghost scenes. The obligatory Marxist reading is visible but not intrusive, and it
gives an interesting social frame to the story. Kozintsev, a master director, had great help:
Boris Pasternak wrote the screenplay, Shostakovich composed the music, and Russia’s
premier young actor, Innocents Smoktunovsky, played the part of Hamlet. The length of
the movie might put some of your students off, but your best students will be impressed
with much of it.
✶✶ Tony Richardson’s 1969 Hamlet starring Nicol Williamson as an angry and disaffected
prince has all the flavour of the rebellious 1960s. Though there’s nothing cinematically
extraordinary about this Roundhouse stage production, the camera is careful in its
attention to the speaker and the listener, and that’s not a bad thing in any version of
Hamlet. Richardson’s take on almost every character in the play is subversive, including
his far-from-innocent Ophelia, played by Marianne Faithful, a briefly famous pop singer
during the British Invasion.
✶ Rodney Bennett’s 1980 production of Hamlet is a spare affair in every way but its
length. At three and a half hours long, its principal use is as record of the text. And
Jacobi’s effete Hamlet is likely to reinforce your students’ perception that Shakespeare is
cuisine suited only to the taste of intellectuals.
✶✶✶ A decade later, almost as if in answer to Jacobi’s hypersensitive Hamlet, Franco
Zeffirelli cast Mel Gibson in the lead of his 1990 Hamlet. Gibson is a good Hamlet –
unfussy, straightforward, and, of course, virile. Paul Scofield’s Ghost and Glenn Close’s
Gertrude are also memorable. As you’d expect from Zeffirelli (see Romeo and Juliet and
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The Taming of the Shrew) the film is visually plush, and the movie is more than usually
watchable for a film version of Shakespeare.
✶✶✶ In 1995, two years before his much-ballyhooed film version of the play, Kenneth
Branagh made a much more interesting Hamlet movie, A Midwinter’s Tale (English title:
In the Bleak Midwinter). Like Pacino’s Looking for Richard or Madden’s Shakespeare in
Love, this movie about the making of a play gets closer to the spirit of the stage than most
film adaptations. Branagh’s funny little black and white film is a warm-hearted look at an
out-of-work actor’s attempt to direct and star in his own production of Hamlet. He
assembles a motley crew of other unemployed actors, and we watch their bittersweet
(mostly sweet) trials and tribulations through to opening night. This low-budget movie
(written by Branagh, who does not act in it) will give your students a much better idea
about why Shakespeare matters than most film adaptations of his plays.
✶✶ In 1996 Kenneth Branagh, following Olivier’s career trajectory, added Hamlet to his
résumé of Shakespeare films, both as a director and an actor. He made the film in both a
long version and a short version, and the long version runs four hours and two minutes.
Branagh set the film in the nineteenth century, and filmed it with high production values
at Blenheim Palace. His Hamlet walks a nice line between the bookish introspectiveness
of Jacobi and Olivier and the worldly vigour of Williamson and Gibson, but after about
an hour the endless tight shots of Branagh’s face become almost parodic. Billy Crystal’s
Gravedigger is a pleasant surprise.
✶✶ Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, released in 2000, is an honourable addition to the long
list of Hamlets on film. Almereyda sets the movie in contemporary New York, makes
Claudius the head (’King’) of a corporation, and casts Ethan Hawke in the lead role.
Occasionally Almereyda’s search for early twenty-first-century American equivalents to
the sights and sounds of an early seventeenth-century England are too cute, but most of
the time those transpositions are thought-provoking. In particular, Hamlet’s video
version of the ‘Mousetrap’ is so strong an assault on Claudius that it makes you believe a
guilty creature would indeed ‘proclaim his malefactions’. Ethan Hawke plays the
disaffected Generation X-er to the hilt. Bill Murray is my favourite Polonius on film. The
film can’t fail to elicit discussion from your students.
Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2
✶✶✶ Though I love Olivier’s Henry V, Orson Welles’s 1967 Chimes at Midnight is my
favourite English language adaptation of Shakespeare because it succeeds more as a
movie. Welles has compressed the entire Falstaff and Hal story into one feature-length
movie. To do that, he has chopped the text radically and rebuilt the story completely.
Filmed in black and white near Avila, Spain, the movie has a stark un-English beauty,
superb camerawork, and terrific acting in all the parts and particularly in Welles’s Falstaff,
Keith Baxter’s Hal, and Margaret Rutherford’s Mistress Quickly. The single most
illuminating performance is Jeanne Moreau’s brilliant Dol Tearsheet. A re-mastered
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version that fixes the film’s terrible original soundtrack is now available on DVD, but you
would do better to show this film to your students after they have read the play (always
good policy).
✶ David Giles directed both parts of Henry IV in 1979 as part of the BBC series. He does
a serviceable job of telling the story, and Anthony Quayle is clear – if a little lugubrious
– with Falstaff ’s language. Though he keeps the famous speeches, his excessive cutting
elsewhere (necessary because of the excessive pauses) finally bleeds the life out of the
two great plays – especially out of Part Two. Keep kids away from this one except to look
at comparative clips.
✶✶ Ironically, Richard Eyre’s two Henry IV entries in the 2012 Hollow Crown series
make us feel the weight of that crown, but do not sufficiently get at the joyous life force
of the heavy man against which Hal must weight it. Simon Russell Beale brilliantly
suggests the age of Falstaff – ‘I am old. I am old’ – but not his agelessness or his dauntless
mirth, and Eyre’s realistic depiction of a night in a flame-lit Boar’s Head aids and abets a
dark portrait of fat Jack that will not endear him to your students. Like the rest of the
series, these instalments get high marks for the pacing and the look of film.
Henry V
✶✶✶ Laurence Olivier’s 1943 film of Henry V is something special – not quite a movie,
not quite a play, not quite a gallery of magnificent images. Anyone studying Shakespeare
should see the first thirty minutes, which recreate the feeling of what it might have been
like to be at the Globe – both as actor and as audience – for the first performance of one
of Shakespeare’s plays. Olivier has got beneath the surface of the play’s story and made a
film about the theme at the heart of the play: imagination.
The movie begins with an aerial view of a toy-set London in 1600 and zooms in on the
Globe for the opening of Shakespeare’s Henry V. There, in a 360-degree pan, it establishes
the give and take between an Elizabethan company and its audience. Slowly, in imitation
of the theatrical process that the Chorus describes to us, the imagination takes over, and
the action plays for a while in front of sets painted to look like the landscapes of the
Brothers Limbourg and their fourteenth-century work, Les Trés Riches Heures. Then the
artificial background gives way to realistic location shots for the Battle of Agincourt.
Finally, the film moves back again through more Limbourg illustrations to the Globe. All
the while, Olivier renders the play in jewel-like detail and in magnificent Technicolor.
His own performance shows us Burbage playing Harry, and ‘Burbage’s’ Harry is finely
crafted verbally and physically, even to his horsemanship.
✶ David Giles’s 1979 BBC version of Henry V completed his work on the trilogy.
David Gwillim’s Harry is okay. As critics say generally of the BBC series, it looks ‘stage-
bound’, but all the performances in it are solid, and the TV camerawork is intelligent
and helpful. For showing comparative clips, it makes a fine third sample with Olivier’s
and Branagh’s.
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✶✶ Your students will enjoy Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 Henry V. Though I applaud
Branagh for making the film, I cannot agree with the uncritical praise that greeted
this movie as an improvement on Olivier’s. First, Branagh purports to have made an
anti-war film, but his excessive use of the close-up flatters faces, puts backgrounds into
soft focus, and, together with the relentless soundtrack, actually sentimentalizes war.
Second, where Olivier lets the other characters in the play compete with Harry,
Branagh’s film is much more a one-man show. However, Branagh’s strong cast – Judi
Dench’s Mistress Quickly, Ian Holm’s Fluellen, Paul Scofield’s Charles VI , and Michael
Williams’s Michael Williams (cute) – retrieves some balance. Of course, the play itself is
something of a one-man show, but in the play the humour and good-naturedness
of the other characters surfaces throughout, whereas Branagh’s film mutes the comic
moments that do not belong to the king. Worst of all, Robert Stephen’s Pistol here is
lachrymose by contrast with Robert Newton’s exuberant Pistol in Olivier’s version. This
is a young man’s film, with all the virtues and faults that term implies: impassioned,
earnest, and energetic; but also simplistic, humourless, and self-indulgent. Your students
will love it.
✶✶ Thea Sharrock directed the 2012 production of Henry V for the BBC ’s Hollow
Crown series. The film stars Tom Hiddleston as King Henry V, and the production’s
low-key approach to the material seems to stem from Hiddleston’s demeanour. This
produces some good quiet moments, for example a Crispin’s Day speech that is more
Crispin’s Day conversation. Sharrock’s decision to give visuals to the Chorus’s sad
summation of the war’s aftermath captures well Shakespeare’s subversion of his own
material.
Henry VI, Part 1
✶✶ Because companies take a financial risk in doing a Henry VI play, they normally
conflate the three plays into one or two. So we can be particularly thankful for
Jane Howell’s 1982 BBC production of all of The First Part. Howell has filmed it
on a soundstage and joyously and ostentatiously played with its theatrical artifice.
She and her Joan, the remarkable Brenda Blethyn, infused the production with a
great sense of humour and as great a sense of the power of womanhood. Trevor Peacock’s
John Talbot contributes as well to the pleasure of this well-spoken and acted version.
Here’s a smart video adaptation of the play that shows off how much fun the stage can be.
✶✶ Dominic Cooke directed all three episodes of the 2016 ‘War of the Roses’ for the
Hollow Crown series. He condenses the three parts of Henry VI into two films, putting
everything to the downfall of the Duchess of Gloucester and the murder of the Duke
into the first episode. He rearranges the timeline, conflates Suffolk with Somerset, and
shrinks Talbot’s role. But he does all this with cinematic panache, and his fine actors,
particularly Hugh Bonneville (Gloucester), Ben Miles (Somerset), and Lara Frances-
Morgan (Joan of Arc), make sense of the mishmash.
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Henry VI, Part 2
✶ Jane Howell’s 1982 BBC production of 2 Henry VI used the same sound stage as
Part One, this time with peeling paint and drabber colours, and again captures the
theatricality of a play. One aspect of that theatricality is Howard’s doubling of David Burke
as Gloucester and Dick the Butcher, and Trevor Peacock as the Sheriff and Jack Cade. This
directorial choice provides an opportunity for your students to discuss the fundamental
differences between film and theatre – why does doubling work in a play but not in a
movie? But three and a half hours is too long no matter how interesting the doubling
might be.
Henry VI, Part 3
✶ Studying the BBC Shakespeare series has made me a fan of Jane Howell’s ability to
capture the feel and thrill of a theatrical production, but her 1982 production of The
Third Part of Henry VI, like its predecessor, is too long to admire. Instead of filling the
film with words, Howell has filled it with unnecessary pauses and the kind of action
scenes that will look stagey to students raised by Wolverine. What’s more she makes some
significant cuts, not the least of which is Richard showing off the head of Somerset with
which the play – and my earlier chapter – begins.
✶ Dominic Cooke’s second episode of the 2016 ‘War of the Roses’ in the Hollow Crown
series is not so good as the first. Having moved one-third of 2 Henry VI into the first
episode and removed entirely the Jack Cade material, he combines the last third with 3
Henry VI and revels in the scenes of bloody mayhem between the York family and
Margaret (a memorable Sophie Okonedo). To make room for the battles and gory effects,
the text here gets pretty thin, but the film introduces Benedict Cumberbatch’s fine
Richard, and will make your students look forward to Richard III.
Henry VIII
✶ As though they wanted to get it out of the way, one of the BBC ’s first productions
is Kevin Billington’s 1979 Henry VIII. It boasts some fine performances, particularly
Claire Bloom as Katherine and Timothy West as Wolsey. The video is faithful to the
text, except that sadly it cuts the ‘Porter scene’ (5.3), in which the ‘youths that thunder
at the playhouse’ try to get in to see the christening of the baby Elizabeth. As will
become the norm in this series, the pauses between scenes are ponderous. What
hurts this filmed version of the play most, though, is that the two-shot TV frame (and
perhaps the budget) prevented it from capturing the spectacle that in the original
stage production helped alleviate a play with many long speeches but with little comedy
and action.
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Julius Caesar
✶✶✶ Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the man who wrote Citizen Kane, directed Julius Caesar in
1953. Mankiewicz’s adaptation of the play makes first-rate use of its movie stars, but it is
not particularly ‘cinematic’ in other ways. Classical actors John Gielgud (Cassius) and
Louis Calhern (Caesar) join Greer Garson (Portia), Deborah Kerr (Calpurnia), Edmund
O’Brien (Casca), James Mason (Brutus), and Marlon Brando (Antony) in a film intelligent
enough to excite your best students. Gielgud is an appealing Cassius, and Brando’s
Antony is fascinating. The Hollywood-style Rome looks good, if not particularly real, but
the film loses that sense of design and size when the action moves from Rome.
✶ The money men who invested in Stuart Burge’s 1970 Julius Caesar must have thought
that Charlton Heston’s name and the appeal of a colour version would make up for acting
and production values inferior in every way to the Mankiewicz version.
✶ Herbert Wise directed the 1979 BBC production of Julius Caesar, in which the fine
actor Richard Pasco plays Brutus. You’ll find little else to admire in this plodding version,
which – at 180 minutes long – is a full hour longer than it should be.
King John
✶ David Gile’s 1984 BBC production of King John falls victim to the muddle of events in
the play. Contributing to this sense of unalleviated sameness, the largely static camera
continually frames the actors, richly upholstered in their costumes, in tight shots of one,
two, or three figures. One important job of the Bastard’s character is to stand out against
that muddle, but George Costigan’s Bastard, though wry and winning in a conversational
way, is too weak to do that. Leonard Rossiter plays a King John with too little sense of
irony. Lue Owens, who looks the part of the young Arthur, can’t keep up with the
language, and Claire Bloom, a great actress, does nothing particular to make you
remember Constance.
King Lear
✶✶ Russian director Grigori Kozintsev’s 1970 King Lear reflects the official Marxist
point of view. The film stresses the social forces at work in the play, and Kozintsev shoots
the film in a way that dwarfs Lear (Yuri Jarvet) and mocks the idea that he or any man
can pretend to sovereignty over others. As with his Hamlet, one advantage of Kozintsev’s
film is that Boris Pasternak’s translation ‘freed’ the director to concentrate on the story,
but your students can get the original text in the subtitles.
✶✶ Peter Brook’s 1971 version of King Lear won’t work as an introduction to the play
because it has been so severely cut, but it is a fine way to get at the play’s bleak modernity.
Brook uses a lot of camera and editing tricks to dislocate and alienate his audience, but
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the central performance by Paul Scofield holds things together. Your better students will
like this movie and will find much to talk about.
✶ Jonathan Miller’s 1982 BBC production of King Lear provides the fullest text of the
play on film and a fine performance by Michael Hordern in the title role. Like all of Miller’s
work, the production is intelligent, but also it is static. I like Michael Kitchen’s Edmund.
✶✶ Michael Elliott’s 1983 made-for-TV King Lear is overlong (almost three hours), but
it is the video version of King Lear that your students are most likely to enjoy. What
makes this version so good is the 75-year-old Olivier’s astonishing performance (his last
important one) as Lear. Elliot shot the entire film in a sound studio, but his frank use of
that space works well. If you are spending an extended amount of time studying King
Lear, then I recommend you have your students see both this version and Brook’s.
✶ I’m supposed to like the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 Ran, but I
don’t; it’s supposed to be an adaptation of King Lear, but it isn’t. The film finds more
parallels with Macbeth. Beautiful film-making, but it’s not going to help with King Lear.
✶✶✶ Elijah Moshinky’s 1985 BBC production of Love’s Labour’s Lost is one of the series’
last, and it’s an enjoyable two hours. Though Moshinsky’s cuts lose some of the play’s depth,
he partially compensates for that loss with sets and costumes inspired by the paintings of
Watteau and with music by Mozart. Add to that David Warner’s excellent Armado –
proving he doesn’t need a heavy Spanish accent to be funny – David Gwilym’s smart
Berowne, and Maureen Lipman’s spirited Princess, and you get one of the series’ best shows.
✶✶ I’ve changed my mind about Branagh’s 2000 musical version of Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Now I find it winning. The idea behind the film – turn it into a Hollywood musical – makes
sense because having four couples in many of the scenes forces choreography on any
staging of a play. True, it’s a bad Hollywood musical, but it’s ‘good’ bad (in a La La Land
way), and you can see that everyone is having fun. Nathan Lane turns in an excellent
performance as Costard, and Branagh in the role of Berowne does his usual good job of
making the language more than commonly clear.
Macbeth
✶✶ Orson Welles’s 1948 Macbeth is both awful and fascinating. You keep asking yourself
what the great man could have been thinking when he (1) had all his actors speak in
indecipherable Scottish burrs, (2) cast Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth, and (3) costumed
the show in what looks like Tin Man castoffs. Still, he succeeds in creating a creepy,
expressionistic world.
✶✶✶ Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 Throne of Blood is one of the best foreign
language adaptations of Shakespeare. Kurosawa sets the action in a samurai world in
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which the warlord Washizu (Toshiro Mifune) is the Macbeth character. The film
contains some of the most famous images in movie history, and though the film will
occasionally produce hoots from some teenagers, your best students will find it a
revelation.
✶✶✶ Roman Polanski’s 1971 movie of Macbeth was something of a scandal when it
came out. Film critics couldn’t resist making connections between the sex and violence
in the film and Polanski’s personal history as the widower of Sharon Tate, one of the
victims of the Manson family ritual murders. Maybe so, but you could also argue that the
violence in the film is first in the play and that oversexed witches and a sexually attractive
Lady Macbeth (Francesca Annis) are just below the surface of Shakespeare’s imagery.
With Kurzel’s 2015 version, this is the most movie-like option for your students and will
hold their interest, if sometimes for the wrong reasons.
✶✶✶ Trevor Nunn’s 1979 rendition of his minimalist 1976 Royal Shakespeare
Production is a treasure. It records for posterity the great performances of RSC actors in
the heyday of the company. It will give your students an opportunity to see the work of
Ian McKellen as Macbeth, John Woodvine as Banquo, and Bob Peck as Macduff. All of
these memorable performances pale beside the work of Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth.
Her sleepwalking scene – shown to them as a clip wholly out of context – has made my
students cry.
✶ The 1983 BBC adaptation by Jack Gold is not one of the better efforts of the series.
The two leads – Nicol Williamson as Macbeth and Jane Lapotaire as his wife – bring
rather tortured concepts to their performances, and the result is a version that will seem
stagey and dated to your students.
✶✶ Scotland, PA, Billy Morrissette’s 2001 variation on the Macbeth theme is one of many
loose adaptations. Two of them, Ken Hughes’s Joe Macbeth (1955) and William Reilly’s
Men of Respect (1990), are obvious and forced in their attempt to fit the story into
gangster movies. By contrast, Morrissette’s film takes the story for a quirky, darkly comic
ride that has Joe ‘Mac’ McBeth (James LeGros) murdering the Duncan figure (James
Rebhorn) by pushing him into a huge vat of hot oil at a fast food drive-in. Your students
will enjoy this odd-ball take on the story, and especially Christopher Walken’s Zen-
studying Lieutenant Ernie McDuff.
✶✶ Justin Kurzel’s 2015 Macbeth is a thoughtful and brutal work. The film opens
with the Macbeths burying their baby in the Scottish Highlands, where their tent
dwelling underscores the tribal and primitive nature of the clans. The film takes every
opportunity to screen the offstage horrors in the play. We watch as Macbeth stabs Duncan
(who also watches it) repeatedly in the heart; and Kurzel shows Lady Macduff and the
rest of her family die – burned at the stake. But from the earthen tones to the sombre
music to the persistent delivery of lines in whispers, there is an unrelieved sameness
about the film. That’s partly because it’s missing a comic Porter like the one who gives
variety to the play. This movie needs him more than it needs that mysterious fourth
witch.
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Measure for Measure
✶✶ Desmond Davis’s 1979 adaptation of Measure for Measure for the BBC is your only
choice . . . and it’s not a bad one. My general complaint that all the BBC adaptations are
‘Shakespeare shoved in a box’ doesn’t apply to Measure for Measure, because that
claustrophobic look works well for Shakespeare’s Vienna, where much of the action is in
the prison. Kate Nelligan’s Isabel and Tim Piggott-Smith’s Angelo are first rate, and the
excellence of their scenes together won’t be lost on your students. That said, I find it
strange that no one has made a good film of this disturbingly contemporary play.
✶✶ Jonathan Miller has twice produced versions of The Merchant of Venice, and the first,
in 1969, is the more valuable because Laurence Olivier plays Shylock and Joan Plowright
plays Portia. Miller and his co-director, John Sichel, based on their production at the
National Theatre, set the play in a nineteenth-century Venice and have Olivier play Shylock
as a kind of depressed Benjamin Disraeli (the Jewish-born Prime Minister during Queen
Victoria’s reign). The world of this filmed staged version is so darkly captured that we feel
more as though we are in Sherlock’s London than in Shylock’s Venice.
✶ Jonathan Miller was also responsible – as producer – for the BBC version in 1980,
directed by Jack Gold. This version provides a good contrast to the 1969 film because
Gold has set the play in Renaissance London and has his Shylock – Warren Mitchell –
dressed in Jewish garb of the period. In short, whereas Olivier’s Shylock could ‘pass’, this
Shylock is wholly and proudly unassimilated. Comparing any Shylock scene from this
film with the same scene from its predecessor will make for a good discussion. That said,
this version suffers from the overall dullness of most of the BBC Shakespeare series.
✶✶ Michael Radford’s 2004 film, William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, is in the
Zeffirelli tradition of lush, atmospheric adaptations that take the viewer into a wholly
different world. That ‘once upon a bad old time’ approach distances us from the troubling
post-Holocaust echoes of the bigotry in his play. Al Pacino’s Shylock is excellent, and
Lynn Collins’s Portia is charming in her Belmont element, if not quite up to Pacino in the
Venetian courtroom. The fact that movie reviewers had a hard time processing the mixed
tone of the work is a tribute to Radford’s attempt to recreate Shakespeare’s own balance
of moods. On the whole, this is a pretty good movie.
✶✶ David Jones’s 1982 BBC production of Merry Wives of Windsor is pretty darn good,
partly because of the detailed sound stage Elizabethan village he shows off with fluid
camerawork, and partly because the acting is uniformly excellent. Jones cast the play
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splendidly using some of the best actors in England. With so little verse, the script frees
them to play with prose, and they have a holiday playing with the eccentric characters in
the play. Judy Davis and Prunella Scales are fine as the title wives, Mistress Ford and
Mistress Page. Falstaff ’s old posse of Nym, Bardolph, Pistol, and especially Mistress
Quickly (Elizabeth Spriggs) are outrageous in their manner but clear in their language.
In that regard, look particularly for the French Doctor Caius played by the late Michael
Bryant (revered by his fellow actors as the best in the business). The playwright Alan
Bennett is a ferocious Justice Shallow, and Ben Kingsley is a first-rate Master Ford. The
one disappointment is the late Richard Griffiths’ slow and melancholy Falstaff.
✶✶✶ Max Reinhardt’s 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins with wooden classical
scenes in Athens, but once this film moves to the woods it becomes irresistible. To the strains
of Mendelssohn’s music, the film marshals all the special effects available then to MGM and
creates a dark fairy world that is one of the great spectacles in film history. James Cagney is
Bottom, oddly frenetic but plausible; Mickey Rooney is really quite good as Puck; and Joe E.
Brown is an hilarious Thisbe. Good as the film is, some students might feel superior to its
special effects on the one hand and its sentimentality on the other. A sad loss for them.
✶✶ Peter Hall’s 1968 A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows that the risk of using
contemporary styles for a film production of Shakespeare is that no matter how ageless
the story may be, the costume will date the movie. Students who can look past the mini-
skirts, Nehru jackets, and bell bottoms (come to think of it, most of that is back) will
enjoy good performances by Diana Rigg (Helena), David Warner (Demetrius), and Judi
Dench (Titania). The film offers a natural reading of the play with the emphasis on mud
and flesh, and, aside from some clichéd film tricks, is full of solid directorial choices.
✶✶ Michael Hoffman’s 1999 version with Kevin Kline as Bottom is an odd disappointment.
Hoffman felt it necessary to give Bottom a sad little side story (including a shrewish
wife), and in so doing he robbed Kline of a comic role he might have soared in.
Unaccountably, the city scenes are filmed on location, while the scenes in the woods are
staged on an obvious set. And then there are the bicycles. I’m not sure why, but there are
lots of bicycles.
Much Ado about Nothing
✶✶ The 1973 made-for-TV production of Much Ado about Nothing, directed by

A. J. Antoon, sets the play in the United States after the Spanish-American War. Don Pedro,
Claudio, and Benedick (played engagingly by Sam Waterston) are Rough Riders returned
to a belle époque world, and Dogberry and company are Keystone Kops. Antoon should
get some credit for realizing that the small screen with a headshot of an actor speaking the
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lines can be hospitable to Shakespeare. That said, the production is a bit stagey and earnest
– better TV than most of the BBC series, but finally somewhat sombre.
✶✶ Stuart Burge directed the 1984 BBC production of Much Ado about Nothing, an
above average entry in that series. Robert Lindsay and Cheri Lunghi do well enough in
the lead parts; and the production tells the story in a straightforward way and provides
some worthwhile clips for contrast with the Branagh version.
✶✶✶ Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film version of Much Ado about Nothing is a good film
and a big-hearted embrace of the fun of Shakespeare. The brilliant first six minutes break
down all the barriers of ‘ShakesFear’ by suggesting that what is coming is going to be
some combination of a Renoir picnic and The Magnificent Seven, and the rest of the film
delivers – mostly on the picnic – with a superb performance by Kenneth Branagh as
Benedick and an even better one by Emma Thompson (then his wife) as Beatrice. My
main objection to the film is that Branagh, despite his frequent assertion that Shakespeare
is accessible, mistrusts the linguistic comedy of the Dogberry scenes and has Michael
Keaton default to his Beetlejuice persona. The result is that none of that linguistic comedy
comes through.1 That said, a student who watches this film straight through is more
likely than not to believe that Shakespeare is good stuff.
✶✶ Joss Whedon’s 2012 black and white film of Much Ado about Nothing is a fascinating
and worthwhile failure to marry a modern LA sensibility to Shakespeare’s Elizabethan
comedy of manners. The first job of such an arrangement is to get past the ideas of chastity
that dominate the play, and Whedon (of Avengers fame) does that first job first when he
shows us Benedick (Alexis Denisof) and Beatrice (Amy Acker) getting out of bed the
morning after a one-night stand. From then on, the movie swerves from hits, when
Shakespeare’s words seem to fit the setting and the thoughts of the actors, to misses, when
they do not. The production seems like Whedon had a good idea for a house party, and you
only wish it had lasted long enough for them to have made it into a good movie as well.
Othello
✶✶✶ George Cukor’s 1947 A Double Life is more than a curiosity; it’s a good movie. Ruth
Gordon and Garson Kanin’s screenplay makes Shakespeare’s Othello the story within a
story. Ronald Colman won an academy award for his performance as Anthony John, an
actor trying to revive his career with a production of Othello. Your students will enjoy the
way the movie finds parallels between the offstage lives of the characters and the play
they are producing. The movie doesn’t use Shakespeare’s language, but of course the play
within the movie does.
1
Branagh also fell into the trap of staging the encounter of Margaret (as Hero) and Borachio on the balcony,
and as a result, English teachers will ask me why an ASC production of the play ‘left out’ that crucial scene.
Shakespeare is the one who ‘left it out’. Staging it undercuts the idea that loving people means having faith in
them. Claudio shouldn’t be swayed by such ocular evidence, and we shouldn’t be bothered to watch it.
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✶ In 1952 Orson Welles directed Othello and starred in the title role. As in so many of his
projects after Citizen Kane, Welles had to struggle with budgetary problems. The result is
a film in which he uses a variety of techniques from voice-over to distant perspective
shots to cover the movie’s shortcomings – and he uses them with characteristic genius.
Micheal MacLiammoir plays Iago. This movie is a good one for movie buffs interested in
the work of Welles, but its primary usefulness for you will be as a source of clips.
✶ Stuart Burge’s 1965 Othello is essentially a film of the National Theatre’s earlier
production directed by John Dexter and starring Laurence Olivier. The setting is too
clearly a soundstage for your students to feel they are watching a movie. Olivier plays
Othello as a West Indian black man, and the result is mannered and controversial. Frank
Finlay’s Iago is a dangerous Cockney and works well with Sir Larry. Maggie Smith is
wonderful as Desdemona.
✶✶ Jonathan Miller’s 1981 BBC production of Othello is more consciously thought
through than most of the BBC productions, and it has the virtues of a distinctive
performance by Bob Hoskins as a Cockney Iago, some intelligent TV framing, and
Anthony Hopkins as a deliberately non-African Othello. This last aspect of the production
can make for a good discussion of what Shakespeare meant by ‘Moor’ or ‘black’; here he
meant ‘Arab’. For that reason, Miller’s version will provide some clips for truly instructive
contrasts with Laurence Fishburne’s Othello in Oliver Parker’s 1995 production.
✶✶ Franco Zeffirelli’s 1986 film adaptation of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello tackles the opera
with Zeffirelli’s typical gusto; and if you are an opera fan, you may want to tackle it yourself.
If so, you ought to devote a lot of class time to it. To do it properly, choose a passage from
the play that corresponds with one of Verdi’s arias and (1) read and discuss the passage in
Shakespeare, (2) see and discuss a clip of the scene on videotape, (3) listen to the aria while
looking at the libretto, and (4) watch the aria as it appears in Zeffirelli’s version.
✶✶ Kenneth Branagh plays Iago to Laurence Fishburne’s Othello in the 1995 film
version directed by Oliver Parker. Both Branagh and Fishburne acquit themselves well,
and Parker attempts to make the film sexier and more cinematic with a number of non-
textual moments. Though that approach ultimately competes with the language, this is
the Othello on film most likely to teach your students about the ways the play can work.
✶✶ For a modern reworking of the story, you might want to look at the 2001 movie O,
directed by Tim Blake Nelson. Brad Kaaya’s screenplay sets the story in a high school and
the title character is O(din) James (played by Mekhi Phifer), the prep school’s star
basketball player and its only black student. The movie is clever in trying to find parallels
but a bit silly in trying to be poetical. Nonetheless, it gets at the subject of race and
jealousy in ways clear to students.
Pericles
✶ David Jones’s 1983 BBC production of Pericles, like a number of the productions in
this series, suffers from sound stage sets that try to give a sense of place – including sand
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dunes and classical ruins – but simply remind us that what we are watching is neither
theatre nor cinema, but a pale semblance of both. Edward Petherbridge’s Gower is clear
and can show students the role of a chorus and the way iambic tetrameter differs from
Shakespeare’s usual pentameter. Patrick Allen’s Simonides and Juliet Stevenson’s Thaisa
capture the playfulness of that father–daughter relationship. Trevor Peacock as Boult,
and Toby Salaman and Lila Kaye as Pandar and Bawd, pull no punches in making clear
the nature of their profession.
Richard II
✶✶ The BBC ’s 1978 Richard II, directed by David Giles and starring Derek Jacobi as
Richard, Jon Finch as Bolingbroke, and John Gielgud as Gaunt, is one of the good
productions in the BBC series. Much of the credit for the success of this Richard II goes
to Jacobi, whose performance as the king is at once fey and dignified, flamboyant and
controlled. Jon Finch is a terrific Bolingbroke, and Gaunt’s ‘England’ speech seems
written for Gielgud’s golden tones. Like most of the BBC series, it’s nonetheless
Shakespeare shoved into a box the size of a 1980s television.
✶✶ Rupert Goold’s 2012 production of Richard II for the Hollow Crown series is heavy
on ominousness and portent and buys entirely Richard’s view of himself as Christ figure.
Okay, but Christ was a man, and this Richard seems always a boy. The casting of the slight
Ben Whishaw as King Richard II , especially opposite the stubble-bearded Rory Kinnear
as Henry Bolingbroke, reduces this to a story of childish poet versus manly regular guy.
That story too easily overwhelms a play about two flawed men.
Richard III
✶✶ Laurence Olivier’s 1955 version provides us with a glimpse of Olivier in the role that
made him famous, as it has done for a long line of actors since Richard Burbage. While
Olivier the director brought a deep understanding of theatre to his film of Henry V and
a powerful idiosyncratic sense of the meaning of the play to his film of Hamlet, he brings
little more to his film of Richard III than his genius as an actor. The movie is good when
Olivier the actor is on screen, slow and obvious when he is not. The cutting of Margaret
might be defensible if the film were shorter.
✶ Jane Howell’s 1983 BBC version is a competent job of videotaping the play, and her
Richard, played by Ron Cook, is tough and hard edged. He lacks, though, the kind of charm
whose flip side is evil. As thoughtful and careful as the production is, even Howell’s practised
help does not raise it above the inherent weaknesses of the BBC series’ straightjacket.
✶✶✶ Richard Loncraine’s 1995 version starring Ian McKellen is successful in the most
surprising way: it’s a good movie. And because it works as a film, in an odd way it gets
closer to the feel of the play. McKellen, who had scored a hit with a stage version set, as
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the film is, in the 1930s, chose Loncraine to do the film in part because he was not a
Shakespearean. The result is a film that looks and sounds like a movie. The text has been
cut down to screenplay size, and the characters move easily through real locations. The
transposition to the twentieth century mostly works, though occasionally the film is just
a tad too clever for its own good. Richard, for example, yells ‘a horse, a horse, my kingdom
for a horse’ because his Jeep is stuck in the mud.
✶✶✶ Al Pacino’s 1996 Looking for Richard is actually a documentary with a staged
version of Richard III intermittently inserted. But Pacino’s movie does two things that
can be really helpful to the Shakespeare teacher. First, in a series of interviews with a
variety of people from famous actors to street people, Pacino explores Shakespeare’s
contemporary appeal, and your students will be surprised and entertained by what these
people have to say. Second, he gives us a backstage look at the kind of conversation that
goes on among actors and directors during the preparation of a show. This film is one of
the few that I’d trust students to see and enjoy on their own as a good accompaniment to
the play.
✶✶✶ Though Dominic Cooke’s last instalment in his 2016 ‘War of the Roses’ trilogy
looks a good deal like the others, the strong through line of Richard III and the
performance of Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard make this a worthwhile treat.
Cumberbatch plays a complicated and, at times, vulnerable Richard, but he has a
showman’s sense of when to forego all subtlety and play the monster. Watch what he does
to Hastings with the word ‘if ’. You’ll also enjoy Dame Judi Dench as Richard’s mother, the
Duchess of York.
Romeo and Juliet
✶✶ George Cukor’s 1936 Romeo and Juliet stars a 39-year-old Norma Shearer as Juliet
and a 42-year-old Leslie Howard as Romeo and is set in a Hollywood never-never-
Verona-land. The black and white movie is an easy target for ridicule as a stagey, old-
fashioned view of Shakespeare, the more so because of Leslie Howard’s pale, limp Romeo.
But the film is nonetheless a gem of sorts. John Barrymore is a funny, man-of-the-world
Mercutio; Basil Rathbone is a fine, menacing Tybalt; and Norma Shearer, whose Juliet is
both intelligent and passionate, makes us hear and feel her pain.
✶✶ Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s 1961 West Side Story is a fine adaptation of a
great musical, but I do not hold with those who use this film to teach Shakespeare. It
shows students that the broad outline of the story is timeless, and it stresses the youth/
sex/violence at the heart of Shakespeare’s play; but in every other respect the many
delights of the film are so far removed from those of Romeo and Juliet that rather than
lead your students to admire and enjoy Shakespeare, it may make them see him merely
as the source of good material for a musical.
✶✶✶ Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet features two gorgeous title characters,
seventeen-year-old Leonard Whiting and fifteen-year-old Olivia Hussey, and a lush,
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Italian setting that captures both the beauty and the heat of Shakespeare’s play. Zeffirelli’s
Verona, like Shakespeare’s, is peopled with young toughs who are showing off for each
other and whose conversation is all lewdness and threat. Finally, in pacing and in
blocking, the movie is energetic in a way that echoes Shakespeare’s poetry. Sadly, Zeffirelli
took out the killing of Paris because Romeo was too ‘lovely’ to do such a thing. Worse, the
film reduces Juliet to a stooge, merely the source of anguish for Zeffirelli’s idea of a
beautiful and guiltless Romeo.
✶ Alvin Rakoff ’s 1978 BBC production of Romeo and Juliet is so bad in every
respect – acting, setting, pacing, everything – that its only possible classroom use is
as a target of ridicule. You might make up a big batch of popcorn and lead your students
in throwing it at the screen during the unbearable moments. You will need a lot of
popcorn.
✶✶ Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo & Juliet tries hard – too hard – to reach the MTV
generation. As a Shakespeare teacher how can I not like a movie of a Shakespeare play
that sold out at my local Cineplex in the Shenandoah Valley? The movie is full of arresting
imagery and such cleverness as a close-up of the brand name ‘sword’ on a handgun to fit
such lines as ‘put up your swords’. But ultimately the failure of the two leads, Claire Danes
and Leonardo DiCaprio, to handle the language dooms this film to the category of
intriguing experiment. The other trouble is that the fashion, music, and style that made
it a hit in 1996 date it badly today.
✶✶✶✶ John Madden’s 1998 Shakespeare in Love is in many ways the best Romeo and
Juliet on film and the one movie I know of that a teacher can show students to explain
to them ‘what’s so great about Shakespeare’. Joseph Fiennes plays Shakespeare, who
falls in love with an aristocratic young woman, played by Gwyneth Paltrow. The two of
them end up playing Romeo and Juliet before Queen Elizabeth I (Judi Dench, in her
Oscar-winning performance); and the script makes sure that we hear the great language
of the play and feel the joyousness of the love it describes. And all of that plays out
against the finest depiction I know of Shakespeare’s London. The screenplay is by Marc
Norman and Tom Stoppard, the great playwright, and this great man of the theatre may
be responsible for the film’s spot-on understanding of the way plays get made and the
sheer thrill of the dramatic enterprise.
✶✶✶ Aleta Chappelle’s 2015 Romeo and Juliet in Harlem is a delight. Filmed in Harlem
for under $100,000, this low-budget film has a handmade feel, but it also has enough
heart and smart to make it a fine introduction to the play. As its title suggests, the film is
a way to reach non-white students, but its value goes much beyond that. Not all the
acting is first-rate, but two performances, Harry Lennix’s Capulet and Jasmine
Carmichael’s Juliet, are remarkable for making the verse simultaneously poetic and real.
Lennix’s Capulet is the best I’ve seen anywhere, and Carmichael’s Juliet far surpasses
Olivia Hussey’s or Clare Dane’s. Throughout the film, Chappelle is careful to marry pace
(just eight minutes over ‘two hours traffic’) and action with an apparent love of the words.
The result is a tough little gem.
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✶✶ George Sidney’s 1953 Kiss Me Kate is a film version of the 1948 Cole Porter musical
about a musical version of the play. The Broadway show is better than the movie, which
‘cleans up’ some of the great lyrics and whose gender politics is more like the world of
Mad Men than like that of Much Ado. For example, the poster for the movie shows Fred
(Petruchio) spanking Lilli (Kate). But the film could be the basis of some good discussions
on the play, and your students will enjoy ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ – especially in the
version from the play.
✶✶ Franco Zeffirelli’s 1967 The Taming of the Shrew is an enjoyable and blatant attempt
to cash in on the celebrity of the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor relationship. No
Sly and huge cuts, but the film is a beautiful evocation of life in sixteenth-century Padua.
In most other ways it is silly. Kate appears to give the final speech because she
sees a lot of adorable children at her sister’s wedding feast and apparently decides
pregnancy by anyone is better than no pregnancy at all. But your students will love
the production values and the no-kidding on-screen explosion of these two super
stars.
✶ Like the Zeffirelli, Jonathan Miller’s 1980 Shrew for the BBC series unwisely cuts the
Induction. Still, because Miller likes Petruchio (played by John Cleese, of Monty Python
fame) and sees that he is not a bully, this version makes an interesting contrast to the
Zeffirelli. Sadly, Miller seems to have felt – quite incorrectly – that a sensitive Petruchio
must also be humourless and physically inert, and without an energetic Petruchio, the
production becomes rather sleepy.
The Tempest
✶✶ Derek Jarman’s 1980 adaptation of The Tempest has the honest subtitle ‘by William
Shakespeare, as seen through the eyes of Derek Jarman’ and is about as close as you’ll
come to a good film production of The Tempest. Jarman’s work still has the power to
shock. The film wears its art house style proudly, and the result is an honest, vigorous, and
inventively recreated rendition of Shakespeare’s play. His treatment of the masque takes
advantage of film with a big Busby Berkeley production. (N for nudity.)
✶ By contrast, John Gorrie’s BBC treatment – also in 1980 – is a lifeless enterprise that
seems designed to prove that Shakespeare has absolutely nothing to say to us anymore.
Michael Horden delivers a Prospero so uninteresting that the wonder is Miranda (Pippa
Guard) hadn’t swum away from the island years ago. Nigel Hawthorne as Stephano,
Andrew Sachs as Trinculo, and Warren Clarke as Caliban do make some sense of the
comedy.
✶✶ Peter Greenaway’s challenging movies are lush and tactile, and his 1991 adaptation,
Prospero’s Books, is unforgettable. If you show it to your students, they’ll hate it, and their
parents will try to get you fired (lots and lots and lots of boring frontal nudity). Greenaway,
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however, understands the essentially non-dramatic nature of The Tempest stems from
the fact that Prospero runs the entire show. So he has John Gielgud – legendary for his
‘Shakespearean’ intonation – say everyone’s lines.
Two other films loosely inspired by the play may have some use as tools to spark
discussion.
✶✶ Fred McLeod Wilcox’s 1956 Forbidden Planet is an entertaining sci-fi movie in
which Dr Morbius (Prospero, played by Walter Pigeon), a kind of mad scientist, is living
in exile with Altaira (Miranda, played by Anne Francis), A cute robot is the Ariel figure,
but there’s nothing cute about the dark Caliban force.
✶✶ Another loose adaptation of The Tempest is Paul Mazursky’s 1982 film of the same
name, in which John Cassavetes plays a contemporary architect escaping an ambitious
wife to live on a Greek island with his daughter Miranda (Molly Ringwald). Susan
Sarandon makes Ariel a very human and very appealing being.
Timon of Athens
✶ Jonathan Miller’s 1981 BBC production of Timon has the great virtue of Jonathan
Pryce’s excellent portrayal of Timon. Pryce’s Philanthropist Timon is naturally engaging,
and the actor’s relative youthfulness makes the character’s generosity into a young man’s
endearing joy in pleasing people rather than something reckless or needy. The payoff is
that the fury of the Misanthropic Timon in the second half seems less the idiosyncrasy
of an unbalanced eccentric than the embittered viewpoint of a good man. The movie
does a reasonably good job of staging the Amazons’ dance, but it cuts the short scene
with the Fool as well as the one with the Three Strangers, two odd moments in the play
that provide texture.
Titus Andronicus
✶✶✶ Directors who would like to bridge the gulf between film and theatre should study
Jane Howell’s 1985 BBC production of Titus Andronicus. She maintains the intimacy of
a theatre while giving her sound stage version of the play a sense of sweep. She’s a master
of adapting the theatrical aside to the screen. Her Titus falls firmly in the realistic
tradition. The camera is discreet, but never shies away from the graphic; the stump of
Titus’s left hand, for example, shows the severed ends of the ulna and the radius. She has
us see the action through the bespectacled young eyes of Titus’s grandson, but largely
stays faithful to the text. Hugh Quarshie as Aaron gives the film’s most remarkable
performance.
✶✶ Julie Taymor’s 1999 Titus was a sensation, and your students will enjoy it for its chic
design (and for its nudity). Taymor filmed the movie at Cinecittà and takes her inspiration
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for the hyperrealism of her characters from Fellini, who made many of his great movies
there, and for her sets from Mussolini, who built the studio. Anthony Hopkins channels
Hannibal Lecter’s humour into Titus, especially in chef ’s attire when he joyfully races
across the screen pushing a dinner cart with his speciality – Chiron and Demetrius Meat
Pie. Alan Cummings has almost too much fun as a loathsome Saturninus, Jessica Lange
is a good Tamora, and Laura Fraser is a fine Lavinia. Taymor uses a more stylized
approach to the violence and gore than Howell does, including twigs coming out of
Lavinia’s stump. Generally the movie – Taymor’s first – tried to use too many tricks, the
worst of which are psychedelic montages that she calls ‘Penny Arcade Nightmares’.
✶✶ Jonathan Miller’s 1981 BBC version of Troilus and Cressida is a smart, tight piece of
work and one of the best of the series. Miller had directed five instalments in the series
when he got around to Troilus and Cressida, and he knew how to keep the pace going and
compress the sprawl of a stage into a tight frame (the camerawork of Jim Atkinson won
the BAFTA award). Two brilliant performances – Charles Grey’s flamboyantly gay
Pandarus and Jack Birkett’s grotesque Thersites – are the best reason to share this film
with students. They make comprehensible the two unorthodox characters who serve as
the play’s commentators. Birkett, who called himself ‘The Incredible Orlando’, was a
dancer and actor, whose voice and appearance anticipates by twenty years that of Andy
Serkis’s Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Suzanne Burden’s Cressida has too little
wit and too much weepiness, but Anton Lesser’s Troilus is convincingly both a young
lover and an important Trojan. Unfortunately, the video’s faithfulness to the text ends up
demonstrating the problematic length of the play’s speeches.
Twelfth Night
✶ Directed by John Gorrie in 1979, the BBC Twelfth Night is another serviceable record
of what the play is about. That is what one could say is the most important achievement
of the BBC productions generally: they usually provide a reasonably textual and visual
example of each play. In doing so, they are tools for teachers to use in boning up on the
play. This Twelfth Night has a cheery take on the play, a take that teachers can profitably
contrast with Trevor Nunn’s dark version.
✶✶ Trevor Nunn’s 1996 gloomy film version of Twelfth Night is interesting, but it should
be better than it is. Nunn is one of the directors I most admire, so I forgive him the
gloom, because there is plenty of melancholy in the play; but I do wish that he had made
a film that moves more quickly and assuredly. As a reading of the play, it will give your
students much meat for discussion, because Nunn takes a wholly sympathetic view of
Malvolio (Nigel Hawthorne) and a harshly critical view of Sir Toby (Mel Smith). His
Feste (Ben Kingsley) is so depressed that he’s virtually suicidal.
367
✶ Don Taylor’s 1983 offering of Two Gentlemen of Verona in the BBC series will seal
forever a student’s dislike for Shakespeare. The sound stage of ‘classical’ sets, the choral
song that opens the film, and the predictable lute playing throughout are bad enough
clichés, but what really kills any life in this film are the endless pauses and snail’s pace
of scene changes (abetted by those flutes). The exception to all the badness is Joanne
Pierce’s fine performance as Silvia. The entire business is a lesson on how not to film
Shakespeare. For example, in the staging of the ‘rape’, we never see Silvia’s response at all.
Such a clip would also make a great start to a discussion about the difference between
movies and plays.
One result of the devaluation of Two Noble Kinsmen that I discuss in my Comments on
the play is that the BBC did not include it in its Shakespeare series and no one else has
been interested enough to try it.
The Winter’s Tale
✶ Jane Howell’s 1980 The Winter’s Tale was her first contribution to the BBC series, and
clearly she learned a lot and improved in her later work. Here the setting of abstract
geometrical cones and arches promises something it never delivers and has neither the
virtues of the stage nor of the real world. Particularly off-putting for your students will
be the casting of the 45-year-old Jeremy Kemp as a bearded Leontes who already looks
well into middle age in the beginning and really old ‘fifteen years’ later at the end, and
that complicates any love story. A pallid and lisping Hermione further lowers their
investment in her or in her marriage.
368
INDEX
Acker, Amy 360 Bryant, Michael 359

Allen, Patrick 362 Burbage, Richard 55, 108, 188, 218, 221, 276, 353,
All’s Well That Ends Well 13, 73, 84, 98–104, 164, 362
187, 226, 313, 339, 347, 349 Burden, Suzanne 367
Almereyda, Michael 151, 351 Burge, Stuart 355, 360–1
American Shakespeare Center x, xiii, 9, 168 Burke, David 354
Annis, Francesca 357 Burton, Richard 365
anti-Semitism 232, 234
anti-Stratfordians 89 Cagney, James 359
Antony and Cleopatra 13, 68, 73, 75–6, 87, 105–17, Calhern, Louis 355
164, 316, 347 Carmichael, Jasmine 364
Antoon, A. J. 359 Cassavetes, John 366
Armstrong, Alan xix cast 5, 23–5, 27, 36, 42, 71, 82, 102–3, 115, 195, 201,
Armstrong, Gareth 236 214–15, 230, 236, 269, 276, 283, 317, 324–5, 345,
As You Like It 13, 22, 67, 69, 73, 76, 78, 80, 83, 96, 350–1, 353, 356, 358
118–23, 187, 239, 240, 263, 339, 348 casting 23–5, 71, 81, 84, 95, 126, 151, 157, 280, 283,
audience contact 68–9 296, 323, 347, 362, 368
audio-visual 21 Chamberlain, Cliff 340–1
authorship 66, 89 Chappelle, Aleta 364
characters in the plays: Aaron the Moor 34, 306–8,
Bacon, Sir Francis 3, 89 312, 366; Abbess (Emilia) 125, 128; Achilles 314,
Barrymore, John 363 317; Adam 13, 67, 118–19; Adriana 76, 124–5,
Bartholomew Fair 35 127–8, 348–9; Agamemnon 314, 317; Agrippa
Barton, John 270 107, 114, 116; Ajax 314, 317; Alarbus 307,
Baxter, Keith 351 311–12; Albany, Duke of 14; Alcibiades
BBC 21, 22, 83, 347–9, 352–8, 360–2, 364–8 299–300; Alençon, Duke of 14, 169; Alexas 116;
Beatles, the 94, 107, 113, 248 Alice 166–7; Angelo 81, 226–7, 229–30, 358;
Beaumont, Francis 264–6 Andrew Aguecheek, Sir 76, 321–2; Anne Boleyn
Bennett, Rodney 350 88, 189–90; Anne Page 238, 244; Antigonus 340,
Bentley, Gerald Eades 257 342–3; Antiochus 265; Antipholi 126–7, 349;
Berger, Tom xix Antipholus of Ephesus 124; Antipholus of
Bien, Peter xviii Syracuse 124, 127–8, 348; Antonio 70, 232–4,
big shots xiv, 79, 80 237, 252, 322; Antony, Mark 36, 76–7, 85, 87,
Birkett, Jack 367 105–9, 111–13, 115–17, 132, 184, 192, 348, 355;
Blackfriars Playhouse x–xi, xix, 33, 36, 188–9, 265 Apemantus 299–301; Archbishop of Canterbury
blackness 234, 258–9 44, 79, 163, 314; Arcite 333–4, 336–7; Ariel 40,
blather score 314 294, 297–8, 366; Arthur 75, 197–8, 201, 355;
Blethyn, Brenda 353 Arviragus 137; Audrey 120; Aufidius, Tullus
Bloom, Claire 354–5 129–32, 134; Autolycus 340; Balthasar 282;
Bloom, Harold 93 Banquo 7, 71, 75–6, 108, 218–20, 222, 357;
Bonneville, Hugh 353 Baptista Minola 266, 288; Bardolph 78, 165, 238,
Booth, Stephen xviii, 101–2, 153, 319 359; Barnardine 65, 79, 87, 228; Barnardo 50;
Branagh, Kenneth 21, 151, 348, 351–3, 356, 360–1 Bassanio 24, 70, 232–6; Bawd 362; Beatrice 24,
Brando, Marlon 355 42, 58, 74, 87, 125, 251–3, 255–6, 287, 360;
Brook, Peter 355–6 Belarius 137, 139; Benedick 42, 56, 74, 87, 99,
Brooke, Paul 347 251–3, 255–6, 359–60; Benvolio 68–9, 281,
Brown, Joe E. 359 283–4; Berowne 79, 212–13, 215–16, 356;
369
Index
Bertram 98–104, 347; Bianca 259, 262–3, 288, 85, 98–104, 240, 249, 263, 347, 359; Helicanus
291; Boatswain 16, 293; Borachio 254–5, 360; 269; Henry Bolingbroke (King Henry IV) 47–8,
Boult 362; Boyet 214–16; Brabantio 266; Brutus 87, 153–4, 156, 270–1, 273, 362; Henry V 22, 36,
34, 41, 48, 69, 79, 87–8, 192–6, 355; Caliban 55, 77, 87, 153–6, 159–60, 162–4, 166, 351–3;
294–7, 365–6; Calpurnia 69, 86, 192, 355; Henry VI 168, 178, 181–2, 184–5; Henry VIII
Camillo 344; Capulet 5, 11, 76, 266, 283, 364; 146, 189–90; Hermia 25, 68–9, 82, 240, 246,
Casca xix, 194–6, 355; Cassio 262–3; Cassius 41, 249–50, 263; Hermione 265, 339–41, 344–6,
56–7, 87, 193–6, 355; Celia 80, 99, 118–20, 123, 368; Hero 68, 80, 251–6, 360; Hippolyta 15, 24,
240, 263; Charles VI 169, 353; Charles the 81, 246–7, 249, 334; Holofernes 211, 213–14;
wrestler 118–19; Charmian 111–12, 115–16; Hortensio 64, 289; Hotspur 57, 69, 87, 153, 156,
Chief Justice 161, 189; Chiron 306, 312, 367; 158–60; Hubert 197, 201; Hugh Evans 15, 241,
Chorus 162–4, 264, 352–3; Christopher Sly 287; 244; Hymen 118–19; Iachimo 137–9, 143, 349;
Clarence 28, 182, 277, 280; Claudio 28, 36, Iago 75, 77, 184, 240, 258–60, 262–3, 278, 339,
226–7, 230–1, 251–6, 359–60; Claudius 41, 43, 361; Imogen 99, 137–9, 142–4, 349–50; Iras
71, 76–7, 84, 87, 145–7, 149–50, 292, 351; 109–12, 115–16; Isabella 37, 226, 230–1; Jack
Cleopatra 25, 56, 73, 75–7, 85, 87–8, 105–17, Cade 174–5, 180, 354; Jailer’s Daughter 334,
169–70, 287, 316, 347–8; Cloten 137, 139, 142–4; 336–8; Jaques 64, 72, 76–7, 120, 122, 348; Jessica
Clown 108, 110, 112, 145, 346; Cominius 131, 70, 80, 232–3, 236–7; Joan la Pucelle 168–71,
133–5; Conrade 254; Constance 198–9, 201, 180, 353; John of Gaunt 15, 274–5, 362; Julia 99,
355; Cordelia 10, 76–7, 87, 203–4, 206–8, 292; 326, 331–2; Juliet 5, 11, 25, 28, 50, 75, 80, 85, 206,
Corin 120, 348; Coriolanus 129–36, 349; 227, 230, 281–6, 316, 363–4; Julius Caesar 41,
Costard 214, 356; Crab 327, 329–30; Cressida 48, 56–7, 69, 75, 77, 79, 86, 106–7, 110, 112,
313–18, 367; Curtis 64, 290; Cymbeline 137, 192–6, 348, 355; Junius Brutus 133–4; Kate 42,
139; Dauphin 44; Demetrius 25, 68–9, 82, 85, 69, 80, 85, 87, 125, 160, 163, 167, 241, 253,
115, 249, 306, 312, 359, 367; Desdemona 75–6, 287–91, 365; Katherine 166, 190, 217, 291, 354;
85, 139, 206, 257–60, 262–3, 361; Diana 104, Kent 27, 209; King John 197, 220, 355; King of
334; Diomedes 108, 316–7; Dionyza 267; Navarre 79, 211–12; Lady Anne Neville 53, 69,
Dogberry 56, 78, 253–4, 359–60; Doll Tearsheet 276–7, 280; Lady Elizabeth Grey 181, 275–6;
47, 160; Don Adriano de Armado 211, 213–14, Lady Faulconbridge 198; Lady Macbeth 41, 69,
356; Don John 76–7; Don Pedro 15, 251–3, 359; 75, 131, 218–19, 224–5, 333, 356–7; Lady Percy
Dromio 24, 126–8, 287, 349; Dromio of Ephesus 156, 158–9; Lady Mortimer 156; Laertes 42, 79,
124; Dromio of Syracuse 124, 348; Duke 147, 150; Lafeu 99, 102–3; Launce 287, 326,
Frederick 118–20, 266; Duke Senior 76, 119–20, 328–30; Launcelot Gobbo 256–7; Lavinia 75,
123; Duke Vicentio 8, 226; Dumaine 212, 306–7, 367; Lear 27, 41–2, 44, 76, 85, 132, 203–9,
215–16; Duncan 75, 218–19, 224, 357; Edgar 32, 266, 269, 292, 302, 355–6; Leonato 78, 252, 254,
44, 203–4, 206–7, 210; Edmund 27, 206, 209, 266; Leonine 267–8; Leontes 87, 240–1, 266,
232, 288, 292, 355–6; Edward IV 181–2; Egeon 339–42, 344–6, 348; Longaville 212–13, 215–16;
294; Ely, Bishop of 163; Emilia 262–3, 334, Lorenzo 70, 232–3, 236; Lucentio 289; Lucetta
336–7; Enobarbus 106–7, 114, 116–17, 348; 332; Luciana 128; Lucio 37, 41, 76, 226–7,
Escalus 15, 227, 229–30; Exeter 167; Falstaff x, 230–1; Lucius 300, 307, 310–12; Lucullus 300;
15, 24–5, 28, 42, 47–8, 64, 69, 74, 77–8, 82, 84, Lysander 25, 68, 82, 246, 249–50; Macbeth 6–7,
153–4, 156–61, 163–5, 238–9, 241–5, 351–2, 41–2, 69, 75–7, 79, 82, 132, 218–25, 278, 314,
359; Fenton 238; Ferdinand 80, 292, 294, 297–8; 357; Macduff 41, 69, 75, 79, 218–19, 223, 333,
Feste 74, 78, 83, 319–25, 367; Flavius 299–300, 357; Malcolm 6, 218–19; Malvolio 77, 321–4,
305; Florizel 340–1, 344; Fluellen 167, 353; Fool 367; Marcade 69, 214; Marcus Andronicus 307;
50, 78, 83, 203–5, 208–9, 320, 366; Fortinbras 82, Margaret 254–5, 360; Maria 76, 217, 321–2, 324;
145, 148, 164; Friar Lawrence 281; Gertrude 84, Mariana 227, 230; Marina 266–9; Master Ford
145–7, 150–2, 350; Gloucester 10, 27, 41, 75, 108, 87, 238, 240, 243–5, 359; Menelaus 314, 317;
209–10; Goneril 10, 76, 205; Gonzalo 293; Menenius 129, 132–3, 135, 349; Mercutio 12, 40,
Gower 264, 362; Gratiano 70, 232–3, 236; 69, 74, 281, 283–5, 363; Miranda 80, 292–4,
Gremio 288, 290; Grumio 287–8, 290–1; 297–8, 365–6; Mistress Ford 240–3, 359;
Guiderius 137, 144; Guildenstern 76, 145, Mistress Overdone 36, 263; Mistress Page
150–1, 350; Hamlet 23, 25, 34, 41–2, 49, 51–2, 241–4, 359; Mistress Quickly 154, 156, 238, 241,
56, 58–62, 68–9, 71, 73–5, 77–8, 80, 82, 84, 88, 351, 353, 359; Morocco 234; Moth 78, 214;
95, 132, 145–52, 164, 184, 276, 288, 314, 350–1; Mutius 307; Nathaniel 64, 211, 214; Nerissa 70,
Hastings 276, 363; Hector 313; Helena 34, 82, 99, 236–40; Nestor 314, 317; Nick Bottom 25,
370
Index
28, 34, 47, 56, 73, 78, 82, 213, 246–8, 250, 359; 163, 167, 348, 353; Wolsey 188, 190, 354; Wooer
Nurse 11, 241, 281, 283, 285–6; Nym 47, 359; 334; York, Duke of 180, 185
Oberon 25, 70, 82, 246–7, 249–50, 281, 337; Chimes at Midnight 21, 351
Octavius Caesar 77, 107, 112; Oliver 67, 83, Clarke, Warren 365
118–19; Olivia 320–2, 324; Ophelia 41, 69, 73, classroom as an Elizabethan theatre/stage 39, 342
76, 82, 145, 147–8, 150–2, 206, 350; Orlando 22, Cleese, John 365
67, 118–20, 123, 348; Orsino 320, 322, 324–5; Cliff Notes 7–8
Osric 42; Othello 41–2, 76, 85, 87, 132, 139, 240, Close, Glenn 350
257–63, 339, 361; Palamon 333–4, 336–8; Cohen, Amy xix
Pandarus 313, 315, 317–18, 367; Pandulph Cohen, Judy xx
201–2; Paris 11, 33, 282–3, 286, 315, 333, 364; Cohen, Kate xix
Parolles 98, 100–4, 347; Patrolcus 314, 317–18; Cohen, Sady xix
Paulina 265, 340, 344–5; Perdita 340–4; Pericles Cole, Mary Hill xix
265–9; Petruchio 42, 64, 87, 253, 287–91, 365; Coleman, Basil 348
Philip the Bastard 197–200, 355; Philo 105, 115; Coleman, Kevin 71
Pirithous 336; Pisanio 137, 143; Pistol 42, 47–8, Collins, Lynn 358
78, 161, 163, 165, 238, 353, 359; Poins 160; Colman, Ronald 360
Polixenes 339–41, 344–5; Polonius 42, 79, 82, Comedy of Errors, The 9, 13, 23, 73, 76, 124–8, 145,
137, 145, 147, 150–1, 227, 351; Pompey 36–7, 73, 220, 239, 287, 293, 299, 306, 348–9
76–7, 116, 214, 226, 229; Porter 68, 225, 354, Condell, Henry 89, 335
357; Portia 69–71, 74, 76, 87, 99, 125, 192–3, 196, Cook, Ron 362
233–6, 240, 287, 308, 355, 358; Posthumus 137, Cooke, Dominic 353–4, 363
139, 143, 265, 349–50; Prince Escalus 83; Coppola, Francis 153
Princess of France 69, 211, 213, 215–17, 356; Coriolanus xv, 13, 50, 73, 75, 80, 129–36, 137, 164,
Prospero 40, 108, 265–6, 292–5, 297–8, 365–6; 349
Proteus 326–7, 331–2; Puck 25, 78, 82, 246–7, Costigan, George 355
359; Pyramus 50, 213, 246–9, 282–3; Queen couplet 5, 50–2, 172–3, 198, 212, 216, 285, 301, 302
Margaret 14, 131, 168, 172, 175, 178–80, 184, Cox, Brian 96, 349
276, 278, 354, 362; Regan 10; Regnier 169; Cox, James xviii
Richard II 33, 87, 271–5, 314, 362; Richard III Crystal, Billy 351
42, 53, 65, 69, 74, 87, 174–5, 180–6, 276–80, 354, Cukor, George 360, 363
362–3; Romeo 5, 11–12, 41–2, 49–50, 68–9, 71, Cumberbatch, Benedict 9, 354, 363
75, 80, 85, 88, 111, 281–6, 292, 314, 333, 363–4; Cummings, Alan 367
Rosalind 64, 80, 99, 118–21, 123, 213, 240, 263, curriculum x, 153, 191, 287, 319, 326; delight xii;
287–8, 348; Rosaline 5, 217, 281; Rosencrantz power xii; solace xi–xii; sympathy xi
76, 145, 150–1, 350; Ross 69; Saturninus 306–7, Cymbeline 13, 137–44, 264–5, 349–50
367; Sebastian 322; Sempronius 300, 305; Czinner, Paul 348
Seyton 7, 218; Shallow 15, 244, 359; Shepherd
346; Shylock 77, 232–4, 236–7, 266, 358; Silvius Daltry, Roger 349
120; Simonides 265–9, 362; Somerset 175, 181, Danes, Claire 364
353–4; Speed 326–8; Stephano 365; Suffolk 168, Davis, Desmond 358
172, 174–5, 178–80, 353; Sylvia 326, 331; Talbot Davis, Judy 359
168, 172–3, 180, 353; Tamora 306–8, 311–12, Deadly Preconceptions xiii, 3–17, 86
367; Thaisa 265–9, 362; Thersites 313, 315, 318, deaths 12, 50, 69, 76, 106, 113, 137, 206
367; Theseus 24, 68, 81–2, 246–7, 249, 265, 334; death scenes 50, 69, 249
Thisbe 40, 50–1, 213, 246–9, 282–3, 359; Dench, Judi xvii, 55, 251, 270, 329, 348, 353, 357,
Thomas Cromwell 190; Timon 191, 299–305, 359, 363–4
366; Titania 25, 73, 78, 82, 246, 247, 249–50, 359; Denisof, Alexis 360
Titus Andronicus 306–8, 310–12, 366–7; Toby Dexter, John 361
Belch 76, 322–3, 367; Touchstone 56, 64, 74, 78, DiCaprio, Leonardo 364
83, 118–20, 122, 348; Tranio 76, 78, 290; dick jokes 110
Trinculo 365; Troilus 313–14, 316–18, 367; dirty 4, 12, 30, 40–1, 73, 242, 273, 303
Tybalt 5, 281, 363; Ulysses 314, 317; Valentine discovery space 39, 342–3
326–8, 331; Valeria 129–32; Ventidious 300; Double Life, A 360
Viola 99, 319–22, 324–5; Virgilia 129–30, 132; Downs, Angela 347
Volumnia 82, 129–32, 135–6, 349; Williams 80, Durband, Alan 58–62
371
Index
Earl of Oxford 3, 89 Harrell, John 232

Elizabethan stage/theatre 21, 33, 37, 39, 60–1, 68, 75, Hawke, Ethan 351
134, 170, 215, 230, 268, 330, 342–3 Hawthorne, Nigel 365, 367
Elliott, Michael 356 Hazlitt, William 93
Ellswick, Jill 85 Hiddleston, Tom 353
Endymion 118 Heminges, John 89, 335
Enloe, Sarah xviii Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 xii, 14, 42, 73, 80, 87, 93, 145,
153–63, 238–9, 240, 351–2
Faithful, Marianne 350 Henry V 8, 14, 21–2, 32, 36, 41–2, 44, 73, 78, 87,
feeding-in 71 89, 148, 162–7, 241, 264, 348, 350, 351, 352–3,
Fiennes, Joseph 364 362
Fiennes, Ralph 349 Henry VI, Part 1 14, 168–73, 180, 238, 353
film xii, xv, 18, 21–2, 29, 42, 55, 62, 68, 86, 95–6, Henry VI, Part 2 14, 139, 174–80, 238, 267, 354
347–68 Henry VI, Part 3 14, 180–6, 238, 276, 354
Finch, Jon 362 Henry VIII 14, 187–90, 238, 292, 333, 354
Finlay, Frank 361 Heston, Charlton 355
Finlayson, Gay 113 hitting 127
Fishburne, Laurence 361 Hoffman, Dustin 232
Fletcher, John 187, 189, 264, 266, 292, 333–5 Hoffman, Michael 359
Folger Shakespeare Library xviii, 112, 145 Holm, Ian 353
Folio 10, 89, 116, 133, 170, 174, 191, 209, 222, 225, homosexuality 132, 191, 193, 234, 318
299, 313, 335 Hopkins, Anthony 27, 361, 367
Forbidden Planet 366 Hordern, Michael 356
Frances-Morgan, Lara 353 Hoskins, Bob 361
Francis, Anne 366 Howard, Alan 349
Fraser, Laura 367 Howard, Bryce Dallas 348
Frederick, Joan xix Howell, Jane 353–4, 362, 366, 368
Frye, Northrop 292 Hussey, Olivia 363–4
Garson, Greer 355 iambic pentameter 5, 48–50, 130, 165

gender xi, xiv, 69, 105, 120–1, 126, 130, 157, 168, Induction 35, 287, 289, 365
171, 252, 269, 287, 298, 316–18, 324–5, 334, Irons, Jeremy 23
365
ghosts 9, 23, 27, 70–1, 74, 76, 81, 97, 146, 149–52, Jacobi, Derek 350–1, 362
218, 350 James Madison University x, xviii, 113, 270
Gibson, Mel 350–1 Jarman, Derek 365
Giles, David 352, 362 Johnson, Agnes xviii
Globe xix, 4, 9, 21, 26, 33, 39, 108, 115, 149, 188, 197, Johnson, Richard 348
230, 323, 342, 352 Johnson, Samuel 10, 73, 93, 98, 130, 139
Goddard, Harold 93, 238 Jones, Allison xix
Gold, Jack 357–8 Jones, David 358, 361–2
Goold, Rupert 362 Jones, Ernest 350
Gorrie, John 365, 367 Jones, James Cellan 349
Greenaway, Peter 365 Jonson, Ben xi, 10, 35, 89, 126, 191, 265, 267, 300,
Greenblatt, Stephen 206 319, 339
Grey, Charles 367 Julius Caesar 14, 36, 56, 73, 75, 87, 96, 159, 191–6,
Griffiths, Richard 359 355
Gwillim, David 352
Gwilym, Mike 356 Katherine of Aragon 146, 187
Kaye, Lila 362
Hall, Peter 359 Kazantzakis, Nikos 293
Hall, Roger x, 83 Keaton, Michael 360
Hamlet xv, 9, 13, 23, 42–3, 59–62, 68, 70, 73, 76, 78, Kemp, Jeremy 368
80, 89, 96, 108, 137, 145–52, 162, 164, 193, 249, Kerr, Deborah 355
267, 292, 349, 350–1, 355, 362 King James I 7, 10, 26, 89, 189, 220–1, 264, 294
Hamlet and Oedipus 350 King John 14, 197–202, 238, 355
372
Index
King Lear 10, 14, 27, 32, 41, 44, 50, 73, 77–8, 80, 83, 85, Mendelssohn, Felix 359
87, 108, 145, 203–10, 264, 272, 292, 302, 339, 355–6 Menzer, Paul xix
King, Stephen xiv, 8 Merchant of Venice, The 8, 15, 70, 80, 89, 232–7, 239,
Kingsley, Ben 359, 367 258, 260, 308, 318, 358
Kiss Me, Kate 287, 365 Meres, Francis 164
Kinnear, Rory 362 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 15, 87, 238–45, 358–9
Kitchen, Michael 96, 349, 356 metre 5, 45, 46, 48–50, 51
Kliman, Bernice xviii Middleton, Thomas 265–6, 299
Kline, Kevin 359 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 8, 9, 15, 23–4, 50,
Knight, G. Wilson 191–2 68–9, 73, 76, 78, 81, 83, 96, 162, 209, 213, 246–50,
Kozintsev, Grigori 350, 355 265, 282–3, 319, 334, 359
Kurosawa, Akira 356 Mifune, Toshiro 357
Miles, Ben 353
Lane, Nathan 356 Miller, Jonathan 348, 356, 358, 361, 365–7
Lapotaire, Jane 348 Mirren, Helen 348–9
Last Temptation of Christ, The 293 Mitchell, Warren 358
leadership 87 Molina, Alfred 348
LeGros, James 357 Morrissette, Billy 357
Lennon, John 106 Mowat, Barbara xviii
Lennix, Harry 364 Much Ado About Nothing 15, 21, 23, 36, 68, 69, 73,
Les Très Riches Heures 352 76–8, 80, 83, 87, 98, 187, 240, 251–6, 348,
Lesser, Anton 367 359–60, 365
Lindsay, Robert 360 Murray, Bill 351
Lipman, Maureen 356
Lodge, Thomas 118 National Theatre 27, 358, 361
Loncraine, Richard 362 Nelligan, Kate 358
Long, J. C. 340 Nelson, Tim Blake 361
Looking for Richard 351, 363 Newman, Paul 283
Love’s Labour’s Lost 15, 50, 68, 69, 73, 76, 78, 79, Nolan, Jeannette 356
211–17, 265, 356 Norman, Marc 364
Lurhmann, Baz 364 North, Thomas 134–5
Lunghi, Cheri 360 Nunn, Trevor 251, 270, 347–8, 357, 367
Lyly, John 118
O 361
Macbeth xv, 6–7, 9, 15, 23, 41, 49–50, 68–9, 73, 75, O’Brien, Edmund 355
83, 96, 108, 129, 137, 139, 164, 218–25, 249, 265, Okonedo, Sophie 354
270, 294, 307, 333, 356–7 Olivier, Sir Laurence xv, 21–2, 151, 348, 350–3, 356,
MacLiammoir, Micheal 361 358, 361–2
Madden, John 351, 364 Ono, Yoko 106
Maharesh, Maharishi 113 Orlin, Lena xviii
malapropisms 253–4 Othello 9, 15, 73, 75, 77, 89, 96, 108, 139, 145, 164,
Mankiewicz, Joseph L. 355 193, 257–63, 360–1
Marlowe, Christopher 89, 308 Owens, Lue 355
Marowitz, Charles 8
Mary Baldwin University xi, xviii–xix, 261 Pacino, Al 351, 358, 363
Mason, James 355 Packer, Tina 71
masque 108, 211, 213, 214–15, 264–5, 294–5, 365 pairing 266, 326, 329, 334
Mazursky, Paul 366 Paltrow, Gwyneth 364
McCarthy, Henry 4 parents 42, 80, 148, 153, 155, 265, 281–2, 303, 365
McKellen, Sir Ian 270, 357, 362 Parker, Oliver 361
McLaughlin, Tom x party animals 76–7, 323–4
McMullan, Gordon 188 party poopers 76–7, 323–4
Measure for Measure 8, 15, 36–7, 41, 73, 76, 79, 81, Pasco, Richard 270, 348, 355
84, 87–8, 98, 164, 226–31, 313, 358 Pasternak, Boris 350, 355
memorization 18–20, 29 Peacock, Trevor 353–4, 362
memorize 6, 18–19, 49, 63, 157, 214, 224, 323 Peck, Bob 357
373
Index
Pennington, Michael 350 Rush, Geoffrey 329

Pericles 15, 125, 238, 264–9, 294, 361–2 Ruhl, Sarah 85–6
Peters, Becky 340 Rutherford, Margaret 351
Phifer, Mekhi 361 Rymer, Thomas 262
Pierce, Joanne 368
Pigeon, Walter 366 Sachs, Andrew 365
Piggott-Smith, Tim 358 Salaman, Toby 362
Plautus 124 Sarandon, Susan 366
plot 7–8, 9, 27, 32, 67, 85–6, 94, 118–21, 124–5, Scales, Prunella 359
138–9, 158, 162, 196, 204, 209, 211–12, 241, 246, Schoenbaum, John Paul 88
253, 262, 264, 267, 276, 280, 282, 287, 299, 328 Scofield, Paul 350, 353, 356
Plowright, Joan 358 Scotland, PA 357
Plutarch’s Lives 134–5, 192–3 Scott, Jason xix
Polanski, Roman 23, 357 Seger, Bob 84, 226
Potter, Lois 88, 333 sex xi, xiv, 4, 8–9, 25, 27, 35, 40–1, 64, 69–70, 72–3,
preconceptions xiii, 3–17, 18, 86, 306 80–2, 84–5, 100, 105–7, 121–2, 126, 128, 130,
Prospero’s Books 365–6 132, 140–1, 147, 151, 169, 191, 211, 226–7, 246,
Pryce, Jonathan 366 250, 255, 260, 263, 266, 270, 274, 276, 280–1,
285, 287, 298, 303, 317–18, 325, 334, 338, 340,
Quarshie, Hugh 366 345, 357, 361, 363
Quayle, Anthony 352 Shakespeare, Hamnet 199, 326
Queen Elizabeth I 10, 89, 238, 264, 321, 364 Shakespeare, Judith 326
Queen Mab 284–5 Shakespeare and Company 71–2
Shakespeare in Love 329, 347, 351, 364
race xi, xiv, 105–6, 234, 258, 361 Shakespeare Made Easy 58
Radford, Michael 358 Sharrock, Thea 353
Rakoff, Alvin 364 Shearer, Norma 363
Ran 356 Shenandoah Shakespeare Express xix, 10, 218
Rathbone, Basil 363 Sher, Anthony 232
Rebhorn, James 357 Sheridan, Richard 254
Redgrave, Corin 348 Short View of Tragedy, A 262
Redgrave, Vanessa 349 Shostakovich, Dimitri 350
Rees, Roger 348 Sidney, George 365
Reinhardt, Max 359 Sinden, Donald 34
research papers 18, 25–6, 29 Smith, Dame Maggie 361
rhyme 5, 46, 50–2, 65, 85, 94, 124, 168, 172–3, 180, Smoktunovsky, Innokenti 350
198, 213, 235, 249, 264, 285, 302 sonnet 16, 50, 68, 87, 142, 164, 193, 213, 215–16, 285
Richard II 12, 15, 23, 87, 162, 270–5, 362 Southwark Cathedral 4, 6
Richard III 15, 21, 28, 50, 53, 78, 86, 89, 96, 119, 137, spinach factor xi
139, 180, 183, 276–80, 354, 362–3 Spottiswoode, Patrick xix
Richardson, Ian 270 Spriggs, Elizabeth 359
Richardson, Tony 151, 350 Springsteen, Bruce 8, 32, 37, 82
Rigg, Diana 359 Standardized Shakespeare Sound Sampler 45–6
Rimson, Elena 290 Stevenson, Juliet 362
Ringwald, Molly 366 Stewart, Sir Patrick 232, 348
rock-and-roll xii, 84–5, 105 Stoppard, Tom 151, 364
Romantics 4, 47 suicide 42, 50–1, 75–6, 108, 110–11, 147–8, 193,
Romeo and Juliet 9, 11, 16, 21, 40, 50, 73, 75–6, 80, 203, 209
83, 86, 96, 108, 193, 233, 266, 281–6, 292, 316, supernatural xiv, 27, 70–1, 74, 80, 137, 246, 276, 294
319, 350, 363–4 suspense xiv, 24, 66, 85–6, 107, 119, 131, 138
Romeo & Juliet (film) 364 Suzman, Janet 347
Rooney, Mickey 359
Rosalynde 118 Taming of the Shrew, The x, 8, 16, 23, 69, 73, 76, 78,
Rossiter, Leonard 355 80, 83, 85, 87, 89, 96, 253, 287–91, 335, 351, 365
Rowling, J. K. 8 Tate, Sharon 357
Royal Shakespeare Company 23, 270, 347–8, 357 Taylor, Don 368
374
Index
Taylor, Elizabeth 365 Walken, Christopher 357

Taymor, Julie 366–7 Walsh, Betsy xviii
Tempest, The 8, 16, 80, 86, 88, 96, 108, 125, 164, 187, Warner, David 356, 359
264–5, 271, 292–8, 333, 365–6 Warren, Jim x
Thompson, Emma 360 Welles, Orson 21, 23, 351, 356, 361
Throne of Blood 356–7 West Side Story 363
Timon of Athens 16, 164, 238, 294, 299–305, 366 West, Timothy 354
Titus Andronicus 16, 75, 80, 145, 306–12, 366–7 Whedon, Joss 360
Troilus and Cressida 16, 164, 226, 238, 299, 313–18, Whiting, Leonard 363
367 Wilcox, Fred McLeod 366
Twelfth Night 16, 69, 73, 76, 78, 83, 96, 125, 164, 187, Williams, George Walton xviii
239–40, 319–25, 367 Williams, Michael 348, 353
Two Gentlemen of Verona, The 16, 238, 267, 287, Williamson, Nicol 350–1, 357
306, 326–32, 333, 335, 368 Winter’s Tale, The 16, 73, 87, 96, 164, 264–5, 294,
Two Noble Kinsmen, The 16, 187, 292, 333–8, 368 339–46, 368
Wise, Herbert 355
Verdi, Giuseppe 361 Wise, Robert 363
verse 5, 42, 45–51, 56, 75, 83, 240, 271, 281, 294, 301, Wishaw, Ben 362
318, 359, 364 Woodvine, John 357
Victorians 4–6, 151, 197, 250 Worth, Irene 349
volunteers xv, 37, 39, 83, 95, 102, 122, 126–7, 133,
157, 171, 229, 235, 243, 255, 289, 303, 311, 323, Zeffirelli, Franco xv, 21, 151, 350, 358, 361,
330–1, 343–4 363–5
375
376
377
378
379
380

ShakesFear and How To Cure It The Complete Handbook For Teaching Shakespeare

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ShakesFear and How To Cure It The Complete Handbook For Teaching Shakespeare

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SHAKESFEAR AND HOW TO CURE IT

CREATIVE SHAKESPEARE: THE GLOBE EDUCATION GUIDE TO

TEACHING SHAKESPEARE WITH PURPOSE:

TRANSFORMING THE TEACHING OF SHAKESPEARE WITH

THE COMPLETE HANDBOOK FOR

Ralph Alan Cohen

Copyright © Ralph Alan Cohen, 2018

Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

1 Seven Deadly Preconceptions of Teaching Shakespeare 3

2 Eight Don’ts of Teaching Shakespeare 18

3 Nine Dos of Teaching Shakespeare 30

4 Student Complaint No. 1: ‘Shakespeare’s Too Hard’ 53

5 Student Complaint No. 2: ‘Shakespeare is Boring and/or Irrelevant’ 66

All’s Well That Ends Well 98

King Lear 203

Appendix: A Personal Guide to Shakespeare on Screen 347

First, me. I am a rogue English professor. Here’s how I went rogue:

So, to be near the theatre, I started a graduate programme in Shakespeare and

Should Shakespeare be required in schools? Un-requiring Shakespeare might take away

How to use this book

ShakesJeerers admit no fault in dismissing the subject. In describing ways of getting

Appendix: A Personal Guide to Shakespeare on Screen

I begin my graduate course in Shakespeare pedagogy by asking each of the graduate

The ﬁrst deadly preconception: Shakespeare as poetry

Figure 1 Shakespeare Memorial, Southwark Cathedral, by Henry McCarthy, 1912.

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright.

The second deadly preconception: Shakespeare as philosophy

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

She should have died hereafter:

The third deadly preconception: Shakespeare as storyline

The fourth deadly preconception: Shakespeare has deﬁnitive

The ﬁfth deadly preconception: Shakespeare as high culture

An experience I had while working towards my doctorate speaks to Shakespeare’s

The sixth deadly preconception: Shakespeare as history

Then, before he responds to her proposal, all this transpires:

The seventh deadly preconception: Shakespeare as another language

Table 1 Number of obsolete words in ﬁrst independent clause of each play

Total number of words = 624. Current words = 98.4% 10 archaic words

That’s right: devoted as I am to Shakespeare in performance, as transforming as I think

The Fourth Don’t: Don’t assign research papers

The Fifth Don’t: Don’t stress the history of Shakespeare’s

The Sixth Don’t: Don’t strain to cover the ‘whole’ play

The First Do: Do connect the works to yourself

The Third Do: Do stress staging

I am as well-acquainted here as I was in our house of profession: one would think

The Fourth Do: Do stage scenes with your students

Figure 2 The classroom as an Elizabethan theatre.

The Sixth Do: Do deal with the ‘dirty’ stuff

The Seventh Do: Do stress character, but in your students’ terms

The Eighth Do: Do confront Shakespeare’s poor speakers

Sir, his deﬁnement suﬀers no perdition in you,

Though yet of Hamlet, our dear brother’s death,

Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,

Hugh Capet also, who usurped the crown

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

The sound of the passage above is

But stay: O spite!

The sound of the passage above is

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,

that I, the son of a dear father murdered,