Teaching Shakespeare through Performance ed. by Milla Cozard Riggio (review)

Milla Cozard Riggio, ed. Teaching Shakespeare through Performance. NY: MLA, 1999.503p. Vivian Foss University of Wisconsin Oshkosh This volume, the fourteenth in the MLA Options for Teaching Series, offers instructors committed to active learning an abundance ofpractical suggestions and models for engaging students in the theatrical contexts of Shakespeare's plays. While the title highlights the acting, directing, and production work that most immediately suggests classroom performance strategies, explorations oftheatrical approaches emerge from explicit theoretical contexts and include extended textual and literary analysis of specific scenes. Riggio includes not only essays by nearly forty contributors—many well-known Renaissance literary scholars—but also extensively annotated lists ofresource materials. The book is divided into five nearly equally long sections. It begins with essays on the history ofclassroom performance and the theory that supports it, moves on to teaching strategies and exemplary courses, then explores the use of films and electronic programs, and concludes with annotated guides to resources. The collection is exhaustive, and the essays offer practical classroom exercises grounded in current theoretical approaches to the plays from literary as well as theatrical perspectives. There are discussions , for example, ofthe unknown conditions ofhistorical staging ofthe plays, the changing dynamics ofaudience in relation to theater design and lighting, and helpful suggestions about resources teachers trained in literature can utilize to work more interdisciplinarily. The sophistication which weaves together theory and literary analysis with discussions ofmodels for teaching belies the volume's pedagogical emphasis. Most essays explore scenes from individual plays in extended discussions that read as if theywere excerpts from even longerjournal articles. Bydesign, this is a book aimed to strengthen the pedagogy ofcourses both at secondary and university levels. Yet this is not an introductory text cajoling reluctant teachers away from literature and theory-based work into prescribed classroom exercises, but rather a group of cogent arguments rooted in historical awareness of the inherently experimental nature of the stage. The volume offers models, but its goal is to provide an outlook on teaching Shakespeare that insists on discussion ofthe plays from the perspective ofrhe playwright, actors, costumers, and stage designers as well as that of the audience, and teachingall ofthatactively, so that students can discover through experiments that drama is a dynamic art, always being re-created. What I like best about Riggio's book is that the essays reinforce a central premise: that the unpredictable dynamics of the classroom usefully mirror the 92 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW + FALL 2001 Reviews immediacy ofperformance before a live audience. Reading silently, says Richard Schechner, reduces drama to a monologue in which the reader is likely to impose a circumscribed interpretation onto one editor's text as she creates an internal, imaginative, virtual performance. While the intense scrutiny individual reading offers is essential to scholarship, drama—perhaps more than other genres—requires an openness to the concept that a text is itself fluid. For example, we are unable to establish a single text for KingLear, so why do we not take diis fact as an opportunity to discuss textual variants and what they might imply for interpretation and performance? Especially when these variants may have arisen from different performance venues? Working through the possible meanings of a selection oflines with students is not unlike a theatrical rehearsal during which actors debate how best to reach their audience. Collectively, die essays insist that if we agree that plays are stories full of contradictions and that the sticking points in meaning will change along with the material culture, then students will inevitably debate meaning as they work through planning a performance line by line. Riggio's collection is very wide-ranging and detailed; the focus, however, remains on teaching through performance. For many readers, the volume mayserve as an excellent review on several fronts. Conceivably, a text-based literary teacher might review current theoretical approaches to drama, consider a range ofactive teaching strategies, and survey availability ofelectronic aids to teaching and webbased databases. Because of its ambitious scope, the book is extremely useful for anyone teaching Shakespeare, and its readership should not be limited to the instructors aiming for active student involvement. Some essays subtly recognize that a teacher implementing these sttategies may encounter resistance from...