Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's Hamlet (review)

The many versions of Hamlet constitute an immense field of cultural production, an exhaustive survey of which may well be impossible. The volume Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's Hamlet, edited by Bernice W. Kliman, offers something else: a diverse sampling of practical, theoretical, traditional, intercultural, and technologically innovative ways to teach Hamlet. This book is neither a guide to Hamlet scholarship nor a teacher's primer with study questions. It is, instead, an admirably succinct, well organized, and up-to-date collection of insights, anecdotes, and methodological examples for teaching Shakespeare's most popular tragedy. Its accessibility and global scope make it a useful resource for those who teach Shakespeare from middle school to graduate school.

Like any good road map, this book provides orientation at a glance. It is divided into two sections, "Materials" and "Approaches." The latter is much more comprehensive and, for my money, a good deal more fun. Here we encounter subsections that treat the traditional concerns of Hamlet criticism, such as "Narrative, Character, and Theme," followed by "Comparative Approaches" and "Modern and Postmodern Strategies." Ranging in scope from such issues as "Introducing Verse and Meter" and "The Multiple-Text Hamlet" to relatively recent topics such as "Hamlet Online," the contributions are logically arranged and available to lay readers. Readers can move from "An Annotated and Chronological Screenography" to "An Interdisciplinary Approach to Hamlet in a Distance-Learning Classroom" or "Act 2, Scene 1, 75-120: Psychoanalytic Approaches" and "The Fencing Scene," to name but four of the more than sixty brief contributions that make up the volume.

While the pedagogical methods and ideological commitments of the contributors vary considerably, each contribution strives for utility. Thus, Margaret Maurer's contribution to the innovative subsection "Short Takes" offers a half-page account of Francis Bacon's essay "Of Revenge." Maurer elucidates the distinctions Bacon makes between the different facets of revenge—social, psychological, political—and their relevance to Hamlet. Another part of "Short Takes," by Denise M. Mullins, includes graphic sketches of the play's characters depicted as familiar animals. Mullins claims that, "by incorporating students' prior knowledge of pop culture, their understanding of animal imagery in literature, and the anthropomorphic coloring book [she] created while studying Hamlet, [she] successfully introduced a taste of Shakespeare into a seventh-grade poetry unit" (227). It seems unlikely that many will make use of both Maurer's and Mullins's contributions as teaching aids. Still, whether or not someone doing research on revenge may be curious to know that early modern tragedy can be taught to schoolchildren, the presence of such diverse contributions emphatically banishes the specter of a unitary, transhistorical take on Hamlet.

Indeed, this volume is evidence of the productive fragmentation of literary studies in the wake of the theory wars and the advent of cultural studies. Kliman has assembled a remarkable variety of contributions, including several that bespeak the international status of Shakespeare in the postmodern world. Thus, Graham Bradshaw's essay, "The 'Encrusted' Hamlet: Resetting the 'Mousetrap'," in the subsection "Comparative Approaches," discusses his experience of teaching the play at the postgraduate level in a Japanese university. Bradshaw faces the issue of interpreting the spectral status of the murdered king when the Ghost has already "been assimilated to the strong Japanese tradition of katakiuchi ('blood revenge') drama . . . " (118-19). Similarly, in a piece that emphasizes not current issues of cultural translation but questions of comparative historiography, Paula S. Berggren's "Teaching Hamlet in a Global Literature Survey: Linking Elizabethan England and Ming China" draws comparisons between Eastern and Western literatures. While the global scope of the "Comparative Approaches" subsection is timely, some contributions strain too hard for a transcultural comparatism. I'm not convinced that insights such as the following, from Berggren, advance our understanding of either Elizabethan or Chinese literature: "Whether standing or crawling between heaven and earth, in both periods human...