Not Just for Actors: Shakespeare and Emotion in the Literature Classroom

In the summer of 2010, the Museum of London reported resuming its in-progress excavation of the recently discovered site of a famous Elizabethan playhouse. The Theatre is believed to have been the first permanent structure in England built specifically for the purpose of producing plays. And, if that claim to fame were not already enough to arouse the interest of theatre enthusiasts and researchers the world over, the playhouse was host to the most famous theatrical figure in our culture. Before Shakespeare's company of players moved to the Globe in 1599, the Theatre was their home. The recovery of the Theatre was met with enthusiastic response—one local theatre company even announced that it would build its own playhouse on the historical site. Declan Donnellan, cofounder of the theatre company Cheek by Jowl, commented on the significance of the plans: "Preserving the site is not important for sentiment or nostalgia but because we need to be reminded where we come from, and where we end up."¹ Although the theatre's building project was subsequently abandoned, the affect inspired by the discovery, and the initial response it elicited, remains significant for several reasons.

In many ways, the exhumation of the Theatre—and the anticipated birth of a new theatre in its place—resonates with the historical trajectory of Shakespeare's plays, produced for the first time in Elizabethan England, but since recreated in every way by actors, directors, audiences, writers, artists, scholars, and students. Such an exciting discovery also energizes the claim for the primacy of performance, an argument relentlessly rehearsed by workshop leaders and theatre practitioners everywhere: "Shakespeare's plays were not written to be studied in an English classroom" (typically preceded by something along the lines of "no offense to English teachers, but . . ."). While there may be English professors out there laboring under the illusion that William Shakespeare envisioned dynamic lectures on iambic pentameter and gender construction when he penned his plays, I have not met any of them.

Even more troubling than the obvious flaw in the logic of such a statement—are any pieces of literature written for the purpose of being studied in an English classroom?—is its insinuation that performance and pedagogy must be mutually exclusive approaches to Shakespeare. Recent scholarship in performance studies has done much to destabilize this dichotomy.² As an actor-scholar, Shakespeare professor, and board member of a regional professional Shakespeare theatre, however, I am struck by how frequently I hear versions of the assertion that Shakespeare's plays do not belong in a classroom. As celebrated Shakespearean actor Kevin Kline puts it: "Scholars and dramaturges do not write for actors. As they discuss the plays you think—that's all very interesting but it has nothing to do with how to make a scene work onstage" (Kline, qtd. in Maher 14; emphasis in original).

Although Kline places "scholars and dramaturges" in the same (nontheatrical) category, professor and dramaturg Michael Flachmann similarly argues for the importance of performance over study: "when we import these 'plays' into the study or the classroom, however, we often lose sight of the primal, instinctive, and authentic purpose behind them and must, instead, begin to invent other, more artificial reasons why the study of Shakespeare, like artistic broccoli, is good for us." He goes on to say that such "artificial reasons" cannot compete with "the high-energy, gut-wrenching, joyful, intense, pressure-filled experience of wrestling with a play so you can perform it on stage" (64). Flachmann has a foot in both worlds—the theatrical and the scholarly—yet decidedly privileges the former, essentially scolding English teachers for not being "professional theater people," to use his terminology. He figures the classroom as both foreign and invasive, claiming that to "import" the plays into this academic space is to desecrate what is "primal, instinctive, and authentic" about them. Significantly, to contrast the theatre experience to the classroom experience, Flachmann uses emotional terms: performance is "high-energy, gut-wrenching, joyful, intense, and pressure-filled." Inherent in this idea are assumptions that the spirit of the...