Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning versus the System by Liam E. Semler (review)

Liam Semler’s latest monograph offers a timely reflection on the meaning/s of teaching and of learning literature within a climate of pedagogical ‘oversystematization’ (p. 18). This is a situation those of us who teach literature at schools or universities know all too well: in our very knowingness, we have had to become ‘system creatures’ (p. 129). Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe reflects ‘systemness’, and provides ways of seeing ‘system’ – an abstract noun capturing the oppressive features of particular educational institution systems – and of finding productive, if temporary, ‘exile’ from it.

Alongside an extended allusion to The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski, 1999), as a system both enabling and oppressive, the book is structured by Shakespearean and Marlovian topoi. We begin, rather intensely, with system-teachers figured as wielders of red-hot pokers, like Hubert in Shakespeare’s King John, sent by John to blind the boy Arthur who is claimant to the throne, and with system-scholars figured like Marlowe’s Faustus, limiting the potential of the disciplines in an ever-increasing need for the enabling power of fraught pacts with financial devils. Later, the peculiar nature of the forest in Shakespeare’s As You Like It helps to theorise productive exile from soul-sucking system. Semler calls this (temporary) exile ‘ardenspace’, an unpredictable place at the edge of system that system knows not what to do with. At his most exhortatory, Semler writes, ‘we must create ardenspaces, the more numerous and diverse the better, so that innovative (or “exilic”) ideas can flow into iterative (or “usurped”) systems’ (p. 50).

Chapter 1 considers soberly the systemness that enmeshes us. ‘My colleagues are being munched’, Semler writes, ‘by the global mania for league table positioning, which is to say, eaten by formula. Formulae are systems’ teeth’ (p. 13). Speaking as university lecturer and co-writer of the State Higher School Certificate English exam, Semler asks us to ‘look at academia now: we live in an age of wisdom teeth and edible academics. Schoolteachers were eaten long ago. They are living an extended burp that provokes endless disapproving looks’ (p. 13). While young English students are thoroughly imbued with system logic, they very often navigate its requirements merely by accommodating to an alternate system, instead of ‘learning’, as we lecturers think and hope they are doing, to articulate new critiques of the world around them from the standpoint of well-reasoned, though personal, discovery. The process of system-to-system accommodation simply reinforces cynicism about ‘learning’. It is ‘the ultimate revenge effect’ (p. 30).

Chapter 2 argues that in a climate of over-systematisation, we cannot enhance learning as reasoned, personal discovery without the production of ‘positive turbulence’ in systems. The chapter theorises ardenspace by linking it with what W. R. Ashby, Chris Argyris, and Donald A. Schön describe as ‘double-loop thinking’; it is like a system that is adjusted from outside, rather than one that simply maintains itself.

Chapter 3 describes the ardenspace attempted by the Shakespeare Reloaded project, a collaboration between the University of Sydney and Sydney’s Barker College. Semler describes in particular the initiative of ‘Bard Blitz’, in which system creatures from both school and university settings, students and teachers, came together to explore ways of promoting a deeper engagement with Shakespeare’s texts than is usual in high school environments so often beset with the dysfunctions of system logic.

In Chapters 4 and 5, Semler describes another attempt at the making of ardenspace, this time in the teaching of a particular unit (on Marlowe) at the University of Sydney. Here, the focus was on strategies for encouraging ‘an authentic personal encounter with Marlowe’s texts’, beyond merely a cognitive engagement with the scholarly debates about his work. These chapters show, compellingly, how such personal encounters (and their meaning as ‘learning’) can be invalidated in university classrooms as much by system-attuned students...