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Reviewed by:
  • Approaches to Teaching English Renaissance Drama
  • Edward Pechter (bio)
Karen Bamford and Alexander Leggatt, editors. Approaches to Teaching English Renaissance Drama Modern Language Association of America 2002. xv, 233. US $18.00

In this engaging and helpful book, twenty-eight academics draw on their pedagogical experience and scholarly expertise to provide advice about teaching English Renaissance plays. The pieces are concise and accessible, including useful information (editions of plays, a filmography, internet resources, source books for pictures) as well as teaching stories and [End Page 405] strategies (classroom practices, assignments, grading schemes). Many focus on the critical topics discussed in learned journals (textual instability, racial and religious difference, gender theory), but even these are geared to classroom practice.

The contributors agree almost universally that the main problem in teaching Renaissance drama is the historical remoteness of the material, but this consensus accommodates a wide range of different and even contradictory advice. Some think that students should be required to confront strangeness head-on. For A.R. Braunmuller, original documentation 'stimulates their understanding of the past's pastness and intrigues, even inveigles, them to think more deeply.' Ric Knowles, 'committed to teaching historical and cultural difference,' advocates a 'careful historicization' as politically 'productive': 'students can feel free to acknowledge a lack of familiarity ... not automatically attributable to inadequacies in their education or deficiencies in their sensibilities.' Leah Marcus claims similarly that by emphasizing textual instability, we give students 'a feeling of interpretive empowerment,' liberating them from 'their seemingly inbred assumption that the play has a single unique meaning that their professor already knows and that they are required to discover.'

Other contributors, abandoning the vanguard, are more accommodating to what Aristotle calls 'the defects of our hearers.' Since 'our students have grown up in a world where information is increasingly presented in a visual form,' Philippa Sheppard offers visual aids. 'My students have reported that they are able to keep playwrights straight much more easily if they can associate a face with a name and play title.' For a similar reason, Paul Budra relies on film: it's what students know. Though not 'as good as teaching Renaissance drama as, well, drama,' the movies are, given the general lack of contact with theatre among our students, a 'practical alternative.'

Still others hedge their bets. Laurie Maguire teaches Mariam through performance as a 'user-friendly' concession to the play's 'triply unfamiliar' nature (not just a Renaissance play, but a woman-authored closet drama). 'The students appreciate the focus on text and character after the heady new historicist and gender politics that have occupied us for so much of the term.' Mario DiGangi also alternates strategy, using 'theorists and historians of sexuality' in order to 'engage student interest in Renaissance drama, especially non-Shakespearean drama, which they are more apt to regard with skepticism or indifference,' and including a Shakespeare play, Twelfth Night, 'to ease students into the less familiar material.'

Shakespeare's inclusion couples oddly with Alexander Leggatt's introductory statement that 'This volume deliberately excludes Shakespeare to concentrate on his contemporaries, whose strangeness we feel more acutely.' But Shakespeare is, willy nilly, always already there, not just when DiGangi (and other contributors) take him into account, but even [End Page 406] when unmentioned. The strangeness of 'non-Shakespearean drama' is precisely that it is non-Shakespearean. Middleton is no more intrinsically remote than Dryden or Eliot, but he seems so because he occupies a cultural and generic space recognizably like Shakespeare's, reminding us of Shakespearean qualities that seem inadequately represented.

DiGangi's yoking of 'theorists of sexuality' and Twelfth Night creates an odder couple still. That Foucault and Shakespeare serve as equivalent vade mecums is a striking instance of the unstable nature of familiarity and difference. In an especially thoughtful piece, John Hunter reflects on these terms in both historical and aesthetic contexts. He questions whether strangeness belongs exclusively to the past (you think Lyly's hard, try Pynchon), calling attention to 'the kinds of resistance that most art' and much life 'mounts against easy interpretation,' and concluding that, 'the difficulties of historical drama are not history's fault, but simply one manifestation of the dialectical nature...

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