A guide to teaching Shakespeare.
ALL drama involves conflict. So, a useful way to begin understanding a Shakespeare play is to consider what conflict or conflicts are apparent. Romeo and Juliet fall in love, and in so doing also fall into conflict with the structures of authority represented by their families. What does this suggest about authority in general? Is authority always in the right? And the desires of the young lovers also come into conflict with chance and accident (consider how they die): what does this suggest about the power of the individual will in relation to what our wills encounter in life?
Equally, interpreting Shakespeare involves very considerable conflict: people have been arguing for more than 400 years over the meanings of his plays. (Conflicts in interpretation happen with all literary texts, not only Shakespeare’s.) People have also argued over Shakespeare’s value: the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy is only one of many people who have expressed doubts about whether Shakespeare deserves his pre-eminent position in English and world literature.
Value in Shakespeare
But even those who value Shakespeare highly do not all do so for the same reasons. John Dryden, the 17th-century English poet, critic and dramatist, identified numerous faults in Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida, and then concluded: ”Yet, after all, because the play was Shakespeare’s, and there appeared in some places of it the admirable genius of the author, I undertook to remove that heap of rubbish under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly buried.” Dryden went on to explain that the ”heap of rubbish” in the play is to be found in the imagery, which he thought far-fetched and obscure. Yet nowadays, admirers of Shakespeare value his imagery (metaphors, similes and all figurative language) very highly, as a powerful way of communicating profound meaning.
This does not mean that Dryden was wrong and people now are right (or vice versa). But it does show that the question of value in Shakespeare is a contested one. So too is interpretation. In South Africa and elsewhere, conflicts over interpretations of Shakespeare have frequently had a political dimension. For example, one way of interpreting Othello is to say that he has a ”fatal flaw”, namely jealousy, and that this flaw generates all the tragedy in the play. Opponents of this view say that this overlooks the racist society in which Othello has to operate (consider all the racist slurs uttered about Othello); that to ignore the racism is subtly to assume that racism is natural; and that the ”fatal flaw” reading unfairly suggests Othello himself is both unnatural and the central cause of all problems in the play. (This has clear implications for understanding racism in South Africa, past and present.)
Another example. Hamlet is sometimes said to have the ”fatal flaw” of indecision (Laurence Olivier’s film of the play even introduced a subtitle: Hamlet: The Tragedy of a Man Who Could Not Make Up His Mind). Opponents of this interpretation say that this ignores the hostile and dangerous political context in which Hamlet has to live and act. Considering that Hamlet may be thought of as a political opponent to an illegitimate and murderous regime (Claudius and his followers), then if we say Hamlet is confused and mad, we seem also to be saying that any political opposition to violent and illegitimate rule is confused and mad. (Apartheid rulers frequently said exactly that, and worse, about those who opposed them.)
Shakespeare in Africa
These brief examples should illustrate how interpreting Shakespeare involves debate and contestation, argument and opposition. Two excellent (and controversial) books are especially helpful on approaches to Shakespeare in South African education: Martin Orkin, Shakespeare Against Apartheid (this deals primarily with Hamlet, Othello and King Lear); and David Johnson, Shakespeare and South Africa.
The important thing is not to think you have to arrive at a single, ”right” interpretation (there is probably no such thing) but, as with interpreting any literary text, to be able to support your ideas with appropriate textual examples. It has become increasingly clear over the past century that ways of interpreting Shakespeare are multiple — for example, feminist, psychoanalytical, Marxist and post-colonial interpretations. Classroom discussion can encourage, rather than suppress, such diversity.
Within South Africa, writers and thinkers as varied as Sol Plaatjie, Albie Sachs, HIE Dhlomo, Peter Abrahams, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, Es’kia Mphahlele, Chris Hani and Mzwakhe Mbuli have looked to Shakespeare for support in their own thinking about and struggles against oppression of all kinds — political, racial, gender, sexual and others. ZK Matthews, once a professor at the University of Fort Hare and Botswana ambassador to the United Nations, records in his autobiography that he ”discovered Shakespeare had things to say not only to England or to Westerners … but also to me, a 20th-century African”. Here might be a fruitful starting point for discussing Shakespeare in South African classrooms.
Verse and Prose in Shakespeare
The greater part of every play by Shakespeare is written in verse. The standard verse pattern that he used is one that most closely follows natural English speech patterns. In English, the stress generally falls on every second syllable. So the stress pattern sounds like a drum beat, with a light beat followed by a heavy beat: ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum. Read this sentence aloud to hear its ”ti-tum, ti-tum” rhythm:
”I saw the man with you in town today.”
The name for this pattern (or metre — which means measure) is iambic. The number of feet (or repetitions) of this metre per verse line varies, but Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets commonly used iambic pentameter (five repetitions per verse line; ”penta” means five, as in pentagon). This pattern is not absolutely regular: the vigour and subtlety of how Shakespeare’s verse sounds derive from his varying of the basic iambic pentameter pattern. (Completely unvarying iambic pentameter would in fact be very boring in rhythm.) This metre became known as blank verse.
How to spot blank verse
Capital letters at the start of each line
Lines usually have 10 syllables — five are stressed
Lines usually do not rhyme
Ask yourself why Shakespeare uses verse. Verse moves language in the direction of music. We become equally aware of how the verse sounds and of what is being said. (Think of rap music today: we listen both to sound and to words.) Is Shakespeare therefore aiming to engage both our minds and our feelings? Do we respond with both thought and emotion to his verse?
Iambic pentameter in the plays is not rhymed. But there is one place where Shakespeare almost always does use rhyme: at the end of every scene. Why does he do this? Read the section overleaf on the theatre of Shakespeare’s day to help you answer this.
Yet, significant amounts of Shakespeare’s plays are also in prose. Minor characters (such as Osric in Hamlet), comic characters (such as the porter in Macbeth) and ordinary people (such as the plebeians in Julius Caesar) speak in prose. But prose functions more widely than that. For example, the mad scenes in Hamlet, including when Hamlet is pretending to be mad, and when Ophelia does go mad, are in prose. Why? Is it because prose can seem less controlled and ordered than verse? Whenever a play moves from verse to prose, ask yourself why. What effects in sound are achieved, and how do these effects contribute to meaning?
The Shakespearean Sonnet
Many art forms flourished in the Renaissance, including poetry. The Italian author Petrarch had popularised the sonnet form in the 14th century as an expression of love, but in a form that was stylised and demanding. Shakespeare wrote 150 sonnets. Sonnet XVIII
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
Many of these are love poems, not only to women he loved, but also to patrons who gave him the freedom to write by sponsoring him. Shakespeare stamped the sonnet form with his own mark.
Instead of the octave and sestet favoured by Petrarch, Shakespeare preferred dividing up his 14 lines in a way that allowed him to put a twist at the end — often a sting in the tail. He would write three quatrains (each consisting of four lines of iambic pentameter) and finish with a rhyming couplet. This comment at the end would either sum up his theme or comment on it — often ironically.
One of Shakespeare’s common themes is mortality. Artists have found a way to cheat mortality by creating a lasting work of art. In some sonnets, Shakespeare praises the beauty of his beloved and adds that, thanks to his writing about it, her beauty will never die because he has captured it forever in his verse.
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, March 2000.
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