Shakespeare dancing

A survey of current teaching resources may suggest, as McLuskie (2009) implies, a growing movement towards working with Shakespeare as a performance text, both in formal and higher education, but I would question that we are yet at a stage where ‘the view that the experience of Shakespeare in performance is critical to the appreciation of his plays and that that experience will in and of itself produce educational value’

(McLuskie, 2009, p.125) is dominant. Although theatre-based approaches are not new, neither are they commonplace enough to be established tools of an English teacher’s craft. Historically, study of Shakespeare as a literary text has dominated and the view that exposure to Shakespeare in literary form ‘will in and of itself produce educational value’ stretches back to at least the eighteenth century when passages began to be selected and compiled with the express intention of providing moral guidance (see chapter two). If the question McLuskie ultimately poses is: ‘Why is the experience of Shakespeare in performance critical to the appreciation of his plays?’ The challenge I take is to argue that it is through the experience of Shakespeare in performance that more young people can be offered structured opportunities for a critical and creative interaction with their cultural inheritance; with Dewey’s (1997, p.27) caveat that ‘Everything depends on the quality of the experience.’ Through theatre-based practice, students can learn the skills of analysis integrated with, rather than separated from, embodied experience. An RSC rehearsal room invites in a wide range of knowledge: experts in particular fields like warfare, law or medicine for example, as well as Shakespearean academics from various areas of study. Alongside this knowledge comes the practical and technical knowledge of voice and movement experts, designers of set, lighting and costume. While few theatre companies and fewer classrooms can boast such luxury, all can refer to notes and essays in different editions of the plays and use other methods of research to find related knowledge. Creative and critical approaches can then provide not just motivation but also

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a deeper, because more personal, interaction with the substance of that knowledge to form meaning.

McLuskie’s (2009, p.139) concluding point is that to overcome what she perceives as a key binary in teaching Shakespeare: ‘difficult/boring texts’ v ‘pleasures of performance’, we need to acknowledge the many different facets of Shakespeare study which would then allow students to ‘explore rather than assume the connection between text, performance, and meaning in more explicit ways’. These more explicit ways being ‘the challenging task of separating out the analysis from the experience of Shakespeare’ or ‘the dancing stalls while the thinking goes on’. The main difference between McLuskie, Rumbold and Olive’s perspectives and my own would appear to be the separation of personal meaning from collective, quality assured meaning. I construct my own partial narrative, understanding their meaning through my own point of view and judging their work through selected examples just as they understand and judge the RSC’s work. We call this understanding and judgement ‘analysis’ because this confers a semblance of objectivity, but there are no right answers in this debate, only informed opinions and experiential truths.

The informed opinion of John Russell Brown (2005), another well established and

respected Shakespeare academic, provides an alternative perspective to McLuskie’s in his aptly named Shakespeare Dancing. Brown writes from the perspective of working with actors and directors and explores the physical experiences that a Shakespeare text requires. For him, the texts provide ‘a stream of sensuous provocation that sets imagination to work and awakens memories of lived experience’ (2005, p.1). He recognises the primary role of analogy in how we experience Shakespeare and the contingent nature of those analogies as Shakespeare’s imagination ‘dancing on the shifting sands that border the ocean’s mind’ (2005, p.2). Like Rancière, Brown believes that the meaning of the plays comes to life in the space between the audience and actors, each of whom bring their own unique experiences to bear on the relationship: ‘there can be no such thing as an authoritative definition of a role, still less a whole play’ (2005, p.115). This is the value of Shakespeare Neelands and O’Hanlon take from theatre into the classroom, explaining: ‘Shakespeare in performance defies orderly and contained study of the authorial achievements of a single mind because it is socially made and sensuously received and because its semiotics are multiple, simultaneous and transient’ (2011, p.249). Binary emphases of Shakespeare study are often characterised as ‘page

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versus stage’. On one side of the perceived divide stands the mind, rarefied art, intellect; on the other stands the body, lived experience, emotion. From the slopes of two

mountains of accumulated knowledge, critics and actors watch each other, operate through the shadow of each other. Between mountains, the most fertile ground is always the valley floor connecting them, fed from the nutrients washed down from both and this is where the most fertile learning can happen as critical and actorly ways frolic together.