When the teaching of Shakespeare is a subversive activity, his texts are understood as relevant to students, and, in a phrase provided by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, in their book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, studying them serves “some purpose that is related to the life of the learner.”
A central tenant of Teaching as a Subversive Activity is that “the critical content of any learning experience is the method or process through which the learning occurs” (18). This idea Postman and Weingartner attribute to the educationalist, John Dewey, who, they say, “stressed that the role an individual is assigned in an environment–what he is permitted to do–is what the individual learns.” Dewey believed, they continue, “we learn what we do” (18). And, they say, Marshall McLuhan meant “much the same thing” when he declared “the medium is the message,” and, Postman and Weingartner continue:
“Message” here means the perceptions you are allowed to build, the attitudes you are enticed to assume, the sensitivities you are encouraged to develop–almost all of the things you learn to see and feel and value. You learn them because your environment is organized in such a way that it permits or encourages or insists that you learn them. (17)
This interpretation of McLuhan’s equation can serve as a principle to guide us toward what is called “Subversive Shakespeare.” If what happens in the classroom (the medium) consists of straight rows of students, each with his or her head bent over a copy of one of the plays, silently reading, what those students learn, their understanding of Shakespeare’s plays and poems (the message) is that they are difficult, boring, tedious, and–worse–incomprehensible.
Rex Gibson, in his book, Teaching Shakespeare, describes what behaviors, for him, allow students to learn in a Shakespeare classroom. He calls for “a wide range of expressive, creative and physical activities.” Teachers must, Gibson says, “recognize that Shakespeare wrote his plays for performance and that his scripts are completed by enactment of some kind” (xii).
Gibson’s comments nicely illustrate John Dewey’s emphasis on what students do in the classroom. “It really is as simple as that, ” Postman and Weingartner comment, in Teaching as a Subversive Activity: “If you don’t do it, you don’t learn it” (24). And, for Rex Gibson, the “consequence for teaching is clear”: teachers must “treat the plays as plays, for imaginative enactment in all kinds of different ways” (xii).
