In their book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner call for teachers to be in pursuit of relevance. Teachers must discover what is relevant to their students, and to themselves, for, Postman and Weingartner insist, teachers cannot hope to “help a learner to be disciplined, active, and thoroughly engaged unless he perceives a problem to be a problem or what is to-be-learned as worth learning, and unless he plays an active role in determining the process of solution” (52). The objective of teaching that is a subversive activity, they say, is the relevance of the inquiry for, they continue, “unless an inquiry is perceived as relevant by the learner, no significant learning will take place” (81).
Teaching as a Subversive Activity was one of the first books I read as I began to develop as a teacher, and many things Postman and Weingartner said have had a profound and lasting effect on my teaching, over the years. I was reminded of their book again, when I recently read an interview on the Muse of Fire website with the actor, Indira Darma, who tells Dan Poole and Giles Terera, “you’re interested in the things that relate to you.” “No one will learn anything he doesn’t want to know,” Postman and Weingartner say (52). They describe teaching that is subversive as a “process” that can be “applied to relevant problems in the society, as those problems are perceived by learners” (54).
It is clear that students sitting passively in a classroom, a textbook copy of one of Shakespeare’s plays in hand, reading without understanding or interest, are not experiencing those characteristics that audiences recognize and value most highly at a performance of a Shakespeare play. It is clear that such students are not experiencing the “power of Shakespeare’s wisdom,” or the “clarity of his insights into the human condition” that the actor, Tom Hiddleston, recalls in an interview in Muse of Fire, about a production of Much Ado About Nothing that hit him with “force,” and “gripped and riveted” him to his seat. The actors in that production, Hiddleston says, take Shakespeare’s “writing off the pedestal of high art and high-spoken inaccessible poetic language and make it real.” Shakespeare’s words in that production of Much Ado About Nothing, Huddleston says, “just completely relate to the people.”
“Successful Shakespeare teaching is learner-centered,” Rex Gibson says in his book, Teaching Shakespeare, and, he continues:
It acknowledges that every student seeks to create his or her own meanings, rather than passively soak up information. The Shakespeare teacher’s task is to enable students to develop a genuine sense of ownership of the play. That entails active expression: helping students to ask their own questions, to create and justify their own meanings, rather than having to accept only the questions and interpretations of others. (9)
When we “simply” read a play by Shakespeare, Fiona Banks says, in Creative Shakespeare,: The Globe Education Guide to Practical Shakespeare, “we get the story, we read the words,” but, she says, we miss its “richness and depth” (4). We must, she says, avoid “reading his plays without any form of active engagement, without his words in our mouths and emotions and actions in our bodies” (3). She continues that, by “engaging actively with text, students gain ownership” of the play they are studying (6). This is what Rex Gibson understands when he explains that Shakespeare “intended his words to be spoken and acted out on stage.” Gibson insists that only “in the context of dramatic realization” can the plays be “more appropriately understood and experienced” (xi).
Jonathan Bate, author of The Genius of Shakespeare, and a biography of Shakespeare, Soul of the Age, suggests similar goals on the FutureLearn website for his course, “Shakespeare and his World”: “Shakespeare cannot be a sixteenth-century antique,” Bate says at the conclusion of The Genius of Shakespeare; he is “still our contemporary” (357). “That’s how I try to teach the plays: with a sense of freshness and wonder, as if coming at them for the first time,” Bates says, in his comments about “Shakespeare and his World.” There, Bates says:
I always find when I teach Shakespeare, however well I think I know each play I always discover something new that I’ve never noticed before. Actors say the same thing—and that’s what keeps Shakespeare so alive.
When approaching a Shakespeare text, whether in a school setting or rehearsal space, “the most common demand” is that the work be “relevant,” Simon Palfrey says, in his book, Doing Shakespeare. That “simply means,” Palfrey explains, “that the plays have to speak with immediacy and urgency.” The plays, he says, must “come alive.” They must “work on some more immediately familiar framework,” Paltry says. They must work in ways that are “going to be relevant to us,” ways that are going “to surprise us,” Paltry explains (8).
As a way to accomplish this, Banks says, she is interested in “how a technique used to create performance can equally become a catalyst for learning.” Banks continues that she is “interested in the journey from the rehearsal room to the classroom” (xv). And Gibson, as well, notes the similarity between a classroom where “students work together on ‘their’ Shakespeare” and “the creative, experimental ethos of the theatrical rehearsal room, where individual talents unite in co-operative enterprise” (1). Students approaching Shakespeare in such a classroom “make the plays relevant to themselves,” Banks says. “In doing so,” she says, those students “play a part in reinventing Shakespeare for the current age.” For those students, she says, Shakespeare’s plays are “worth studying” (6).
