In spite of Shakespeare’s elaborate language, and the challenge of comprehending what happens in them, his plays appeal to audiences today, much as they did at the Globe theatre, when they were first performed. For his seventeenth-century audiences, Mario Fantini and Gerald Weinstein write, in their book, The Disadvantaged: Challenge to Education, Shakespeare’s plays offered something “elemental,” and modern audiences connect with the plays because they, as well, recognize in them “a common emotional concern.” Audiences recognize in Hamlet, for example, the prince’s “desire for revenge to right a wrong” as something they have experienced and have feelings about (365).
Andrea Lowe, who has been involved with many interesting theatre projects, including developing workshops to bring Shakespeare to prisons, confirms this characteristic of Shakespeare’s plays. In an interview with Dan Poole, on Muse of Fire, Lowe declares, Shakespeare “explores everything you can imagine.” Frances Barber makes a similar observation in a conversation with Giles Terera, also on Muse of Fire:
There isn’t anything that we can experience as human beings that he hasn’t already written about. There’s nothing: It’s death, life, love, loss, bereavement, murder, jealousy, revenge, vengeance. You name it . . . . And he’s expressed it more psychologically in depth than we could ever hope to.
The actor Tom Hiddleston, also on Muse of Fire, calls Shakespeare “the most emotionally truthful writer that has ever lived,” and he says Shakespeare’s “depiction. . .of the whole of human life is so rich, and so deep, and so detailed, and has universal access to every soul of every age, and he speaks t us and his writing shows us who we are.”
When students encounter Shakespeare’s plays in the classroom, however, they are seldom encouraged to explore the play in a way that is connected to their own lives. A student’s “persistent question” is often left unanswered, Weinstein and Fantini say in Toward Humanistic Education: A Curriculum of Affect. Too often he must respond to questions his teacher proposes, when, in fact, what he wants to know is “What does it have to do with me?” (23). Shakespeare approached in this way, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner write in Teaching as a Subversive Activity, is taught because it is “inherently good,” or because teachers believe “‘the subject’ will do something for their students” (42). But, Postman and Weingartner ask, “where is the learner in all this? Where is his world?” (43). If the learner does not perceive an inquiry as relevant, they continue, “no significant learning will take place” (81). “No one will learn anything he doesn’t want to know,” Postman and Weingartner conclude (52).
What schools fail to do, Weinstein and Fantini write, is to build a curriculum with a “broad human focus” (18). This failure occurs because the curriculum of many schools is indistinguishable from the immediate objectives of various academic disciplines in the school. The objectives of literature classes in many schools do not extend beyond teaching students to “understand plot, character and theme,” say Fantini and Weinstein. Schools, they continue, give “overwhelming emphasis” to those objectives that belong in the cognitive realm–in the realm of the intellect, and that deal with extrinsic subject matter. Such objectives are associated with the student’s “understanding of,” and “knowledge about” a variety of academic subjects. Fantini and Weinstein continue:
Even in some of the more experimental curriculum guides, specific objectives of units read “To enable the student to identify the basic elements of tragedy,” or “To enable the student to describe the rhetorical sense implied in a work of literature.” (18)
It is easier for schools to meet objectives that address a student’s “need to know how to read, write, compute, and to have some knowledge of his environment,” argue Fantini and Weinstein, than to meet ones that prepare him to engage in “constructive personal and social behavior” (19). Schools are more likely to recognize and address the basic requirements of the academic subject than to recognize and address the student’s “need for a satisfying self-definition, for constructive relationships with others, and for some control over what happens to him” (18).
“Teachers must be in pursuit of relevance,” Postman and Weingartner say; “teachers must discover what is relevant to their students, and to themselves” (59). Often, however, the practices of the school “lack intrinsic relevance for many children,” Fantini and Weinstein say (21). What is not emphasized by schools is the realm of the affective–the realm which is concerned with the student’s feelings, with,Fantini and Weinstein say, the student’s “experiential and emotional framework” (23). Educators would be able to “more effectively engage students,” Fantini and Weinstein conclude, if they could discover “the feelings, fears, and wishes” that move students “emotionally,” and that concern them in their lives. “When the content and method of instruction have an affective basis,” they say, “significant contact with pupils is most effectively established and maintained” (10).
In a conversation between Gerald Weinstein and a group of students that constitutes a chapter in Toward Humanistic Education, one student’s observations especially emphasize the importance in school of emotional engagement. The Language Arts curriculum in his school, the student tells Weinstein, should not be “just English,” but should be broadened “to Communication.” The student goes on to suggest:
Make school more interesting, not so boring. Broaden English to . . . really communicate. . . . For instance, you go to English class, you pick up a novel, you learn about that novel, but you never really relate it to what’s outside, to what’s real. . . .Well, that’s the most important thing. If you just go to English class and you don’t feel anything. . . . (194)
Weinstein then asks the students what part they think “feeling has to do with learning,” and a second student explains why feeling is such an important part of learning:
Because people feel. You have to live with people, and people have feelings. They have emotions. You can’t get around it, and in order to live with them, you have to learn about the emotions. You have to be able to understand them, and how can one understand them if you never learn about them, if you just sit and listen and never throw things open for debate, and they just teach it to you straight? (196)
The goal of a curriculum of affect is to recognize and address the concerns of students. Students often encounter concerns that are “rooted in the core of their being,” Fantini and Weinstein say; the concerns students experience are, in fact, those that most people experience, but can be “enormously powerful” for young people (40). Students most frequently express concerns, Fantini and Weinstein report, about how to develop a personal sense of identity, how to establish connections with others, and how to control what happens to them. In his article, “A Curriculum of Concerns,” Mark Phillips calls these student concerns about identity, connectedness and power. Phillips explains the importance of such concerns to students:
Adolescents wrestle with figuring out who they are and what their direction is for the future. Relationships with others, acceptance and rejection, and intimate relationships are dominant concerns for many. And kids often struggle with feelings of powerlessnessrelated to their ability to control their lives and determine their futures.
The process of dealing with any of these concerns is, for students, a struggle integrating what they think about, what they are concerned about in their own lives, and the actions that express such concerns. Inherent in the process, Fantini and Weinstein say, is “the development of the individual’s own personality,” which includes, they say, the student’s skill in interpersonal relations,” and his “skills of identifying, articulating, and evaluating his own feelings, concerns, and opinions and comparing them with those of others” (30).
Such observations appear to make the development of an instructional model based on a curriculum of affect, one that validates students’ experiences and feelings, a critical project for teachers. As part of the development of such an instructional model, Shakespeare’s plays, I am arguing here, would appear to be significant texts.
In her book, Creative Shakespeare: The Globe Education Guide to Practical Shakespeare, Fiona Banks writes that the “mirror” the plays “hold up to nature”–their “insight into the human condition”–is “one of the main reasons why the plays remain worth studying,” for, she says, “every character and every scene teaches us something about ourselves as human beings.” When students engage with “how the situations they experience in the plays relate to their own lives and dilemmas,” and can “empathize with how a character behaves,” says Banks, who is Senior Advisor: Creative Programmes at Shakespeare’s Globe, they will begin to “develop as human beings,” and they will begin to develop an “experiential understanding and connection” with the characters in the plays, and the characters’ situations (9).
In Creative Shakespeare, Fiona Banks goes on to say that it is important for students to “learn about Shakespeare’s plays,” to approach “the plays themselves” (9). But in order for students’ knowledge to be relevant to them, it must relate to their feelings and what concerns them. “Curriculum relevance,” Fantini and Weinstein write in an earlier article entitled “Inner Content vs. Academic Content in Public Schools,” “is largely a problem of allowing the affective dimensions of learning to direct the cognitive dimensions of learning” (13). In the “Learning Through Shakespeare” project that Banks describes, the plays, she says, “provide an excellent teaching tool,” allowing students to “learn through Shakespeare’s plays . . . (9). Banks is more specific about the objective of such a project:
The universal nature of the stories of the plays provides endless opportunities to explore a range of issues and ideas. In such work the primary objective is . . . to use the plays as a frame to explore a specific issue. Shakespeare’s plays depict worlds that . . . are simultaneously distant from our world, yet relevant to our humanity. It is this combination that makes the plays such wonderful vehicles for exploration. . . . (205)
Fantini and Weinstein propose in Toward Humanistic Education that a curriculum in which “the learner’s feelings and concerns are recognized” will be “more relevant” to students (32).
Shakespeare “wasn’t written to be read,” Michael Fentiman explains to Dan Poole, in Muse of Fire. “There’s lots to dig into in these plays intellectually, as you read them,” he says; “that’s what’s so great about Shakespeare–what it does intellectually for you when you read it . . . .” As a result, Fentiman continues, “you can feel like that that’s the gig with Shakespeare.” But, Fentiman says, Shakespeare’s plays are “connected to something kind of . . . visceral, as well as sometimes intellectual, all at the same time–all bound in.” The plays are “written to be experienced,” Fentiman says, and he continues:
. . . the act of going to see a piece of Shakespeare for a Shakesperian audience with Shakespeare’s . . . sort of objectives were to come feel a play, to experience a play, to see a sequence of events and then in that sequence of events be prompted to think things.
For some people, Fentiman continues, seeing a Shakespeare play is a “literary event,” but, he says, “what the event is about is–about . . . tapping into something human–tapping into something like the world we live in, that we recognize.” That, Fentiman concludes, is “what the plays are designed to do.”
If to prompt readers and audience members to “think things” is what a “sequence of events” in a play by Shakespeare is designed to do, what things are readers and members of an audience supposed to think? The question is significant–and urgent. Fantini and Weinstein, in “Inner Content vs. Academic Content,” note that, often, students’ “personal reactions to the world . . . are not viewed as content worthy of attention.” Instead, they continue, students’ concerns “become a means for inducing the child to learn more about the prescribed content,” to acquire “‘an understanding of’ or ‘a knowing about’ a variety of academic subjects” (11). But, Fantini and Weinstein insist, in order for knowledge in the cognitive realm to be relevant to students, and to affect their behavior, it is important to consider “how these subjects may serve the needs of the student.” The cognitive realm must be directed by the affective realm. What concerns the students, their “wants, desires, interests, fears, anxieties, joys, and other emotions,” must occupy a position from which to facilitate the cognitive, and are “therefore legitimate content in their own right” (14).
This line of movement, however, is usually reversed, so that the cognitive area dictates “what areas of affect should be included”; the affective, placed in the subordinate position, subsequently, serves the cognitive. In “Inner Content vs. Academic Content,” Fantini and Weinstein offer an example of this “line of movement.” They contrast the attempts of a teacher to use students’ feelings to serve their acquisition of a piece of cognitive knowledge with those of a teacher who starts with students’ feelings and selects cognitive “subject matter” in order to serve the affective. The second teacher might say, “I want to work with Johnny on his concerns and feelings, on things that bother him.” And, Fantini and Weinstein continue, that teacher would then ask, “what piece of cognitive knowledge could help him to cope better with the things that bother him?”
In another example, from The Disadvantaged: Challenge to Education, Fantini and Weinstein describe a situation in which a teacher is “experiencing difficulty in teaching the Declaration of Independence to a recalcitrant class.” After many failed attempts to motivate and interest the students, the teacher begins to consider what it is in the Declaration of Independence that is “most like an emotional concern” of her students. Her answer, “Defiance,” Fantini and Weinstein say, is in fact “the whole emotional context of the Declaration.” Further, they observe, “what child has had no experience with defiance? Indeed,” they say, “much of daily classroom activity is occupied with just that defiance.” The continue:
The teacher then began to explore the notion of defiance and the children’s experiences with and feelings about it; then, when she reintroduced the study of the Declaration of Independence, it became a vital issue. (365)
Fantini and Weinstein argue, in conclusion, that what students recognize as “a vital issue” must be at the center of what happens in the classroom. The teacher must recognize students’ common emotional concerns and make them integral to the curriculum (365).
The actor Judi Dench gets this absolutely right, when, in a conversation with Dan Poole and Giles Terera on Muse of Fire, she says, “If you feel it, and you know what it’s about, you can–you just say it.” She continues:
If you say to a child, “You’ve fallen in love with somebody, or you know what the feeling of love is, or have you ever envied somebody–something? A toy? Have you ever gotten really angry about something?” That’s what Shakespeare’s about. It’s all about those things–all about those things.
The goal of such an instructional model must be to approach Hamlet, or any of Shakespeare’s plays, in ways that make it more personally meaningful, and so that students are more deeply involved in its content as a text, and in their lives.
REFERENCES
Banks, F. (2013). Creative Shakespeare: The Globe Education Guide to Practical Shakespeare. New York: Bloomsbury.
Barber, F. (n.d.) Interview conducted by G. Terera. Muse of Fire. Retrieved January 12, 2018 from https://www.globeplayer.tv/museoffire.
Dench, J. (n.d.) Interview conducted by D. Poole and G. Terera. Muse of Fire. Retrieved June 10, 2021 from https://www.globeplayer.tv/museoffire.
Fantini, M. & Weinstein, G. (1967, March 20-23). “Inner Content vs. Academic Content in Public Schools.” [Conference Presentation]. American Orthopsychiatric Association 44th Annual Meeting, Washington, D. C., United States.
Fantini, M. & Weinstein, G. (1968). The Disadvantaged: Challenge to Education. New York: Harper & Row..
Fentiman, M. (2014, August 3). Interview conducted by D. Poole. Muse of Fire. Retrieved January 12, 2018 from https://www.globeplayer.tv/museoffire.
Hiddleston, T. (2013, January 11). Interview conducted by D. Poole and G. Terera. Muse of Fire. Retrieved January 12, 2018 from https://www.globeplayer.tv/museoffire.
Lowe, A. (n.d.) Interview conducted by D. Poole Muse of Fire. Retrieved January 12, 2018 from https://www.globeplayer.tv/museoffire.
Phillips, M. (2013, May 23). A Curriculum of Concerns. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/a-curriculum-of-concerns-mark-phillips.
Postman, N. & Weingartner, C. (1969). Teaching as a Subversive Activity. New York: Dell.
Weinstein, G. & Fantini, M. (1970). Toward Humanistic Education: A Curriculum of Affect. New York: The Ford Foundation.
