“SHAKE-UP”

1. “SHAKE-UP” Like Shakespeare, teachers are forced to simplify their knowledge to gratify the bad tastes of the ‘rank-scented many’ Thomas Hinton, Oakhill College

2. Why is Shakespeare relevant in the 21st Century Classroom? There are many answers to this contemporary student query or complaint. The obvious answers relate to Shakespeare’s genius and mastery of poetry and prose, or the complexity and authenticity of his characters, or the universality of his themes. However, the common approach of demanding that students recognise these assertions and proclaiming Shakespeare’s perennial significance is an obsolete teaching strategy which is doomed to fail in the 21st Century Classroom. The 21st Century student must discover Shakespeare on their own terms through the teacher’s guided focus on “appropriation”. Once students are able to nominate contemporary equivalents for Shakespearean characters, scenarios and language they will, to some extent, recognise Shakespeare’s universal significance. In order for students to embrace the process of appropriation, teachers should introduce students to Shakespeare’s own sources and methods of adaptation, analyse and evaluate various Shakespearean film appropriations and assist students in creating their own modern appropriation of a Shakespearean scene. In addition students should compare Shakespeare’s poetry to modern rap songs in terms of metre, rhyme and content to find a 21st Century Shakespearean voice; and thereby affirm that Shakespeare’s work is relevant and integral to the 21st Century Classroom.

3. Contents I- Shakespeare in the 21st Century II- Shakespeare’s World III- To Appropriate or not to Appropriate? IV- Shakespearean Film Appropriations V- Modernising Shakespearean Language VI- Shake-Up VII- Units of Study

4. I- Shakespeare in the 21st Century “He was not of an age, but for all time” - Ben Jonson

5. Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford,2002) ‘The distinction between Shakespeare and popular culture epitomizes the great divide in culture over the last century between highbrow and lowbrow.’

6. During Restoration Drama, Shakespeare was modernised to eliminate what was perceived as archaic or unsophisticated, and plots were recast to serve royalist perspectives. • It was not until the early eighteenth century that notions of textual fidelity would have any purchase on the appropriation of Shakespeare, popular or otherwise- suggesting the language became more and more sacred with time. • The ‘educated minority’ appreciate Shakespeare aesthetically as ‘poetry’, whereas for the ‘groundlings’, Shakespeare is all story, character and spectacle.

7. Finding a suitable medium, style, or genre for bridging that gap between cultural registers, one that might preserve Shakespeare’s cultural authority while addressing a mass audience, has been a recurrent issue in modern popular appropriations of Shakespeare. • Jonson’s influential image of Shakespeare as a fixed star in an artistic firmament is, then, misleading. Rather we might more profitably imagine Shakespeare…in a more contemporary sense as a figure whose importance and survival depends upon skilfully navigating the ever-changing politics of the establishment and the street.

8. Richard Burt, Shakespeare “Glo-cali-zation,” Race, and The Small Screens of Post-Popular Culture (London, 2003) ‘The implicit claim is that the Shakespearean language is not universal but the plots, narrative conflicts, and/or character issues are. Yet plot and character are what traditionally was taught as inessential, borrowed, not-Shakespeare. Popularization does not return us, then, to the fuller, original and essential Shakespeare; it is the essence of Shakespeare.’

9. Paul Prescott, Shakespeare and popular culture (Cambridge, 2010) ‘What sense does it make to couple Shakespeare- Bard of Avon, icon of genius, highbrow extraordinaire- with ‘popular culture’? If his writings are widely valued for their complexity, timelessness and universal human truths, popular culture is for many synonymous with banality, the ephemeral and the trivial. If Shakespeare is deep and difficult, the typical products of popular culture are shallow and all too accessible. To enjoy Shakespeare, the argument might run, requires training, time and long-term investment; the consumption of popular culture, by definition, requires little or no effort. From the perspective of these stark contrasts, ‘Shakespeare and popular culture’ looks like a dead-end of incompatibility’

10. Where would you sit?Where would your students sit? The galleries The “pit” & groundlings

11. ‘The public theatre was situated near the bottom of the cultural spectrum…a gathering place for mixed crowds relatively unregulated by authorities and thus it contributed to the erosion of social and cultural order and the expression of popular licence, both on stage and in the behaviour of the audience, which was raucous and participatory.’ - Douglas Lanier

12. We are “groundlings” Teachers are groundlings & Students are groundlings

13. “Given the choice, these critics argue, Shakespeare would never have written so many dirty jokes, low comic routines, sword fights and other crowd-pleasing spectacles. He was shackled to his trade, forced to prostitute his talent to gratify the bad tastes of the ‘rank-scented many’ (Coriolanus, 3,1,170)” – Prescott • “Shakespop appropriations do not necessarily lead to ‘dumbing down’, though they do often fit poorly with high cultural standards of verbal sophistication” – Lanier

14. Essence As aurally-challenged “groundlings” in the 21st Century perhaps all we can attain is the essence of Shakespeare. The fuller, original and essential Shakespeare is beyond the realm of our comprehension.

15. However, if the essence of Shakespeare can produce : • The first Shakespeare recorded outside Europe, an English merchant ship off the coast of what is now Sierra Leone became in 1607 a stage for Hamlet, with an African guest providing a running translation in Portuguese (and probably Temne) • Love’s Labour’s Lost in a bomb-scarred Mughal garden in Kabul over five nights in September 2005. For the Kabul’s Love’s Labour’s Lost eleven Afghan actors gathered under direction of a Canadian actress and a US aid worker to perform a text adapted into Dari by two Afghan writers from a Farsi translation prepared by an Iranian scholar. - AnstonBosman, Shakespeare and Globalization (Cambridge, 2010)

16. Surely, the essence can satisfy and engage Year 7-10 students. Teachers should not alienate or intimidate students with the foreign language of Shakespeare until Year 11.

17. Teaching philosophies such as the 21st Century Solution Fluencies and other project-based learning initiatives promote: • Relevance- interest precedes learning • Creativity enhances the value of the function through the form. By teaching students to appropriate Shakespearean plays to modern settings, a teacher can convince students : • Shakespeare is relevant to their world 2) Shakespeare can enhance their creativity.

18. However, before one can effectively appropriate a Shakespearean play to a modern setting, one must understand Shakespeare’s appropriation of sources. • In order for one to understand Shakespeare’s art of appropriation one must have knowledge of Shakespeare’s world

19. Modern Shakespearean Appropriation Shakespeare: Master of Appropriation Shakespeare’s World

20. II- Shakespeare’s World

21. If you had a time machine and could live, for one month, anywhere in the history of civilisation. Where and Whenwould you live? • List your top 3 choices

22. What did you choose? … Ensure Shakespearean London is in your top 3. The greater your knowledge and passion of Shakespearean London, the more likely you are to present Shakespeare’s world in a relevant and creative way

24. What are your fondest Shakespearean experiences? • Titus Andronicus at The Globe • A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Sydney Botanical Gardens • Kevin Spacey in Richard III • Shake-Up Cup…

25. WHAT Statementsbrought to you by Bill Bryson & Stephen Greenblatt

26. In the Elizabethan period the average life expectancy was 40 years and 1/5 of children died before the age of 10 WHAT! In 1564 England had a population between three and five million. Due to the plague and diseases such as tuberculosis, small pox and scurvy, the previous decade had seen a 6 per cent fall in national population. The plague outbreak in 1564 resulted in at least 200 deaths in Stratford which included nearly two-thirds of the infants.

27. A person uprooted from his family and community in Elizabethan England was generally a person in trouble. This was a society deeply suspicious of vagrancy Vagabond Act of 1604- if a vagrant could not show that he had land of his own or a master whom he was serving, he was tied to a post and publicly whipped. WHAT! Then he was either returned to his place of birth- to resume the work he was born to do- or put to labour or placed in stocks until someone took him into service

28. The gates of the city were locked at dusk (later in winter), and no one was allowed in or out till dawn. WHAT! A curfew took effect with darkness, at which time taverns were shut and citizens forbidden to be out, though the fact that the night constables and watchmen were nearly always portrayed in the theatre as laughable dimwits suggests that they were not regarded with much fear.

29. Stuck on the poles on the Great Stone Gate, two arches from the Southwark side, were severed heads, some completely reduced to skulls, others parboiled and tanned, still identifiable... WHAT! The heads on the bridge visitors were duly informed, were those of gentlemen and nobles who suffered the fate of traitors. A foreign visitor to London in 1592 counted thirty-four of them.

30. London was a non stop theatre of punishments. Almost daily people watched the state brand, cut and kill those it deemed offenders WHAT? In some cases of murder the offender’s right hand was cut off at or near the place where the crime was committed and the bleeding malefactor was then paraded through the streets to the execution site.

31. According to one estimate at least 70 per cent of men and 90 per cent of women of the Elizabethan period could not sign their names WHAT? Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway signed her name with an “x”. Illiteracy was present in the recording of names. More than eighty spellings of Shakespeare’s name have been recorded, from Shappere to Shaxberd. WHAT?

32. Shakespeare was a renowned neologist WHAT? A neologism is a newly coined word or expression Shakespeare coined- or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of- 2,035 words. If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide, then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception.

33. A particular challenge for audience and performers alike was the practice of putting young male players in female parts. The fear was that spectators would be attracted to both the female character and the boy beneath, thus becoming doubly corrupted. WHAT? This disdain for female actors was a northern European tradition. In Spain, France and Italy, women were played by women- a fact that astonished British travellers, who seem often to have been genuinely surprised to find that women could play women as competently onstage as in life.

34. Shakespeare was routinely guilty of anatopisms, particularly with regard to Italy. WHAT! An anatopismis, getting one’s geography wrong. In The Taming of the Shrew he puts a sailmaker in Bergamo, approximately the most landlocked city in the whole of Italy, while in The Tempest and The Two Gentlemen of Verona he has Prospero and Valentine set sail from, respectively, Milan and Verona, even though both cities were a good two days’ travel from salt water.

35. Henry VIII bequeathed to his royal children a loe of seeing bulls and bears “baited”, that is penned up in a ring or chained to a stake and set upon by fierce dogs WHAT! The public entertainment helped bear the cost of keeping the animals.

36. In a popular variation, an ape was tied to the back of a pony, which was then attacked by the dogs WHAT! An observer wrote: “To see the animal kicking amongst the dogs, with the screams of the ape beholding the curs hanging from the ears and neck of the pony is very laughable.

37. Shakespeare was bullied by a group of playwrights called The University Wits WHAT! Rehearsing the old rivalry between poets and players, Robert Greene warned his gentlemen friends Marlowe, Nashe and Peele not to trust those “puppets,” the actors, that “speak from our mouths.” Actors were mere burrs that cleave to the garments of writers. They would be virtually invisible were they not “garnished in our colours” “Yet trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shakescene in a country”

38. The Avenue of Film Anonymous (dir. Ronald Emmerich, 2011) • Opening scene of Ben Jonson’s comedy deemed seditious. • 32ndmin- Henry V play • 50th min- series of plays.

39. Project Tasks • Web Research on the University Wits • Create an 8 Episode Mini-Series set in Shakespearean London Series 1- Shakespeare’s arrival in London Series 2- Rivalry or Respect until Marlowe’s death • Cross- curriculum focus on Shakespeare’s world- English, art, history, drama, music and science- for an entire term

40. III- To Appropriate or not to Appropriate?

41. ‘Shakespeare didn’t scruple to steal plots, dialogue, names and titles- whatever suited his purpose. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare was a wonderful teller of stories so long as someone else had told them first.’ - Bill Bryson

42. Summary Of Shakespeare’s 38 plays, only five are thought to be original plots: -Titus Andronicus (1592) • Love Labour’s Lost (1594-5) • A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) • The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597-8) • The Tempest (1611)

43. Shakespeare used Raphael Holinshed’s, Chroniclesof England, Scotland and Ireland (1587) as the principal source for 11 of his plays. • Approximately nine plays were modelled on Italian works of the past few centuries. • The Two Gentleman of Verona (1590-1), All’s Well that Ends Well (1604-5) and Cymbeline (1610) were all influenced by Giovanni Boccacio’s, The Decameron.

44. “Half-Wits” In addition, there are several plays influenced by the “University Wits”: • As You Like It (1600)- Thomas Lodge’s novel, Rosalynde(1590), made over as a romantic satire by Shakespeare’s addition of Jacques and Touchstone. • The Winter’s Tale (1609)- Robert Greene, Pandosto, a romantic ‘novel’ published in 1588 and reprinted in 1607. Shakespeare changed the tone and style of this original, provided a new ending (the statue coming to life) and added Autolycus, Antigonus, Paulina and the rustics. • It is thought that Christopher Marlowe significantly influenced Shakespeare’s early history plays and Titus Andronicus.

45. Morality Plays • Influenced by morality plays which instilled two crucial expectations in their audiences: 1. Drama worth seeing would get at something central to human destiny. 2. It should not only reach the educated elite but also the great mass of ordinary people.

46. But Shakespeare learned something else from morality plays; he learned that the boundary between comedy and tragedy is surprisingly porous • “Shakespeare grasped that the spectacle of human destiny was, in fact, vastly more compelling when it was attached not to generalized abstractions but to particular named people, people realized with an unprecedented intensity of individuation: not Youth but Prince Hal, not Everyman but Othello” - Greenblatt

47. Royal Orders • Queen Elizabeth commanded the author to write a play showing Falstaff in love. In two weeks time, or so it is said, The Merry Wives of Windsor was written, to be first performed on April 23, 1597 at the annual feast to commemorate the founding of the Order of the Garter. • “Shakespeare constructed Macbeth as a piece of flattery. King James is honoured not for his wisdom or learning or statecraft but for his place in a line of legitimate descent that leads all the way from his noble ancestor in the distant past to the sons that promise an unbroken succession. In order to enhance this point Shakespeare had to twist the historical record” - Greenblatt

48. Master of Appropriation “Greene and his crowd, despite their drunken recklessness and bohemian snobbery, saw something frightening in Shakespeare, a usurper’s knack for displaying as his own what he had plucked from others, an alarming ability to plunder, appropriate and absorb”

49. Shakespeare understood his world in the ways that we understand our world- his experiences, like ours, were mediated by whatever stories and images were available to him. When he was in a tavern and encountered a loudmouthed soldier who bragged about his daring adventures, Shakespeare saw that soldier through the lens of characters he had read in fiction, and at that same time he adjusted his image of those fictional characters by means of the actual person standing before him. - Greenblatt

50. The Making ofMacbeth On November 4, 1605, carrying a watch, a fuse, and tinder, Guy Fawkes intended to put into execution a desperate plot devised by a small group of conspirators, embittered by what they perceived as James’s unwillingness to extend toleration to Roman Catholics...Among those arrested and brought to trial for the Gunpowder Plot was Father Henry Garnet, the head of the clandestine Jesuit mission in England...Convicted of treason, Garnet was dragged on a hurdle to Saint Paul’s Churchyard for execution, his severed head then joining the others displayed on pikes on London Bridge.