by Michael Schoenfeldt
It is a particularly exciting time to be teaching and writing on Shakespeare. The intellectual ferment of the profession has produced a welcome aperitif to our continued engagement with Shakespeare's remarkable poems and plays. Indeed, the issues that have preoccupied recent criticism-largely questions of sexual and of racial identity, of embodiment, and of the workings of power-involve phenomena that the plays and poems continually probe. It is sometimes difficult to imagine just how the plays were read and performed without explicit attention to them. How, one wonders, could one read Othello and not confront issues of race? How could one read the Sonnets or stage Twelfth Night and not confront the prospects of same-sex desire?

My own research into Renaissance medicine has changed the ways I read the afflicted bodies and disturbed souls that populate the Shakespearean canon. Locating the Sonnets amid the early modern medical understanding of emotion as a kind of disease has allowed me to see just how ardently Shakespeare investigates the pleasures and dangers of erotic desire amid a physiological discourse prescribing salutary self-regulation.

Michigan has proved to be an intellectually stimulating venue in which to work on Shakespeare. The recent visit of the Royal Shakespeare Company (shepherded expertly by my colleague Ralph Williams) has reminded us that the plays are scripts intended to be staged rather than texts for professors to interpret. At the same time, research accomplished by my colleagues here has profoundly enhanced our knowledge of the plays, and enriched our teaching and performing of them. Through scrupulous historical research, for example, Steven Mullaney has redefined the place that the Shakespearean stage occupied in early modern society. Likewise, Valerie Traub has brilliantly expanded the range of possibilities for understanding the ways that gender and desire function on the Renaissance stage.

Part of the thrill of working on Shakespeare at Michigan, then, is being at a place not just where the old paradigms are handed down, but where the new paradigms emerge. I am surrounded by colleagues and students who are central players in the continual process of reinterpreting these plays and poems for our particular cultural moment—a process that keeps the plays, and us, alive.


by Steven Mullaney
Shakespearean studies underwent a significant reconfiguration about twenty years ago, when I moved from graduate school at Stanford to a first job teaching Renaissance literature to MIT undergraduates. A number of different theoretical movements seemed to achieve critical mass simultaneously; conferences in this country and abroad were often fractious as a result, but they were also quite exciting things to attend. Teaching and writing about Shakespeare seems quieter now but no less interesting or exciting. Feminist theory and new historicism and cultural materialism and the other critical revolutions of the 80s did not disappear quickly or give way to the next new fashion; they proved less faddish, and more substantial, than many predicted, and this means that they have developed, expanded, matured, evolved into something a lot less monolithic than a new orthodoxy, a lot more flexible and useful now that they are less polemically-charged.

What has grown out of the critical reformations of the early 80s, it turns out, is a more dynamic and nuanced understanding of the cultural webs that unite historical individuals but also sets them apart, that hold individuals and societies in relation and sometimes opposition to one another. The period of Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare’s lifetime, was a complex and confusing time of religious upheaval, political instability, economic transformation, and territorial expansion. Europe split in two with the Reformation, and many lives were lost as a result of religious wars and persecution. Some individuals hid their beliefs while others broadcast them in the streets, but Shakespeare was one of the wary ones; we don’t know what he believed to this day. His plays explore the warp and woof of this confusing world, however, in savvy and witty and bawdy and profound ways. I tend to think that it is this deep involvement in the particularities of his own time that makes his plays last so well and remain so vital, still, for us. This was a drama of experimentation and exploration, of questions posed rather than solutions offered, and Shakespeare seems to have had a very good mind for questions, for asking how words, things, people, and nations were put together, what made them work and what made them fall apart. As a consequence, he’s a marvelous author to teach because one is always learning new questions to ask, whether about the poetics of revenge, or about the Islamic and Judaic worlds that loomed so large in Elizabethan politics and have recently occupied a new generation of historians and literary critics, or about the complex mix of religion, ethnicity, class, and gender comprised individual identity in sixteenth-century England.

In recent years, Shakespeare has been teaching me (and my students) a great deal about the theater and how dynamic and interactive a medium it can be, and was in the heyday of the Elizabethan stage. Over the past ten years, I’ve been able to see some incredible productions in playhouses in London and Stratford and New York and Chicago. The experience has helped me open up the plays that I teach in new ways for myself and my students, to give them a feel, even in the classroom, for the ways in which the Elizabethan stage embodied the real rather than merely represented it. I’ve been teaching Shakespeare along with his contemporaries, too, and watching how Kyd and Marlowe and Shakespeare and Webster all learn from each other, complicate each other, and ask us to complicate our own understandings of our own lives and worlds, in a similar fashion.


by Valerie Traub
My teaching of Shakespeare is motivated by multiple desires: to introduce students to the rich density of the Shakespearean text; to help them navigate its complexities of language, rhetoric, metaphor, character, and structure; to convey the historical differences separating late sixteenth century English society from the present day U.S.; and to suggest the salience of Shakespeare’s texts to our understanding of contemporary culture. My undergraduate lecture course on Shakespearean drama focuses on Shakespeare’s depiction of the theatricality of identity. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” says Jacques in As You Like It. This is only the most famous instance of the idea that identity is a role that one performs, that the boundaries of selfhood are permeable and identities transformable. Sometimes a character’s transformation is a happy one, as when young women cross-dress as men, escape their harsh fathers, and find lovers of their choice. Sometimes the metamorphosis is mined for its comic potential, as when Bottom the Weaver is transformed into an ass. And sometimes the change is tragic, as when King Lear or Coriolanus self-destruct before our eyes. Characters constantly ask, “Who am I?” and assert “I am not what I am.” Concerned as well with the fabrication of illusion and with acts of deception and disguise—not to mention its own status as fiction or artifice—Shakespearean drama thematizes how identity is created out of, and often threatened by, axes of social definition such as rank, nationality, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity.

In an undergraduate seminar, I focus more intensively on a particular research specialty of mine: representations of gender and sexuality across the Shakespearean genres of sonnet, narrative verse, and drama. Specific historical differences in regard to how gender and sexuality were conceptualized inform our understanding of Shakespeare’s texts. Thus, we explore such questions as: How are masculinity and femininity defined? What does it mean to desire? What is the impact of patriarchal marriage or misogyny on the expression of desire? In a historical period prior to the division of homosexuality from heterosexuality, how is eroticism conceptualized? What does the homoeroticism of the sonnets tell us about the meaning of such desire in the period? How are gender and sexuality related to such social variables as social rank, race, and national identity, and how is their representation informed by literary genre, formal structure, and available vocabularies?

In general, my approach emphasizes the range of interpretative possibilities within a bounded historical frame: to read Shakespeare through the lens of our own concerns does not mean that anything goes. My method happily coincides with the interest of our students in visual media, and the increase, in recent years, in the availability of creative visual treatments—from faithful performances such as Kenneth Branagh’s exuberant Much Ado About Nothing to less dutiful adaptations such as Baz Luhrman’s “updated” MTV version of Romeo + Juliet and the “citations” of country music videos such as Dolly Parton and Billy Rae Cyrus’s “Romeo.” Short film clips not only convey to students the dramatic qualities of the text as it is lifted off the page, they also encourage students to consider their own interpretative standards (where does the freedom to interpret end?) as well as the ongoing availability of Shakespearean materials to cultural appropriation.

The interpretative possibilities posed by contemporary performance affect my assignments as well. In the seminar, I ask students to choose and present a short video sequence that exhibits an interesting “take” on gender or sexuality. In the lecture, I invite students to imagine themselves as directors of their own production; with an unlimited budget and talent pool, their job is to create a production concept, providing an interpretative rationale for their staging accompanied by a visual representation: drawing, graphic, diorama, webpage. The results, often surprisingly creative, prove how stimulating a sustained engagement with the Shakespearean text can be.