{"id":17714,"date":"2022-03-30T08:35:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-30T08:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-news\/?p=17714"},"modified":"2022-03-30T17:30:22","modified_gmt":"2022-03-30T17:30:22","slug":"shakespeare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/2022\/03\/shakespeare\/","title":{"rendered":"Shakespeare"},"content":{"rendered":"

Professor Penelope Geng shares a snapshot of her English course, Shakespeare.<\/h3>\n

“You will learn to curse expertly in early modern English. Joking! Much of the learning in the class centers on language\u2014thinking about how language forges community, and how it divides it, how it consoles, how it wounds.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Today, Shakespeare is venerated as the \u201cBard\u201d and \u201cwonder of the stage.\u201d His peers were more divided. Early in his career, he was accused of plagiarism (\u201cthere is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers,\u201d fumed Robert Greene) and, after achieving star-status, he was said to be lazy in his editing (\u201cI would he had blotted a thousand [lines],\u201d mused Ben Jonson). How did the imagination and language of this upstart crow shock and delight audiences then\u2014and why do his plays continue to offer entertainment, consolation, and debate today? In this course, we study some of Shakespeare\u2019s most enduring work.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Why take this class?<\/b><\/p>\n

Reading a Shakespeare play by oneself has its own rewards! But for those who enjoy reading plays with others, analyzing Shakespearean rhetoric and poetic devices, studying a play\u2019s historical context through primary documents, theorizing a scene\u2019s staging possibilities, watching multiple recordings of productions, participating in table readings, and performing scenes using the barest of props (the things you carry in your backpack)…This class is for you.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Students wait in the downtown lobby of The Guthrie before the play begins.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fun fact<\/b><\/p>\n

Whenever possible, we see a live, professional performance of a Shakespeare play. This semester we are seeing <\/span>The Tempest<\/span><\/i> at the Guthrie Theater. Previous outings have included <\/span>The Two Gentlemen of Verona<\/span><\/i> at the Jungle Theater, <\/span>Hamlet <\/span><\/i>at Park Square Theatre, and <\/span>Henry IV, Part 1<\/span><\/i> at the Loft\/Open Book performed by Ten Thousand Things. The Twin Cities has a great theater scene, and many companies experiment with Shakespearean performance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Building community in class<\/b><\/p>\n

We build community through table readings. Plays are meant to be performed and sonnets read aloud. For every class, I ask students to read a part or lines from a poem. Hearing a mix of voices in the classroom space builds a sense of community. It\u2019s also a fantastic way to do close reading. Since this is an English class, our performances will be quite amateur (I encourage those who love performance to take classes in Theater and Dance!). The stakes are low and we aim to have a good time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What new knowledge will you take away from this course?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

You will learn to curse expertly in early modern English. Joking! Much of the learning in the class centers on language\u2014thinking about how language forges community, and how it divides it, how it consoles, how it wounds. We look up both \u201ceasy\u201d and \u201chard\u201d words using the Oxford English Dictionary to glean their secondary and tertiary meanings. We watch films to get a sense of how an actor transforms the text using a combination of gesture and tone.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The be-all and end-all…among others.<\/b><\/p>\n

Scholars estimate that Shakespeare introduced (or popularized) roughly 1,700 new English words. Some of my favorite ones come from <\/span>Macbeth<\/span><\/i>, a text that features prominently in my book <\/span>Communal Justice in Shakespeare\u2019s England<\/span><\/i>: \u201cunsex,\u201d \u201ccompunctious,\u201d and \u201cbe-all and end-all.\u201d As a former ESL learner, I\u2019ve always enjoyed memorizing vocabulary words, so it\u2019s a genuine pleasure to study early modern English with my students.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Outside of class you will find me\u2026<\/b><\/p>\n

Playing online Dominion. No one asked, but I am ranked 4916 in the world in 3-4 player games.<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Students learn about the great bard and see live performances in this course.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1077,"featured_media":17742,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academics","mediatype-articles","collections-englishhomepage"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":[8],"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":[78],"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1077"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17714"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30757,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17714\/revisions\/30757"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}