Discovery May 2002

by Annette Trinity-Stevens

To get to the Globe Theatre in London where his plays were performed, Shakespeare would have walked past a jail nicknamed the Clink. In Shakespeare's day, imprisonment was so common and punishment so public that even if the Bard himself never spent a night in the pokey, plenty of people he knew probably did.

Maybe it's no surprise, then, that even today's most hardened criminals can relate to the famous playwright's rendering of Richard II's imprisonment before his death.

"This is a writer with an incredible imaginative gift," said Sharon Beehler, a Shakespearean scholar and professor of English at MSU-Bozeman. "Other writers of the day don't match him."

Prisoners in solitary confinement are just one unusual group to find meaning in Shakespeare's plays today, according to a new book edited by Beehler and a colleague at the University of Salzburg in Austria.

The book, "Shakespeare and Higher Education: A Global Perspective," represents the success and failures of teaching Shakespeare in such places as South Africa, Egypt, China, Estonia and Brazil as well as in the U.S.

Beehler said she was asked to lead the project because of her years of writing about the teaching of Shakespeare. She and her co-editor solicited about 100 articles about how the plays are taught in different locations. They culled the final number to about two dozen.

"The book contributes not only ideas and techniques that others might try but also exemplifies the range and vitality of the teaching of Shakespeare around the world," said MSU English Department Head Sara Jayne Steen, herself a Shakespearean scholar. "In that sense, it's very exciting that Shakespeare is working and speaking to people all over the globe."

Macbeth, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet are the most widely taught Shakespeare plays, Beehler said, in part because their themes of evil, revenge and clan conflict cross nearly all cultural lines.

Because magic played a role in ancient Egyptian culture, students in Cairo can easily connect with the idea of witches in Macbeth, wrote an instructor from Cairo University.

Educators in Estonia staged a Shakespeare Day, where student performances were described by its organizer as "nearly five hours of what sometimes felt like torture."

As chaotic and mixed-up as the Estonian performances were, most contributors acknowledged the tremendous power that either live or videotaped performances have on understanding a play's meaning.

"It seems to me teachers have changed their thinking about how they teach Shakespeare," Beehler said. "They teach it more as a performance versus a piece of literature, and with that change has come a popular opening to Shakespeare that resonates with students."

In particular, clips from several films showing different interpretations of the same scene can take pressure off students to "get it right," Beehler said.

Performance wasn't an option for the convicted felons in Indiana who read Richard II's final soliloquy with an instructor through the steel doors of their concrete cells.

Shakespeare, they allowed, knew something about isolated imprisonment. Their interest in the text was great enough that for a time the inmates shouted out study questions to each other rather than obscenities.

Beehler said the prison chapter has drawn the most interest, especially among non-scholars. "On occasion Shakespeare instructors will teach Shakespeare in prison, and very often we don't hear about it," Beehler said.

Annette Trinity-Stevens is the Research Communications Director at MSU-Bozeman.