Hi, My name is Jeff Rufo. I'm a visiting faculty fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers. Prior to this appointment, I was an assistant professor of English at Trinity University in San Antonio. My research is on early modern literature and culture, with special emphasis upon drama and the history of political thought. I'm excited to write for Pixels and Pedagogy, so thanks to Claire for this opportunity!

Email me at jarufo@gmail.com

There are a lot of good reasons to think hard, if not creatively, about how to teach Shakespeare's Hamlet--a play most experience at some point in life (I first read it in high school, in the 90s) whether they want to or not. I needn't rehearse the way in which Hamlet remains at the heart of the Western literary and cultural tradition. And yet, despite its near omnipresence in twenty-first century Anglophone cultures, the play can be challenging to teach. This is due neither to a dearth of quality material to discuss with students (regardless of level), nor a lack of pedagogical resources on Shakespeare and this particular play (see, for instance, the Folger Shakespeare Library's publications geared towards teaching). Rather, I think that teaching Hamlet is difficult because it's hard to know where precisely to dig in when facing such a treasure trove.

In Spring 2011, while teaching at Trinity University in San Antonio, I taught a course called "Hamlet in Performance." Collaborating with my friend and colleague Kyle Gillette (Department of Speech, Theater, and Human Communication at Trinity), we secured a pedagogical innovation grant to develop a Shakespeare course for theater and literature students. We used the funds mostly to work at research libraries and teaching institutes, preparing to teach the play through performative and historical lenses. My time was spent at the Folger in Washington, D.C., where I attended some great workshops. (I highly recommend spending at least one week there, no matter what you teach or write about.)

Course Description: "Hamlet in Performance" will give students critical and artistic approaches to considering Shakespeare in different intellectual, social, and aesthetic contexts, taking Hamlet as a point of departure. Mixing theory and practice, this class will introduce students to the overlapping ways in which literary and theatre studies challenge, inform, and feed one another. Combined with the traditional analytic approach to literary texts, with its emphasis upon close reading and critical contexts, “Hamlet in Performance” will also attend to problems of directing, acting, and adapting Hamlet. Students will be asked to weigh the thematic resonance of these performance questions in Hamlet itself, questions which must be understood as central metatheatrical components of the play’s analytic sensibility concerning “being” and “seeming.” For instance, how do production decisions and spectator perspectives influence questions of interpretation?  Conversely, how do theoretical questions inform performance and production decisions? We will focus on Hamlet as a play in many ways about theatre, about staging, about issues inherent in theatre studies and performance studies, such as the nature of memory, acting as a form of ghosting, theatre as a space for political reflection, drama as embodied philosophy, and performance as “a rehearsal for death.” Through close reading, directing, performing, and by viewing the enactment of the same scenes across different media, students will get to the heart of these important questions about dramatic literature and its theatrical interpretations.

"Hamlet in Performance" was, for the most part, a success. Kyle and I learned a lot from the experiment, and would have liked another crack at it. The most significant learning took place when we had students take on projects in which small groups were asked to create adaptations of (or inspired by) the play itself. We felt that the best work was done when students focused on a single episode, piece of dialogue, theme, or question in the play. Some of the concepts that our students excavated and repurposed in their own productions were "ghosting and haunting," metatheatricality, Machiavellian rhetoric and performance, spying, and addiction. 

Some of the more memorable presentations focused on an especially notable scene--the famous play within a play. In Act 3 scene 2, Hamlet hires an itinerant troupe of professional performers to stage a play known as "The Murder of Gonzago," which Hamlet later calls "The Mousetrap." Here's a synopsis of what happens in the scene:

Hamlet tells a group of actors how he wants them to perform the play that's about to begin. He'd like it to come off naturally: they shouldn't be too loud, or gesticulate too much, as bad actors often do. Instead, they should use their discretion to build up suspense with their actions. Most importantly, they shouldn't be tempted to get a cheap laugh, since the audience might miss the important parts. Throughout the scene, Hamlet gives directions as if experienced with acting. He pulls Horatio aside, and asks a favor. Horatio is asked to watch Claudius's reactions, especially when the play depicts killing of King Gonzago (in precisely the way the Ghost says he was killed). If the play does not reveal Claudius as the killer, Hamlet promises Horatio that he will admit to having seen a "damnèd ghost" rather than the honest spirit of his late father. Hamlet's play, The Mousetrap, is a game of chicken which, if he wins, will reveal--with absolute certainty--Claudius's guilt.

Before the play itself begins, there is a dumb show, which shows the following things silently: A man murders a king while he is sleeping in his garden. His loving wife, initially inconsolable over the king's death, marries the usurper, who has crowned himself king. Then, oddly, the the play itself begins, only with words this time. In the first scene, the Queen repeatedly swears to her husband (the King) that she will never remarry. Oh, sure, says the King in the play: she's faithful now, but she'll forget all her faithfulness as soon as she's in her new husband's bed, which should happen roughly about the time her old husband dies. Hamlet says the play, called "The Mouse-Trap," is a "wicked piece of work," but wouldn't bother anybody with a clean conscience. The husband/King is taking a nap when his nephew sneaks in and pours poison in his ear —exactly what Claudius did to Hamlet's father. Seeing this, Claudius gets out of his seat and rushes out of the room. As everyone but Hamlet and Horatio rushes out of the room, Hamlet gloats about this brilliant performance.

This scene seems to connect directly back to problems that can only be considered central to the play's meaning: questions of knowledge, concerning the actions and morality of others. If Hamlet is to trust his father's ghost and kill his uncle Claudius (the new King of Denmark), he must acheive absolute certainty that he is doing "the right thing," whatever that might be.

Going through the collaborative and deliberative process of generating and giving a production pitch--as opposed to"staging" a reading of the original dialogue--encouraged our students to consider the contemporary relevance (or enduring meanings) of Hamlet. Using performance in an English classroom, with its primary focus on printed texts, need not always be a staid affair. We wanted our students to experiment, to play seriously, to take risks, and even to court failure. Shakespeare is an invitation to engage, no matter how much cultural value we tend to ascribe to him. Anything that we as teachers can do to break down the barriers that keep him apart from us (above us?) will help the uninitiated come to understand and appreciate "him." Although focusing on Shakespeare's language will always be a fruitful approach, younger students may benefit from focusing more on the forest than the trees.

Adaptation / Production Pitch assignment:

General description: The “production pitch” midterm assignment will count for 15 % of your final grade and is to be done in groups of 5. It will consist of suggesting a possible production of Hamlet pitched to a “board of directors” or group of programming coordinators for some sort of theater, performance space, or cultural institution. For the purpose of this assignment, these roles will be played by members of the class during your pitch. You will choose as a group what theater, performance space, or cultural institution we are (e.g., The Foxwoods Theater on Broadway? The rebuilt Globe in London? The Off-Center in Austin? The ruins of an old castle in Denmark or old pyramid in Cairo? An elementary school somewhere in rural Oklahoma?). This decision should deeply inform your interpretation and vision, and should include specific research into the venue in question. 

Please note: the “pitch” must directly involve and feature all group members. It must last between 15 and 20 minutes (make sure to rehearse and time this, as all presentations will be cut off after the time limit). Attendance is required at both sessions, because you will serve on the “board of directors” during the other pitches and will be expected to ask follow-up questions at the end of each presentation.

Structure: Here is one way in which you might wish to structure your group’s production pitch. Begin by having one member of the group introduce the concept and outline the major elements. Then, after the broad vision has been sketched out, hand off to the next member of the group. Each member might then address a specific aspect of your vision as outlined below in the 4 major categories, or you might choose to divide the visual aspect among group members and then look at the other categories together. It might be helpful to have a short scene performed or read aloud if you feel this can elucidate some aspect of your approach. Finally, give some “concluding remarks” (like the conclusion of an academic essay or closing remarks in a trial) in which you address the significance of your work (and the other points mentioned in the “assessment” category below). In both your introduction and concluding remarks you should address us as the hypothetical board and explain why our theater in particular needs this production. Remember: the goal is to make us want your production in our next season.

Content: Each group is asked to present its unique “vision” of a performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that it proposes to stage, or otherwise present. This vision should include detailed descriptions and ideas pertaining to the following aspects of production design: 

• Visual and aural aspects. These should include but not be limited to the choice of performance space, costuming, lighting, set design, and sound design. Your presentation should give a tangible sense of how this production will look and sound. While you can and should talk about the choices you will make, we want to see actual images -- sketches, visual research, collages, etc -- so that we can better understand your vision. Please give a sense of at least five different scenes, including one Ghost scene and the Mousetrap.

• What will you be looking for from the actors you intend to cast for the major roles? How do you see Gertrude or Laertes or Polonius, for example? What traits would describe your take? You might use either well-known stage or cinema actors or students in the class to give us a sense of how you see these parts physically, vocally, and in terms of personal affect. Attend not only to individuals but also to the chemistry between people. Describe your casting choices or approaches for at least 5 characters. 
• Script. What version of the play or which text will you use? How will you deal with “cuts” and other aspects of language? Include both your base or “control” text -- First Folio? Arden? “Bad” Quarto? -- and a few ideas about specific cuts to make, if any. You could certainly choose to do a 4 ½ hour production, or even, for that matter, think really big and do a giant 48 hour production with slow motion and lots of repetition and added subplots. Remember also that sometimes thinking big means thinking small: maybe you want to do a 30 minute version appropriate for a tour of area high-schools.... 
• Interpretation. How do your visual, casting, and script choices, which should convey a “directorial vision” of the play in performance, relate to your interpretation of the play -- specifically, its plot, characters, themes, and meanings? Your discussion of interpretation should also relate specifically to the ideas we’ve discussed in class: textual problems and ambiguities, ideas about metatheater, ghosting, the nature of character, the history of Hamlet in performance, etc. This part should receive a few minutes in your presentation but should also and more importantly dominate the written component: 5 pages you will turn in that will summarize aspects 1-3, detail who in your group did what, and make a case for your interpretation.

Assessment: Your grade for the project will be determined based on the following four criteria, which are of equal “value”:

• Boldness of choices and clarity of your “vision.” Brave, striking choices score higher than safe ones. Your choices should reflect a strong point of view, intensive effort, and a striking aesthetic. Ask yourself, what is the goal of the production as you see it? It should be a worthy one!
• Amount of detail and rigor in your “research.” You needn’t consult outside texts and materials for this component, but we encourage all groups to explore what is available on the web and in the library. You might wish to draw inspiration from film versions, from artistic renderings of the play, from literary criticism and theater reviews, for instance. You must include references to texts we have read in class (Rosenbaum, Dawson, States, Stoppard, et. al.).
• Sophistication of interpretation. How does your vision relate to the themes and texts of the course? This includes a consistency of theme and unity of vision. Do your visual, aural, casting, and script elements unify, or at least clash in an interesting and thoughtful way?
• Relevance. Why does this production need to be done whenever and wherever you are proposing? Why does the particular theater or venue’s audience need this production of Hamlet? What is unique about your group’s talents and experiences that qualifies you to bring this vision to life?

I visited with teachers at a New York City public school yesterday: the Quest to Learn Institute of Play in lower Manhattan. They teach a curriculum centered on games and game design. After witnessing some of the innovative, playful approaches to Shakespeare at this school, I'm now wondering what a "game version" of The Mousetrap scene might look like. What are the most crucial moments of dialogue, for instance, that must be adapted or otherwise absorbed into the game? Is role play or simulation the most likely scenario for Quest students, or is theatricality and performance too far removed from Common Core directives to be "useful" in the classroom, as concerning learning outcomes? Put simply, what might we expect to learn from a lesson in which students use Hamlet as the basis for a game? Adaptations don't need to be theatrical or performative in nature, as in our assignment above. Rather, they can be acts of cultural translation--ways of reconfiguring narrative material that make a text's intrinsic values more explicit (dare I say real?), and not only to our students, but to all stakeholders in academic and educational communities.

Note from Claire: Hyperion to a Satyr is a great blog to explore that has a wealth of information about Hamlet, including a series of posts (click here) all about The Mousetrap. Check it out!

As promised, here are some paper prompts for both The Glass Menagerie and Trifles.  Some of these prompts are individual to one author or the other, and some ask for an argument that synthesizes readings of the two plays. As I noted before, I have benefited from the advice of my friend and co-teacher, Tiffany Gilmore. The paper prompts below were written variously by Tiffany or by me.

• Modern plays, and Tennessee Williams’ in particular, are often intensely dialogue-driven and often include minimal stage directions and sets.  Consider how either stage directions or props help develop the theme(s) of one of the plays we read.  You may not choose the glass menagerie as a prop to develop the theme for dreams/fantasy/illusions.  However, all other props are available: the father’s portrait, the victrola, the furniture, etc.  You may use multiple props within one argument but your essay should not list an analysis of several props (the furniture represents this….. the photos on the wall represent this….the clothing represents this….) Avoid the obvious: “the shabby apartment , furnishings and clothing represents the poverty of the Wingfield family.”
• Trifles is about small things which “say” a lot, what do we learn about the other characters, the plot, or something else through these small things which are overlooked by the male characters?  Stage directions focus the attention on the character/actor’s movements.  How is a character developed through their movements in or relationship to the physical space of the set?  How is a particular theme developed through stage directions that we could not get through dialogue alone?
  
• Compare and contrasts the images of the sets for Trifles and The Glass Menagerie. Why do you think that these sets are so sparse? How does that sparseness do signifying work in the plays? How does the physical space of modern theater affect the way that you judge Tom and Mrs. Wright?
  
• Does Glaspell seem to think that justice has been achieved by the end of Trifles?  Whether or not you think Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters were right for hiding the evidence from the men, how does the play make you want to see it one way or another?  You might consider how the plot develops, the stage directions impact our understanding of central conflicts in the play, or certain items seem loaded with symbolic meaning.  How do these literary devices make the reader consider justice from a certain point of view? 
  

And this final paper prompt is one that I liked a lot--but it's putting The Glass Menagerie into dialogue with Shakespeare instead of with Glaspell. Even though it's a bit off-topic, I thought I would share it with you!

• Compare and contrast the theme of dreams in the two plays we read in our class, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Glass Menagerie.  How does reading the two texts together give you insight into the kind of statement about dreams that one of the plays is making? We spoke at length about how the dreamers in The Glass Menagerie can seem to be both courageous and selfish—and how the play presents dreams as either necessary or dangerous.  Does that discussion of dreams affect how you think about the types of dreamers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whom Theseus helpfully lists as lovers, madmen, and poets?  Alternatively, does thinking about the ambiguity regarding whether or not the dreamers in the forest outside of Athens learn from their journey help you to conceptualize whether or not Tom has learned anything as he presents his memory play to us?

This spring, I inherited a syllabus that had been hodge-podged together from several of my colleagues at the OHS over the years, and while some of the texts didn't work together anymore after so many years of Frankenstein-ing the syllabus, one really productive grouping was Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, and several poems by Elizabeth Bishop: "In the Waiting Room," "The Filling Station," and "The Moose."

The thread that tied these texts together was James Joyce's modernist notion of the epiphany, an aesthetic philosophy that he develops in Stephen Hero.

Joyce outlines a three-step process of an "epiphany," a secularized moment of inspiration that borrows the language of religious revelation.

1. The object is understood as a discrete entity that stands apart from the rest of the universe. Its integrity or wholeness becomes an object of meditation.
2. The object is understood as being perfect in its own kind. Its symmetry and beauty are considered.
3. The object's "soul" leaps out to the observer. It offers the viewer an epiphany in its radiance.

Now this discussion of objects and their "souls" works really well in two ways: 1) it creates a cohesion for all the modernists texts I've indicated above, and 2) it works really well as a point of contrast  later in the semester for developing a working definition for postmodernism, which is a concept that is legitimately hard to define. (I have discuss this before in my post on Pynchon).

It's also useful to contrast the model of "epiphany" to what Carter-Bresson calls the "decisive moment" in photography:

Although Cartier-Bresson and Joyce differ in the way that they are talking about the gaze (is it mediated through the artist, or is it experienced directly by the reader/viewer?) they align in their conception that suspended moments of time communicate real meaning or significance.

Cartier-Bresson is considered the "father of street photography" and he is a major influence in both photojournalism and photography as an art form. You can browse through a wide array of his photographs at the Magnum Photography website.

We can see this idea of the revelatory instant--whether its an epiphany or a decisive moment--at work in Woolf's novel in many ways: Clarissa shopping at Bond Street, Septimus waking up from his hallucinations to find Rezia making a hat, Peter looking at Clarissa and feeling excited and comforted that Clarissa simply exists just so, etc.

In the passage above, Clarissa takes comfort in the material objects around her. They ground her and make her feel suddenly less invisible. They pique her interest and then make her feel that both she and they are real and have meaning. I like to have my students compare and contrast some of the major moments of epiphany in the book.

The epiphany is apparent also in Bishop's three poems.

In the first of the poems, "In the Waiting Room," a child narrator comes to a sudden realization about identity through meditating on a National Geographic magazine while she waits for her aunt in the eponymous waiting room. This poem raises many questions about individual and group identity. It also establishes a complicated temporal shift: the writer reflects back on a moment in her childhood, but the speaker (a child) looks forward in terror to what it will mean to grow up and lose her individual identity through affiliation with other groups: age, familial, gender, cultural, etc.

In the second poem, "The Filling Station," a narrator meditates on the material objects of a family-run gas station shifting her perspective so that she stops thinking of the place as a "dirty" place of business and begins thinking of it as a home where people live and love.  There is a wonderful recording of Bishop reading her poem at this website. In her recitation, Bishop calls attention to a central question in her poem: does the narrator show a lazy sense of complacency, or is this a profound moment of empathy and connection across class boundaries?

In the third poem, "The Moose," a narrator moves from a hazy-dreamlike state into a sudden shock of reality when her bus trip through New Brunswick is interrupted by a moose crossing out of the fog into the street. This one is harder than the others because the moose itself is a complicated symbol in the poem: she is ugly and smells bad, but she somehow makes all the passengers on the bus feel a sudden sensation of joy.

In each case, I ask my students to consider how the poem both depicts an epiphany, according to Joyce's definition, and offers the reader his or her own epiphany.  In more advanced classes, I might ask my students to then consider the frame of mediation that Cartier-Bresson proposes in his definition of the "decisive moment."

The decisive moment differs from the epiphany in that the important gaze comes from the perspective of the photographer and not from our perspective as viewers. In other words, the image is “decisive” because Cartier-Bresson has decided to mediate it or frame it just so for his viewers. As such, it tells us just as much about Cartier-Bresson’s artistic subjectivity as it tells us about the “real” world. The image may cause us to have an epiphany, but it also expresses something about the world that Cartier-Bresson wants us to see. We could investigate Bishop's poems (or, indeed, Woolf's novel) from this perspective as well.

The following are my paper prompts for their paper related to these texts:

1. Compare and contrast the “decisive moment” in one of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs to the moment of falling in Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room.” Think about how formal elements of the image and the poem structure a moment in time. What kind of philosophy of subjectivity emerges from Bishop’s poem, and does Cartier-Bresson suggest a similar philosophy in his photograph? How do you know and why does it matter?
2. Compare and contrast Mrs. Dalloway’s contemplation of Septimus’ suicide with the speaker’s contemplation of the family who lives about the gas station in “The Filling Station.” How does meditating on another person’s suffering help these characters to think about their own sense of self? What kind of philosophy of subjectivity does that suggest?
3. Compare and contrast the moose in Bishop’s “The Moose” to something that Oedipa finds during her quest in The Crying of Lot 49. Do these textual moments subvert the “modernist sublimity” that we talked about in relation to the concept of the epiphany? Why or why not?
4. Consider one of the suspended instants in Mrs. Dalloway that we’ve talked about in relation to the “thusness” of a thing and compare it to a comparable moment in The Crying of Lot 49. For example, Oedipa ponders several kinds of objects such as stamps, obscure textual variants of the fictional Jacobean tragedy The Courier’s Tragedy, and pseudoscientific objects related to entropy and demons, etc. What different kinds of philosophies about subjectivity emerge in the modern and the post-modern texts as a result of a character’s meditation on these material objects?