Character ReadingS
The greater plays leave us knowing we should be perplexed.
Norman Rabkin, “Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V”
Introduction
Too often the most interesting characters in Shakespeare’s plays are limited by the dominant readings of their character. Reading Hamlet as the melancholy philosopher or Ophelia as innocent victim are two examples; reading Brutus as naïve idealist is another. Shakespeare’s text supports these readings, but does it require them and them only? This approach to reading Shakespeare’s characters challenges us to embrace the ambiguity of Shakespeare’s text by engaging in multiple readings of a single character.
Objectives
To compare different readings of a single character; to analyze the ways in which these readings are constructed; to explore the reader’s role in constructing characters; to view performance as a reading of character; to choose between different readings of character and justify that choice in writing.
Lesson Sequence
Step 1: Reading _______________ (Fill in the blank!)
In his book, The Genius of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate asserts that there “are two laws which all the plays obey. The first law is that truth is not singular” (327). Click here for an image of the Gestalt beast modeled after the one in Bate’s book and share it with your students. It provides a visual frame for the approach to character study in this lesson.
Select characters from the play you are reading whose dominant reading limits their complexity. This is a partial list of plays and characters that invite multiple readings:
- Romeo and Juliet: Romeo, Juliet, Capulet, Lady Capulet, Friar
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Theseus, Oberon, Titania, Bottom
- The Merchant of Venice: Shylock, Jessica, Portia, Antonio
- The Henriad: Prince Hal/Henry V, Falstaff, Katherine
- Julius Caesar: Brutus, Portia, Cassius, Caesar, Marc Antony
- Twelfth Night: Orsino, Viola, Antonio, Sir Toby Belch, Malvolio, Feste
- Hamlet: Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
- Othello: Othello, Desdemona, Iago, Emilia
- Macbeth: Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Banquo, Ross, The Weird Sisters
- The Tempest: Prospero, Miranda, Ariel, Caliban
Step 2: Reading the Critics
One way to introduce students to alternative readings of a character is to provide them with excerpts from the essays of Shakespearean scholars that express the polar ends of a critical continuum. In Reading Hamlet, Bronwyn Mellor cites two diametrically opposed interpretations of Ophelia; at one end of the spectrum, Ophelia is described by Rebecca West as passive, unchaste, and “disreputable” while Fran Richmond insists that she is “innocent and pure in motive” and capable of both wit and independence (52-53).
Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a character that inspires radically different interpretations. Provide your students with a continuum of readings of a character like Bottom. Click here to view the Reading BottomS handout.
You don’t need critical citations to do this work with students. Simply share with students what you know about the range of interpretations of the character(s) you are studying.
Step 3: Reading the Reader
“We don’t see things as they are,” Anais Nin tells us, “we see things as we are.” Adolescent preoccupations with their social, psychological, and ethical selves can limit and distort their reading of a literary text. Yet these preoccupations can also spark an adolescent’s empathy for literary characters and enrich his/her understanding of the text. In her 1938 treatise on literature and teaching, Louise Rosenblatt enjoins English teachers to help their students explore themselves as readers. “What the student brings to literature,” she asserts, “is as important as the literary text itself” (78).
Rosenblatt outlines the complex network of attitudes, values, and emotions that the adolescent brings to literature in Chapter 4 of her book. Issues of authority, group dynamics, relationships, individuality and culture “possess whole constellations of fixed attitudes and automatic emotional reflexes” (92).
Step 4: Rereading the Text
Working in cooperative groups, students should return to key scenes in the play looking for ways in which the text can be used to support multiple readings of their chosen character. The Character ReadingS chart lists contradictory readings of characters from five plays, key scenes in which each character appears, and a framework for rereading these scenes.
After students have reread key scenes and analyzed the ways in which a Shakespearean text supports multiple, even contradictory, readings of a single character, students (and most readers) will tend to gravitate toward the reading they prefer. Challenge students to explain how the three most fundamental building blocks of information in a dramatic text — what the character says, what the character does, and what others say about the character — can yield so many different constructions of a single character.
According to Mellor, this focused rereading and analysis of key scenes should help our students to see that single readings, or single constructions, of a character depend on:
- emphasizing particular narrative fragments
- ignoring or suppressing particular narrative fragments
- reading particular narrative fragments to make them ‘fit’ an interpretation
- interpreting from a cultural, social, moral, or political position (50-53).
To repeat Anais Nin, “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
Lesson Extensions
Directing _______________ (Fill in the blank!)
In his critical introduction to the Oxford edition of The Tempest, Stephen Orgel states, “Shakespearean texts are by nature open…It is performances and [critical] interpretations that are closed” (12). Explore with students the ways in which a performance is also a reading of the text. Assign one key scene to different groups of student-performers, each with an alternative reading of the character in question. This activity will spark discovery of the ways in which even small choices about line delivery, movement, gesture, and props can have radically different consequences. You will find a helpful resource in Ralph Alan Cohen’s ShakesFear and How to Cure It. In this book, Cohen identifies “scenes for alternative readings” in twenty-two of Shakespeare’s plays.
Another way to approach performance is by having students write film scripts for a key scene. Read Revere High School student Joseph Dreeszen’s film script for MND 4.1, the scene in which Bottom awakens from his “dream.” Dreeszen chose to read Bottom as dynamic and capable of experiencing a spiritual awakening. Note the wonderful ways in which his directorial commentary conveys that reading.
Reading Performance
Key up two or more film productions of the scene your students worked on. Focus student viewing on each production’s construction of that character, and the theatrical and cinematic techniques employed to convey that construction. Two film productions of MND 4.1 that provide a fascinating contrast are the 1935 production directed by Max Reinhardt and starring James Cagney as Bottom, and the 1999 production directed by Michael Hoffman and starring Kevin Kline as Bottom.
For an excellent lesson on viewing film critically, see Jonathan Mitchell’s “Reading Shakespeare on Film,” published at this web site.
Analytical Writing
Assign students to write an essay in which they describe multiple readings of a character and choose the reading they prefer. Mellor provides an excellent format for students to follow in Chapter 4 (88-89).
Works Cited
Bate, Jonathan. The Genius of Shakespeare. London: Picador, 1997.
Cohen, Ralph Alan. ShakesFear and How to Cure It. Prestwick House: Clayton, Delaware, 2007.
Goddard, Harold C. The Meaning of Shakespeare. 2 vols. Chicago: UChicago Press, 1951.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 2004.
Josephson Institute of Ethics. “The Josephson Institute’s Report Card: The Ethics of American Youth.” 15 Oct. 2006. 09 Nov. 2006. <http://www.josephsoninstitute.org/reportcard>
Mellor, Bronwyn. Reading Hamlet. The NCTE Chalkface Series. Cottesloe: Chalkface Press, 1989.
Mitchell, Jonathan. “Reading Shakespeare on Film: Thinking Like a Director to Improve Understanding.” Reading Shakespeare. 2005. <http://readingshakespeare.org/Lessons/ThinkingLikeADirector/>
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Stephen Orgel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Rabkin, Norman. “Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V.” Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000. Ed. Russ McDonald. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 245-263.
Rosenblatt, Louise. Literature as Exploration. New York: The Modern Language Association, 1995.