The Shakespeare Dialogues: (Re)producing The Tempest in Secondary and University Education

From Digital to Dialogic ShakespeareIn the 1990s, scholarly discussion of “digital Shakespeare” revolved primarily around the electronic reproduction of print materials. One has only to think of such sites as the now-defunct “Enfolded Hamlet,” MIT’s Complete Works of Shakespeare, or Matty Farrow’s “Moby-Shakespeare” to conclude that the Web primarily has offered virtual readers increased access to Shakespeare’s texts, either as cheap, accessible web documents or as searchable databases. During the same time period, teachers and scholars demonstrated some interest in web-based or stand-alone (laserdisc, CD ROM) supplements to enrich the study of Shakespeare, whether through clips from films and performances, background materials, image banks, or professorial lectures (see Mullins for an overview). Even more ambitious attempts to create interactive spaces for experiencing Shakespeare’s plays have been conducted by Peter Donaldson at MIT (“The Electronic Shakespeare Archive” (see Donaldson 1999) and Larry Friedlander at Stanford (“The Shakespeare Project” [see Friedlander 1999]).For better or worse, Shakespeare’s place in pedagogical cyberspace has been defined by the boundaries of the digital text. By contrast, in the world at large the Internet’s oldest and most crucial function has been to link up readers and writers over previously insurmountable barriers of time and space. It is therefore surprising that the Internet has not been enlisted more widely to spark and maintain communication among the dispersed and growing body of Shakespeare students. Hardy Cook’s well-known discussion list, SHAKSPER, aims to be inclusive, but is unusual in that regard. The discussion lists, bulletin boards, and chat rooms made available to teachers through such for-profit ventures as Blackboard and WebCT do not, generally, encourage interactions outside the boundaries of a particular class or, at best, an institution. Several of the more elaborate online classes, such as “The Electric Shakespeare” constructed by Larry Danson at Princeton and Michael Best’s “Shakespeare by Individual Studies” at the University of Victoria, do envision the Web as a space where students and teachers can interact, but mostly the discussions are asynchronous and teacher-directed.1This seems a pity, for as students and teachers in a post-colonial and postmodern context, we often lack knowledge of the specific educational institutions, politics, and histories that have made “Shakespeare” a protean cultural signifier. University students in Georgia, for instance, find African perspectives on Othello fascinating, but have greater difficulty understanding Martin Orkin s account of the role played by Shakespeare in the post-secondary educational system of apartheid South Africa (1998). (The same criticism might be applied to academics who find the material and ideological conditions of literary instruction across the globe of limited relevance to determining the “meaning” of “Shakespeare.”) Virtual communication could go some distance toward disseminating important information about how Shakespeare is viewed, taught, and consumed, particularly in educational institutions.On a humbler level, within smaller cultural units the motives and methods of teaching Shakespeare can also vary significantly. Another pedagogical relationship that deserves further attention is that between the teaching of Shakespeare at the secondary and university levels. As Russ McDonald puts it in a 1995 interview with U.S. secondary school teachers,High-school teachers once attended college, and college teachers high school, but neither group seems to remember much about its experience. And times and modes of instruction have changed so much that one’s own experience is probably outdated. Regrettably, little commerce occurs between the secondary school and the university, at least as far as English is concerned, and this is so because there are very few thoroughfares to promote communication