Scores for part V of the midterm follow this distribution:
Midterm part V (AMND review) score distribution
As you can see, the numbers don’t curve in quite the way I would have hoped—the average score was 12.7 out of 20, a D. These scores worry me—an instructor who sees an average this low has to confront the possibility that the low grades reflect a poorly-worded assignment, an unkind grading rubric, or some other incompatibility between instruction and examination. Were the essay instructions unclear? Did I grade essays in a way completely unrelated the other work we have done in this course?
As I graded these essays last week I spent several hours searching my soul—almost every time I encountered an essay that seemed to have missed the point I asked whether we instructors did enough work to be sure that the writer could have succeeded. I feel fairly confident that these grades are not deeply unfair, but let me explain some of my reasoning.
First, Larry’s lectures have been demonstrating the analytical process since the beginning of the course. His lectures on AMND, for example, looked at the relationship between the play’s themes (e.g. the conflictive powers of reason and imagination) and the play’s imagery (e.g. the structure of references to animals). Larry spends almost no time in his lectures discussing plot; instead, his analysis emphasizes the importance of structure, symbol, and theme.
Second, the assignment itself emphasizes the importance of explaining why the director and design team made the decisions that they made. Larry, in his lectures, has never argued that Shakespeare or Charlotte Brontë or Jean Renoir or Nadine Gordimer made such-and-such an artistic decision to make things “more relatable” vis-à-vis the audience. Larry always answers the why question by asking what the point of the artwork might be: Why did Jean Renoir take his camera outside? Because to him, as to his father, artwork was something that must live in the real world and not the sheltered space of the studio. Why did Nadine Gordimer have Vera die? Because she sought to expose the myth that innocence trumped evil.
The foregoing explain, at least to my mind, the reasons many students succeeded—some quite astonishingly well—in writing this essay. It’s just as important, I think, to explain why some of the essays did not do quite as well. What follow are four common approaches to the assignment that did not quite address the question:
1. The essay identified the setting as a script change
Many essays offered some variation on this main claim: “William Brown helps a 21st-century audience relate to this 16th-century play.”
There are two problems with this approach:
a. Because Shakespeare’s script says comparatively little about the characters’ outfits or the play’s setting, the American Players Theatre’s costuming decisions are not changes from Shakespeare’s original.
Brown’s decision to set AMND in contemporary Greece is not unusual: plays produced by Shakespeare’s own company (in the 1590s, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men) would have been costumed according to contemporary fashion—no 16th-century theatre would have researched what kings wore circa 2000 BCE.
An audience in 1595 and an audience in 2008 have a different sense of fashion, but this doesn’t make a 21st-century performance in 21st-century garments unusual.
You could turn to specific costuming choices to defend more specific arguments about Brown’s interpretation of the play. Why is Theseus a wealthy businessman, for example? Why is Puck a Euro-raver?
b. Whether or not a play is “relatable” vis-à-vis its audience says nothing about the director’s interpretation of the play. Furthermore, it makes assumptions about the audience that might not be wholly sustainable.
2. The essay argued that script changes were unimportant
Example: “Although Brown cut the lyrics from the First Fairy’s song (II.2.9-24), those lyrics did not advance the plot and so were unimportant.”
True, Shakespeare’s songs can sound tedious, especially since the music to which we have become accustomed is not in iambic pentameter; however, we who were glad to hear the Fairy’s song rendered wordlessly fell victim to the blindness Larry described a while ago: Larry noticed he often skipped Bessie’s song in Jane Eyre (27) as though it were unimportant, but later recognized that a good structuralist could see in this song the novel in miniature.
When Larry lectured about the Fairy’s song in II.2 he said much the same thing: look at the animal imagery in that passage! Look at the correlation of magical powers and nocturnal creatures! A passage that does not advance the plot might advance something else—the meaning of the play, for example—and so the decision to cut it will have repercussions.
Remember that Shakespeare is no Dickens: he’s not paid to pad his plays with needless text. Every word is there for a reason: the reader’s job is to discern what that reason is; the director’s job is to discern whether that reason is sufficiently compelling to retain it in a new interpretation of the text.
3. The essay saw comedy as an interpretation
Example: “American Players Theatre performed AMND as a comedy rather than as a more serious or even tragic play.”
It’s easy to understand that a reader coming to AMND immediately after Romeo and Juliet might see a young-lovers-thwarted-by-authority plot as fundamentally tragic; however, AMND is unequivocally a comedy. Remember Larry’s first lecture on the play? He spent some 10 minutes explaining how Shakespearean comedies work.
Some essays focused on ways Brown and APT updated the comedy in AMND, adding several pieces of stage business. (Stage business: incidental events that originate outside the script; generally used for comic effect.) This led to several successful arguments that Brown interpreted the play as being primarily about the effect of comedy rather than, for example, the effect of imagination.
4. The essay discussed audience rather than production
I often tell students to keep a journal: journal-writing will strengthen you as a writer and help you process the information you’ll be dealing with for the next 4 or so years. But there’s a third advantage: journals force you to process your personal responses to information and so leave your brain free to process that information more objectively when you have to write an essay about it.
(So-called “response papers,” of which you will probably write several dozen, have nothing to do with your personal response to anything. Response papers and their ilk ask you to identify and analyze relationships that you’ve noticed between texts or ideas you’ve encountered.)
Essays often took a too-personal approach to reviewing AMND. Examples:
- By setting AMND in late 20th-century Greece, APT made the play easier for a 21st-century audience to relate to.
- By adding gags, APT helped AMND come across as a comedy.
- By cutting out sophisticated wordplay and imagery, APT made the play easier to understand.
- By removing lines, APT made the play and hence easier to sit through.
These observations tell me a lot about your experience of AMND, but don’t answer the analytical questions we have asked you to address in this essay. I agree that the play is easier to laugh at with the addition of cell phone jokes, and it’s easier to understand when “thou” is changed to “you,” but this information tells me nothing about why APT made these decisions and not any of the hundreds of others that were possible.
If APT was concerned only about how easy it was for their audience to relate to AMND, why set it in 20th-century Greece and not 20th-century Wisconsin? If length was an issue, why did they cut the fairy lullaby in II.1 and not the wordy chunks of IV.1—or, for that matter, the entire Theseus/Hippolyta storyline as Benjamin Britten did? And if a shorter play is a better play, why did APT add time-fillers like the cell phone gag and the Matrix-style time distortion in III.2?
Several essays dwelled on how much more easily the jokes and content of AMND could be understood when performed. This is certainly an important issue: the introductory Shakespeare course at UW–Madison (English 162) will usually require students to watch 1 or 2 versions of each play—Shakespeare didn’t write the plays to be read, indeed, he doesn’t seem to have published any of them himself, and so only to read the plays is to miss much of what’s in them. However, the essay did not ask you to explain the effect of seeing a play performed.
A note: Old English, Middle English, and Shakespeare’s English
Several essays observed that Shakespeare wrote in Old English. This is incorrect.
Here is the first line of Beowulf, an epic poem in Old English:
Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum
Does that make any sense to you? Does it sound like Shakespeare?
Old English is the pre-Norman language of England. When William the Conqueror defeated the local English (themselves a mixture of native Gaelic speakers and invading north Europeans—Angles, Saxons, Jutes) in 1066, he brought with him a version of French that mingled with Old English and other local languages to, eventually, produce the language we know today.
Speakers of modern English cannot read an Old English text without training—in the English department here at UW–Madison we offer a one-semester Old English course (English 320). There is a fairly thorough, though not entirely accurate, synopsis of differences between Old and modern English on the Old English Wikipedia page.
A few essays observed that Shakespeare wrote in Middle English: also incorrect.
Here is the first line of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a delightfully raucous poem in Middle English:
Whan þat Aprill with his shoures sote
(That þ character is called a thorn; it represents a “th” sound.)
That line should make a little more sense to you than the beginning of Beowulf, though it is still nothing close to Shakespeare.
The name “Middle English” describes the language written in England between the Norman conquest and the arrival of the printing press, which helped regularize the English language. It can be a bit tricky to read at first, but a reader of modern English can pick up a Middle English text and understand what it means with only an hour or two of training—and you’ll have to do exactly this if you ever take English 215 (which I hope you will). After a little while of reading Middle English, you’ll begin to feel that it makes more sense than modern English: this is actually a good sign.
Shakespeare, who arrived in London several decades after the printing press, writes in modern English; sometimes you will see his language described as early modern English, but the difference is more one of spelling than of grammar or lexicon.
Tags: 2008, A Midsummer Night's Dream, American Players Theatre, Midterm, William Shakespeare
