From Shakespeare on the Page to Shakespeare on the Stage: What I Learned about Teaching in Acting Class

Abstract

This chapter is about both the difficulty and the usefulness of learning to see how differently our teaching might look—not to mention how our teaching might change—if we could get a view of it from the perspective of a totally different context than the one we are most used to. I was lucky enough to receive such an eye-opening view when I took an undergraduate Shakespeare acting class for theater majors at my home university. I did not do what any other busy faculty member with good sense might have done, which would have been to take just part of the course or merely hang around the fringes. No, in keeping with my full-bore approach to almost everything, I took all of the exercises and assignments. I will never forget the elocution exercise that entailed my being rolled back and forth on a gym mat by two undergraduate women while I recited my soliloquy from Hamlet using only vowels, no consonants.