Primrose Road

My department prefers that we use "readers" for introductory lit classes, so I use the Bedford Compact Introduction to Literature, which is probably the least of several evils because its pages aren't as thin as Norton's. ;)

This semester, on a dare, I'm teaching as part of the drama unit Othello, the one Shakespeare play that the Bedford reader anthologizes.

The reader offers students "A Note on Reading Shakespeare," which advises:

"If you find the reading difficult, try listening to a recording of the play. (Most college libraries have recordings of Shakespeare's plays.) Allowing professional actors to do the reading aloud for you can enrich your imaginative reconstruction of the action and chaacters. Hearing a play can help you with subsequent readings of it."

While audio recordings may be used while you're reading, films may only be used after you've read the play:

"It is important to view the performance after your reading, though, so that your own mental re-creation of the play is not short-circuited by a director's production."

Because, after all, Will wrote plays specifically so that they might be anthologized and read by college students; he never intended them to be performed or anything. ;)

Reading this semester:

1) Burt (ed.), Shakespeare After Mass Media.

2) Hockey, A Guide to Computer Applications in the Humanities (1980).

3) Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero.

4) Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory.

5) McAlindon, Shakespeare Minus "Theory".

6) Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England.

To read post-hibernation period when seminar and semester are over:

1) Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.

2) Elkins, Six Stories from the End of Representation.

3) van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age.

4) Jenkins, Convergence Culture

5) Deleuze, Cinema 1: Movement-Image (and probably a re-read of Cinema 2: Time-Image).

Primrose Road: scaring Internetters out of going to grad school since 2007.

An article called "The Shakespeared Brain: A Theatre of Simultaneous Possibilities" describes an experiment that tests the effects of reading certain Shakespearean turns of phrase on the brain. My linguistics and educational psychology buddies will appreciate this one.

Philip Davis and colleagues used an electroencephalogram (EEC) to look at what happens when we read "functional shifts" in Shakespeare's plays. (A functional shift occurs when one part of speech serves as another, i.e. verbing a noun.) Davis sees each Shakespearean functional shift as "a small instance of inner drama."

Because, it turns out, functional shifts do have a profound effect on the brain, Davis goes on to label the functional shift one of Shakespeare's "dramatic tools." Okay, but this experiment only looked at what happens when we read these functional shifts. Since Shakespeare wrote for the stage (though there are debates about the degree to which he was concerned with print publication), it might be interesting to also explore what happens when we hear functional shifts.

I've heard it argued that our readings of the sonnets are often affected by mid-poem page breaks; what happens when we read the plays via Instant Message?

On AIM, you can IM the "SmarterChild" bot and ask to read any one of Shakespeare's plays. (I'd assume that the edition used is the non-copyrighted Globe Edition used by a number of Shakespeare projects on the Internet.) Here's the IM equivalent of a "page break," for The Two Gentlemen of Verona:

Proteus
Upon some book I love I'll pray for thee.

Type more to continue.
PrimroseRoad (11:05:04 PM): more
SmarterChild (11:05:04 PM):

Valentine
That's on some shallow story of deep love:
How young Leander cross'd the Hellespont.


I wonder what the purpose of this service is when online texts like Open Source Shakespeare are readily available and searchable. Perhaps next in line is Hamlet: The Text Message?