Making Shakespeare modern.
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When teaching The Tempest to a Grade 12 Advanced Placement class, I used Stratford Digital and Drama Online to bring the play to life. I instructed students to view a Stratford Festival production starring Christopher Plummer and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 400th-anniversary production starring Simon Russel Beale. Beale's performance made Prospero seem repentant and merciful, while Plummer's Prospero was calculating and conniving, reflecting two contrasting interpretations of the play.
I also used Audible to show students a scholarly perspective, using clips from an audiobook written and narrated by Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at University of Oxford.
Simon Russel Beale in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Tempest
Audible was a useful tool for making literary criticism accessible.
Westminster Abbey memorial of William Shakespeare, featuring lines of Prospero’s famous soliloquy
In teaching this play, I contrasted differing interpretations of the play using historicist, postcolonial, and feminist lenses. Some critics have interpreted Prospero to be a benevolent and sensitive reflection of the bard himself. Others see him as a Machiavellian tyrant, a master manipulator. Seeing the play performed by different actors and directed by different directors highlights how much room there is for interpretation. This is the central idea in Emma Smith’s book: Shakespeare’s enduring success lies in the capacity of his plays to be understood and performed in countless different ways.
Introducing the Drama Online platform to other educators