Final Point 3

Play: As You Like It

Audience: High school students

This play dabbles in romance, humor, and identity, which are all subjects that high school students deal with on a regular basis.  This is conducive to our goal to get the students interested and interacting on a more personal level with Shakespeare.  We want to make reading Shakespeare a more fun and less daunting class for the next rising generation.

• We do not think it would be productive to overwhelm students with scholarly articles.  We think it would be counter-productive in relation to our goal to create an environment that fills the gap between Shakespeare and the students.
• That being said, we do want to open their minds slightly to the idea that the text can be more than just a text.  We are interested in the idea of bringing a feminist lens to the surface in regards to Rosalind's identity throughout the play.  We feel this would be an interesting point to bring up for high school students as they themselves are molding their own identities.  We feel it would, once again, diminish the gap between the students and Shakespeare.
• With the goal of interaction in mind, we think it would be helpful to give a [very] brief explanation of the history of performances of Shakespeare's time and the different techniques one can use to perform this play today.  The history of men playing women's roles in a cross-dressing play could be humorously engaging to a high school audience and discussing the different techniques one could use today in performing the play would promote the students interpreting and performing the play themselves.
• With high school students being active in their use of technology, we like the idea of creating an online/e-book version with hyperlink annotations.  It would be less distracting to an audience that can be a  little attention-deficient and more easily accessible.  It would add to the text rather than detracting from it.  We would annotate words that are not familiar to your average high school students and "translate" them in a way that they specifically would understand.

For our edition, ultimately what we hope to accomplish is a way to grab the attention of students; a way to help them, at the very least, find enjoyment from reading Shakespeare, because enjoyment of a subject/thing cultivates a love for learning more about that subject/thing.  We think that it is a lot to ask young students to dive deeply into Shakespeare and really "get it," but to learn how to enjoy it is a terrific and an important starting point.

Final Point 2 - Annotations

Scene Selection: When the three witches tell Macbeth that he is going to be king (Act 1 Scene 3)

For the purposes of our group's intended audience, we will annotate according to a high school audience.  The Pelican edition already does this, but there are a number of minor changes to format that would greatly improve the annotations already given.  First, any annotated word in the play should contain a symbol directly next to it indicating that is has been annotated. Our edition of The Tempest does this, preparing the reader to focus on that selection.  Second, for visual's sake, it is also good to make bold the words/phrases being annotated (Pelican italicizes the words but bold is a lot more visually helpful).  Third, it would be ideal to line annotations one below the other the way our Richard III text does as opposed to just writing them across.  With the Richard III annotations it is easy to quickly reach the next annotation sought after and identify which ones have already been looked over.  Writing them across, as Tempest and Macbeth do, makes them a lot harder to follow.  With the scene we've selected, the information Pelican includes in its annotations is still highly applicable to our chosen audience, but the format would need some serious adjusting.

Another approach is to do an online annotated version of Macbeth in which a symbol or number is set next to the word/phrase being annotated.  The symbol could be a hyperlink to some sort of pop-up tab (like a sticky note looking pop-up or a hovering box) that contains the annotation.  What this would do is eliminate the frustration of having to move back and forth between the text up top and the annotations down below.

Of course cross-referencing between texts and between other parts of the play, as seen is As You Like It, is another great way to annotate and offers terrific context.  However, for the purposes of a high school audience, doing so might be overkill and ruin the clarity that a simple defining of terms would offer for students at that level.

Macbeth: Very definition oriented, plus it describes some of the stage setting.  Ideal for high school audience as it clarifies potentially troublesome diction.  Offers little context, but for the target audience (probably high school) context probably isn't that necessary.

Tempest: Like Macbeth, it gives little historical/literary context and a lot of definitions, but almost to a fault in that at times it seems to question the reader's intelligence.  For instance, clarifying the word "like" in Act 3.3.66 as meaning "similarly" seems almost an unnecessary clarification, because the connection is so obvious.  This sort of thing gets distracting.  The lack of context leaves depth to be desired for students of criticism at the university level.

As You Like It: Gives contextual definitions.  Places definitions of difficult-to-understand words/phrases within the context they appear, as if explaining the reason for their use.  Includes cross-referencing and external sourcing (such-and-such phrase originates from such-and-such Bible verse).  Offers plenty of clarification and information; risks detracting from the actual play itself as some of the lengthy explanations tend to run long and occupy the majority of the page. There is such a thing as too much explanation.

Measure for Measure: Defines words/phrases, offers some contextual explanations (such as why such-and-such character is saying what they are saying). Some annotations seem to overdo it in trying to explain simple terms or phrases whose meanings would be obvious to undergrads like ourselves (which seems to also be the audience of this edition).

Richard III: Annotations focus mainly only on definitions of words/phrase, but unlike Macbeth and The Tempest this edition explains more about references to people or places that anyone unfamiliar with history of the time period may not understand. There are notes on the names of different dwellings, for example, and if any name-dropping occurs (such as kings/queens/royalty of the day) it notes exactly who that person is. Helpful for those looking to understand and grasp the historical feel and time period during which Richard III takes place, less helpful in understanding characters and context.