“Some Enchanted Trifle”: Shakespeare and Popular Culture in the Community College

Given that many community colleges offer few, if any, literature courses, because they require rhetoric courses instead, with remedial corequisites for many students, most students—particularly those who have faced educational inequities and/or are enrolled for a workforce certificate or degree—feel that Shakespeare is inaccessible and/or irrelevant. With a flexible and creative approach, community college students make profound connections with Shakespeare, thereby dispelling misconceptions about who should or can read Shakespeare. In this chapter, I examine how teaching Shakespeare plays as popular culture in the community college classroom makes them accessible as well as relevant to students’ lives. More specifically, I focus on teaching The Tempest or Macbeth using films like The Forbidden Planet or Scotland, PA, although this pedagogical practice can be applied to a variety of play/film pairings. These popular cinematic adaptations lead into an assignment that asks students to do the same: re-envision Shakespeare. In small groups, they rewrite a scene, plotline, or thematic element in a different time and place than Elizabethan England, they review each other’s performances, and they provide analytical support for their interpretation. As they write their performances and reviews, we ask, “how is this Shakespeare?” This question is much like Douglas Lanier’s provocative question, “is this Shakespeare?” Lanier like other scholars of popular culture and Shakespeare have noted that many twentieth-century popular cinematic adaptations remove Shakespeare from his language to reach wider audiences while remaining recognizably Shakespeare. This move, divorcing Shakespeare from the very element that students most frequently identify as Shakespeare, and thus inaccessible, asks students to think more critically about what he says, rather than how. In reimagining Shakespeare’s play as applicable to their experiences and interests, community college students find Shakespeare less intimidating, more relevant, and certainly approachable.