One-Act Shakespeare: Teaching Cultural Legacy Through Excerpts and Adaptations

Despite widespread resistance to teaching Shakespearean drama through excerpted passages, an alternative to the standard two-week study of a canonical play is to extract a key scene as a means of initiating a conversation about the playwright’s cultural legacy. For students in a general education course, such as Introduction to Literature, engaging a Shakespeare text in a brief, highly focused segment offers several advantages. First, it can help alleviate the anxieties that come with navigating the unfamiliar language of a writer whose reputation can be as intimidating as the work itself. More importantly, with a carefully chosen and manageable excerpt, an instructor can guide students beyond received (and often simplistic) understandings of Shakespeare and, if done skillfully, of authorship in general. Presenting a selection from a play as merely one contribution to a larger, centuries-long dialogue of ideas organically introduces students to concepts—intertextuality, adaptation, and historical context—crucial to the study of artistic and cultural production. Two selections, Act 5 from Antony and Cleopatra and Act 4 from The Merchant of Venice, have proven particularly useful when introducing Shakespeare in the general education classroom. With Cleopatra’s death in Antony and Cleopatra, an instructor can challenge students to investigate Shakespeare’s depiction of just one moment in the life of a well-known historical figure alongside the representations offered by Plutarch and a contemporary artist like Barbara Chase-Riboud. The trial scene from The Merchant of Venice offers numerous possibilities, too, for similar explorations. Again, an early modern source or perhaps even a passage from Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta provides much-needed context to the Venetians’ treatment of Shylock, while later adaptations—such as a nineteenth-century burlesque or Gareth Armstrong’s Shylock—reveals the abiding fascination with a figure as complicated as Shylock. An instructor who can successfully link an iconic Shakespeare moment to earlier texts and later adaptations can also integrate film, music, and paintings into the classroom since the characters of Cleopatra and Shylock retain a currency in artistic modes beyond literature. As a result, students gain an opportunity to analyze more than a single text in their writing and, ideally, learn how the literature of the distant past remains alive today.