“To Double Business Bound”: Shakespeare and Gen Ed

The opportunity to teach Shakespeare beyond the major often hinges on General Education requirements. At the University of Tennessee, where I teach, we offer a lower-division Shakespeare class that satisfies two distinct Gen Ed requirements: Arts & Humanities and Written Communication (which includes a minimum of 5000 words over the semester and mandatory revision exercises). It is a reminder of Shakespeare’s cultural status, a status the course interrogates as well as reinforces, that the poet-playwright could be recruited to such “double business.” This essay starts by examining the reasons, including pragmatic concerns about enrollment, that the department designed the class in this way. I then discuss the pedagogical demands made on the instructor by these two distinct Gen Ed requirements and offer strategies for addressing them, including inviting students into explicit class discussion about the meaning of Gen Ed and focusing on the rhetorical terms and conventions that Shakespeare would have encountered in his own schoolroom. I conclude by considering approaches to teaching Hamlet in this environment, providing a sample assignment that addresses the play’s famous textual problem (the existence of three distinct early editions, Q1, Q2, and F) by asking asks students to choose—and explain their choice—between “roots” and “rots” for the line: “And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed / That roots/rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf” (1.5). The assignment prompts self-reflection on their broad Gen Ed training in writing and interpretation even as it asks them to participate in one of the most disciplinary of exercises: textual editing.