Teachers' Resources for Shakespeare

The following is a list of books and other resources that can be very useful for teachers preparing lessons, discussions, and assignments on Shakespeare plays. Please contribute your ideas for extending and improving this list.

• Brightest Heaven of Invention, A Christian Guide to Six Shakespeare Plays. Excellent book by Peter J. Leithart (Cannon Press, Moscow, ID, 1996) with chapters on Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado About Nothing. Also an introduction on "A Christian Approach to Literary Study" and general introduction essays to history, tragedy, and comedy plays. I find the material quite sophisticated, and use it primarily with A.P. English classes, although it can be a useful resource at the College Prep level as well.
  
  
• Stories from Shakespeare by Marchette Chute. For generations a standard little reference book with easy-to-read but literate and accurate prose summaries of 36 of the 37 plays of Shakespeare (the 36 included in the First Folio, excluding Pericles). When you need a quick summary for any reason, this is an excellent resource. I sometimes have students read one of the summaries if I want them to have a working knowledge of a plot line that somehow parallels a play they are actually reading. (Teach Twelfth Night and include a summary of Comedy of Errors, for example.) The book also has a useful 7-page introduction.
  
  
• Twisted Tales from Shakespeare by Richard Armour, "twistfully illustrated by Campbell Grant." My dear old Dad, bless him, introduced this book to me while I was still in high school. A hilarious collection of pseudo-academic spoofs on Hamlet, Macbeth, Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo & Juliet, Merchant of Venice, and Othello. Also spurious introductions on Shakespeare's Life, The Elizabethan Theater, and Shakespeare's Development, and appendices on The Sonnets and Authorship of the Plays, which offers a fractured guide to those theories that Shakespeare didn't write anything at all. My rule: Students MUST master the real play before being allowed to see the spoof. Out of print for years, I'm seeing used copies on Amazon for $14 and up. My old copy says $2.45 on the cover, 70 cents higher than the original 1957 published price.
  
  
• An excellent on-line "concordance" to Shakespeare's works is available at www.rhymezone.com/shakespeare/ Enter a word or phrase and find where it appears in Shakespeare's writings.
  
  
• Christ in the Drama by Fred Eastman, (Macmillan Co., New York, 1947). Chapter Two is titled “The Influence of Christ in Shakespeare’s Plays.” In this venerable classic, Eastman gives special attention to Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, but also deals with Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, and Julius Caesar. (Other Shakespeare titles are referred to in passing.) Available as of this writing from Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com.
  
  
• Shakespearean Criticism, published by Thomson Gale. This is beyond being a gold mine; it’s the Mother Lode! In printed form it is a series of more than 80 volumes, with new volumes added periodically, collecting short scholarly articles and excerpts on Shakespearean drama. Each volume updates a complete indexing of the entire set, with a Character Index, Topic Index, and Topic Index classified by play titles. Bibliographic information is included. Probably available only in large libraries such as those on college campuses. My students and I use the set at the University of Oregon library. The material is now being made available as an online database as well.

Tragic Heroes

Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, the tragic hero, the tragic flaw, and the tragic fall, has survived pretty well. It is not always the rule that great or small playwrights follow, but it remains the standard against which their forays into tragedy are judged, or at least compared. Shakespeare was very willing to violate some of Aristotle’s precepts, especially as his career progressed, but that gives us no less reason to understand what the great Greek philosopher wrote in the first place, based on his observations of the considerable body of tragedy that he was privileged to witness in his lifetime.

To start simply with the tragic hero himself, Aristotle said that he must be both great and good. By “great,” he meant a man in a high position such as a king or a general. He reasoned that the tragic fall of a lesser man will not sufficiently engage the attention or emotions of the audience. In the greater scheme of things (cf. the medieval idea of the Great Chain of Being) he wouldn’t be falling very far. [In modern times, Arthur Miller mounted a very conscious challenge to this idea with his play Death of a Salesman and his essay Tragedy and the Common Man. The salesman’s wife delivers a heart-tugging statement of Miller’s premise in her “I’m not saying he’s a great man…” speech.]

By “good,” he meant a man of sufficient moral quality that we will lament, “What a loss!” when his fall comes. The fall of a villain is just what we expect and desire; it does not teach the moral lesson that the Greeks were trying to teach in their dramas. (The Greeks, remember, used their plays for religious reasons, as acts of worship to the god Dionysus—not that Dionysus was a particularly “moral” god!—so moral improvement was to be the goal of worthwhile scripts.) We think of ourselves as good, so we will identify best with a good hero and take warning that if he falls, we might also unless we beware.

However, this good man must have a serious moral flaw that will contribute powerfully to his downfall. The more clearly the audience members can identify this flaw and see its consequences, the better they will be morally instructed about that particular flaw. So here is the fulcrum of the delicate balance that made a great tragedy in Aristotle’s view. The flaw had to be a grievous one yet the hero had to be, on balance, good. This required that external factors must also contribute to the fall. These could include coincidence or accident, villainy on the part of others, etc. The delicate balance is that too much tragic flaw makes the hero too close to a villain, and too much external factor weakens or destroys the “moral lesson” aspect. My extreme example of the latter is that a good, great man at the height of his virtue is walking down a sidewalk and is killed by a flowerpot falling from a fourth-floor window.

Tragic flaws are not just moral slip-ups or particular unwise choices. They must be deeply-rooted flaws in character, not individual sins but a malignant core of sin that metastasizes to take harmful control of a man’s life. The most common example in the Greek tragedies, and certainly represented among Shakespeare’s heroes also, is “hubris,” the Greek word for a titanic level of pride that challenges even “the gods.” King Leontes in the first half of the tragicomedy A Winter’s Tale provides the most blatant of Shakespeare’s examples when he reluctantly consults the god Apollo’s oracle at Delphi to determine whether his charge of adultery against his queen is true, but then, when the god’s verdict in the queen’s favor is unsealed and read at her public trial, bellows, “There is no truth at all i’ th’ oracle. The sessions shall proceed. This is mere falsehood.” (III.2.151-152) The divine retribution comes down on Leontes’ head immediately.

Other seemingly obvious flaws that bring about some of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes include Macbeth’s “ambition” in the negative sense of challenging God, and Othello’s “green-eyed monster,” jealousy. But even in these cases, Shakespeare makes sure the flaw is not as one-dimensional as it appears. Othello’s jealousy, for example, is definitely fueled by his insecurity and gullibility. But are these tragic flaws? And could the jealousy have grown without them?

Even more often, Shakespeare builds outright ambiguity into the question of his tragic hero’s flaw. Identifying Hamlet’s flaw has been a controversial exercise for centuries now. Indecision? Yes, but is that a moral failing? And what is Romeo’s tragic flaw? Acting too hastily on his first-sight youthful passion for Juliet by marrying within hours? His killing of Tybalt in a street brawl he had tried to avoid? Mistakes in judgment, but moral flaws worthy of death? King Lear’s flaw? Bad temper? Misjudging his daughters? Shakespeare complicates this one by giving us a tragic hero who is eighty years old and showing signs of senility from the beginning of the play. [Arthur Miller borrows from this device, complicating the tragic flaw question with his salesman’s mental state. A fair question: How responsible can people be for the deteriorating of their own minds?]

The ultimate tragic fall of the hero almost always includes his death. Sophocles’ Greek classic Oedipus the King is one exception, but only because the hero chooses something he considers worse than death rather than the expected suicide.

A Christian study of literary tragedy can be enriched by having students apply what they’re learning to the Bible’s account of King Saul in First Samuel chapters 9-11, 13-24, 26-29, 31.

Sexual Morality

Shakespeare's plays include elements of appropriate or inappropriate sexuality. Christians might be uneasy with some of these story lines, and feel that the overall body of Shakespeare's work sends mixed messages as to sexual morality.

One generalization I would offer is that Shakespeare sometimes implies a distinction between upper class characters and commoners with higher standards expected of the former, while lower standards for the latter might be assumed.

The exceptions among the upper class are treated as serious matters, often with weighty consequences. Hamlet takes his royal mother bitterly to task for her adulterous (by his society's standards) marriage to her brother-in-law (III.4.19-106). Juliet (III.5.216-255 and IV.1.51-90) is desperate to avoid violating her marriage as she has been advised to do by her nurse.

Even false accusations of fornication among the upper class are extremely serious when believed, whether in Shakespeare's comedies (Much Ado about Nothing IV.1.81-210) or tragedies (Othello IV.2.37-105). Yet in Much Ado, Borachio and Margaret seem to have something going on (II.2.12-49), as do Cassio and Bianca in Othello (IV.1.123-158), but these liaisons between commoners are treated as normal. Measure for Measure (the only Shakespeare play named from a verse of scripture, Matt. 7:2) deals with fornication and hypocrisy via a unique plot line in which the premature sexual union of a "nearlywed" couple is regarded as a mitigated sin in contrast with the immeasurably worse intentions of Angelo, the city's interim ruler.

All's Well that Ends Well offers another unique story in which a young nobleman brushes the boundaries of adultery. See my post on that play describing the two buffers between Shakespeare's general rule about sexual misconduct by the high-born and what actually happens. First, Bertram has already despairingly given up his title and considers himself ruined, virtually a dead man. Second, he never actually commits adultery although he fully intends to and just as fully believes he has! In the same play, notice the frequent words in praise of virginity and chastity. See also the modest propriety of Hermia, another nearlywed, under tempting circumstances in Midsummer Night's Dream (II.2.41-70).