Weaving the Text: The 70th Birthday Edition of the 1994 Dissertation

By Jim Carpenter

"Something seems to have happened while I was working with Shakespeare's text and with Heidegger's notion of 'letting learn.' It has become increasingly difficult to 'impose' my interpretation on the students. My suggestions find more resistance from my students as they gain a greater sense of what it means to 'suit the action to the word' (Hamlet) and as they learn to turn to the sources of self and text. I also find that resistance growing within myself.

"'Letting learn' requires letting go. It means letting go of the fear of the judgment of the outsider. If I let the students learn to interpret Shakespeare's text, I must also let go of the fear of what the critics, the audience, might say. Likewise I must let go of my own interpretation and watch my students with 'a watchfulness filled with a teacher's hope' (Aoki) as they discover their own interpretations. I must find the way to let them learn, that is, I must provide them with the guidelines they need to help find their way into the text, and I must create the space in which that learning can take place. And I must let go of my students ...."

Jim Carpenter's 1994 dissertation, Weaving the Text, looks at his production of Hamlet from the previous year. Weaving the Text is the principal surviving document of his decades of collaboration and dialogue with his theatre students. It draws on pedagogical, hermeneutic, phenomenological, textual and acting theory -- but its focus is on the real-life experience of students and teacher.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Hulbert
• Release date: Dec 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370621989

Book preview

Dedication

To my mother, Helen Carpenter,

and

to the memory of my father,

John R. Carpenter

Chapter I: Introduction and Background

My Turning

I teach theatre in a public high school. I used to consider myself a drama coach after school; I now think that it is after school that I am most effective as a teacher. I used to think of myself as the drama coach who directed great plays; now I think of myself as the drama teacher who is exploring the nature of theatre and text with his students. I used to use student actors to create my vision of the text on the stage in much the same way that an artist uses brushes and paint to create his vision on canvas; now I collaborate with my students to uncover the meaning of the text and invite my students to join me in presenting it on the stage. I used to see my role as director as one of telling the student what to do; now I see it as one of guiding my students in their efforts to make interpretive choices, As I begin to examine the ways in which I understand what it is like for high school students to interpret Shakespeare’s text, it is appropriate to consider how I arrived at my current stance.

Reflections of the Journey

It takes two. I thought one was enough, it’s not true: it takes two of us (Sondheim in Sondheim & Lapine, 1987, p. 54).

Turning to the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, the Broadway laureate of disillusion (Lahr, p. 10), seems somehow appropriate as I reflect on the beginning of my journey when I was, to be sure, burning out, in the job I had loved so much. Perhaps I was becoming disillusioned because, as Sondheim’s lyrics from Into the Woods reflect, I thought I needed to do all of the work of the curriculum on my own and failed to enlist the collaboration of the students themselves.

My journey for survival led me to graduate studies in education. In a summer institute for teachers of the humanities I was introduced to the notion of teaching Shakespeare through performance, by John Styan, a pioneer in the field. The following summer my interest in Shakespeare was heightened by the Theatre East and West summer institute, whih explored the relationship between Shakespeare’s theatre and the theatre of Japan and culminated the following summer in a theatre-packed journey to Japan. I also enrolled in two scene-study workshops for actors, team-taught by a young professional actor and his wife. My reconnection with the experience of being a student actor allowed me to imagine what it must be like for my students to act in my classroom, and the skillful and thoughtful practice of the teachers moved me forward on my journey toward a new way of teaching. As I reflect on that journey now, I realize that in becoming a student again I began to share my renewed status as student with my own students. I took the risk of establishing a more democratic relationship with my students and hoped to help them to establish a more democratic relationship between themselves and the text (Harman & Edelsky, 1989, p. 397). Once again, I am reminded of Sondheim’s lyrics from Into the Woods: If I dare, it’s because I’m becoming aware of us as a pair of us, each attempting a share of what’s there (Sondheim in Sondheim & Lapine, 1987, p. 55). Together, my students and I would approach Shakespeare’s text as something to explore. Together, we would develop a production written by the master of all English playwrights. Together we would do what seemed impossible. Why Shakespeare? Why the impossible? I have come to understand my own choices regarding the teaching of Shakespeare to my theatre students by reflecting on my own education.

The Origin of Ways of Not Knowing

Stop worrying if your vision is new. Let others make that decision – they usually do. You keep moving on (Sondheim in Sondheim & Lapine, 1991, p. 170).

I want to linger in the lyrics Sondheim composed for Sunday in the Park with George because of the special comfort the words stop worrying and move on hold for me as the teacher and director of high school plays. The lyrics have captivated me because I recognize my own struggle with the others, the faceless authorities, the keepers of knowledge. Who are they? How do they know what they know? How do they make their decisions and how do they arrive at the judgments they make about the meaning of things? What intrigues me is the dismissal of the others and the encouragement to move on. In so few words the power has been taken from the critics and placed in the hands of the artist. I wish to make this song my own.

To understand further my struggle with the others, I looked back to the earliest days of my being a student. I have spent a lot of my existence as a student not knowing. I felt as if there were some great body of knowledge that only others knew, smart others, like teachers and fathers and priests and sometimes, though rarely, a classmate. Others seemed to have access to knowledge which for some reason I just did not have. And these others made decisions about my ways of understanding the world. I believe now that not knowing was something learned. My indoctrination into the ways of not knowing began early with Sister Louise. My first lesson went something like this:

Sister: Now, today we are going to learn about the Trinity. It is a mystery so you cannot understand it at all. But I am going to tell you about it. There are three persons in one God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. What you cannot understand is that there are three persons, but they are one person. Now, does anyone here understand it?

(Jimmy raises his hand enthusiastically, thinking, I do! I do!)

Sister: James? You understand it?

Jimmy: Yes.

Sister: No you don’t. You can’t. It’s a mystery.

As I reflect on the moment I remember my surprise at being told that I didn’t understand what I was certain I did understand. In my seven-year-old mind it was really simple: three persons equal one God. Who was this other who decided that I could not understand? Her decision about the truth of my vision of my understanding led not only to my embarrassment, but also to self-doubt about my ways of knowing the world. I worried that maybe I didn’t understand anything: maybe I only thought I understood things. When she asked me if I loved God, and I said yes, how could I know that what I was saying was true? How could I ever really know anything? Who did know the answers? At seven years of age, I reasoned that someone, some other, must understand the mystery at least well enough to know that no one else could understand it.

The Gift of Not Knowing

Gadamer (1986/1989) writes of the knowledge of not knowing and identifies it as the famous Socratic docta ignorantia which opens up the way to the superiority of questioning (p. 362). He explains that to be able to ask, one must want to know, and that means knowing that one does not know (p. 163). Since Sister already knew the answer to the question, she did not truly question when she asked if anyone understood the Trinity. Her question was a pedagogical question, one that paradoxically has no questioner since no knowledge is being sought (Gadamer, p. 163). If one knows then one does not exist as a questioner. Not knowing leads to questions, and the path of all knowledge leads through the question (Gadamer, p. 363). Sister’s lesson on the mystery of the Trinity appears, upon reflection, to be a gift.

Buber (1923/1958) describes the relationship between teacher and student as an I-Thou relationship which demands that the teacher meet the student as his partner in a bipolar situation (p. 132). My relationship with Sister might be viewed not as a partnership, but rather as the more familiar … teacher-pupil relationship, an authoritative form of welfare work in which one claims to understand the other person in advance and in so doing robs his claims of their legitimacy (Gadamer, 1986/1989, p. 360). One can only imagine what directions the lesson might have taken had we been partners in the search for understanding. Had Sister listened to my claim to understand, might she not have discovered something about children’s ways of knowing? Had I listened to her claim, might I not have discovered something about mystery? Gadamer writes: In human relations the important thing is … to experience the Thou truly as a Thou – i.e., not to overlook his claim but to let him really say something to us. Here is where openness belongs. But ultimately this openness does not exist only for the person who speaks; rather, anyone who listens is fundamentally open (p. 361).

As I turn back to my early childhood experience and open myself to it, I begin to recognize Sister’s lesson on mystery as a gift. She forced me to question my own understanding, and told me I did not know what I thought I knew. When I truly listen to her words, I come to know that I do not know. Not knowing leads to questions, which in turn lead to new questions. My concept of the others and the authorities as the keepers of the knowledge falters as I realize that knowledge is generated by those who question. Authorities, as I had imagined them, did not question, because they already knew the answers. I imagined that some had access to knowledge which was not available to me. My thoughts about knowledge were perhaps not that different from those of the individual who asked Gadamer about finding the ultimate truth and received the following response: "God may know but human beings seek truth (Gadamer, 1982/1991, p. 234). Not knowing" is simply part of what it means to be a human being, a seeking person.

Not knowing played an important role in the approach I took when guiding my students through the production of Hamlet. As partners we faced the mystery of Shakespeare’s play. We entered the world of the play not knowing it, and therefore asked questions for which answers had not yet been settled (Gadamer, 1986/1989, p. 163).

Why Shakespeare?

Not knowing and mystery remain in my life as a student and teacher. I believe that my decision to focus on Shakespeare in the theatre is due largely to my desire to become involved with a mystery to which I believed I had a solution. I began to question the validity of how I taught the playwright in the English classroom. Although I always made a point of telling my theatre students that plays were written to be performed, I taught Macbeth as literature in my English classes and ignored the play as theatre. Likewise, although I told my theatre students that Shakespeare was the greatest English playwright, I seldom had my theatre students work with Shakespeare’s texts. I