Habitation and Naming: Teaching local Shakespeares

Abstract

In the introduction to the essay collection World-wide Shakespeares (2005), Sonia Massai makes an important point about the Shakespeare field. Enlisting Bourdieu against Foucault, she posits Shakespeare as a permeable field of production whose shape and possibilities are constantly reorganised through the agency of ‘new entrants’ (2005, 6). Local Shakespeares are not just distant iterations of the real subject of scholarly attention but are, much more compellingly, by their very locality, constitutive of the dynamic cultural field called ‘Shakespeare’. Moreover, studying local Shakespeares yields dual dividends. Inquiry into what Shakespeare comes to mean under particular local conditions is richly reflexive in that it prompts sophisticated questioning of how the plays interacted with conditions of their own period, and thereby invigorates awareness of the radical contingency of meaning in drama. In this essay I explore the obstacles to, and reasons and resources for, teaching local Shakespeares. My key focus is Shakespeare studies at university in Australia, but my case has far-reaching implications for school and arts education.