Students and Shakespeare

CALEEN SINNETTE JENNINGS: I did a workshop on Shakespeare and August Wilson, having a hunch, and having heard so many people speak of them in the same sentence. We had just done August Wilson, a choral reading of August Wilson.

I passed out "To be or not to be," and the first thing a student did was (affected voice) "To be or not…" I said, "Wait a minute, where's the guy who just did August Wilson? Why this voice?" I said, "I know you're kidding, but in that kidding, there's so much. What made you do that?" He said, "Well, I just kind of, that's how I think of it." I said, "exactly." I said, "but if you come away from this workshop with nothing else, I want you to know that the same person who just did August Wilson is the same person who's going to do Shakespeare. You don't have to change yourself to open the door to this material."

I didn't know how it was going to be received, and I had a lot of young people, a lot of young students, and some of the things they said— I said, "You know, how has this work that we've done, what is your response?" and one of the gentlemen said, "It makes me feel bigger." The images, the ideas, the profundity of the questions, the doubleness of the language, the meter, the rhyme. All of that takes you out of your everyday immediate experience. You have to aspire to be more, think bigger, feel more, through that text. And my mission as an educator has sort of been to take all the obstacles out of the way so that a student can say to me, "I feel bigger." I felt I'd gone to heaven when he said that. The text, the doing of the text made him feel bigger.