Bad Shakespeare Makes a Good Class

By Sarah Minges

Don’t judge a book by its cover, or in this case, a class by its title.

Kaara Peterson’s class, Bad Shakespeare, may seem like an excuse to mock the playwright’s weaker works, but in reality, students enrolled found it intriguing.
An assistant professor at Miami, Peterson’s class was the brainchild of the English department’s flexibility in allowing faculty to structure higher-level classes around their personal research.

Bad Shakespeare is an example of the wedding of research and teaching and the enriching relationship of teaching a subject in which the professor has spent time with as an independent project. It is a relationship the English department encourages.

Rebecka R. Rutledge, assistant English professor, focuses her research around W.E.B. DuBois. When she taught a graduate seminar on DuBois, she incorporated his lesser-known works as well as his major writings. She has also taught survey courses that included excerpts from Dubois’ works. According to Rutledge, DuBois was a profound thinker, as well as a meticulous scholar who taught that with leisure comes the responsibility to contribute positively to society. In her classes, Rutledge wanted to “lead her students toward a certain social conscious that makes them aware of their role and their privilege.”

Peterson’s research is based in Renaissance drama with a British emphasis, focusing on the history of classical medicine in the 16th and 17th centuries. In addition to studying interdisciplinary approaches through art and literature, she is also fascinated by the editorial process of Renaissance texts.

Peterson’s graduate school dissertation research was based on how medicine intersected with culture and literature.

Through her research, she’s found that some plays possibly coined “bad Shakespeare” have literary merit.

Many of the plays examined in Peterson’s class have to do with events that no longer translate into modern culture.

“A lot of Shakespeare’s overlooked plays focus on the weird medically-related events,” Peterson said. “Everyone gets taught his big, whopping plays.”

She wanted students to experience plays that were not universally considered Shakespeare’s best works

The class consisted of Shakespearean plays that were considered his lesser-works. Peterson said the common thread among the plays was their relegation to the sideline. “Plus, I find that I like them,” she said.

For instance, Pericles involves the revival of a dead female. When medical myth, like bringing back the dead, that is not commonly accepted finds its way into a play, the play is often difficult and open-ended to modern readers, Peterson said.

Disconnects in modern culture with the culture of Shakespeare’s time often account for the popularity (or lack of popularity) of a play. Modern inter-relations with the media assume a role in how popular a play is. Titus was considered one of Shakespeare’s lesser works until it was made into a movie in 1999, starring Anthony Hopkins as Titus, at which point the virtually unheard of play made its way into pop culture.

Students of Bad Shakespeare explored the historical reception of works and what made a play “popular.” They questioned the cultural implications of the popularity of a play, aiming to identify shifting societal tastes in perceptions, juxtaposed to the real value of the work.

“Some of the plays—it wasn’t that they were not any good,” said Melissa Steckhahn, a junior English literature major, “It was just they are not very popular right now and were at one time very popular. Social requests just aren’t desiring of some of them currently.”

Steckhahn took the class because she thought looking at Shakespeare’s lesser-known works would be enriching.

“It is nice to see all the different sides of people,” Steckhahn said. “It makes Shakespeare more real to know that not everything he wrote was wonderful and amazing and life altering.”

Due to the higher-level nature of the course, it was mostly composed of English literature majors who were familiar with Shakespeare’s better-known works.

Jill Rumpf, senior, thought the class would have included more “radical, Shakespeare-bashing,” instead of looking at the merit of his lesser-known works.

“I enjoyed the class. I like Shakespeare, and for me it was as if someone just found additional written works of my favorite author,” Rumpf said.

Rumpf also noted that many of the comments made in class were comparisons to other Shakespearean plays. She thought it was beneficial for students to have substantial background before coming into the class.

Justyn Rampa, senior, agreed that a strong background in Shakespeare was essential. “So much meaning was lost with respect to ‘bad Shakespeare’ works if you didn’t have other texts to compare it too,” he said. Rampa frequently referenced other works of Shakespeare with class readings.

Rampa wasn’t sure what to expect from the class but liked that it was different from other Shakespeare classes.

“In other Shakespeare classes, we were somewhat expected to venerate Shakespeare,” he said. “This class let us knock him down some – if we chose to.”

Steckhahn was surprised at some of the selections of plays for the class, such as Antony and Cleopatra and Venus and Adonis, but agreed that the works were not common selections of Shakespeare. Before the class, Steckhahn had not heard of Troilus and Cressida. Her favorite part of the class was that it wasn’t merely a review of plays she had previously read or seen performed.

“I have to search for the important phrases and scenes instead of already knowing them,” Steckhahn said.

Rumpf also acknowledged the easy availability of Shakespeare’s well-known works and found it helpful to have new materials for discussion such as Pericles and All’s Well That Ends Well.

Peterson said Bad Shakespeare was aimed toward the more complex issues of the plays that tend to be perceived as simple.

“I wanted to make them more confused,” she said with a laugh.

“Most of Shakespeare’s works are very straightforward,” Steckhahn said. “You understand who is good, who is bad and what the moral is. What was so great about this class was that the texts were really challenging. The class continuously got frustrated by the fact that these texts were not clear. The main character did good and bad. The boy did not always get the girl. Often the girl chased the boy.”

Shakespeare has a range of different plays and in exploring the lesser-known works; students were shown works beyond the literary canon.

“I am grateful that some of these plays were not in the more traditional canon, because they were very difficult,” Rumpf said. “If my first exposure to Shakespeare had been reading Troilus and Cressida, I probably would have given up on Shakespeare long ago.”

Steckhahn agreed that Peterson’s class made her view Shakespeare differently.

“Perhaps if we weren’t told that he was great and we weren’t force-fed the same ‘best’ plays over and over again, we could make our own opinion about his quality and skill,” Steckhahn said.

Steckhahn thought a more apt name for the course would be “plays that are not currently popular, and the more mentally difficult of Shakespeare’s plays and poems.” She conceded that Bad Shakespeare was an adequate summation of the literature that was read in the class.

Amy Knueven, senior, thought the class was essential to her education.

“It almost seems that without a class of this nature, which confronts non-mainstream issues in his texts, I would have come out of college with a fairly one-dimensional almost elementary view of his works,” she said.

Perception isn’t always reality, and Peterson’s students learned that “bad Shakespeare” may be just as important and worthy of their attention as the “good.”

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