Urs Lauer	Urs Lauer: More Strange than True - Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream in the Classroom  Wednesday, 12 January, 2000. Building bridges between the pupils' real-life concerns and the museum exhibit of a "famous play" is perhaps the major difficulty in teaching Shakespeare in the English classroom. But then all education is said to be about 'opening doors': Taking Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream as an example some active methods of opening the text are presented, allowing our pupils to enter into a Brave New World - and hopefully make it their own.
.	Allow me to start with a preliminary remark. The title of my talk is MORE STRANGE THAN TRUE. It is, of course, from Act V, scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream , and points at one of the central themes of the play, namely the tricks played on us - voluntarily or not - by imagination, and, at the same time, at the main question of my talk, namely how we can make use of our pupils' imagination to deal with Shakespeare in the classroom.
.	Moreover, and in this very same context: The recurring metaphor of my announcement of this talk is about opening and closing (of minds, of texts, of approaches etc.): in other words it is about making Shakespeare accessible to a classroom-audience that is perhaps not primarily interested in literature and even less in poetic and antiquated language, an audience that - in its overwhelming majority - does not intend to study English at university, but desperately needs the language for their professional careers in and outside a university, and in everyday social interaction abroad, an audience that has heard of Shakespeare (mainly "to be or not to be", "something is rotten in the state of Denmark", or of some woman who wants to wash the blood off her hands etc.) but that also stands petrified and in awe in front of "the Bard", whose language is notoriously said to be difficult.
.	This has just been a brief and incomplete sketch of the main difficulties of a grammar-school teacher facing the task of 'doing' a play by Shakespeare will come across, namely 'bardolatry', which means that Shakespeare's qualitiy as a cultural icon can be demotivating because pupils may think they have to find out "what Shakespeare really wanted to say" to us, the lesser beings,as it were, the lack of connection of the plays and their inherent way of thinking or problem-solving to real-life needs of the pupils on the one hand, and the 'eternal truths' about the human condition on the other hand, which might cause some kind of defence-reaction by adolescent pupils, who, in their last years of grammar-school, after all, have just about found their own position in the social and psychological turmoil around them the seemingly concise picture of how the world functions, which is presented in the plays, outdated in a time where scientific evidence seems to tell us exactly how it really does, or in a time where "anything goes" the inability of pupils, who, day in, day out, are fed by representations of reality on TV and at the cinema, which makes it hard for them to get into a discussion about different possible functions of such representation, i.e., in our case, to get into a discourse about theatre, and, of course, the 'ceterum censeo': the strangeness of such an outdated language, commonly called 'Old English' by our pupils.
.	Facing all these obstacles one might as well wonder why to read Shakespeare-plays at all in the classroom. And of course, the easiest answer is exactly 'because': - because all these obstacles that I have just mentioned are worthwhile dealing with, - because it is a real challenge to read a Shakespeare play, both for pupils and for teachers, - because reading a Shakespeare-play can fulfil some of the demands which the national (in our context: the federal) curriculum requires from our grammar-school pupils, or, to say it in George F. Babbit's words, and I quote from Sinclair Lewis' 1922-novel of the same title: "I'll tell you why you have to study Shakespeare and those. It's because they're required for college entrance, and that's all there is to it ! Personally I don't see myself why they stuck'em into an up-to-date high-school system like we have in this state. Be a good deal better if you took Business English, and learned how to write an ad, or letters that would pull. But there it is, and there's no talk, argument, or discussion about it !" Personally I think Babbit's son Ted made a point when he launched off this oratory highlight of his father's, because the conversation started off by Ted's complaint: "I don't see why they give us this old-fashioned junk by Milton and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and all these has-beens. Oh, I guess I could stand it to see a show by Shakespeare, if they had swell scenery and put on a lot of dog, but to sit down in cold blood and read'em - These teachers . how do they get that way ?" I do think that "to sit down in cold blood and read'em" does quite nicely describe the problems we teachers have when reading Shakespeare in class. The special position of Shakespeare does indeed call for some specific approaches, which I am going to sketch out for you in this talk. I intend to take you through the various steps a teacher has to make when embarking on a project such as reading a Shakespeare-play, and by doing so, to refer to some passages in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
.	Of course, there are various possibilities of planning a unit on a Shakespeare-play. One could imagine reading parallel plays, or a thematic anthology of passages from different plays, for example "Shakespeare on War", or a combination of a play with some spinoffs in other literatures or genres (The West Side Story, Mendelssohn, Verdi, Thurber's Macbeth Murder Mystery, the excellent crime novels by Edward Marston, some of which take place in the Elizabethan theatre-world). One could take a play as a simple foil for a comparison of the text with different video- and film-versions (this would be a course on "the language of the moving image"), or one could even imagine a workshop-approach, which would be based on a thoroughly independent reading of the play or plays. As all these overall designs take up a lot of organisational energy - what with the readiness of colleagues to cooperate, the break-up of teaching - and of learning - routines, or schedule-constraints etc. etc., I have decided to set out in this talk from a traditional idea of a lockstep-approach, which means reading the play from scene to scene, from act to act with the whole class, where all the pupils have the same text and read longer passages at home, with the odd reading task provided by the teacher, and with lessons, mostly double lessons of 90 minutes, which are devoted to the "discussion" of the passages read at home. I would then put the word "discussion" in inverted commas, because this will be our real starting point.
.	After having touched somewhat lightly on a teacher's first question when undertaking a Shakespeare-project - "Why Shakespeare at all ?" - we immediately have to address the question "Which Shakespeare ?", which can be looked at from two different perspectives: the question of the choice of the play, and of the choice of the edition.
Figure 1	In order to focus on the question of the choice of the play, and at the same time to refer to the heated discussion which has been going on in ELT-circles about the 'school-canon' I am going to show you and to comment on some statistical data from 1992, which was collected among students at the University of Cologne, Germany. As far as I have learnt from my recurrent, but statistically not valid questions of my teacher-trainees I think that all in all the German results are quite similar to the situation in this part of the country. Figure 1 shows the answers to the question as to which play the university students had read when they were at school. (Figure 1)
.	The leader is clearly Macbeth, the runner-up is "none", i.e. those students who had not read any Shakespeare-play at all: together the two cover 75 % of all the answers. None other plays make up the remaining 25 %. To put it in a nutshell: this is perhaps what could be called the "Shakespeare-school-canon". Among all the remaining plays there is no mentioning of either Richard III, A Midsummer Night's Dream or As You Like It. However, nowadays this might look a bit different from 1992, because in the mean time there have been some filmed versions of these plays in the cinemas.
.	The reasons for the popularity of Macbeth are manifold: first of all the play itself, which is one of the shortest Shakespeare-plays, whose plot is fast-running and an exciting mixture of horror- and crime-story, with some comprehensible psychological developments etc. Another reason for the popularity of Macbeth might be that the play is dealt with as a model in the curricula of several German Bundesländer, together with lists of sub-themes, with teaching aims, teaching ideas. As a consequence of this, a lot of teaching aids, videos, model units etc. are available on the market. Let me be quite explicit about this: in my opinion there is nothing dubious about making use of such material. Just bear in mind that the average grammar-school English teacher is supposed to be some kind of an all rounder, and an expert in various field, such as Commonwealth literature, First World War poetry, recent women's literature etc. , and with the increasing pedagogical and didactical demands on her job it is only natural that she should be able to rely on the expertise which may be at hand. The trouble is that only too often it is not easily accessible, and this is where I can see numerous practice-oriented possibilities of a cooperation between universities and schools.
Figure 2	Let us follow the field-study of the University of Cologne a bit further. The German research went on to ask university students, which play they, after having been at the university for some semesters , would now read in their classes. Figure 2 (Welches Stück würden Sie lesen lassen ?) shows the result. If we look at these data a bit more closely we will notice some interesting facts.
.	Macbeth still ranks first, but now, after some years of study, only with 18,2% (i.e. 56.9% - 38.7%) namings. It is followed by A Midsummer Night's Dream (14.4%) and Romeo and Juliet (12.1%), which has gained 8.3 %. Hamlet follows with a total of 8.8%, King Lear with 5.3% and The Merchant of Venice with 6.8%: this play has almost the same numbers of wishes as it is in fact read in reality. What is equally striking is the fact that doing Shakespeare at university has reduced the number of those students who would not read a Shakespeare-play at school quite dramatically down to 5%. This may be an indication of the quality of teaching Shakespeare at the university of Cologne.
Figure 3	Figure 3 (Differenzen in der Auswahl) examines the same question "Which of Shakespeare's plays would you read at school ?", but this time from a gender perspective, asking if, in the students' opinion, there are typically male and typically female plays. This time the white boxes mean "answers by female students" and the black boxes "answers by male students". If we study this data we notice that especially A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant, Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest seem to appeal to female students, whereas the leader among male students seems to be Richard III, followed by As You Like It , Measure for Measure, and some plays which we might call "historical", which were not opted for by any of the women students. On the other hand, it strikes us that there was no option by male students for The Taming of the Shrew - perhaps because nobody dared to vote for the alleged "Macho-comedy" ?
Figure 1	If we compare these gender-biased choices with the school-canon shown in Figure 1, it looks as if the school-canon were predominantly male-oriented, with maybe the notable exception of The Merchant of Venice. The fact that only male students said that they wouldn't read any Shakespeare-play at all: this seems to confirm the suggestion of a basically male orientation of the Shakespeare-school-canon.
.	The choice of A Midsummer Night's Dream in my class is still not clear to me: it took place in summer 1998, a long time before any of us knew that there was going to be either a film-version or the current production at the local theatre. It was also quite a spontaneous choice, I remember: there were some very resolute voices for the play ("I heard it was good" being the main reason), and a general reluctant murmur of the class consenting to it. I would not like to go into futile speculations about the reasons of the class's choice. Let me only add here that about two thirds of the pupils were young women ( and among them the opinion-leaders of the class), and one third rather - let's say: phlegmatic - young men.
.	As mentioned before the question "Which Shakespeare ?" also contains, of course, the question "Which Shakespeare-edition ?", and the answer to this question is invariably tied up with the question of "How Shakespeare ?, or "Shakespeare: how ?", because the the text-edition has to be matched with the purpose of reading a Shakespeare-play in class. And, of course, this purpose has to be compatible with the requirements of the grammar-school's curricula, which do claim, in some instances, rather bluntly and in accordance with George F. Babbit, that "reading a Shakespeare play is compulsory", but which, on the other hand, sets great store on the development of the four skills of reading, speaking, listening and writing. How, then, may we ask, can all these diverging requirements be met ?
.	I think the answer to this question lies in a general approach towards literature, which, by the way, seems to borrow a great deal from some of the more recent developments of literary scholarship. In order to make this clearer I would like to present to you a list of "don'ts" about dealing with literature at school.
.	HOW TO TURN STUDENTS OFF READING 1 the same book 2 with dictionaries 3 summaries 4 tests 5 questions 6 reading aloud 7 finishing the book
.	However, I have to warn you that this is a negative list, and it refers to reading literature in class in general. What it wants to advocate is best be seen when it is turned into the positive.It then means that already in the classroom it is both necessary and possible to
.	- create a "multi-voiced discourse" about a text, both intertextually and intratextually. This concerns items 1 (the same book) and 7 (finishing the book). "Finish" in number seven might amaze you, but basically it means "don't finish the book off", i.e. do not choke it to death by talking too much about it. But of course it can also mean "leave the end of the book open to personal appreciation", or: don't read the book in class with hardly any comment and add a seemingly generally valid interpretation after it, of the kind of "what does the author want to tell us ?" - create situations, which allow the pupils to primarily focus on the global understanding of the text, and only in the second place, and only when that global comprehension is severely impaired resort to a 1:1- meaning of words (items 2, dictionaries and 6, reading aloud). In other words: the times of reading out whole passages in the classroom and summarising them "in your own words", or translating them into L1 are definitely over. - create tasks in which pupils can actively participate, rely on their individual understanding of the text rather than on their rendering preconceived opinions from the outside about it (items 3, summaries and 5, questions). As a practical consequence this might mean "alter the text according to the problems it addresses, allow the pupils to inhabit the text in this way, and don't give them fixed solutions to these problems." - likewise (item 4, tests): avoid the display of a set-knowledge but rather enhance individual constructions or hypotheses, which may and which should be revised in the course of the reading of the text: meaning is not just there, meaning is negotiable, or in other words: "Shakespeare does not mean, we mean Shakespeare." (Hawkes, T. quoted in Antor, H.)
.	Referring to the national / federal curriculum again this approach fulfils the requirements of enhancing the pupils' emancipation and developing their responsibility when dealing with any kind of text autonomously, getting the pupils to take sides between different positions about a text's construction of reality, according to their needs, and based on their reasoning, on their recognising and on their critically dealing with particular interests of opposing opinions, making the pupils acquire a critical receptive and media competence, making the pupils develop and practise various kinds of problem-solving strategies.
.	This is the second time I am referring to this national / federal curriculum, and I have done it for two reasons: first of all to remind you that we teachers are not completely free to do whatever we like with our pupils but that we have to have to follow some guide-lines, and secondly because I think it is quite useful for this audience to know something of the general educational aims of grammar-schools, as you are the ones who will have to take over these kinds of pupils in the first semester at university.
.	But I know that I am treading on thin ice here, as always when the subject matter is pedagogical aims. Let me therefore be a bit more concrete and now make a few remarks on the text-editions which are suitable to fulfil best these high-flown aims of a still vague approach to Shakespeare.
.	If we decide to focus on one play to be read by a class, what we need then is not a bilingual edition. We don't want our pupils to "understand" the original text passively, as it were, and accept it as it is, we want to get them to work actively with it, and by working on it we want to make use of and expand their second language competence . We may use a translated version of the play from time to time, but then only for specific purposes, for instance to compare particular passages of the original text with the L 1 - version. I would therefore prefer a monolingual edition, but neither pupils nor their teachers are usually Shakespeare-experts: none of us are interested in all the finer details of Shakespeare research, but only in those details that help us get a more thorough understanding of certain passages. Although scholarly editions may come in handy for the teacher, they are certainly of no use as class-readers.
Figure 4	The text-editions which are most suitable for our purposes of "getting into Shakespeare" seem to be those that follow the so-called performance-approach and are published by some British publishing houses for native readers. Notably these are either the Cambridge School Shakespeare, which offers little language help but a lot of run-on commentary on possible tasks and interpretive methods, or the Oxford School Shakespeare, which abounds in glossaries, but offers little help as far as actual tasks or teaching helps are concerned. The copy of a page from the Oxford School Shakespeare may give you an idea of what the edition looks like Figure 4. The text itself appears in the common moderately antiquated form of spelling and lay-out, there is a short summary at the beginning of each scene, and difficult words or even passages are explained with the usual methods of visuals, synonyms / antonyms, paraphrases, definitions etc.
.	Our questions of "Why Shakespeare ?" and the two questions of "Which Shakespeare?" - the choice of the play and the choice of the class-reader -, then, have brought us to the "How Shakespeare ?" - question, the one that probably interests you most.. But I am afraid that have to disappoint you again: as there are "a thousand ways to love you", as one singer says, or "... to kill your lover" (as another one puts it), there are as many - and some more - ways which allow pupils to play an active part in a Shakespeare classroom. As I am not teaching a methodology course here, and as it is one of my maxims not to give you a set-list of good teaching behaviour - because recipes may or may not work with one particular class, and the particular needs and dispositions of the pupils - I'd rather like to resort to some principles of teaching Shakespeare in the classroom, and to illustrate them with some examples, most of them from A Midsummer Night's Dream:
.	PRINCIPLES OF TEACHING SHAKESPEARE AT SCHOOL 1 TREAT SHAKESPEARE AS A SCRIPT 2 MAKE SHAKESPEARE LEARNER-CENTRED 3 SHAKESPEARE IS SOCIAL 4 SHAKESPEARE CELEBRATES IMAGINATION 5 SHAKESPEARE IS PHYSICAL 6 MAKE SHAKESPEARE EXPLORATORY 7 ADDRESS THE DISTINCTIVE QUALITIES OF THE PLAY 8 CHOICE AND VARIETY 9 SHAKESPEARE CELEBRATES PLURALITY 10 NEGATIVE CAPABILITY 11 SHAKESPEARE IS ABOUT ENJOYMENT
.	The didactic considerations of what follows about the beginning or opening of a play are based on the fact that this is most probably the first time ever that pupils are confronted with an original text by Shakespeare. However, they do sometimes have a vague notion or even some kind of pre-knowledge of Shakespeare, and in order to both introduce into the play of our choice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and to widen their scope as well as to confirm (?) their pre-notions, we could give them the first scene or part of Act I of, say, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear, or Twelfth Night, and ask them to read it in pairs and to agree on a list of "everything that you learn from this scene": the persons present, their position, their problem(s), the atmosphere, the setting etc. etc.
.	Next, we could give them a list of solutions and ask them to compare this to their own list. In the case of Macbeth, they might learn that - the atmosphere is terrifying and menacing (a heath is, after all, a lonely place, and there is thunder and lightning) - there are three witches (whom we commonly associate with evil and a desire to do harm) - these three witches talk of a battle (is there a war going on ?) - that this battle is lost and won (how is that possible ?) - that the witches want to meet again (do they have a plan ?), and they will do so at sunset (i.e. the beginning of night) - that they want to meet Macbeth (is he part of the plan ? is he the one the plan is plotted against?) - that they can fly (what power have they got exactly ?), - that they want to fly through fog and filthy air (i.e. where you can't see anything -why or what do they want to hide ?) - that "fair is foul and foul is fair" (which is contradictory and puzzling (like the battle mentioned above): can they make good look like evil, and evil like good ?) All of this gives rise to speculations about what is going to happen - Why do the pupils think it is going to happen ? How is it going to happen etc. - and may naturally lead to some - guided - speaking and / or writing activity. As a next step, and with quite a parallel way of procedure, which the pupils are now familiar with, we could then do the same with the beginning of A Midsummer Night's Dream and will finally come up with the following result:
.	Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream I,1 I.1.1-19: Theseus, Duke of Athens, is going to get married to Hippolyta in four days, when there's the new moon. He can hardly wait. Hippolyta comforts him; it will be soon (enough?). Theseus sends away Philostrate to organise the wedding reception with some young people of Athens. Theseus confesses that he conquered Hippolyta's love, but he promises that the wedding will be different: there's going to be a big party.
.	Referring back to the beginnings of other plays we have looked at, for example Iago's "I am not what I am", or Hamlet's "Stand, and unfold thyself", we could then ask the pupils to concentrate on contrasts in the first scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream . These could be arranged in the following way:
.	Language: contrasts between day night . "four happy days" (Theseus) the four days will become night (Hippolyta) . the wedding day will be a wedding night ! . old moon new moon . "wanes slowly" will watch our wedding . . "the pale companion"? . joy sadness . merriment funerals . mirth melancholy . dreaming awakening . sleep (for good) Athenian youths . violence love . sword, injuries triumph, pomp, revels
.	This sums up one of the more striking structural features of the play, and lends itself nicely for a reading task of the following passage, thus creating and practising prediction and anticipation, which are so central for the acquisition of a reading competence.
.	This short sketch of a starter-lesson into Shakespearean language and into A Midsummer Night's Dream may serve an example for the teaching-principle of "Making Shakespeare exploratory" i.e. "Speculate about things, events, situations etc which are only hinted at or merely mentioned in the text".
advert	The next example (the ad "Meet me under the clock - pubs are people") rather refers to the principle "Take Shakespeare as a script / make him learner-centered, social, physical, and variable":
.	The didactic consideration for it is to start with the pupils' needs and interests, and with their daily experiences, with what they are supposed to be familiar with.Love is a topic that is dominant not only in the real-life circumstances of 18-year-olds, in their fantasies, dreams and thoughts: they are, sometimes self-appointed, experts in this field. So, for example, starting classroom-work on a longer text-passage, and referring to all the kinds of (marital) relationship that are presented in A Midsummer Night's Dream ("I woo'd thee with my sword..." (I,1,16) / Oberon's "Am I not thy lord ?" and Titania's reply "Then I must be thy lady." (II,1,63f.) / Helena's "I am your spaniel ... the more you beat me, I will fawn on you." (II,1,203f.) and pss.), we could construct a role play around the ad.
.	By definition, there should be some specific role-profiles in a role-play. These role profiles can take up basic constellations in the play (of Theseus / Hippolyta, in the case of the following example) and are an excellent way of summarising passages, which have been read at home. For this example the following profiles for four people were written:
.	Role Profile: Ted Although still very young. you are a very powerful executive manager at the town's leading company. At the moment you are sitting in one of the in-pubs of the town, talking with the woman of your dreams,Liz, whom you have been seeing for a few weeks. This time, you are very sure, will be IT: you want this woman to be your wife, and soon so. In order to achieve your goal you have exerted some pressure on Liz' father. Moreover you have already told your best friend to arrange for a big party, at which you are going to celebrate your engagement. There is just one slight obstacle: you are renowned for your various short-lived affairs to a lot of the eligible women of this town. You know that Liz, your wife-to-be, knows about these, and that she is suspicious of your intentions. Role Profile: Sue You are the leading social events-reporter of the nation's tabloid THE MOON. You have heard through the grapevine that the town's most notorious playboy Ted, a very powerful executive manager at the leading company of this town, and heir to his father's enormous fortune, intends toget engaged to Liz, one of the most outstanding beauties among the town's eligible women. You have followed Ted into a pub where he is now talking to Liz. Taking a seat near them, you are able to overhear their conversation. You intend to call your editor-in-chief after the end of the meeting of the two. Role Profile: Linguistics Student You are sitting in a pub, bored to death when suddenly you overhear a conversation of two very posh young people. You get interested in the way they talk to each other, so intrigued indeed that you take your note-pad to take down some notes about their language. Role Profile: Liz Up to now you have been able to successfully ward off the many passes that young, flashy men of this town have made at you. Although you know that you are thought to be very beautiful indeed, you would rather wait until you are very sure who to start a serious relationship with. But now, with Ted, everything is a bit different. Not only is he good-looking, but also very powerful an the sole heir of his father's enormous fortune. He has trapped you with some foul tricks, and you know that if you do not consent to his persistent attempts to get you engaged to him, he might be absolutely able to destroy your family. You have also heard rumour that Ted has already begun organising a big party, at which he is going to publicly announce your engagement to him.
.	This might look "more strange than true". However, the result of this activity among a group of four will be some short play-acting scenes, which, in fact, practise free-speaking within a fixed framework, and it will moreover and invariably launch off a discussion among the spectators of the short role-plays about how the actors have succeeded in grasping the gist of the Shakespeare-constellation: again, and as a by-product, the pupils will have summarised and commented on a home-reading passage. Hopefully now, the underlying idea of the "principles" becomes clearer: the relationship between text and readers is turned around, as it were: it is the pupil-readers and their ideas and ways of reading and understanding of the text who are the starting point of the activity: they are asked to inhabit the text, and not vice versa.
.insult generatior	Other efficient ways of summarising passages in different versions, which means by different groups of pupils, and thus allowing comments by bystanders, are the so-called tableaux or stills, where small groups of pupils have to mime or represent a situation or a figure-constellation in the form of a sculpture, or - rather with an emphasis on language and reading aloud - reading out crucial passages in various ways: shouting, whispering, singing, reading them laughingly, despisingly, admiringly etc. etc. One special and highly successful activity is the so-called "insult generator", where the pupils have to stand in two lines facing each other, and have to pick out combinations of the three columns of swear-words and shout them at each other.
.	My next example of the "Principles of Teaching Shakespeare At School" is about "Shakespeare celebrating imagination" or "Negative Capability". This expression is, of course, from John Keats' letter to his brother of December 22nd, 1817, and basically means that "you needn't know it all", that you should explore texts imaginatively rather than over-analyse them. Let's take the example of the three Mechanicals' scenes in A Midsummer Night's Dream (cf. copy of pages 10f.above) The (silent) reading of this first mechanicals-scene in class could be combined with the task to find out who is who in the picture, and to give good reasons why. This will amount in an invariably contradictory discussion of the picture and, at the same time, in a characterisation of the workers. Later on, for instance with the example of Ovid's Metamorphosis-passage we could try to find out what kind of staging problems the mechanicals will have to cope with, and to compare our anticipated problems with those mentioned by the Mechanicals in III,1. At the beginning of the "play within the play", in Act V, we could hand out "the original cast-list", which is based on Act I, scene 2:
.	The Most Lamentable Comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe A Tedious Brief Scene of Young Pyramus and His Love Thisbe very tragical mirth by Peter Quince, carpenter, Athens Dramatis Personae Pyramus, a lover, that kills himself most gallant for love Bottom, a weaver Thisbe, the lady that Pyramus must love Flute, a bellows-mender Thisbe's mother Robin Starveling, a tailor Pyramus' father Tom Snout, a tinker Thisbe's father Peter Quince, a carpenter and a playwright A Lion Snug, a joiner
.	and make the pupils find out all the alterations that have been made by the Mechanicals. The following worksheet could draw the pupils' attention to all the problems they had during their rehearsals and make them become aware of how they solved them, and - eventually - what their idea of performing a text is, as compared with ours:
	The actors' problems: suggested solutions: You speak all your part at once, cues and all. (III,1,96) -> learning their parts by heart ................................ When you have spoken your speech, enter into that brake (= either "break", or, during the rehearsal in the forest: "a gap in a bush"), and so everyone according to his cue.(III,1,71) -> ...................................... ................................ That will ask some tears in the true performing of it: if I do it, let the audience look to their eyes! I will move storms; I will condole in some measure (= I will lament to a certain extent). (I,2,20) -> ...................................... ................................ An (= If) I may hide my face, let me play Thisbe, too. I'll speak in a monstrous little voice: 'Thisne, Thisne !' (I,2,47) -> ...................................... ................................ Masters, I am to discourse wonders - but ask me not what; for if I tell you, I am not true Athenian. (IV,2,28) -> ...................................... ................................ Pyramus must ... kill himself, which the ladies cannot abide (= can't bear, is too much for them) (III,1,9) -> ...................................... ................................ Will not the ladies be afeard of the lion ? (III,1,26) -> ...................................... ................................ A calendar ! a calendar ! Look in the almanac; find out moonshine, find out moonshine. (III,1,50) -> ...................................... ................................ There's another thing: we must have a wall in the great chamber. (III,1,60) -> ...................................... ................................
.	Working with cast-lists, or dramatis personae, has proved to be very rewarding, by the way. So, for instance, we could pick a cast list from a different Shakespeare-edition (P. Alexander, William Shakespeare - The Complete Works, London: 1951, 196813) and ask the pupils to compare it with the list in their edition, which is differently arranged, and to suggest reasons why this may be so. Furthermore, we could ask them to arrange the different roles according to various other criteria, or to write their own favourite cast-lists, even under various aspects, such as suggesting famous film-stars for the various parts, and to give reasons for their choice. Again the pupils' "previous experience" will in fact get them to discuss the different shades of the characters in the play.
.	My last example of the "Principles" is about "Addressing the distinctive qualities of the play". However, I would like to start with something that rather focuses on the opposite, namely some general insights about Shakespearean theatre, which might help the pupils to develop their theatre-competence. The first step would be to put these five drawings of stages (Figure) into a chronological order and to guess, very generally, of course, about " 'characteristic features' of each of these stages, as far as actors, the audience, the kind of play that can be performed on such and such a stage, problems with the props, the costumes, the lighting etc of each of these stages are concerned". We could then, if available, confront the pupils with such a reader's letter as Frau Hardmann's, which appeared in the BaZ some time ago (reader's letter) and, after reading Act V, scene 1, have them write Theseus' answer to her, following this model:
Letters	Two Letters
Figure 6	We could then, if necessary, and as an afterthought to the play, also try to develop an "imagination" set-up (figure). This figure (Figure 6) is supposed to show that at the very core of the play there are several infringements, as I would call them, all of which transfer people into different worlds, either with violence (Theseus / Hippolyta), with force (Puck and Bottom), or with the famous love juice (indicated by the small symbol of a phial). These infringements take place between different social levels, for example by usurping authorities, or between different states of mind. In this way the whole play can be seen as some kind of infringement, administered by the "Chief Mechanic" of the play, i.e. its author, who - likewise - transports his audience, first into the world of the play, then into the unreal world of the play, and eventually into the enchanted world of the play - not only by his imagination but also, with the help of his words (his "love-juice"?), by appealing to the audience's imagination . One of the central question of the play, then would be if, with the help of their words and their performance, the Mechanicals succeed in transporting their audience into a different world, which, by the way, inherently also means bridging a social gap between their and the court's world.
.	After this and with suitable classroom-activities, we could launch off a discussion about "representations of reality" - about what is true and what is strange - and, in fact, about our basic principles of dealing with a literary text. This then would be the metacognitive stage in and of our approach to the play: a demand, by the way, which is also urgently claimed by the federal curriculum. After all, representations of reality, or the question of what is real, or - in Hermia's words "Am I not Hermia ? Are you not Lysander ?" is the fundamental question, not only of this play.
.	The last item in my list of the "Principles" is "Shakespeare is about enjoyment". I do not know whether these few examples have been attractive enough to fulfil this requirement, but I do think they, or at least some of them, were for my pupils, even within the well-known constraints of the school environment. They were so, even if the pupils knew that they had to write tests on Shakespeare, which cannot be avoided with such a project as reading a Shakespeare-play, which, after all, will take up most of the lessons of a whole term. But teachers are to generate marks so as to give legally valid evidence of our pupils' proficiency in English. The approach of "active Shakespeare", which I have been advocating here, has the advantage that it avoids assessment-questions such as these found on the web (Figure) or the "Is Iago evil ?"-type of questions, which, in my opinion, are too demanding, because they follow the principle of "writing to show off your (basically still non-existent) knowledge of the play" rather than "using your individual knowledge in order to write about the play". Fulfilling the requirements of a so-called "good test", for example reliability, face and contents validity, and last but not least practicability, the "active Shakespeare"-approach opens up testing possibilities that are compatible with both the demands of the curriculum and the needs of the pupils, i.e. to become more proficient in their use of English.
.	At the end of this talk, and bearing in mind some members of the audience, we might as well ask what grammar-school teachers would like to gain from a dialogue with you Shakespeare-scholars. I think what is most urgent is the possibility to start talking to you, which would involve steps from either side. We teachers would have to have the courage to open up our classrooms to you (again this "opening"-metaphor !) and to present our ways of dealing with Shakespeare to your scrutiny. And you would have to make your scholarly discourse accessible to us, to show us where you stand, what the present state of the art is and which direction it might be going to. Referring again to my announcement of tonight's talk, this would mean "building bridges", but this time between the teachers' real-life concerns and the ivory-tower of research. I think an institution such as Sh:in:E is solid ground to start our dialogue.
.	Bibliography Alexander P., William Shakespeare - The Complete Works, London: 1951, 196813 Antor, H., "Now Set thy long-experienc'd wit to school". Neue Shakespeare-Forschung und alternative Literaturdidaktik in Der Fremdsprachliche Unterricht Englisch 6/1997, pp. 4 - 9. [This edition of the magazine entitled "Shakespeare alternativ" is entirely devoted to the teaching of Shakespeare and contains a bibliography, videography and mediography, and a list of CD-ROMS and internet-support addresses to the subject] Bauer, HP., "Statistische Untersuchung zur Praxis der Shakespeare-Lektüre. Plädoyer für eine Neuorientierung", in: PRAXIS des neusprachlichen Unterrichts 3/92, pp. 250 - 259. Brusch, W. Discovering Shakespeare, Schülerbuch und Teacher's Notes. Stuttgart: Klett 1996. Fitzgerald, B. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Approaches and activities. OUP 1994 Gibson, R. Teaching Shakespeare, CUP 1989. [I am indebted to this booklet for both the stimulus and the primary source for the development of an „active Shakespeare"-approach.] Gill R. (ed.) A Midsummer Night's Dream. Oxford School Shakespeare. OUP 1994 3 Marston, E. The Queen's Head, London 1988. Marston E. The Merry Devils, London 1989. Meyer, M., "Schüler (sic !) als Regisseure und Lehrer von A Midsummer Night's Dream. Irrungen und Wirrungen, in: PRAXIS des neusprachlichen Unterrichts 4/94, pp. 126 - 134. Sullivan, T., Getting Into Shakespeare. The English Collection. Longman 1994. Timm, N., "The better part of valour is discretion". Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 in einem Leistungskurs der Sekundarstufe II, in: PRAXIS des neusprachlichen Unterrichts 3/96, pp. 137 - 147.
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