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"Determined to Prove a Villain": Criticism, Pedagogy, and "Richard III"
Ist Teil von
College literature, 2007-10, Vol.34 (4), p.1-21
Ort / Verlag
West Chester: West Chester University
Erscheinungsjahr
2007
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Literature Online (LION)
Beschreibungen/Notizen
This essay offers suggestions for teaching William Shakespeare's "Richard III", using a pedagogy that combines a historically aware, text-based exploration of the play's treatment of subjectivity with a performance-oriented approach. Concentrating especially on the play's famous opening speech, I explain how students might be encouraged to engage productively with the text's intermingling of competing, overlapping, and mutually enhancing models of identity. The play's representations of identity derive from the early modern period's secular humanism and metaphysical views of selfhood, but also present us with less clear-cut reflections on psychology and theatricality. The essay ends with an analysis of three modern film versions of the speech, showing how these can be used to help students learn to recognize the ways in which our own perspectives on identity are themselves the product of a long, complex, and often contradictory historical development.