Nate Eastman - Shakespeares Storytelling: An Introduction to Genre, Character, and Technique

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Aspiring professional Shakespeareans need to learn all kinds of things before they go to graduate school: the differences between fair and foul copies, between quartos and folios, and between the typesetting habits of A and B compositors. They need to read Norths translations of Plutarchs Lives, and Holinsheds Chronicles, and histories from Conrad Russell and Christopher Hill. They need to know what influential Shakespeare criticsfrom Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Samuel Johnson to Jean Howard and Margarita de Graziahave had to say about Hamlet . And so most undergraduate Shakespeare courses focus on these topics.

This is wonderful for aspiring professional Shakespeareans, who see clear connections between what they learn in Shakespeare, what they think is important, and what theyll do in the future. But in my sections of Shakespeare, every aspiring Shakespeare professor enrolls in the company of about fifty aspiring software developers. That one Shakespearean is also in the company of about fifty aspiring doctors, accountants, and engineers. The world might need Shakespeare professors, but it doesnt need that many of them.

I wrote this book because every studentnot just the aspiring Shakespeare professordeserves a Shakespeare course that speaks to their interests, that helps them make sense of Shakespeares plays, and that helps them discover why Shakespeare is worthwhile. And so this book is about Shakespeares storytelling .

A story is any relation of events in which a character tries to get something they want. As a genre, it includes most novels, movies, comic books, and television shows. Unless you have a shriveled-up turd for a heart, you know and love at least one story. Maybe you read Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone (1999) as a child (or still read it as an adult) or keep up with Hugo winners like N. K. Jemisins The Fifth Season (2015). Maybe you watch Disney movies. Maybe you dig on sprawling, multiple-narrative pieces of storytelling like George R. R. Martins A Game of Thrones (1996), or Stephen Kings IT (1986), or multi-generational pieces of storytelling like Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club (1989) or Gabriel Garcia Marquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).

Stories bring us joy. They prompt us to reflect on the hows and whys of life, and to develop the kind of emotional intelligence that used to be called wisdom. Unless you are seriously unlucky, you will read, or see, at least one more story before the universe packs you up for recycling. This book will help you understand how that story does what it does, and why that story has Shakespeares fingerprints all over it.

Shakespeare defined the modern story and invented what are now indispensable storytelling techniques. We talk about Shakespeare in the same ways that programmers talk about Grace Hopper (who invented the compiler), the way that science fiction writers talk about N. K. Jemisin (who won three Best Novel Hugo Awards in a row), or the way that directors talk about Steven Spielberg (who invented the Summer blockbuster). These are players who, like Shakespeare, gamed so well that they changed the rules.

This book will help you better understand storytelling : what storytellers do, and which techniques they use to do it. This is important because you might have already learned other concepts that allegedly help you understand how stories are put together concepts like rising action, climax, or protagonistand, well, you might as well try to understand a story by throwing rocks at it. Who is the protagonist in A Midsummer Nights Dream? Which scene is the climax? What does applying these labels to the play, or to its characters, teach you about how they work? Luckily, this book will help you learn to use a better set of tools.

This book will also help you better understand Shakespeares stories. If you understand why Shakespeare has both Laertes and Hamlet ask Claudiuss permission to leave Denmark, or understand why the ghost of Old Hamlet complains about how gross his poisoning was, youll also understand how the pieces of a play fit together, and why these pieces look the way they do. Thats useful if youre interested in Shakespeare, or in reading other pieces of storytelling , or in writing pieces of your own.

This book will also help you understand why Shakespeare is such a big deal. Its hard to overstate just how often writers use Shakespeares storytelling tools. Once you know how to spot those tools, youll see them everywhere.

If youre teaching Shakespeare, this book should help you design a course thats challenging, accessible, and relevant. A course that focuses on Shakespeares storytelling toolson concepts, rather than on contentlets students focus on making connections between Shakespeare and the hundreds of other pieces of storytelling they see and read. This isnt about re-treading Shakespeare by talking about how The Lion King (1994) and Hamlet are basically the same story. Its about helping students see how Shakespeares symbols work in Hamlet so that they can discover how other pieces of Hamlet-style storytelling, like Fences (1986), Star Wars (1977), Beloved (1987), or The Mist (1980), use symbols the same way.

I wrote this book because its concept-driven approach has a lot of advantages. One is that it promotes close reading. Too often, close reading of Shakespeare means discussing the rhyme, meter, and imagery of a short passagesay, Hamlets first soliloquyto no clear purpose. Too often, it means throwing around a few terms like enjambment or feminine rhyme before using a line like tis an unweeded garden to segue into a more sustainable discussion of, say, Shakespeares ecophobia, or of Early Modern horticulture.