Conceptual Unit: Working (with) Hamlet: Relays and Appropriations Submitted: December 4, 2006 Scott Reed ELAN 7408 Dr. Peter SmagorinskyTable of Contents Short Description . . . . . 1 List of Materials . . . . . 1 Rationale . . . . . . 2 Goals and Rubrics . . . . . 10 Unit Goals . . . . . 11 Rubrics . . . . . 14 Lesson Plans . . . . . 20 Week 1 . . . . . 20 Week 2 . . . . . 22 Week 3 . . . . . 24 Week 4 . . . . . 27 Week 5 . . . . . 29 Appendix A: Introductory Activity . . 31Reed 1 Conceptual Unit Project: Working (with) Hamlet: Relays and Appropriations Short Description: This unit is organized around creative adaptations and “relays” based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Alongside a reading of the play, students will consider other texts that use Hamlet as a resource for creating their own distinct meanings, as well as visual/filmic interpretations of the play. The ultimate goal is to have students produce something of a creative portfolio, working both independently and in groups to consider issues of interpretation, visualization, and framing based on readings of the original text, while putting those issues into creative forms of their own through scene concepts and performance. List of Materials: 1. Hamlet by William Shakespeare. The primary text for the unit. 2. Romeo + Juliet (1997), directed by Bah Luhrmann. This text will prop up one of the major focuses of the unit: the translation of the text into visual forms. The film’s thoroughly modernized mise en scene, along with its jumpy, music-video style editing, make the film uncommonly accessible. This very accessibility may also help develop the students’ familiarity with Shakespearean dialect. 3. Excerpts from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard. While the full text of this play might offer many difficulties, given its elliptical structure and language, carefully selected excerpts (particularly from the interactions between Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet, with the subsequent discussion) provide rich opportunities to consider responses to the play through two of its most hapless characters. 4. Excerpts from Hamletmachine by Heiner Muller. A purely experimental work inserted to handle purely experimental ends, the text of Hamletmachine is a dense and confounding maze of references to the play and to European history. As the students consider their own projects, looking to appropriate Hamlet into a visual/aesthetic form of their own, Hamletmachine functions as something of a limit-text, sketching the farthest borders to which the text can be deformed while retaining something of its original value. 5. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot. The poem’s citation of Hamlet makes it valuable as a case for considering the ways in which the character of Hamlet, in particular, has been addressed and re-addressed over the years. In a happy accident, the inclusion of Eliot’s poem opens up the opportunityReed 2 to discuss the author’s famous critique of Hamlet, in which he calls the play a failure for its title character’s lack of an “objective correlative” – a meaningful goal that would sufficiently justify his famous lack of action in the middle acts. 6. Four film versions of Hamlet: the darker, more poetic Laurence Olivier production of 1948; Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 production starring Mel Gibson; Kenneth Branagh’s epic four-hour adaptation from 1996; and the more recent (2000), modernized adaptation from Michael Almereyda, starring Ethan Hawke. While interesting for their distinct visual styles, more important for the discussion will be the various films’ adaptations of the Hamlet character, with special attention to Olivier’s famous dictum: “This is the story of a man who cannot make up his mind.” Rationale In my limited experience, Hamlet is the closest thing there is to a universal exit requirement for high-school English classes. The play is practically a fixture of twelfth-grade English curriculum in particular, often poised at the tail-end of a three- or four-year sequence of Shakespearean plays. Such a move often allows for a long process of enculturation into both Elizabethan language and the more general structures of tragic drama. Its climactic placement in the English curriculum also tends to underscore the play’s particularly monolithic place in the history of English literature, about which little else needs be said, in my opinion. As one of the most famous, most frequently discussed, most finely wrought pieces of canonical Western literature, the play seems to provide something of a “capstone” experience in which the many years of study devoted to language, character, and plot can all come to fruition. However, these factors can do equally as much to work against the play’s success when it comes to presenting it to students. With a wariness of literature (canonical, in particular) often enculturated over the course of several years of English studies, students can often regard the play as a monument of Elizabethan stuffiness, complete with a preconceived, built-in caricature of the mopey, poetic protagonist. Such knee-jerk responses can either be validated through an often torturous close reading of Shakespeare’s masterful text, or they can be confronted through more dynamic means. Without doing violence to the play’s nuanced grasp of character or its finely-wrought language, my hope is to develop a conceptual unit in which students approach the play asReed 3 material to be interpreted and applied, rather than simply read and (passively) appreciated. Hamlet (1601) forms the first of what critics have often deemed Shakespeare’s four great tragedies: a trajectory that also includes Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1608). While no categorical distinction can be made between Shakespeare’s earlier works and these, the works of his later, more robust period, a few distinctions can be made. In these more “mature” tragedies, relative to earlier tragedies like Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare seems more willing to experiment with the tragic mold. In the case of Hamlet, such experimentation can be seen in the play’s long delay, in which Hamlet plots and ruminates over various courses of action, instead of immediately dispatching with Claudius, as per his father’s command. Later, in Othello and Lear, Shakespeare’s experiments with