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| Valentina Gheorghe in the Paster Reading Room, Folger Shakespeare Library |
Being a huge “Shakespeare nerd” also made the experience of attending the Shakespeare Academy unlike anything else. We were given many opportunities to let our “nerd flag fly” through not only using a primary text from The Vault for a lesson presentation, but also through exploring the Paster Reading Room and performing on the actual Folger stage. Surreal is the idea that you are standing on a stage in a recreation of an Elizabethan theatre treading the boards where actors do such things for a living. I am strongly considering adding “played Laertes at the Folger Theatre” to my resumé, because how many people can say they did that?
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| Gheorghe learning stage fighting |
The cohort was able to select a primary source, from several pulled for us, to use for a lesson presentation and this really allowed me to turn the “nerding out” up to an eleven. Besides the fact that the Folger has the largest collection of First Folios, it has other rare items such as prompt books from productions done in the 19th century, a caricature of Edwin Booth playing Hamlet, and a copy Montaigne’s Essayes owned by John Thompson, an actor in the King’s Men who largely played female roles. The utter bibliophilic excitement of touching a book that was 400 years old was amazing, hyper-real in that the only thing separating me and the owner of this book was time - they touched these same pages!
I picked a fairly newer book to use in my presentation, a copy of Hamlet translated into German from 1928 that had beautiful art deco plates of scenes and various translations of Saxo Grammaticus in the margins. I used this book to springboard ideas for a lesson involving students reading an excerpt of Amleth in an Early Modern English translation of the Grammaticus. It’s a vastly more gruesome account of Hamlet’s killing of Polonius, so naturally I assumed it would be perfect for children to read. (...“presently drawing his sworde thrust it into the hangings, which done, pulled the counsellour [halfe dead] out by the heeles, made and end of killing him, and beeing slaine, cut his bodie in pieces, which he caused to be boyled, and then cast it into an open vaulte or privie, that it mighte serve fore food to the bogges.” Doesn’t that sound like a book you’d love to read as a kid?) I could have spent a whole week reading the Early Modern translation of Grammaticus in that book. Wondrously, we were allowed to take pictures of our items, and I found myself wanting to come back just to read everything they would let me read.
On top of all of this we got lessons in stage fighting (prompting curious looks from DC residents as we were literally swinging dowels at each other on the sidewalk), had a very British tea time every day at 3 pm promptly and ogled the graves of Emily and Henry Clay Folger in the Paster Reading Room, who are literally entombed in a functioning staircase.
The whole building, which houses the Paster Reading Room, offices, and vault is a “moniment without a tombe”, and it is so beautiful and so full of the love for Shakespeare that I did not want to leave. In contrast, the Library of Congress, which I visited the weekend after the program ended, represents Shakespeare on his three very real, very unapproachable pedestals. I would recommend the Folger Summer Academy to any and every teacher. Not only is it enlightening to collaborate with some many different educators, but it is transformative in that it gives real, fun, and practical evidence-based pedagogical approaches to teaching Shakespeare that can be applied to almost any text in a remarkably beautiful setting that is, if nothing else, truly Shakespearean.
