Tag: teaching

On Playreadings

I am wearing a jumper with Rock & Roll written on it, and to honour that garment I have spent the past hour finalising the cast list for Monday’s online Christ Church playreading, which will be Romeo and Juliet. I was surprised to realise it will be the fourteenth playreading I’ve run since taking up my Christ Church Fellowship in October 2018 – and the fourth I’ve run online. I’m sharing the list below in case it’s of interest, and also to note that our last in-person playreading was on 2 March 2020 – almost exactly a year before we’ll read Romeo and Juliet. I tracked down an email to make sure (I have been… variable at archiving the readings) and detected no hint of concern; we did then cram about 25 people into my office. 

I began the play readings because (as a graduate student and ECR) I’d really loved the Liripoop playreadings run by Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith. I thought that a version for undergraduates could build community and introduce sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century plays to students in a low-stakes, enjoyable way. Those who know the Oxford BA syllabus will see that I followed it very closely pre-pandemic. This means reading Early Modern drama in Michaelmas (Autumn) Term; Restoration/eighteenth-century drama in Hilary (Spring) Term; and Shakespeare in Trinity (Summer). That’s been helpful, and I scheduled plays to complement my classes; during the pandemic, I also moved to a very deliberate pedagogy of Bangers Only. Where possible, I choose short plays with (in pre-pandemic times) a lot of hard copies available in Oxford’s lending libraries and (very cheaply) online.

Almost fourteen playreadings in, the regular cast includes undergraduates, postgraduates and recent students from across the university – not just English and not just Christ Church. During lockdown we’ve had people from all over the UK, and also from France, come together to read. I look forward to seeing all the participants again in person, but online playreadings have also been absolutely lovely: The Winter’s Tale, before Christmas, was one of my favourites. There were two reasons: first, several Freshers genuinely didn’t know what was coming when the royal family assembled to see Dead Hermione’s Statue; second, people wore costumes. Another joy is seeing students who initially attended as an “audience member” start to request small parts of their own, and then bigger, and then bigger. That’s another big thing: you don’t need to read to attend. Nor do you need any acting experience or ability. The only real rule is not to bring dark-coloured drinks into a study with pale grey carpet.

Reading the plays of course throws up new textual insights and delights; preparing the cast lists and doubling charts has been illuminating (it’s also given me some good research ideas). But that’s not really been the point. It’s taught me more about how plays sound, and how people read, and about the merits and demerits of snack foods sold in the vicinity of St Aldate’s. This blog post is to mark the fourteenth playreading of its kind, and to say thank you to everyone who’s attended over the past two-and-a-half years. It’s also to challenge me to create an archive of the readings in a much more deliberate way.

nb food is key

If you have questions, or run a similar series of your own, I’d love to hear from you. These are the plays we’ve read together – now I’ll get thinking about where we’ll go next! 

  1. Autumn 2018: The Massacre at Paris (Christopher Marlowe)
  2. Autumn 2018: Arden of Faversham (Anon.)
  3. Spring 2019: The Country Wife (William Wycherley)
  4. Spring 2019: The Beaux Stratagem (George Farquhar)
  5. Summer 2019: The Merry Wives of Windsor (W. Shakespeare)
  6. Summer 2019: Pericles (W. Shakespeare)
  7. Autumn 2019: The Witch (Thomas Middleton)
  8. Autumn 2019: The Changeling (Thomas Middleton and William Rowley)
  9. Spring 2020: Venice Preserv’d (Thomas Otway)
  10. Spring 2020: The Enchanted Island (John Dryden and William Davenant)
  11. Summer 2020: Twelfth Night (W. Shakespeare)
  12. Autumn 2020: Edward II (Christopher Marlowe)
  13. Autumn 2020: The Winter’s Tale  (W. Shakespeare)
  14. Spring 2021: Romeo and Juliet (see above)
  15. ?????

Life at Christ Church (six weeks in)

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obviously the House (I managed to say it!) doesn’t still look like a sun-kissed Loire valley chateau, it now looks like a resentful Venetian winter.

I am now six weeks into my new job. For the next five years, I shall be Fellow in English at Christ Church at the University of Oxford, teaching literature 1550–1760 to undergraduates, and supervising undergraduate and postgraduate work on drama from the Renaissance to the present day. My colleagues’ friendliness belies the buildings’ grandeur, afternoon tea is served daily, it’s the sole Oxford college with its own art room, and the students like play-readings and crisps. For the past four years, my contract has been full-time research with a significant, although intermittent, amount of BA and Master’s teaching across the last four-and-a-half-centuries of Anglophone literature – this is definitely more intense. But teaching the third-year Shakespeare paper alongside the second-year Renaissance paper is rich and rewarding. One reason is that the intensity of tutorial teaching gives tutor and students alike the luxury of focusing on the process and skill of writing as much as on literature. Although Oxford terms can often combine the worst of sprints and marathons, I’m trying to find spaces to help already strong writers develop their written style – and structures – as quickly as possible. Essays are, after all, attempts and experiments, and tutorial teaching allows them to be just that.

The other reason it’s so rewarding is the obvious one: the literature. I was always going to love reading and discussing essays on the drama of this period (i.e. the reason I’m an academic), whether it’s realising why A Woman Killed With Kindness should be read alongside Coriolanus, or getting excited about all the different ways you can die from an Early Modern painting. At the same time, though, it’s been great to work again on John Donne, and Anne Locke, and Thomas Southwell, among others.

Of course, I’m on my second cold in six weeks, I really need a haircut, and my face is falling off. I have, however, overspent on a Christmas tree for my office (there was an even pricier one with two-tone branches. I mourn it). Only two weeks left til Oxmas.

 

Good luck to the English Finalists!

My first stable crop of BA (Hons) English Language and Literature finalists start their exams this morning. Everyone not tutoring finalists for the first time thinks I am over-invested. All my peers who are tutoring finalists for the first time agree that the experience is, you know, just a little like taking Finals again, several times, with no control over the outcomes!

My thoughts will be in the Exam Schools every morning this week. I am so proud of them all – which includes my non-student undergraduate friends, especially the wonderful NDK – for getting this far, and know they’ll do well (I’m already dying for July and the results). Oxford Finals are horrendous, and English is particularly tough because it’s so early & intense in the season. They’ll have an exam every morning this week, and then a final exam (which, like most of the others, lasts three hours) next Tuesday. The good thing is that Englishers also finish very early, leading to the GOLD RUSH: three glorious weeks of nostalgia, booze, punting, parties and (when not desperately cramming in aquatinted, heart-melting dreaming-spires experiences for the v. last time unless you just do more degrees) blessed, blessed sleep while everyone else still has exams to do.

In the spirit of things, here’s a picture of me finishing Finals in June 2008. Oh, goodness, just – if you’re finishing your Oxford BA this term, do everything in those amazing weeks which follow. I’ll stop now before, like, Tom Lehrer, I’m so-o-ggy with nostalgia, but, yes. Love is the only education worth having, and I loved (the last part) of that last Trinity term.

…of course, it wasn’t the last term at all, and I hope it won’t be for some of my finalists, but nonetheless…. /recruitment drive for eternal ACADEMIA.