“The Wheel Is Come Full Circle; I am Here”: An Inter-text Approach to King Lear, act 5
“The Wheel Is Come Full Circle; I am Here”: An Inter-text Approach to King Lear, act 5
This lesson plan builds upon recent scholarship in history of the book such as Cynthia Clegg’s essay, “King Lear and Early Seventeenth-century Print Culture,” to foreground the necessary information for students to understand Shakespeare’s contemporaneous, pre-copyright law print culture in its appropriate context alongside ours in which they will be working to spotlight key concerns/areas of interest Shakespeare may have had working on The King’s Men and within the structure of early modern print culture.
“The wonder is he hath endured so long; he but usurped his life,” Kent says of King Lear at the tail-end of the play (Lear 5.3). The same could be said of Lear, Shakespeare’s play itself, which has in textual editions for the past 400 years, “usurped” itself, with subsequent editions taking on the previous editions’ “authority” as textual scholars debate the quality of the Quarter versus the Folio, for instance, on various evaluative criteria. (See Wayne State University’s Dividing the Kingdoms text module for more on textual concerns for Lear specifically.) As Edgar puts it at the end of the play, “The weight of this sad time we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most; we that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long” (Lear 5.5).
The in-class discussion, editorial role-playing, and workshopping and the multi-week (or semester-long) take-home assignment of creating and sustaining an online following for their creative takes (fan-fiction, or other type of creative writing) on Lear are designed for undergraduate-level students to appreciate the textual world of early modern England in which Shakespeare’s work circulated, and how the driving forces of rhetorical situation and audience informed the dueling Quarto and Folio editions of Lear. This goal of this lesson plan is to teach students history of the book methodology in an engaging, memorable way that also provides valuable marketing skills in contemporary, digital print culture in which writers now operate. This lesson plan would be ideal for upper-level undergraduate English students who enjoy creative writing and/or seek a career in professional writing, but it could also be tailored to/fun for lower-level undergraduates as well.
Using digital subscription and publishing technologies such as Patreon and/or Wattpad, students will imagine what it was like for Shakespeare to have operated in seventeenth-century print culture as they learn to navigate contemporary (post Copyright-law) print culture online. Contemporary writers use Patreon and/or Wattpad as valuable tools writers to market and publish, and receive funding for and feedback on, their work in ways akin to and distinct from Shakespeare’s concerns. (The common underbelly for questions of “legitimate” and/or “authoritative” authorship then and now? Power dynamics between author and fan, editors, and other key stakeholders in the shape of editorial content and monetary compensation for the public- and privately perceived “value” of the art.)
Interestingly, the Patreon introductory (marketing) video invokes Shakespeare as inspiration for its business model: “Patreon exists because when creators are paid, they can create more amazing things. Things that inspire us, teach us, challenge us, things that make us last. Patreon is a membership platform that makes it really easy for creators to get paid. We’re using the idea of patronage, which is actually a really old idea. If it weren’t for patrons, we wouldn’t have Romeo and Juliet, … Mozart, Shakespeare, Da Vinci, they all had patrons, mostly aristocrats who paid them to create so they could enjoy their works and brag to their friends about how cool they are for supporting creators” (Patreon.com). Writers (and other creator-types) launch a subscription-style payment for various levels of membership/patronage. Early content, extra videos–etc. Which allows “sustainable income and fans to connect on a whole new level.” Start your page and give your audience the opportunity to become patrons.
Students can use the the Wattpad’s “How do I promote my story?” to embark on this experimental journey into the contemporary digital-publishing world. Instructors can expound upon these tips in a lecture (as seen in the lesson plan breakdown below).
Instructors can use Cynthia Clegg’s essay, “King Lear and Early Seventeenth-century Print Culture,” to foreground the necessary information for students to understand Shakespeare’s contemporaneous, pre-copyright law print culture in its appropriate context alongside ours in which they will be working to spotlight key concerns/areas of interest Shakespeare may have had working on The King’s Men and within the structure of early modern print culture.
Methodology: History of the Book
Activity (in class): Discussion, editorial role-playing, and workshopping
Assignment (out of class): Multi-week (or semester-long) take-home assignment of creating and sustaining an online following for their creative takes (fan-fiction, or other type of creative writing) on Lear
An Early British Circulating Library in Wales.
| Activity (in class): Discussion, editorial role-playing, and workshopping
Beginning How will I engage the learners: motivational strategy, hook, activation of prior knowledge? |
| For homework, students will have read King Lear, act 5 as well as the article “King Lear and Early Seventeenth-century Print Culture” (Clegg) to familiarize themselves with Shakespeare’s publishing industry’s affordances and constraints in the early modern period. They will sketch a process map–using pen and paper and potentially other visual software such as Visme or Piktochart–that depicts the process flow (or flows) that Shakespeare’s Lear text would have undergone in early modern England, to include passing through the master of revels, and so forth, according to Clegg’s interpretation.
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| Middle
How does the lesson develop? How are new concepts/processes learned? By gradual empowerment? Modeled, shared or guided instruction? |
| Once students have established the publishing process for Shakespeare in a format (akin to the above sample process flow infographic), the instructor can lead a lecture centered on their best practices/process for publishing and marketing content on Wattpad and/or Patreon (students’ choice). Throughout the semester or multi-week timeframe as identified by the instructor, students will participate in (1) examining Shakespeare’s print culture and (2) digital print culture today, both benefiting from patronage. The instructor will launch an ongoing class discussion on best practices for promoting creative work, then as now, and can use Wattpad’s guidelines as a discussion launch-point. (Sample tips include: “follow other writers and read their work” (i.e., Shakespeare’s reading/borrowing of Marlowe and countless other plays); “engage others in conversation” (i.e., Shakespeare’s plays such as Lear “played” upon playgoers’ fears/worries/issues of the day), and so on and so forth.
Students will start a Patreon and/or Wattpad page to promulgate their King Lear fanfiction to a contemporary audience. They will participate in in-class creative writing workshop-style classes throughout the semester, as they reflect in journals and in a culmination reflective essay on what they learned about publishing to a fan base (or lack thereof) then as now. Examples of Shakespearean fanfiction can be found here. |
| End
How will I conclude this lesson? How will we integrate the ideas/experiences? How will I check for understanding? Application–what will learners do to demonstrate their learning? |
| Assignment (out of class): Multi-week (or semester-long) take-home assignment of creating and sustaining an online following for their creative takes (fan-fiction, or other type of creative writing) on Lear. The assignment will culminate in a 4-page (or more) reflection compare/contrast paper on their experience as digital publishers and Shakespeare’s purported publishing experiences according to recent scholarship in history of the book methodology. |
Notes
This lesson plan is indebted to Wayne State University’s Dividing the Kingdoms: Interdisciplinary Methods for Teaching King Lear to Undergraduates, developed for The Folger Shakespeare Library, which I used as a framework/guide for developing this lesson plan’s history-of-the-book method.
Works Consulted
“Text Module.” Dividing the Kingdoms: Interdisciplinary Methods for Teaching King Lear to Undergraduates, developed for The Folger Shakespeare Library’s “Teaching Shakespeare to Undergraduates.” Date accessed: October 31, 2018.
Clegg, Cynthia Susan. “King Lear and Early Seventeenth-century Print Culture.” King Lear: New Critical Essays, edited by Kahan, Jeffrey, pp. 277-296. Routledge: 2008.
