In Becky Friedman’s English course Shakespeare in Love, undergraduate students analyze language, genre, and adaptation in the Bard’s plays through the lens of love.
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In honor of Valentine’s Day, and as a way of fostering community in her Shakespeare in Love course, Becky Friedman took her students to the University Club for lunch one class period. They talked about the movie “Shakespeare in Love,” as part of a broader conversation on how Shakespeare’s works are adapted.
“If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.”
These are the opening lines of Duke Orsino’s first speech in William Shakespeare’s romantic comedy “Twelfth Night, Or What You Will.” Becky Friedman wanted to know what her students thought of how characters in the play talk about love. “Is it performative?” she asked them one Wednesday afternoon. “Is Orsino in love with the idea of love?”
Her students observed that different characters portray love in terms that seem extreme or self-sacrificing. They debated whose love seemed the most authentic and discussed the way love is framed as a sickness or disease—a theme, notes Friedman, that will return later in the semester when students examine madness and love in “Hamlet.”
“I knew I wanted to teach a class about Shakespeare that felt relevant for students,” says Friedman, associate director of undergraduate studies in the Department of English, describing her undergraduate course Shakespeare in Love. As love drives the plot of many of his plays, she knew she could spend an entire semester exploring romantic love, desire, family obligation, and other expressions of love.
“Shakespeare presents love in all its complexity, showing how relationships can be ecstatic and devastating and full of twists and turns,” Friedman says. “He’s representing these broad ranges of human experience and emotion, making his work as relatable to us now as when he wrote it over 400 years ago.”
The course covers 10 plays, and part of how Friedman makes Shakespeare relatable is in her playful and contemporary framing for each text. She has a different theme each week, such as Love Languages (for “Twelfth Night”), Love Games (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Forbidden Love (“Romeo and Juliet”), and Love Island (“The Tempest”).
“Students might have encountered some of these plays before, in the classroom, on the stage, or on the screen,” Friedman says. “But we’re reading them through the lens of love and exploring how that particular point of view revises our interpretation of the work.”
The class also touches on the categorization of Shakespeare’s plays—calling into question the rigid genre divisions of tragedy, comedy, and history—and how his works have been adapted.
Challenging previous notions of Shakespeare
Fourth-year Aleiyah Aguero, a history and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies double major, had not previously been interested in Shakespeare, noting the work had barely been taught in her Philadelphia high school and had felt inaccessible.
Drawn to the course by the topic of love and a desire to challenge previous assumptions about Shakespeare, Aguero says the course has helped them step back and examine the broader moral messages and themes in Shakespeare, rather than just analyzing individual interactions between characters.
Becky Friedman took her students to the Common Press one class period to typeset the prologue from “Romeo and Juliet,” and each student got a copy to take home. Friedman says this was a way for students to explore print history, a big theme in the class.
Aguero is also interested in how class status shapes depictions of love in the plays and in how Shakespeare portrays gender, noting that she didn’t previously know that the Bard wrote about and staged cross-dressing. “From a gender studies perspective, it’s very interesting the way he portrays heteronormativity in society,” says Aguero—and that’s still relevant today.
Third-year Anya Rothman, on the other hand, describes herself as “a huge Shakespeare nerd.” Rothman, a theatre arts major and English minor from Crozet, Virginia, previously took Friedman’s Witchcraft and the Occult class, and when she saw Friedman was teaching Shakespeare in Love, she knew she had to enroll.
Rothman says she is especially looking forward to discussing “Othello”—a play she took an entire course on at Penn—because she finds Desdemona one of Shakespeare’s most fascinating characters, particularly in the realm of love.
In addition to rereading Shakespeare through the lens of love, the class has given her new way to approach Shakespeare: She says that as an actor, she is accustomed to focusing on what a character is doing, but this course has her thinking about what the story itself is doing.
“We’ve gotten to have so many collaborative discussions,” Rothman says. Approaching the text from so many different perspectives, she says, “you get fresh eyes on it.”
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