 What do you enjoy most about teaching Shakespeare to college students? What I enjoy most about introducing Shakespeare to college students is exposing them to the richness and density of Shakespeare's language, to the details that he provides in order to give the reader a fuller picture of the context in which the poem or the play is unfolding. During Shakespeare's time the stage was really rather plain than weren't that many props and Shakespeare had to provide a lot of the visual details through his language. Students have found come with a lot of assumptions which can be misleading. For example, they've often in high school read the sonnets and then read something like the sonnet 18, shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. They assume when they read this that it's a woman that's being addressed. They flashes into their mind Kate Winslet from the Titanic. She appears in Branagh's version of Hamlet as well. But really as you go along and read the poem you find that it's being addressed to a young man, that all this language of love is being used to describe a young man and the person speaking is an older man. For example in the sonnet 20 he calls the young man the master mistress of my passion. That shakes up the students and gets them to think that Shakespeare is really forcing to think about the language of love not just to rehearse their expectations that they bring to it. I also enjoy introducing them to the artistic and cultural context. For example it's important when you read one sonnet to realize that it's part of a whole group of sonnets. Most of Shakespeare's sonnets are addressed to a young man. The first group of them is addressed to a young man trying to get that young man to consider marriage. And also I try to introduce them to the ideas of love during Shakespeare's days because those ideas about love and about what love was made up of was really different from our conceptions of love.