 You state that a good reader of Shakespeare is more like a film director looking at a potential script than a passive recipient of information and universal truths. How do you get your students to be like film directors? That's an interesting question because it's not something that they automatically start doing at all. They begin reading Shakespeare silently and usually much too fast without absorbing a lot of the details. So one thing that I ask them to do is imagine a dream cast. Take a specific play that we're reading, a Midsummer Night's Dream, for example. Who would you cast as Theseus? Who would you cast as Hippolyta? In Hamlet, who would you cast as Hamlet? Pick some of your favorite stars and not only tell me who you would cast, but why? Why would they fit into that role? That helps give them a much more concrete sense of what kind of characters being created through the words and also in their role in creating the meaning at that point. I think in many ways looking as a film director gets them to consider two alternative points of view. In Hamlet, for example, I show them alternative scenes from Laurence Olivier's version and from Kenneth Branow's version. And when Hamlet is speaking to his mother and to his uncle, he points up his dress, his costume, and his whole situation as he's speaking to her saying that she doesn't really understand him. But I have that within which passes show. These but the trappings and the suits of woe. When he says that, he's calling attention to his dress, to his costuming. He's dressed in black because he's mourning. But you also have to imagine how are the other characters interacting with him in his dress? Is his mother fussing over him? Is he picking at his clothes and rearranging his collar? Is she close to him? In Olivier's version, which is very Freudian, his mother Gertrude is kissing him and feeling his clothes and very close to him. And that gives you the feeling that Hamlet's words that he's so different from his mother and so distance from his mother are contradicted by the fact that he's been quite close to her. In Branow's version, Gertrude, his mother, is quite aloof and quite distant. And that gives you a very different sense or feeling about Hamlet's relationship with his mother. So reading like a film director means considering costuming, but also how different characters are positioned within the frame of the screen, within the stage and how they're interacting with each other. Also, I like to get into thinking about lighting. How would lighting really change? In Olivier's version, it's called low-key lighting, technically in filmic terms. Low-key lighting is where the character in the scene has gentle, luminous pools of lighting that surround everything. And there's a lot of shadows. Emphasize Hamlet's morose aspect. Olivier portrays him as often stopping and moving very slowly and striking poses of contemplation. In Branow's version, it's remarkably different. It's in high-key lighting. Everything is very bright. And Hamlet, instead of being slow-moving and morose, is frenetic and moves very quickly around the stage as if he's in a manic disposition. So by focusing on things like lighting and movement, how the characters are moving, how they are lit, makes students become much more attentive readers of the text.