 How do you guide your students into making their own meaning out of what they study in Shakespeare's plays? Why do you feel that this is important? One of the things I want to do is make them aware of the fact that they are always already bringing their own meanings to the play. That they are actually already attaching various meanings to what they read. And that they are never really passive recipients of what's going on, although it may seem to them when their first reading Shakespeare's plays. I try to make them aware of the assumptions that they bring when they are looking at the plays. For example, assumptions about race are really important in my course, especially as I'm teaching a play like A Fellow. There are many different ways you can imagine producing what A Fellow himself looks like. In Shakespeare's time, they often did A Fellow as a white person, as Elizabethan white Englishman, who was put into blackface. When you're reading the play, are you thinking about a white man who's in blackface presenting this character? What does that say about that character? In the first act when A Fellow has first heard from Iago that Desdemona's father is really mad about his elopement with Desdemona, he said, A Fellow says, my services which I've done as scenery shall outtongue his complaints, the complaints of his father. And at this moment, A Fellow is just so sure that what he has done, all the work that he's done to fighting wars for the aristocracy in Venice, is going to alleviate everyone's concerns about his elopement with this white woman, Desdemona. But if you imagine this as a white person saying this, for example, in the BBC production, Anthony Hopkins plays A Fellow, and a lot of students know Anthony Hopkins, and I show them that clip. If you see Anthony Hopkins is playing this, you might think, oh, well, yeah, this language that he's using, that his tongue, his voice is going to be louder than the voice of the complaints that are brought by Desdemona's father. You can believe in his confidence. But if you see it as Lawrence Fishburne playing it, for example, in the Castle Rock production, as a black man playing it, and you come from the 20th century, from an American culture, you think about an African American's voice being positioned next to a voice of other white men. And you wonder maybe about his confidence then. Will his voice, Will's accomplishments really outtongued, really, really overwhelm all the complaints that have been brought, or does Iago standing behind him, slightly smearing at a fellow's confidence, make you question whether people are going to trust what a black man has to say. What are the students doing when they're reading the play? Are they imagining a black man? Are they imagining a black man with a set of assumptions that they're bringing about race from American culture? What do they think about a set of assumptions about how dark-skinned people were thought of in Shakespeare's time? What kinds of meanings do they bring? Another thing that I find really important is gender. Viola, in Twelfth Night, has a line where she says, I am the man. And what she's referring to is that the fact that she's been cross-dressed as a man, and she has gone and courted a woman named Olivia for her master, for her seno, and Olivia, this woman, instead of falling in love with her seno, hasn't fallen in love with her. And Viola is just astounded by the fact that her cross-dressing has worked so well that a woman has fallen in love with her. And what I try to get the students to think about is, how do they say this line? Do they think about this character as Viola as a modest person, as a woman who's really taken aback by the fact that she's been able to do this and really worried about what she's done? Or did they see this as a person who is liberated, who is, I am the man, who is euphoric about the fact that she's actually been able to portray a man at this moment? And I try to get them to think about how their ideas about what is a woman, what values do they attach to being a woman? What does it mean that in Shakespeare's time, that in England, that all the women's parts were played by young boys playing the role of women? What does it matter that they see a real woman on the stage, and not a man playing a woman, playing the man, as in Viola's situation? How does that affect what meaning they bring? So I try to show them that they are never in a passive or neutral position when they're reading the play. That when they see a black man or when they see a woman, that they are already bringing meanings to the play, certain cultural beliefs that they're bringing to that play. And I want them to interrogate those cultural beliefs. I want to put them into doubt about those beliefs. I want them to question what values they assume go along with these different kinds of characters. And that allows them to see that they have a very active role in shaping a play and bringing a play to life.