공연 중심의 셰익스피어 극 교육론 - 쟁점과 대안

Shakespeare Performance Pedagogy: Issues and Alternatives

&nbsp;&nbsp;Performance-centered Shakespeare education has recently emerged as a significant alternative to text-based Shakespeare education in an effort to overcome the crisis of Shakespeare education. This paper examines the theoretical background of Shakespeare performance pedagogy and issues related to its application to the classroom, while searching for the possible alternatives that can be corrective to some of the problems current Shakespeare performance pedagogy exposes. This paper would also like to suggest that the potential of performance pedagogy could be fully realized only when the performance itself is not the sole purpose of Shakespeare performance pedagogy.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;During the 1970s, Shakespeare performance criticism emerged as a &quot;revolutionary&quot; research field by a group of Anglo-American scholars who insisted that Shakespeare wrote playscripts whose potential meanings could be best realized in theatrical performance. This new trend in Shakespeare studies soon influenced Shakespeare pedagogy enormously. By 1984 performance pedagogy became not only universally accepted but also regarded as a ‘correct’ way to teach Shakespearean drama. Proliferation of the publication of performance-oriented textbooks and audio-visual materials helped teachers incorporate performative aspects into their classroom.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;However, Shakespeare performance criticism and thus Shakespeare performance pedagogy based their theory on the seriously misconceived conception on the relationship between text and performance. Despite its interest in stage performance of the text and its theatrical conventions and history, the real motivation of performance pedagogy was to recover the primacy of Shakespearean language in performance. This logocentric attitude toward the relationship between text and performance falsely assumes that the function of theatrical performance is realization of the text&quot;s authentic commands and recovery of meaning intrinsic to the text. Theatrical performance is more than a visual interpretation of a written text. It is a special place where stage and text encounter in their specific materiality and historicity. Logocentric assumption of performance pedagogy tends to read Shakespeare&quot;s texts as apolitical texts, foregrounding their universal values and poetic language while ignoring historical, material, and cultural conditions surrounding their original and subsequent productions.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;An alternative to this logocentric and apolitical performance pedagogy has to reconsider the relationship between teacher and students and the nature of Shakespearean text, along with more detailed discussions on developing specific pedagogical methods reflecting these reconsiderations. In order to teach Shakespeare in a way that introduces historical contingency, textual instability, and plurality of meaning, a reconfiguration of the role of teachers and students is fundamental. Teachers should function as a kind of provocateurs and mediators, working with their students, in their collaborative efforts to construct meanings of Shakespeare. Understanding that the text we now study is an imperfect, variant text, subject to history and existing in many forms and media, and that Shakespeare plays have an intrinsically open structure that can generate multiple, even contradictory, meanings and forms empowers students and thus encourages them to be active participants rather than passive consumers in creating Shakespearean meanings.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;This new understanding of the nature of Shakespearean text and relationship between teachers and students eventually put the emphasis on the rehearsal process rather than on the end product itself. Through the emphasis on the rehearsal in which trials and errors are allowed and even encouraged and various, even conflicting interpretations could be made, students will deeply understand the relationship between text and performance and be con