A Shakespeare Brief Immersion Method for Undergraduates

Abstract

Australian undergraduates, in general, don’t want to read anything much longer than a tweet or a Facebook post. They are too busy living in their virtual world of instant communication to sit at home reading a ‘book’ in which a lot of people whom they don’t know lob pithy comments at each other, or engage in the sixteenth-century equivalent of a blog — a soliloquy or a long public speech. It’s a cognitive habit, or preference: a youthful way of being-in-the-world enabled by the communications technology of the early twenty-first century. That technology, which is global, (and let’s add YouTube clips on everything, from everywhere) was not widely available in the 1990s and early 2000s when the experiment described in this essay was developed, tried and refined. But the ‘Shakespeare immersion’ course was dependent upon a recognition of the same social and cognitive habits: undergraduates won’t read a long book but they will interact, they will play. And in Australia, there’s a reasonable chance that they can play outside, any day, with the blue sky above and the birds and planes adding their raucous commentary; and the passing engineering, chemistry, psychology students and others happy to pause and enjoy a few minutes as audience.