The next day, I do not begin to take up Book I in fragments, but I give a reading designed to give the story of the whole book in a series of the most striking passages, strung together by connecting narrative.
We are now ready to study the poem analytically, and as we take up each part and dissect it, the students always have in view the relation of each part to the whole book, and, from the first lecture, to the whole poem.
How to teach a play of Shakespeare is a subject that might well demand a whole lecture to itself. Shakespeare is undoubtedly the best material for teaching literature that we have, and is suitable for all grades, from the lowest to the highest. Of course, I need scarcely say that the method of treatment and presentation for honour students will naturally differ entirely from that appropriate to beginners.
But there is one thing certain, that a play of Shakespeare, whether one teaches it to beginners or to advanced students, demands on the part of the teacher a most intense study. He must be soaked in it; he must be thoroughly familiar with it down to the smallest detail; he must have thought out the setting of every scene; he must have formed a clear conception of every character; he must have decided definitely the exact tone and emphasis with which every speech should be delivered; and lastly, he must decide how he may most effectively present it to his students.
But this, you will say, is putting too big a demand upon the teacher. It is a demand which few of us are able to fulfil, but I am convinced myself that every teacher should keep such an ideal in view, and work toward it patiently. I have been studying Hamlet off and on myself for ten years, I have been teaching it for four, and I am only just beginning to get some confidence about it now. I hope perhaps if I study it for ten years more to be able to teach it with some success.
The great actor Salvini studied the part of Lear for eight years before he made any attempt to commit it to memory.
Shakespeare is thus, in a sense, the most difficult of all authors to teach, for one can never exhaust him; in another sense he is the easiest, for even the poorest teacher cannot help making some effect with him. The latter fact, however, should not make us content with slovenly work.
In this connection I may say that I am convinced that the greatest aid to success on the part of the teacher of English literature is painstaking and exact study for himself—not to be content with something that will do, but to absorb and reabsorb the spirit of the best works, and never to be satisfied that he knows them well enough. The number of works that he can know thus thoroughly will be limited at first, but their range will be constantly increasing; and therefore the work that he will be compelled to do in a more or less imperfect fashion will be constantly decreasing.
As an example of how a single poem can be made sometimes to serve as an introduction to the whole of an author's work or to a large portion of it, let us take a very short and simple poem of Browning and see what can be made of it. Let me read to you A Woman's Last Word.
Probably this poem, like many of Browning's, produces at the first reading only a vague and indefinite impression, a sort of groping sensation, in short, a wonder as to what it is all about.