Students also attended a session at the Rare Book Room of CMU’s Hunt Library. Here, students were not only able to handle a 1632 Second Folio of Shakespeare’s collected works; they also paged through a late seventeenth-century edition of Ben Jonson’s Works, a complete set of Shakespeare edited by Alexander Pope, large plates from John Boydell’s Illustrations of the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare, and a number of textual artifacts from various performances of Shakespeare throughout the twentieth century.

 

Upper School English Teacher, Dr. Anna Redcay organized the trip as the capstone experience for the seniors’ study of Shakespeare. Beginning with the annual trip to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, students have been working closely with Hamlet's script, considering in particular how its status as a living text opens it to infinite interpretations and performative iterations. Faculty member, Dr. Joshua Smith, who holds a doctorate in Shakespeare studies, also accompanied the senior class on their trip. He gave a brief talk on how a folio would have been put together by early modern printers and traced a play from its first draft (the author’s “foul papers”) to its transcribed “fair copy,” its marked-up revised version for use in performance (“the book of the play”), and finally, the printed copies that surrounded students during their visit.

 

A play in Shakespeare’s time would have been performed in repertoire until no longer profitable, at which point it might be sold to a publisher to be printed and sold to the public, but Shakespeare’s growing reputation meant that his theatrical company retained the rights to many of his later plays—meaning that without the First Folio, Macbeth, The Tempest, As You Like It, and over a dozen other plays would be lost, having never been printed in any other form.

 

Finally, Dr. Smith touched on the nature of theater and authorship: if Shakespeare was not concerned enough with his legacy to publish half of his plays before his death, and since staging any play necessitates making alterations, what do we mean when we call Shakespeare an author, and why is it so important that we determine what plays (and what portions of what plays) are “authentically” his?

 

At Ellis, faculty members understand and address the learning needs of girls as they become able and independent readers and writers. In the Upper School, students read literature that challenges them intellectually and inspires them to reflect on their lives and the world. In daily small group and class discussions of the literature, students are encouraged to develop confidence in their own ideas, articulate reasoned arguments, and respect the opinions of others.