Excerpt from Holistic Shakespeare (Intellect Books, 2012)

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/H/bo12317504.html

Shakespeare and his contemporaries perceived man’s mind, body, spirit, and environment as inextricably interconnected. This holistic mindset, the foundation of scientific and medical thought during the Renaissance era, profoundly influenced art and literature throughout the period and supplied the ideological cornerstone of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. In the modern classroom, recapturing this lost holistic viewpoint offers an invaluable resource for encountering Shakespeare’s plays with greater depth, clarity, and authenticity.

Three intertwined concepts made up the fabric of holistic thought during Shakespeare’s lifetime: Wholeness, Interconnectivity, and Embodiment. Borrowed, adapted, and refined from classical and medieval philosophies, this triad of holistic values comprised one of the most significant theoretical influences on Shakespeare’s stagecraft. Collectively, these core tenets, which Shakespeare absorbed from earliest childhood, indelibly colored his perspective on the world in which he lived, while providing the wellspring for his creation of character and situation, and sustaining the ethical systems that underpin the fictional world of the plays. These seminal values, which are discussed in greater depth in Chapter 1, also support the framework for the holistic curricular approach outlined in the ensuing chapters. In the holistic Shakespeare classroom, application of these foundational concepts opens up a fertile pathway that leads students toward a more intimate understanding of how Shakespeare thought—about himself, his relationships, and his environment.

In holistic education, WHOLENESS (or holism) describes an integrated curricular approach that places value on the complete learner and cultivates every student’s unique potential to become active, thinking, and caring contributors to the larger world. In contrast to conventional curricular approaches, which locate primary focus on the learner’s acquisition of formulaic essential knowledge and skills, the holistic educational approach draws upon the rich resources of intuition, memory, sensation, and imagination as channels for personalized discovery. Of course, time-honored analytical and critical tools are not discarded; instead, within a supportive and exploratory classroom community, students are encouraged to engage in the constant interplay between cognitive polarities. Like Shakespeare’s dramatic language, which fluctuates between restrained, highly patterned rhetorical structures and unpredictable, impassioned syncopation, the holistic Shakespeare classroom stresses the plurality of teaching strategies necessary to convey content and facilitate communication of the expressive meaning of Shakespeare’s multilayered plays; instructional techniques that target students’ analytical reasoning skills are deliberately juxtaposed against those that favor subjective, individualized responses, and experiential activities that motivate freeform creative play are balanced by those that foster introspective contemplation. Students learn to practice wholeness through both inner reflection and collaborative activities that enhance personal and transpersonal awareness. By accentuating the unity of the complete learning organism, the holistic model invites students to become adaptable, fluid, and self-aware learners, who are open to experimentation and not intimidated by the unfamiliar.