Dr. Christopher Nielson is an English professor at Drexel and a Shakespearean Dramaturge at the Hedgerow Theatre. Dr. Nielson teaches many different English classes, but he is best known for his Shakespeare lectures. His insights into the texts show how Shakespeare is not only profoundly important in modern society, but also how relevant Shakespeare still is.
After taking Dr. Nielson's Shakespeare class, I had always wanted to learn more about his methods of analyzing the texts, and to also talk to someone who has walked the Appalachian Trail in its entirety. I saw this interview as a way I could do both.
ASK: Where are you from?
CN: I'm New Hampshire born and bred, grass-rooted and sure-footed. I was an undergraduate at [the University of New Hampshire], and then, quite frankly, I wanted to get as far away from New Hampshire as possible, so I used graduate school as a way to see the country. I earned my Master's degree at Arizona State and took my doctorate at Purdue University. Afterwards, I came to the Philadelphia area, and here I am.
ASK: Have you ever read Bill Bryson's book A Walk in the Woods?
CN: [Laughs] I took time off from college in 1974 to hike the entire Appalachian Trail. Before I left the University of New Hampshire to do that, I acquired an Associate in Arts degree, because I didn't know if I'd ever be coming back to school. With a buddy of mine, who is now an eminent professor of geology at MIT, we hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in four months. We began at Katahdin in Maine and finished at Springer Mountain, Georgia. That was in the fall of 1974.
Since then, I've dabbled in the literature of the Appalachian Trail, including Bryson's book that my wife gave me as a Christmas present. I remember reading it and laughing and laughing hilariously because what he experienced is what many people experience when they hike the Appalachian Trail. They think, "Oh, this is going be a mellow time. I'm going to eat granola and drink spring water, and I'm going to have this pack on my back, and it's going to be a merry hike in the woods. And the birds are all going to twitter" and so on and so forth. But it's nothing like that. The hike is very strenuous. The packs are heavy; the terrain is rough. When I read about this guy panting for breath, being out of shape, and just wanting to take his backpack off, throw it into the woods, and say "the heck with it," I understood completely. Unfortunately, many people do just that in the first week or two. Several hundred started on the trail in 1974, and maybe a dozen of us actually finished. So, I was able to identify with Bryson a great deal, very funny. We have these romantic notions, but the reality is far different.
ASK: What were you able to take away from that experience?
CN: One is survival. And by survival, I mean pursuing my goals and sticking to them, because there were many times hiking the Trail when I really questioned why was I doing it. Sometimes I didn't have much food and water, and things were not going well. But I'd made a commitment and stuck to it. That determination is one thing that I seriously took with me from the Trail.
A second is—I know this is going to sound sort of new-ageyish, but I grew up in rural New Hampshire, and I've been an outdoorsy guy all my life—that I'd never experienced the outdoors quite the same way as I had when hiking the Appalachian Trail. The example I would give is that perhaps two months into the Trail my friend and I came to a beautiful spot to make camp that night, and it was autumn with the leaves falling from the trees, the late afternoon sun shining, and everything was like a great symphony in perfect harmony. I sat and heard the music and saw the leaves dance while the trees swayed in perfect rhythm. I experienced it all and realized afterwards that I had momentarily entered the world of Wordsworth when he says, "I heard a thousand blended notes," and I realized that I, too, was hearing them for the first time. The experience lasted only a few minutes, but it had taken me months to get civilization and the city and the city noise and all that out of me so that I could experience Nature. I had a genuine epiphany.
ASK: So where did you go from there?
CN: When I was an undergrad at the University of New Hampshire, I started off as a Chemical Engineering major. I had excelled in science in high school and had advance-placed in several courses, but quite frankly I got to the University of New Hampshire and, as awful as this sounds, I was bored by chemistry, particularly the labs. So I dropped out of that and went into Geology thinking I was going to be a paleontologist. I realized that wasn't what I wanted, and although my grades were fine, I took time off, I guess, to discover myself and what I wanted to do with my life. Believe it or not, I was in the middle of Pennsylvania, up on those ridges in 1974, hiking southward on the Trail well after Labor Day, no one around, when I realized what I really liked to do in my spare time was to read Shakespeare. So I thought, "Well, I'll be an English major," and continued thinking, "Oh that's kind of weird, but all right."
My senior project revolved around Shakespeare. For my Master's, I took a seminar in the poetry of Dickinson and Whitman, and the reason I took that seminar was that I knew Dickinson's poetry fairly well, but I didn't know much about Whitman. The professor really opened up a whole world for me. I wrote my master's project on the Civil War poetry of Walt Whitman. He considered himself to be America's Shakespeare, so I guess that met my determination to study Shakespeare, or at least I was able to rationalize my pursuit of Whitman.
And now, my God, I am paid to walk into a classroom and talk about literature, especially Shakespeare, which is just wonderful. So, "my avocation and my vocation" are one and the same, to quote Robert Frost.
ASK: One staple of your class is your philosophy of "insight of the first intensity." What is that for the people at home?
CN: An "insight of the first intensity" is an interpretation that changes one's understanding of a text. It is the result of a very close reading.
Frank Kermode is a famous and well-respected Shakespeare critic of old, a generation before me. I agree with him that to read Shakespeare other than reading for meaning is madness. We have to read closely for meanings. After about 1965, that approach to literature became out of vogue. What is interesting now is that we have gone back to close readings of texts. I go on Shakespeare blogs and see all these Ph.D.s and young graduate students going back to these "grandfathers" of interpretive method, and see them admitting that there's a lot to what scholars like Kermode, Bradley, Knight, and Goddard are saying. I agree and think that the proper business for scholars, students, actors, directors is to discover and share the play's depth of meaning. We never can fully explicate a play; it's not like a jigsaw puzzle that we can finally solve. If we're willing to spend the time with it, we get a deeper appreciation of Shakespeare and perhaps a deeper appreciation of ourselves. I think one thing Shakespeare does is to present us with the full range of human thought and emotion. I think that we can learn from that.
Obviously, the study of Shakespeare is complicated because there are intrinsic matters and extrinsic matters. The intrinsic matters are things like language, structure, metaphor, symbol, character, and how they all interplay. Extrinsically, Shakespeare comments on society at the time, on history, and so forth. We see the reflective and refractive nature of his texts: how a text was influenced by society and how society was influenced by that text. So if we're going to look for meaning when we read Shakespeare, then we participate in the entire play as best we can (with all the theoretical problems notwithstanding). We try to see how each part is related to what I call the complicated whole.
The best way to read Shakespeare is to read the entire play first, then come back to discuss Act 1. We can't really discuss Act 1, Scene 1, until we've read the whole play. By spreading the play out in front of us, we might see correspondences that deepen our interpretation. For example, in Hamlet, the play I'm presently teaching, 5.1 and 5.2, the two last scenes of the play, are structurally identical. In the middle of both scenes, a character appears whom we have never seen before. In the middle of 5.1, Yorick appears; in the middle of 5.2, Osric appears. I think we are to look at Yorick and Osric in terms of Hamlet's character. Yorick obviously shows us the inevitable end of us all—the grave. Osric is the superficial and new self-made man of the court, who, if anything, shows us the meanlessness of life. Hamlet, as we know, has been looking at death and the meaninglessness of life throughout the entire play. Consequently, Yorick and Osric represent two aspects of Hamlet. Also, in 5.1, we have the grave, and Laertes and Hamlet fight over the grave. In 5.2, we have the poisoned stoop of wine. I'd have that table with the poisoned wine in the same spot on the stage as the grave had been, letting us know that the stoop of wine and the grave are connected. Also, I would have at one point in the fencing match Laertes and Hamlet fighting over the table and wine, just as they had fought over the grave. We can make all kinds of equations between those two scenes, as if the grave has been translated into the stoop of poisonous wine and the superficial court it represents. Perhaps we are to think that if Hamlet were to survive and gain the kingdom, his life would be as meaningless as death. That's what I mean by an insight of the first intensity.
What I want my students to do is to read the Sparknotes, read the Cliffs Notes, go back to the play again and again, and then let us sit down and go through each act, each scene, each line very carefully and see what we can find beyond the published, commercial commentary I just mentioned. And this semester students have made astute observations on several of the plays. I've been very happy. But it takes that concentrated effort; it is work to read Shakespeare. It is not easy; it's unlike any other literature class that I teach. It's very difficult because we must commit ourselves to giving it our all. We must abandon ourselves in the text, and that's hard to do.
I would say that Shakespeare criticism, in many ways, is in its infancy because now we're just getting back to the text. Let's trust Shakespeare, and he'll take us through the plays.
ASK: How does teaching in the classroom compare to your job as a dramaturge at Hedgerow Theatre?
CN: Teaching actors and directors the play and students the play is more similar than different. We are all concerned with meaning; we all want to know where should this actor be standing when he/she delivers this line. How should we block these scenes? How can we enforce the parallel structure of two scenes on stage? How can we translate that? The actors, directors, and students are very concerned with "What does this line mean?" "What's the motive?" "Why would the character say this?" I think the difference, and there is a slight difference, is that the actors and directors recognize immediately, before we even start, how complicated and difficult it is to read and to study Shakespeare. I think my students, when they first come into my class, are not aware yet that it is a very difficult job, and it is going to ask a lot from them.
ASK: Is that why you assign students to perform a part of a play?
CN: Yes, that's exactly why. I think that if students are responsible for teaching the play in a creative manner, they really have to know the play. And to know the play, they must try to understand the complicated whole.
Let me give an analogy that's probably quite silly. We can all drive over to Lancaster County and go to the Renaissance Faire, and some of us might think, "Oh that's what the Renaissance was like." That's not what the Renaissance was like. It's much different from a bunch of women wearing long gowns and men wearing tights. Well, in a similar vein, when some of us decide to encounter Shakespeare, we might have the idea, "Oh we're in a Shakespeare class, and we're going to be transported to merry-old England" and so forth. But Shakespeare's plays are poetry, and it's darn tough poetry. They have intrinsic values that are also informed by the extrinsic world of Shakespeare. We have to slog our way through these texts to get at those insights that will give us an appreciative understanding of the play. This is why I don't show movies. I think movies shut the plays down. I want the students to be so involved with the text that when they go to a movie version they can critique it instead of just saying, "Oh I really like that movie; Mel Gibson looks so good." I want students to do all that outside of class as we're studying the play. Unfortunately, and this bothers me a great deal, these movie companies spend gazillions of dollars producing and filming these masterpieces, and they take liberties that are uncalled for.
The two great Romeo and Juliet films, Zeferelli's 1968 and Luhrmann's 1996, remove crucial lines after Juliet says to her father and mother that she's not going to marry Paris, while the Nurse consoles her: "I think it best you married with the County." Immediately, both films shift to the next scene, so we don't hear Juliet's denunciation of the Nurse: "Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend." By removing this line, theatergoers probably assume that the Nurse is a good person, who is trying to make the best of a bad situation. She's not. She is evil, just as Juliet says she is. The problem with showing movies, therefore, is that as soon as we see a film version we accept it and shut down our own reading, our probing deeply, our interpretive faculties.
But these two movies have their merits. For example, I was sitting behind my youngest daughter and her girlfriends (all in their early teens) during the Luhrmann production. They were in love with Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo, and they thought that Claire Danes was just beautiful in her angel costume. By the end of the film, my daughter and every single one of her girlfriends were sobbing, and I thought, "Mission accomplished." They felt the play. As a result, they spent many a time that summer acting out parts from the play, especially the balcony scene. That was great.
ASK: Well, I've taken two of your classes, and I know you've told us this answer changes. But if you were stuck on a desert island with one Shakespeare play, what would it be?
CN: Oh boy, you know, I'm not going answer your question because I can't. But here's what I offer: My favorite Shakespeare play is the one I've just read. In a sense, they're all "perfect." I say "perfect" in quotation marks because art is not meant to be perfect. I think that A Midsummer Night's Dream is wonderful; I think that Measure for Measure is a great play. Of the tragedies, three come to mind immediately, and they are the big ones: Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth. But, Antony and Cleopatra is a masterwork; Othello is a masterwork. So, what play would I take that I could read and reread even though I've read it through for 30 years? Probably Hamlet. Then, as soon as I say that I think, wait a minute, ah maybe King Lear; etc., etc. I can't make that decision.