Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the College Fix on November 15, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
Boston College hired a new professor in theater arts this year to teach a class that will “interpret the theme of identity” in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”
One scholar criticized the new professor’s approach for having a “political aim,” while another said that it “makes sense” in interviews with the College Fix.
Dawn Simmons is teaching the class this fall semester to “take a fresh look at ‘Macbeth’” and “provide students with the opportunity to work collaboratively to interpret the theme of identity,” Boston College News reports.
The class dives into how factors such as “social location,” “lived experience,” and more can impact interpretations and recounts of classic texts, specifically Shakespeare.
“This interpretation—based on the experiences, artistic impulses, and ideas of the class contributors—will culminate in a new script inspired by ‘MacBeth,’ which Simmons will direct,” according to the school.
Further, the school calls Simmons a “trailblazer in fighting racism and encouraging diversity in the theater community.”
However, not everyone agrees with the new professor’s approach. Anthony Esolen, a distinguished literature professor at Thales College, criticized Simmons’ class as “political” in an email to the College Fix.
“If all we do is to see in literature our own ‘lived experience’ or the images we have of ourselves, then I don’t see why we bother with the pretense of learning at all,” Esolen told The Fix.
“The devil, of course, is in the details, but I can say straight off that I teach nothing, absolutely nothing, with any specific political aim in mind,” he said.
Esolen also told The Fix:
If I travel to a foreign land, presumably it’s to set my own way of life to the side and open myself up to something different from myself. Shakespeare is such a foreign land.
There is no ultimate reason to value any of the arts or any literary study unless you believe that they can convey what is actually and immutably good, true, or beautiful. Otherwise, it is all a matter of use, turning Shakespeare into a tool, which the professor here fairly confesses she is doing, or boasts that she is doing. It is all quite dreary.
On the other hand, English Professor Julia Lupton, who teaches at the University of California, commended Simmons’ approach.
“Shakespeare himself was interpreting events and stories from the past within the framework of his own time period,” Lupton told the College Fix in an email.
“’Macbeth,’ for example…depicts events from many centuries earlier but with an eye to celebrating the accession of King James I of England, who was also King James VI of Scotland,” the professor said.
“So it makes sense that we also renew these works in relation to our own dreams and challenges,” Lupton said.
Professor Simmons told the College Fix she does not currently have time to provide comments on her new class.
Simmons previously held roles as a co-founding artistic director of The Front Porch Arts Collective, as well as a producer and a playwright.
The Front Porch Arts Collective “is a black theater company committed to advancing racial equity in Boston through theater,” according to its website.
Theatre Department Chair Luke Jorgensen told the College Fix in an email that the school is “very excited to have Dawn Meredith Simmons as [its] Monan Artist in Residence.”
“She brings a wealth of directing and arts administration experience as well as her valuable perspective as a professional theatre maker. Her class in Devising will challenge our students to create a contemporary take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth,” he stated.
The Monan Professorship in Theatre Arts brings regionally and nationally experienced artists to teach and work at Boston College every year, according to the school’s website.
Image designed by Jared Gould using Boston College color scheme and an image of Shakespeare by Claudio Divizia. Source: Adobe Stock, Asset ID# 42292346.
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
