(A slightly different version of this essay appeared as "Teaching Shakespeare on Computers," Computers and Texts, Oxford University Centre for Textual Studies, 1991: 4-6. For other ideas, Michael LaMonico's essay about teaching with Word Cruncher can be found here. Christy Desmet's teaching materials can be found here. Finally here's a link to the WordCruncher homepage.)

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Like many English Departments, the University of Georgia had used computer-assisted instruction (CAI) in writing courses, but not in literature courses. Word processing software helped improve students' writing because of the ease with which they are able to plan their essays, check mechanical errors, and revise. The department had not used computers in literature courses, however, because no software seemed appropriate to help teach critical analysis of literary texts. Henry Kisor says about word processing and style check programs:

Such software is useless for literary texts . . . That's because computers are logical machines that follow strict rules, and English is often illogical. Much good literary writing often breaks the rules. Besides, sophisticated prose employs such difficult-to-quantify devices as irony, metaphor, and idiom. (Chicago Sun-Times, Feb. 7, 1988)

In the late eighties, I (Teague) started daydreaming about a computer-assisted literature class. Ideally, in such a literature classroom, a program would allow an instructor to identify patterns of imagery quickly, help a class to find key terms easily, or permit a student to locate a key quotation and insert it into an essay. With assistance from the university's Office of Instructional Development, I was able to try out such a program in a Shakespeare class.

In the summer of 1990, the University of Georgia offered a special computer course in Shakespeare's early plays. For the course, I assigned a standard print edition, the Riverside Shakespeare, an electronic text of that edition (from Electronic Text Corporation), and a text retrieval and analysis program (ETC's Wordcruncher). Patsy Worrall volunteered to assist me in teaching the class. Students also had access to an easy word-processing program. Our experience with this course was terrific: the students learned more about Shakespeare than they would otherwise have done. And we learned an enormous amount as well.

The Wordcruncher software allows students to find words and phrases in an electronic text. It offers students information at three levels. The first is a concordance, which shows each word in a group of plays and tells how often it is used. At this level students can request a word, a word list, or combinations of words and phrases. The second level shows a word or words in context. It identifies the act, scene, and line where the highlighted keyword(s) occur. On the third level, the student can read the text of the play. The program also provides frequency information and an easy way to seek absence; thus, if some element isn't present when students think it should be, they can try to figure out why it's not there. The program allows students to copy passages quickly and easily.

Our class, a mixture of upper-division and graduate students, read the plays on their own in the printed textbook. They also used that textbook at home and in several regular lecture sections each week. In addition, we met twice a week in a networked computer classroom, where students had access to the electronic text, to do exercises on particular plays or work on independent research projects for a term essay.

The first problem that we faced was introducing students to the software and showing them how to make effective use of it. It soon became obvious that the class sessions alone did not provide enough time, so we had to schedule extra time in the classroom. Viewed negatively, computer aided instruction does not save time because students do less work; rather it leads them to do more, either to master the system or to try out new ideas. The positive side is that students want to spend longer and to do more than the minimum amount of work.

The class exercises were designed to make students familiar with certain literary topics that we then discussed in the computer classroom sessions. Here is one of the questions that we gave on Hamlet; it illustrates the kind of work that students did (*, of course, tells the machine picks up all variants of each word):

To look at disease imagery, enter this word list: corrupt*, diseas*, envenom*, infect*, mildew*, pois'n*, poison*, ulcer*, venom*. Next look at the list of frequencies. Is Hamlet unusual among the tragedies in the number of such images? If you move the light bar, you'll see where the words occur in that play. Can you account for the distribution of the terms, i.e., why no disease references occur in the early part of play? Consider your own reading; are there such images that this list would not pick up?

Once a student has worked through this chore, a lecture about what's rotten in the state of Denmark makes a lot more sense.

When we did Romeo and Juliet, students found examples of figurative language--paradox, light-dark imagery, personification--that we then discussed in a lecture on Shakespeare's rhetoric. Moon imagery and its inconsistencies provided the basis for A Midsummer Night's Dream exercises. In Henry IV, part one and Henry V, the exercises were thematic, and students tracked down references to honor and to family relationships (father-son relationships in the first play and brothers in the second.) The examples of classroom exercises may not seem esoteric, but in some ways the exercises provided our greatest challenge.

Essentially, we had to learn to teach all over again. As the students worked through each exercise, Patsy Worrall and I moved around to offer assistance. We became quite adept at answering ping-pong questions:

How can I find this phrase?
Why is the cursor flashing?
Why does the play define honor in different ways?
Can you help me put paper in the printer?
What's a changeling?
Don't you think movies are better than stage plays?
How can I get back to the word list?
Did Shakespeare know he was going to write a sequel?

While we were both accustomed to standing before a group and dealing with only occasional questions, we had to learn to teach on the move and handle a wide variety of problems.

In the Romeo and Juliet classes, I tried to lecture on the figurative language to a collection of students' backs because all were gazing intently at the computer screens. Without eye contact, I had no sense of whether the students could follow each point, if they were puzzled, and so on. I soon saw that I would have to teach peripatetically, moving around the classroom to peek over shoulders and see how students were doing. I also had to encourage students to swivel around, interrupt, and respond audibly, and to discourage them from simply taking notes on the material. With computers, interruptions, noise, and motion mean that education's going on.

Finally, we soon learned that if all the students did the same set of exercises, then the class was locked into a dreary sameness. The discussion consisted of choric repetition of what each point was and where it could be found. To overcome that problem, we wound up developing more than one set of exercises on each play. Thus when we reached Hamlet, students choose among exercises on the relationships among the various characters, on the play's principal events and their structural connection, and on central images patterns. Variety was essential, more so than in a regular class.

During the exercises, students covered more territory than they normally would have managed. The students seemed to like working independently and having the opportunity to speak with me on an individual basis. Often they would raise issues about the plays, or Shakespeare, or drama in general that would not have come up in a regular lecture course. Since different students did different exercises at times, every student had a chance to contribute in class discussion of the exercises.

The students enjoyed exploring the play's issues by doing exercises; in some cases students even came outside of class to finish exercises. (One student said that was the best way to prepare for the final exam.) A graduate student pointed out one final advantage to these exercises: doing the work on each play showed her ways of getting usable information from the program that she had not thought of on her own. Thus, doing the exercises allowed students a model for researching their own projects.

In addition to the computer exercises, students had to prepare an independent research project that made use of the software. The projects, like the exercises, were more varied and creative than regular term papers. Final papers included work on the "theatrum mundi" trope, the language of music, the display and use of swords, Shakespeare's saints, numerology, bawdy language, Renaissance anti-Semitism, formal and informal pronoun use, and any number of imagery studies (e.g., images of madness, dreams, roses, animals, and so forth).

The students had to think creatively for the projects; as some of them commented, they couldn't simply crank out yet another English major paper. They were also somewhat taken aback to discover that the data they turned up didn't always fit their working hypotheses. The best papers came from the students who could imagine new ways of finding information: those who relied on the lectures and "what the book said" had to re-consider their approach.

Another major benefit was that students could not think of an individual play in isolation. The way that the software is set up, they had to see each play in a larger context, as one of a body of plays. Several pushed well beyond the assigned plays. Thus half of the undergraduates drew on plays that were not assigned. Finally, the work was genuinely original research. One student planned to use his undergraduate work as the basis for a master's thesis; two graduate students have given conference papers as a result of using Wordcruncher.

I started out to see whether I could use computers in a literature class as effectively as I do in a composition class. And I can--as can any literature instructor with patience and access to a text retrieval and analysis software. The package we acquired for our department is now being used in courses on introduction to literature, American literature, and linguistics, as well as in other Shakespeare classes. Patsy and I have gone on to use different electronic texts and search engines in outher courses. What we really learned however, is a new way of thinking about literature. Just consider everything that the class achieved; the program

1. forced students to acquire and polish computer skills,
2. enabled students--and the instructors--to think creatively,
3. rewarded us all for thinking beyond a given assignment,
4. encouraged us all to do more than we really had to do,
5. pushed us to think about individual plays within a larger context.

The student evaluations of the course were quite high and most praised the innovative method. The main problems were that we had to do more preparation than we normally would have done, We had to spend more time with students than usual, and we had to learn to teach in a new style. But those problems were also the course's greatest strengths.

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