Mojo, The Bard, & Me

4/12/17

I know that you can do very little alone;

-Menenius

Coriolanus                                    Act II, Scene i, Line 35

I know you can do very little alone; for your helps
are many, or else your actions would grow wondrous
single: your abilities are too infant-like for
doing much alone. You talk of pride: O that you
could turn your eyes toward the napes of your necks,
and make but an interior survey of your good selves!
O that you could!

That’s the full quote there, those seven lines. I gave you a nice short piece of it for today’s Totally Random line, but I thought you could use the seven lines to give it better context. This is Menenius talking to two of the tribunes (representatives) of the people, Sicinius and Junius. It’s pretty obvious that Menenius has a low opinion of these two guys he’s talking to. And he’s right, because they are pretty sleazy. They are politicians and Will has embodied in them all the things that we don’t like in politicians. Not that all politicians are bad. But these guys are.

You know what is a little curious though, is this thing about turning their eyes toward the napes of your necks. What’s up with that? An interior survey of your good selves, I get that. But eyes toward the napes of your necks?

And this leads me to a little bit of an epistle. Get comfortable.

One of the things I remember from my MAT program (that’s masters of teaching program) was the idea that one of the best ways to go about teaching is to make the subject matter the center of the classroom. In a sense, to take the subject matter, whether it’s Shakespeare, or the area of a triangle, or the atomic weight of wheat (okay, not sure if that last one makes sense), and literally or figuratively put it in the middle of the class and gather round it. And then take turns talking about it, questioning it, or just poking at it. As a teacher you should be doing some poking too. And yes, helping out a bit if you know a little more about the subject matter than the rest. This is in stark opposition to making it a teacher centered classroom where you’re just lecturing and the students are supposed to be paying attention to you.

With that in mind, my point is that Menenius’s seven lines today are a perfect example of how poke-able Shakespeare is. Why would you turn your eyes toward the napes of your neck? Why does Menenius have such a low opinion of politicians. These lines, and the questions I’m raising about these two lines,  are the kind of things that you can toss out into the middle of the circle and start poking. If you stop and look at these little things in the play, in the text, you can find some really interesting stuff. Shakespeare is so incredibly full of interesting stuff. Some of it’s very obscure, like the nape of the neck thing. And some is incredibly relevant and relatable to our world, like the politician thing.  

So that’s my epistle. It’s too bad I don’t have any teachers reading this blog, huh?

Here's my guys going at it again. They are just crazy about this play. That's Jerry, on the left, playing Sicinius and staring at Junius's neck. I coached him a bit on this one because I told him I wanted to put extra emphasis on the neck staring thing. He just took it and ran with it. Beautiful!