Founding Pedagogies of Modern Drama

Abstract

Celebrating the importance of pedagogy in the founding editor’s original vision for Modern Drama, this article begins and ends with a memoir of A. C. Edwards, who taught Marvin Carlson, the author’s future doctoral mentor, and later the author himself at the University of Kansas. “In our days,” Edwards wrote in the Foreword to the first issue of this journal in May of 1958, “it is too often assumed that research is the handmaiden of publication, whereas, as we all know, scholarly research may be done only in order to improve one’s teaching.” He practiced in his classroom what he preached. Trained as a medievalist in Old English philology at the University of Iowa, Edwards taught the dynamic relationship between written and spoken words, not only in Chaucer and Shakespeare but also in modern drama. A key technical challenge for modern dramatists, philologically understood, is how to represent unspoken thought. At this Henrik Ibsen excelled, and others have followed. Reading for “subtext,” therefore, becomes both a compelling pedagogical approach and a rehearsal method, as demonstrated here by three first-hand accounts of faculty-directed student productions of plays by Ibsen and Suzan-Lori Parks.