ABSTRACT
It was noted in Part 1 of the book that when Finlay-Johnson introduced her primary-school students to Act Four Scene One of The Life and Death of King John (see p. 23), what fascinated her was the imaginative props they created to represent Hubert’s implements of torture (see Activity Sequence 4 below). Finding an aesthetically pleasing solution to that problem of representation seemed enough. In one way, I argued in Part 1, the students who suggested red chalk as a means of representing a glowing instrument of torture could be said to have met Vygotsky’s criteria of ‘creativity’ because they demonstrated the ability to ‘combine elements to produce a structure’ and ‘to combine the old in new ways’ (see p. 23). The children need to do more, however, if they are to win that particular plaudit from Vygotsky. Returning to his analogy of the boy who creates a play activity in which a stick represents a horse, he argues that the stick ‘becomes a pivot for severing the meaning of horse from a real horse’. What makes this activity so important in terms of cognitive development, Vygotsky suggests, is the idea that when a child calls a stick a horse, ‘mentally he sees the object standing behind the word’. That conceptual break-through offers an opportunity to begin to access the powerful thinking tools of metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche. I would suggest that the children who chose red chalk to represent an instrument of torture have not seen ‘the object standing behind the word’. They do not appreciate the fact that the ‘particular’ (as Bolton and Heathcote might say) – the red-hot iron, which Hubert’s executioners are preparing in order to blind a child – represents metaphorically the hideous ‘universal’ of human cruelty. Simply to put on ‘black paper masks’ as Finlay-Johnson’s students do, is not enough. One of the purposes of revisiting this scene a century after Finlay-Johnson is to explore again the relationship between drama and aesthetics; and in this context, it would be useful to re-read the sections of Part 1 of the book that consider respectively the two collections of essays compiled by Abbs (1987) and Hornbrook (1998): Living Powers and On the Subject of Drama (see pp. 66-70). The activities described below attempt to engage with the same material encountered by FinlayJohnson’s students. Like them, the students addressed in these activity sequences are encouraged to use naturalistic and non-naturalistic strategies to craft aesthetically their explorations of and responses to the text. Unlike Finlay-Johnson’s students (but perhaps more like Hourd’s), however, they are also encouraged to engage with the ‘particular’ metaphorical representations of a ‘universal’ horror. They also attempt to acknowledge those claims of drama as a subject discipline voiced by Kempe and Ashwell and the call to ethical commitment voiced by Neelands. The sections of Part 1 of the book that explore their ideas should also be referenced in the context of this set of activity sequences (see pp. 67-88; 77-88). Finally, the activities described below are an attempt to explore the full implications of what the authors of A Language for Life (DES, 1975) meant when they suggested that the exchange between Antony and Enobarbus in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra remains ‘unfulfi lled’ until ‘the relationship and all its implications have been fully experienced by trying them out in a convincing setting – physical, social and emotional’ (see p. 42).
