ABSTRACT
My son Davis came to Shakespeare at an early age. In the womb, he encountered the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Georgia Shakespeare Festival, and countless video productions and classroom presentations on Shakespearean drama. His first airplane trip, at the age of three months, took him to the Shakespeare Association meeting in Washington, D. C. His passion for the bard, therefore, may not be surprising, but the range of his Shakespearean knowledge and his enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s plays is noteworthy nonetheless. Now three, he is conversant with about a dozen plays, several of the related ballets and three Shakespearean operas. 1 He enlists his friends as performers in his productions of the plays, corrects his father when he playfully misquotes famous lines, plans his own operatic versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth, and begs to see Shakespearean videos as a “special treat.” When Georgia Tech cancelled its production of “Romeo and Juliet on Ice,” he was inconsolable. In this essay, I will describe my incorporation of Shakespeare into Davis’s education at home. Loosely following the educational model of Reggio Emilia, I have provided Davis with a range of Shakespearean materials and encouraged his interest, but the primary motivation has clearly come from him. 2 In this discussion, I will begin by offering a brief overview of the Reggio educational philosophy, then I will detail some of the ways that Shakespeare has become part of Davis’s life. I will also speculate on possible reasons for the apparent positive results emanating from this exposure.
