I tend to find that students are usually quite good at picking up the distinct elements of an essay: the general purpose of the author and the techniques of the writing. This makes for fairly good essay-writing. It’s missing something, though. What I have noticed students particularly struggle with is the link between, for example, Shakespeare’s use of metaphor in The Merchant of Venice and his actual desire to critique emerging transactional capitalistic ways of thinking he noticed were leaving people feeling unfulfilled and hollow.
I consistently find this is the biggest struggle for students as they progress to the senior years of high school. There is a missing piece here – macro techniques!
These are the wider conceptions of form and structure that constitute the ‘middle man’ between the smaller techniques in the writing and the wider purpose of the text. Macro techniques are the big choices that you’d talk about in a synopsis: Why does Shakespeare tell the story of Antonio and Portia through a comedy? Is it really a comedy? Why does Shakespeare constantly have his characters describe their love and desire through economic language? Asking the right questions helps to bridge between purpose and form. Why is the particular story the author is writing such an effective way of exploring their ideas?
Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is a story about love, told through a framework of money. The reason why it works is because theatre allows characters to speak directly, to lead the audience through their narrative. We know that Bassanio’s love for Portia belies a preoccupation with wealth and venture symptomatic of his mercantile world… because from the moment he opens his mouth, he can only express his love through economic language – of thrift, venture, and gain. This connectivity, between Shakespeare’s concerns about a world whose frameworks of understanding were too hollow to sum up the human experience, and his decision to express this through the dramatic form, and then intricately embed it into the dialogue of his characters…I love reading this in an essay. Tell me exactly why that metaphor matters!
Kate Ambrogio
