Giving "to Airy Nothing a Local Habitation and a Name"

William Shakespeare's Worlds of Imagination as Accessed through a Role-Playing Game

Authors

Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak University of Wrocław, Poland
Agata Zarzycka University of Wrocław, Poland

Abstract

For several decades, role playing games (RPGs) have enjoyed a growing popularity, not only with Western youth, but also with researchers in various academic fields. The interactive nature of RPGs, which involve participants actively in creating fictional plots and characters, makes them especially useful for exploring a given issue on several levels at once. We have attempted to verify these observations practically through a joint university and secondary-school project that introduces a group of students (age fifteen) to the atmosphere of William Shakespeare's writings and their historical-cultural context. Although the project is still in progress, its theoretical background has provided us with a series of theses that are presented in this paper. We discuss the process by which a RPG convention eases young adults into Shakespeare's works without resorting to conventional theatrical renderings or ready-made interpretations that leave little room for individual engagement with the plays. By encouraging students to remodel freely the original texts, the game fosters their creativeness and sensitivity. Simultaneously, the game acquaints participants with the metatheatrical experience of Elizabethan theater and with specific metafictional aspects of Shakespeare's plays — such as role-playing-within-a-role — which in turn can sensitize young players to the playwright's fascination with the difficulty involved in distinguishing between appearance and reality. Finally, the flexibility of RPG scenarios (1) allows students to engage in intertextual experiments with Shakespeare's plays; (2) underscores for them those aspects of the plays that tend to be marginalized in traditional classroom analyses; and (3) helps them to see in Shakespeare's works themes close to their personal and social experience (for example, ecological concerns, ethnic diversity, and gender issues). Hence, we conclude that the RPG convention can help young people of the twenty-first century discover that Shakespeare is still their contemporary.

Author Biographies

Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, University of Wrocław, Poland

Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak is Assistant Professor of Literature and co-founder of the Center for Children's and Young Adult Fiction at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland. She has taught courses on British literature and fantasy. She is the author of a monograph on Salman Rushdie, Rushdie in Wonderland: "Fairytaleness" in Salman Rushdie's Fiction (Peter Lang, 2004), and has published numerous articles on Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, fairy tales, and fantasy for young adults. Her research interests include post-colonialism, postmodernism, children's literature, ecocriticism, and fantasy fiction. She is also a co-editor of the collection of essays Towards or Back to Human Values: Spiritual and Moral Dimensions of Contemporary Fantasy (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006). Dr. Deszcz-Tryhubczak is a 2005 fellow of the International Youth Library, Munich, Germany. She has also received two domestic grants for young scholars from the Foundation for Polish Science. She is a member of IRSCL, the Mythopoeic Society, the Polish Association for Canadian Studies, and the Central European Association for Canadian Studies.

Agata Zarzycka, University of Wrocław, Poland

Agata Zarzycka is an M.A. graduate of the Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland. She wrote her M.A. thesis on the correlation of poststructuralist theories, social activism, and the popular novels of Karl May. Currently, she is working on her doctorate on role-playing games and investigates their connections with literature, as well as their usefulness for purposes of social involvement. She teaches courses on the theory of literature and uses of English. She is a member of the Center for Children's and Young Adult Fiction at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland.