This website aims to support the educational dimensions of John Webster’s play, The Duchess of Malfi, which will be staged in summer 2014 at Uranium Madhouse in Los Angeles.
Although this website is primarily aimed at teachers, it may offer audience members background information on the play, the playwright, and the theater company. Instructors who have the opportunity to teach John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi will find pedagogical pathways suited for a large variety of educational contexts. They can use and modify these pathways to support their students as they see, read, and discuss the play. The activities featured in these classroom suggestions help young people engage with issues that are still contemporary to our world. Students develop a critical appreciation for how the Jacobean stage expressed these issues about 400 years ago — in a language that is for many native speakers of contemporary English somewhat foreign and framed by an entirely different cultural context.
This website was not produced by a group of students specializing in English literature as one would intuitively assume, but rather by graduate students from a variety of fields within the humanities with an expressed interest in education. Specifically, this website was developed in the context of a graduate seminar on “Literary Reading in a Second Language” offered by Per Urlaub at the University of Texas at Austin in spring 2014. The digital teaching materials that we produced for The Duchess of Malfi are grounded in evidence-based principles associated with second language reading research. The project provided hands-on materials development and a service-learning opportunity for the graduate students. This website explores approaches to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama — often a challenge for both students and teachers due to its linguistic, temporal, and cultural distance — through pedagogies developed originally in the context of second language acquisition and transcultural studies.
We hope that you find these materials interesting and helpful, and that you and your students gain as many fascinating insights into John Webster’s world as we did while developing this website. If you have questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact Per Urlaub