Introduction
Rediscovering familiar texts with new students who bring fresh eyes to the endeavor remains for me one of the great pleasures of teaching literature in high school. Working with students who confess their initial insecurity about sharing their responses to Elizabethan dramas, I find it helpful to remember, as a colleague once noted, "what it was like the first time reading Hamlet and finding two Hamlets in the play." Nonetheless, those first confusions and early epiphanies generate the enthusiasm that allows young readers, viewers, or listeners to overcome their hesitations about "the classics" and to engage in the conversations around the seminar table and across the spans of time and imagination. As their explorations evolve, however, I borrow Lillian Hellman's definition of pentimento and ask students to practice "seeing and then seeing again," hoping their tentative conceptions will compete with later choices. Not surprisingly, discussions involving comparison and contrast provide prime opportunities for rethinking ideas, testing theories, and questioning assumptions. Thus, the following discussion materials represent my attempts to encourage students to challenge their views more fully.Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.Lillian Hellman
Pentimento
In designing the juxtapositions, I tried to apply the standards suggested by Dr. Albert Rabil, the director of the 1998 NEH Summer Institute entitled "Worlds of the Renaissance." Rabil asked that the projects not simply reflect each participant's interest and classroom needs but that they also offer suggestions to other teachers in similar situations. Finally, following the interdisciplinary nature of the institute, I endeavored to broaden my approaches beyond the literary texts I will use in teaching a senior Shakespeare seminar and a junior American literature course in the 1998/99 school year.
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