London - EN225/405 - Shakespeare in Context

EN225/405  Shakespeare in London

London, England

Summer: Offered Annually

"All the world's a stage," laments Jacques in As You Like It, "and the men and women merely players." It's a statement that presents us with the question of the place of the stage not just within Shakespeare's London but in ours as well. This course will take you across the Atlantic to London and Stratford-upon-Avon to explore just that. What is the place of the stage today? Are players merely players (in Shakespeare's time and ours, in Shakespeare's London and ours)? What is the place of Shakespeare in the globalized, digitally-mediated, international world of today? These are just some of the questions we will be considering as we read, watch, and perform Shakespeare this summer.

This class will introduce students to the work of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, by experiencing productions of his works, and by exploring the cities and the countryside where he lived and wrote. In addition to introducing students to the particular constraints and demands of the theatrical medium and to the cultural particularities of early modern England, we will attend a number of productions and thus seek to raise the question of how a dramatic text has (and can be) adapted. What kind of an interpretation of a text is a dramatic production? Are there limits to interpretation? What are the particular challenges to editing the early modern dramatic text? What is lost when a scene is cut? What are the politics of a performance? How do performances differ and how are they the same? Are they ever the same?

These and other questions will serve as the lens through which we consider the questions of performance and performativity in general, alongside a detailed discussion about the historical and cultural positioning of the theatrical representational space.

Course led by Prof. Steven Hayward