Shakespeare and the City

Catalog description

Although Shakespeare was born and raised in the rural English countryside, his career took off in London, a city that experienced massive political, economic, and environmental changes over the course of the sixteenth century. By 1600, London had a conspicuously outsized population and had developed into a major domestic and international center of trade. How did Shakespeare and his contemporaries make sense of this new metropolitan center, and how did it affect their understandings of the social roles and identities of its inhabitants? Unlike many of his fellow playwrights, Shakespeare never set his plays in the version of London where he lived and worked, so what idea of 'the city' seems to emerge from Shakespeare's dramatic worlds? We will answer these questions by reading six of Shakespeare's plays, each set in a city that might seem far from early modern London in both time and space, alongside contemporary plays, poems, and pamphlets that represent London's everyday people and places in intimate detail. As we trace these historically-situated representations of the city, one of our goals will be to clarify the role of the theater 'as both medium and institution' in creating fictions that continue to speak to the problems of urban life today. To that end, we will take a group field trip to see at least one Shakespeare production in New York, and we will meet with representatives from the Red Bull, Fiasco, and Public Theaters to explore the role of Shakespeare in the current New York theater scene.