Global Shakespeares

Catalog description

Shakespeare's works are continually being reinvented in global popular culture evident in an explosion of comics, dance, film, radio, television, and new media adaptations. How did 'Shakespeare' become a global phenomenon? We will study the dissemination of Shakespeare's plays across a range of cultures. Our focus will be on Shakespeare's modern afterlives in different parts of the world, and the course will center questions of race, gender, sexuality, generational conflict, ecological catastrophe, and political intrigue. In addition to acquiring a close understanding of select plays, students will reckon with the theoretical and methodological issues attendant on a study of Shakespeare, adaptation, and "global" culture. Forcibly exported along with the ideology and practices of empire, Shakespeare's works have become an index for the complex histories of colonialism and postcolonialism as well as a crucial site for studying the invention of universalizing ideas of 'the human.' We will consider the relationship between the spread of English as a global language and the development of Shakespeare as a global author; the tension between the so-called "universal values" expressed in Shakespeare's plays and the local meanings of their staging; the challenges of translating content from one language to another; and the transfiguration of linguistic to visual, musical, and other media. Plays will include Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and The Tempest . Authors and directors may include James Baldwin, Sulayman Al-Bassam, Vishal Bharadwaj, Alan Brown, Aimé Césaire, Chloe Gong, Tayeb Salih, Shyam Selvadurai, Janet Suzman, Feng Xiaogang, and Derek Walcott.