Performing Shakespeare

Catalog description

This course explores the alchemy of Shakespeare's performative texts from the perspectives of the reader, the actor, the editor, and the audience. It will examine "original practices"- the conditions of acting in Shakespeare's time- for example, mimicking Shakespeare's original actors, students will perform scenes using cue scripts, knowing only their character's lines and a few phrases of each cue. We will examine and construct promptbooks, learning how to mark the text for stage business and how to cut it. We will consider the practicalities and ethics of performance including casting for race and disability, performing with or against the gender binary, doubling roles, performing violence and intimacy, creating metadrama, and gaining audience complicity. Additionally we will analyze Shakespeare's poesy-rhetoric, scansion, rhymes- from the perspectives of an actor performing the language and the audience listening to it. Students should be prepared to perform scenes in class that will build to a final performance. They will be considering the plays as literary scholars, theater critics, and editors through database research, writing essays, editing scripts, and judging performance.