Shakespeare.

Catalog description

Throughout his extraordinary dramatic career, Shakespeare wore many masks: lover, misogynist, royalist, traitor, poetic genius, racist and, most emphatically, double-agent. Nothing could be more evocative of the many faces of William Shakespeare than his unrelenting afterlives on screen. In this course, we will focus on the ways in which Shakespeare’s characters – specifically, bastards, moors, and whores – instantiate and disturb categories of “difference” that otherwise exist to shore up the boundaries of the “normal”. These profoundly non-normative characters, often deemed secondary or minor, are in many cases the unacknowledged engines of the plot, as well as envoys of the message (particularly in their contemporary cinematic incarnations) that the lechery and treachery afoot in Renaissance England is alive and well in the tribalism of our own times. ( DVSY , FILM , GE2A , GEDI , GELN , GEND )