Global Shakespeares Honors

Catalog description

Shakespeare’s plays have been staged around the world, made into novels, films, ballets, musicals, and operas, set in the Wild West, medieval Japan, fascist Italy, and on fictional planets, blended with Bollywood Cinema, Chinese Opera, Zulu dance and Japanese Noh Theater. But what does it mean to incorporate the work of the canonical Western playwright into global artistic practice? Studying a handful of Shakespeare’s plays - both directly and in adaptation - we examine issues of race, gender, colonialism, disability, and religion, and confront the real-world violence behind these representations. While some suggest that the Western canon, with Shakespeare at its center, has been used primarily as a tool of cultural oppression; might reinventions of Shakespeare also be seen as acts of liberation or rebellion? Exploring these issues in both theory and practice, this course includes both the traditional scholarship of reading and analysis, and creative practice, as students will produce their own short film interpretation/adaptation of selected scenes.