Shakespeare and Performance

Catalog description

This class is designed to enhance students' understanding of Shakespeare's place in the UK performance (and political landscape) through analysis of landmark productions on British stages and screens. We will apply range of scholarly approaches to these works and their lives on film and in the theatre, including close reading, performance studies, critical race studies, queer studies, and gender studies. Students will be introduced to these methodological frameworks early in the course, and are free to apply any of them in their assignments. Throughout our exploration of these canonical works, we will consider how today's theatre and film makers, as well as their audiences, engage with these plays to make new meanings and interventions in contemporary culture. Central to our discussion will be an interrogation of the place of Shakespeare in contemporary British culture, chiefly through analysis of performances of his plays and those of his contemporaries in major national institutions: Shakespeare's Globe, the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the BBC, and the mainstream film industry. At the same time, however, we will be equally concerned with how marginalised groups, including minority ethnic and queer artists, have turned to Shakespeare's plays in order to reposition his works, and themselves, on the global and political stage. These in-class discussions, supported by study-group preparation, will prepare students for the written assignments, which are designed to allow students to interpret these plays and their theatrical/filmic afterlives, with a particular focus on the social and political implications of staging and screening these plays in today's diverse British society. Each week, students will be expected to have read the set text (a play by either Shakespeare or his contemporaries) and, in one of three 'study groups,' to have engaged with…