待補Shakespeare’s plays have generated an “infinite variety” of passionate responses over the last four centuries. They have been continually adapted and reinterpreted, generating new experiences and ideas all around the globe. This course invites you to join the ongoing conversation about these multi-faceted texts. As we explore Shakespeare’s different dramatic genres, we will think together about a wide range of human experiences: the nature of love and friendship, the encounter with death, the influence of literary tradition on our lives, questions of justice and political order, and differences of race and gender. To properly understand how Shakespeare represents these issues, we will learn about the political, social, economic, and religious world of Shakespeare’s England.

Above all, we will approach Shakespeare as a man of the theater. We will learn about the theater buildings where his plays were first performed, about the actors who first performed them, about the audiences who paid to see them, and about the publishers who first got them into print. We will thus analyze the plays as scripts for performance, thinking both about the original conditions in which Shakespeare worked, and the possibilities for contemporary performance inherent in the plays.