ENGL 240 - Shakespeare

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Study of some representative comedies, histories, and tragedies.

Topic for 2020/21a: Shakespeare Through Performance. This course emphasizes the performance of Shakespeare’s plays as an act of collaborative meaning-making, both in Shakespeare’s time and in our own. We discover how the conditions of performance in early modern theaters shaped the construction of Shakespeare’s plays, and how those plays made their way from stage to page. We explore how contemporary productions remake the plays’ meanings for new audiences, focusing on representations of gender, race, religion, sexuality and disability. And we perform Shakespeare ourselves, learning through experience how the language works on our bodies and minds, and how the play texts work as scripts for performance. At the end of the course we look at some contemporary efforts to make Shakespeare accessible to diverse performers and audiences. Each student completes a research project on the production history of one play, focused on a particular issue or problem in interpretation. Leslie Dunn.

Not open to students who have taken ENGL 241-ENGL 242.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS

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