Human-Sciences - Course - SHAKESPEAREAN STUDIES

This course will allow students to study the dramatic potential of Shakespeare's plays through comparison of vastly different readings, re-writings and stagings, beginning with examination of how far Shakespeare's playwriting was in keeping with practice in his own time. The approach will demonstrate how individual scenes, settings, characters, and even the whole conception of a 'play' can be invested with radically different significances depending on the agendas of critics, directors and actors; agendas which are themselves subject to larger cultural factors. This course will also examine the representation of economics in the drama of Shakespeare, and a few of his contemporaries, from 1590-1610, when London theater was flourishing as a business and England was beginning to emerge as an international economic power. The course may also read Shakespeare in relationship to Feminism / New Historicism. Focus of course and selection of texts may vary from year to year according to instructor.