Welcome to ECU's Fall 2024 seminar on Shakespeare! This course will explore why Shakespeare
continues to be the most-performed dramatist worldwide (even in languages other
than English!), and why, like Jane Austen’s novels, you can change almost
everything in the text and the play will usually survive intact. To understand
this, we will attempt to uncover the unique DNA of Shakespeare’s writing,
by examining five key texts (both comedies and tragedies) and some of their
big-screen adaptations. Ultimately, I want to discover what is more important
for Shakespeare: the story or the words? The setting or the characters? His
time or our own? As Stanley Wells suggests in the quote above, Shakespeare
seems to have done more than write plays; he created a mythology of language
and character. So why do we still believe in his work, even if most people don’t
particularly know or like it? Why does Shakespeare still haunt our 21st
century American lives?Make sure to buy a copy of the five plays we're reading in class (any edition, though Folger is the most helpful IMHO): The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest. We'll also be reading a supplementary text, Wells' William Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction, which will help us contextualize where these plays came from, and whether or not they are still tied to their distinct moment in the past. The bookstore is currently out of this latter text, but assures me that new copies will arrive this week. Stay tuned!
NOTE: The posts below this one are from previous semesters, and though they won't reflect the work we're doing this semester, feel free to browse!
