ENGL 519

Spring 2024 All Classes

All Classes

Seminar in Shakespeare

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Credit: 4 hours.

May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: A college course devoted entirely to an aspect of Shakespeare's work or consent of instructor.

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ENGL 519 class schedule data for spring 2024
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	46619	Lecture-Discussion	AS	3:00PM -5:50PM	R	135 English Building	Stevens, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/16/24-05/01/24 Section Info: SP24 - ENGL 519 - Seminar in Shakespeare - Andrea Stevens - Shakespeare Criticism - We all know the role Shakespeare continues to occupy within the Western canon. In this graduate seminar, I would have us concentrate on Shakespeare the actor and playwright who made his considerable living writing for the London professional theater from roughly 1580 to 1611. The city of London, Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the physical spaces of the Globe and the Blackfriars playhouses, and any number of material and cultural factors—props, music, special effects, audience expectations—shaped the plays Shakespeare wrote and consequently inform the printed play editions that we now read. Our study of Shakespearean ‘original practices’—the key theatrical conventions and staging conditions that existed in Shakespeare’s time—will allow us to see Shakespeare’s plays as living documents intended for performance. Emphases will include an attention to the plays in their earliest moment of composition, rehearsal, performance, publication, and reception, as well as to the production histories of Shakespeare’s plays. This focus on production history will take us from Shakespeare’s time up to the present moment: that is, many of Shakespeare’s plays have been in continuous production for 400 years, including recent popular film adaptations, and not just in the English-speaking West. What does this history of performance, adaptation, and revision tell us? Do the plays continue to offer us insight into the social world we ourselves inhabit? What can we learn from more recent discussions of ‘color-blind’, cross-gender, and cross-racial casting practices? Do we find any of Shakespeare’s plays to be ‘exhausted’? This graduate seminar offers, moreover, two streams for students: one for folks specializing in the early modern period and/or Shakespeare and one for students who are taking this class more out of general interest or for reasons of period coverage (that said, every student has the option of choosing which of those two streams best suits their research plans for Spring semester 2024). Students outside of the department of English must seek instructor approval before enrolling. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.