Global Shakespeare

About

How and why are Shakespeare’s plays performed, filmed, read and taught from China to Chile, from Singapore to South Africa? What makes Shakespeare a “global” force? Shakespeare's plays display the vast panoply of human desires and emotions: from passionate love to bewildering fear, from unswerving loyalty to basest envy, from the noblest instances of self-sacrifice to the desire to inflict unspeakable pain. His depictions of these emotions are often shocking in their vividness, yet always recognisable as fundamental facets of human experience. This course will look at Shakespeare’s afterlives in different parts of the world, and include hands-on workshops in which we will try out different possible ways of interpreting “global” plays like Antony and Cleopatra.

Course leader

Professor David Schalkwyk

Target group

Undergraduate students

Course aim

This course aims to introduce students to a range of recent developments in Shakespeare’s afterlives around the globe, allowing them:

to understand the global cultural exchange and globalization more generally as a force in the dissemination of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century;
to grasp the ways in which Shakespeare's plays themselves engage with worlds beyond early modern England as a way of exploring and representing Shakespeare's own world;
use global theory and criticism to analyse and interpret a range of Shakespearean (and other early modern) texts;
understand the history of the theory of tragedy and its significance for understanding Shakespearean tragedy in a globalized world;
read Shakespearean texts closely, in a historically and theoretically informed way, and convey such interpretations in appropriately scholarly forms of discourse and writing in the light of the latest available research findings.

Fee info