Shakespeare and Performance

• Credit value: 15 credits at Level 6
  
• Convenor: to be confirmed
• Assessment: to be confirmed

Shakespeare’s plays arguably only exist as such when encountered not as books but as present-day live performances; but such has been their author’s status as a keystone of our notions of writing and the literary that no corpus of drama has been so haunted by recurrent anxieties about authority and authenticity.

In this module we focus on the recent stage history of three plays which the modern and post-modern stage has found especially fruitful:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Hamlet
• The Tempest.

You are advised to familiarise yourself with the texts of these plays before the start of the module (for Hamlet, ideally in the three-text Arden edition, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, 2005-06). You will also be required to attend two live performances as well as undertaking historical and theoretical reading.