 2012 - 2013 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 0811-1332-01 | Shakespeare in the Flesh | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FACULTY OF VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Course description
The study of performances is an essential tool in understanding Shakespeare’s drama; reading Shakespeare performances as new texts in themselves, subject to their historical and cultural moment. The proposed course will look at specific performances in the theatre or in film which will be studied in detail in terms of staging, performance, audience response, the work of the actor in rehearsal, the director and the reciprocal relationship between performance text and playtext.
Following the presentation of introductory material about the conditions of playing in Shakespeare’s theatre as opposed to the multi-media possibilities open to today’s practitioners in both film and the theatre, we will study each play in turn but also in comparison with each other with particular emphasis laid on the treatment of the body in the texts and performances studied. The course will use the critical tools at the students’ disposal (derived both from literary theory, film and performance studies) to read performance texts as contingent, unstable but richly embodied entities. Plays to be studied: Richard III, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, King Lear.