Module overview
This module approaches Shakespeare from a number of perspectives. It thinks about Shakespeare now: how his plays continue to be performed and adapted, on stage and for the screen, in the UK and abroad, and about how Shakespeare is continually being reinvented by being freshly edited, abridged, translated, reworked by novelists, or reinterpreted by new generations of critics. The module also thinks about Shakespeare in his own time – the Renaissance world in which his plays were first written and performed – and about how Shakespeare approached his own past: medieval England, ancient Britain, classical Rome. The module considers how Shakespeare’s plays lived on after his death, through the closure of the theatres during the civil war, to their revival by Restoration theatre-managers, appropriation by eighteenth-century editors and celebrated nineteenth-century productions. The module will enable you to consider how Shakespeare approached his own culture, and how he has been received and remade by different cultures at different times since. You will engage with recent critical thinking about, for example, early modern playhouses and original practice; reading the medieval past in the early modern; adaptation and appropriation; the Shakespearean cultural industry; ‘Global’ Shakespeare. The module will be taught by all those contributing to the MA in a given year.