Anthony Harding | 20 seats available
Mondays, 1:00pm — 3:00pm
January 29 — March 5 (5 sessions; no class Feb. 19)

Shakespeare has changed. Whether you were in high school five, fifteen, or fifty-five years ago, you’ll have noticed that Shakespearean productions have recently taken on a very different look.

At one end of the spectrum, Shakespeare on the wide screen with bright colours, A-list actors, exotic locations, and spectacular CGI. In a radically different category, productions in post-industrial spaces such as disused factories or warehouses, with minimalist scenery (or none at all), playing to large and enthusiastic audiences.

Look closer and other, still more significant changes become apparent. The number of female directors working in professional theatre in major cities has increased: Emma Rice, Phyllida Lloyd, Julie Taymor, Deborah Warner and many others have directed ground-breaking, controversial productions of Shakespeare, in some cases with all-female casts. Women are also more often playing prominent, traditionally male roles: e.g. Helen Mirren as “Prospera” (in the 2010 film version of The Tempest, directed by Julie Taymor); Maxine Peake as Hamlet (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 2014); Glenda Jackson as King Lear (Old Vic, 2016).

All-male productions have also challenged our assumptions about fixed gender-roles in Shakespeare, and have unsettled some received views of the plays. In 2002, Mark Rylance’s all-male Twelfth Night at Shakespeare’s Globe made headlines. An all-male Taming of the Shrew (Propeller Theatre, 2013) prompted one critic, Carol Chillington Rutter, to remark that only an all-male Shrew could have so effectively exposed “male supremacism,” wryly adding that “no woman was harmed in the making of this production” (Rutter 2014, 409).

Shakespeare has gone global in ways that could not have been anticipated thirty or forty years ago. The 2012 “World Shakespeare Festival” in London brought companies from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe to perform Shakespeare in twenty or more different languages. This Festival’s production of Julius Caesar, directed by Gregory Doran with an all-black cast and set in an unnamed “modern African state,” provoked widespread discussion.

Changes in performance practices, both in live theatre and in film, have had an impact on the work of critics and scholars, altering and broadening their understanding of the ability of these plays to engage audiences in the twenty-first century. Studies of Shakespeare’s plays now take current performance practice into account far more frequently than was the case twenty or thirty years ago. Conversely, directors and actors have paid attention to new critical approaches: for example, gay and queer criticism, revealing “a Shakespeare who would have astonished audiences in the 1950s but delights them in the new century” (Dusinberre 2003, xvii).

Today’s scholarship generally starts from the principle that Shakespeare learned his craft by immersion in the world of Elizabethan theatre, accepting that his plays cannot be fully understood without a working knowledge of both the practicalities of Elizabethan-era entertainments (for the court, and for the wider public), and the highly fraught political and religious climate of the time. The 1590s were turbulent: far from being the peacable kingdom of the “Gloriana” myth, the country was troubled by political squabbles, tensions at court, an exchequer depleted by war expenses, and a beleaguered monarchy. And, as Michael Neill wrote recently, Elizabethan audiences “were not passive consumers but active participants in the creation of a play” (Neill 2016, 29).

This five-week course will begin with an introduction to the new developments in the performance and critical understanding of Shakespeare. We will then take a closer look at a comedy (As You Like It) and an early history play (Richard II), and discuss how these plays – both as texts and in performance, in the hands of innovative actors and directors – can not only challenge modern audiences to re-examine their assumptions about “Shakespeare,” but work as a means of reformulating notions of gender, vice and virtue, political power, and the dramatic arts.

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Sources:

Dusinberre, Juliet. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, 3^rd edition. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Neill, Michael. “Out of the Ossuary”. London Review of Books, 14 July 2016. 28-9.

Rutter, Carol Chillington. “Shakespeare Performances in England 2013.” Shakespeare Survey 67: Shakespeare’s Collaborative Work. Ed. Peter Holland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 396-438.

Anthony Harding

Anthony Harding taught English literature at the University of Saskatchewan from 1974 to 2005, and now lives in Wolfville. He has a BA from the University of Manchester and a PhD from Cambridge.  He continues to study and write about the literature of the early nineteenth century, recently contributing a chapter on religion and classical mythology in Keats’s poetry to John Keats in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017).