Shakespeare Seminar Invites English Grad Students to Join Them for Video Screenings

This semester (Spring 2011), Professor Sealy Gilles (Co-Chair, English) is teaching English 643 (a graduate seminar on Shakespeare).
On Thursdays, from 5:15-6:30, in the Spector Lounge (Humanities Building, 4th Floor), the seminar screens video versions of the plays they are reading/discussing.
For example, on Thursday, 2/10, is the second half (roughly) of Richard II starring Derek Jacobi.
All graduate students in
English are welcome to attend, but please note this caveat from Professor Gilles: "We will be jumping around a bit in the films as we focus on scenes that interest/puzzle us so we can’t guarantee a linear experience."
No need to RSVP and you are welcome to drop in and out.
Professor Gilles thanks Laurel Schumacher for spearheading this series.
The following is the course description for this semester's section of English 643.
ENG 643 Seminar in British Literature [Shakespeare] (Course ID# 6941)
William Shakespeare’s work is both daunting, in its scope and complexity, and an inescapable part of our cultural and literary landscape. This seminar aims in part to set the bard and his work in context by taking a look at the plays as they emerge from early modern London, a city undergoing exponential growth and beset by turmoil. By 1600, London was fast becoming Europe’s most populous city and the theaters provided its crowds with dynamic and unsettling entertainment. Much of that entertainment reflected contemporary anxieties about the vicissitudes of the human body. As we work to understand the Shakespearean stage as an urban art form, we will also be delve into the plays to explore the language of disease, the volatile presence of racial outsiders, and the constant rewriting of gender.
The seminar will be centered on six plays – two comedies, two history plays, and two tragedies. I have ordered tickets for two performances at Theater for a New Audience: Cymbeline with the Fiasco Theater Company & MacBeth, starring John Douglas Thompson (whom you may have seen in Othello last year). Both shows are on Thursday nights and we will be applying for funds to subsidize student tickets.
Course projects will include:
• A close reading of a passage or scene OR an original Shakespearean soliloquy or dialogue with a metatext linking it to passages in the plays
• A recitation of a passage from the plays.
• A research project that places a play in context: historical, critical, political, religious, or cultural OR an extended dramatic script using research on early modern London.

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