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Shakespeare: Text, Script, Performance, Performance History

ENGL 597.401
instructor(s):
T 9-12

This course examines the scholarly enterprise of "stage-centered analysis" by considering the ways that contemporary theatre artists make theatre events out of older, canonical scripts. What is the relation of script to performance, and of printed text to playhouse script? How do scholars understand and analyze contemporary performance? How does our scholarly understanding of historical performance--both the original performance, and subsequent performance in the intervening centuries--affect contemporary performance and how we write about it? Using Shakespeare and his contemporaries as the test case, we will examine scholarship about playhouses and stage conventions, and theories of early-modern subjectivity, acting, and performativity, and consider these issues as they are manifest in contemporary theatrical theory and practice.

fulfills requirements