Course description

The plays by William Shakespeare pose serious challenges for actors, directors, designers, and audiences—challenges they must solve in performance. Because Shakespeare's plays have such a long history in the theater, they offer a unique window into ever-evolving performance aesthetics. In staging Shakespeare, artists attempt both to capture what they perceive as Shakespeare's universal achievements and to increase his work's resonance for a contemporary audience. This seminar examines a history of Shakespeare in the English-speaking theater to illuminate how Shakespeare shapes theater and how theater makes Shakespeare. We read a number of Shakespeare's works, attending not to literary interpretations of the texts, but rather to the problems those texts create in performance and how artists have solved those challenges over the past four centuries. In other words, we explore approaches to staging Shakespeare and what in Shakespeare's plays makes them particularly difficult—and exciting—to stage.

Instructors

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This Harvard Medical School one-year, application-based certificate program is designed to help clinicians, researchers and allied health professionals achieve their writing career goals.

Price
$14,900 - $15,900
Registration Deadline