Dr Ben Morgan

Introduction

It’s very easy to be scared of Shakespeare: the most famous writer in English, an icon of literary difficulty. He’s a writer who attracts strong feelings, of love, scepticism, resentment, admiration and curiosity. He’s the object both of fascination and conspiracy theory. Maybe you’re a lover of his work – or someone who’s made nervous by the noise around it. But this course is intended for anyone, from long-time Shakespeare readers to those who’ve always been more unsure but would like to know what the drama is about.

This course is based in Oxford, but it involves a trip to Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford on Avon, where we see one of Shakespeare’s plays performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The course also asks us to set aside our preconceptions about Shakespeare and see his works with fresh eyes. We look at visual materials from Shakespeare’s time – the Globe theatre he wrote for, for instance. How did it look? How did the plays sound? What was it like to see them in situ? And what about the artworks they’ve inspired – not just famous performances but films, novels, and portraits?

We also look in depth at the texts themselves, reading them together and exploring, at the level of the speech and the line, what they have to say to us – about political power, gender relations, citizenship, marriage, mourning, love. Throughout the course students immerse themselves in his primary texts, and in the felt and seen world of early modern England. But they also have the chance to interrogate the texts from contemporary perspectives, bringing their own specialisms and interests to bear.

WEEKLY TUTORIAL AND SEMINAR PROGRAMME

Week 1 – Early comedies

In this week, we look at the whole idea of comedy in Shakespeare. The genre insists lovers move towards marriage, but what is the value and meaning of marriage in these plays, and what about those who are left out? How acute, and how radical, is Shakespeare’s reading of conformity and community in these plays? And what about the relationship between comedy and tragedy? After all, Romeo and Juliet is full set to be a comedy until half-way through, when a lost message sends the play tumbling into a different genre altogether. From The Merchant of Venice to his famous Veronan lovers, we look at Shakespeare’s early efforts to reimagine genre, the language of romantic love, and the politics and economics of life in the city, from marriage market to trade and commodity. Students can ask questions about love, about the depiction of feeling onstage, about the rhetoric of romance, or about the nature of economics – that’s how wide Shakespeare’s lens is.

Week Two – Power, leadership and theatre

How does Shakespeare imagine power? What are his recommendations for the right way to run and organise a society? Is he a monarchist, or something more complicated? And, as a writer who represents the collapse of political order, what is his reading of what sustains, and undoes, that order? These questions might seem historical but they are really, for Shakespeare, questions of theatre and performance – how we perform our belief systems, the rituals, processes and personalities that sustain our political norms.

This week, we look at plays which depict transitions of power, and the personalities and belief systems they throw into relief. From the charismatic, but flawed, Richard II, who over-presumes on his divine right as king, to the brilliant, unstable Coriolanus, who fails to respect the values of the Republic, how does Shakespeare depict the world of politics? We look at speeches which think about violence, the body, and war. We ask: what is the role of outsiders in these plays, from women, often excluded from political power and office, to the poor and dispossessed? And – in a world where theatre was a key arena for playing out these ideas – how dangerous was Shakespeare’s writing, and how might it work for today’s complex, restless public sphere?  

Week 3 – ‘Problem’ plays

Is Shakespeare sometimes trying to provoke our impatience? A lively and brilliant subgenre of Shakespeare’s writing, the so-called ‘problem plays’ are recognised now as among the most modern and provocative of his works. They seem to mark his confrontation with the limits and frustrations of genre – the marriages feel forced, the sexual politics troubling, the endings notoriously odd. What is Shakespeare exploring and expressing in plays which refuse fairytale endings, or critique their own heroes and heroines? In Measure for Measure, a Puritanical politician is revealed as a corrupt predator; in All’s Well that Ends Well, a woman’s fixation on an unwilling man makes her manipulate everything and everyone to force him into marriage. What are we to make of these strange anti-fairytales, and how do they renegotiate the idea of generic category itself?

Week Three – Mature comedies

Some of Shakespeare’s most widely performed plays, Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing are enchanting but complex dramas. They revisit the preoccupations of the early comedies with gender roleplay and the relationship between comedy and tragedy, but with arguably an even greater sophistication of tone and form. We look at Twelfth Night’s fascinating mixture of grief and laughter, reading it as an exploration of the balance between mourning and hope. We look at Viola, its protagonist, as gender pioneer, and also as migrant, arriving in a new society and negotiating its norms. We look at Antonio and Sebastian as a hidden love story which cannot quite speak its name – but strikingly, more or less does. Much Ado also allows us to ask – how can we reconcile freedom with the commitment of marriage and romantic love, and how do two people create the private world, rhetorical and imaginative, that is marriage? Or – we ask – does the play regard romance sceptically, as a thin veil over a world of misunderstanding and even violence?

Week Four – Tragedy

Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Lear – is there a more famous sequence of plays in history? In discussion, we decide together which of the plays to focus on this week. The choice is wide – from Macbeth’s fascinating study of witchcraft and the supernatural, to Othello’s profound exploration of race, gender and violence, to Lear’s study of the nature and meaning of familial love, as well as Hamlet’s famous investigation of revenge, interiority and the nature of tragic form, this is a rich, deep week for which the previous three weeks have well prepared you. The table is set, and, in ongoing discussion with each other and with me, the choice is yours!

Week Five – Late Shakespeare

What is a late style? What does it tell us about the work at the end of an author’s life, and how does it reflect back on the work that came before? Do Shakespeare’s late plays have a teleology – that is to say, do they show he was going somewhere, had an intellectual or artistic destination (the traditional view)? Or are they something else – an attempt to reconcile with the demands of a changing Jacobean theatre, a theatre that may well have been leaving Shakespeare and his generation of writers behind? This week, we will look at The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, examining the way the plays stage the idea of being, and feeling, (too) late. Events in The Tempest happen after the main action of usurpation and exile, which has to be narrated, a ‘mouldy tale’ or source text for the action. Throughout these plays, characters seek impossible reconciliations, often across generations; the playwright, too, thinks about time and destiny.

Primary Bibliography

Note: while all these plays will be discussed at various points, and we will read excerpts together, it is only required to specialise in, and write on, one per week for each student.

All’s Well that Ends Well                             Richard II                                          Much Ado About Nothing

King Lear                                                       Measure for Measure                  The Merchant of Venice

Othello                                                           Romeo and Juliet                           The Tempest                    

Twelfth Night                                                The Winter’s Tale

We recommend the Complete Works produced by Arden, who also do very good play-by-play individual texts, with useful introductions to each play. If this is hard to get hold of, then the Oxford edition (ed. Taylor and Wells) is also excellent. Oxford’s Worlds Classics do good play-by-play editions too.