Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century

English 208   •   Cornell University   •   Spring 2009   •   4 credits

What can we learn about Shakespeare's plays from their reception in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? What can we learn about modern cultures from their appropriations of these texts? We will study four or five plays and their adaptations in film and theater and explore the uses made of Shakespeare in education, advertising, and public culture and by the "Shakespeare industry" itself. For spring 2009: Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, and Tempest, together with plays by Tom Stoppard and Aimé Césaire, films directed by John Madden, Julie Taymor, Laurence Olivier, Grigori Kosintsev, Peter Greenaway, and Fred Wilcox, the musical Kiss Me Kate, and the Reduced Shakespeare Company's The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). This course may be used as one of the three pre-1800 courses required of English majors.