‘Henceforth this isle to the inflicted be/ A place of refuge, as it was to me:/ … On my retreat, let Heav’n and Nature smile./ And ever flourish the Enchanted Isle.’ So Prospero in the Dryden-Davenant adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest bids farewell to the island. Nineteenth and early twentieth century critics like Hazelton Spencer and George Odell measured adaptations like this one against what they considered to be ‘original’ Shakespeare texts and found them ‘defiled,’ almost ‘like a rouged corpse—a thing too ghastly to conceive of.’ More recently, adaptations have been studied as products of particular social, political, or theatrical conditions, or as examples of implicit Shakespearean criticism. We will concentrate on adaptations of a select group of plays— Macbeth, Henry V, The Tempest, King Lear, and Hamlet—which will provide us an opportunity to consider the notion of an ‘original’ Shakespeare text, to reconsider various explanations for the existence of multiple versions of some of his plays, to examine some Restoration and eighteenth century adaptations, and to consider motives behind current adaptations of Shakespeare in the theatre, on film, and in the culture at large.
Requirements. Collaborate with a colleague in leading a discussion on one of the scheduled seminar topics. Write a critical essay on any subject related to Shakespeare adaptations (any period--any medium). The course is adaptable to a wide variety of interests and methodologies.
Books: Course Pack + your own edition of Shakespeare’s collected works. If you do not own an edition, you might find an older one at a used book store. For our purposes, the best student editions are Riverside, Bevington, Pelican, and the old Penguin. The Norton is useful for the parallel texts of Q1 and F1 of King Lear. Avoid editions that do not discuss how their texts were constructed or which have no notes.