The course surveys the major works of William Shakespeare thought to be produced in the reign of King James. Our focus will be performance spaces: the Renaissance theater in England, Shakespeare’s Globe and Blackfriars, and (this being Shakespeare after 1603) the space of modern cinema, where the playwright’s most enduring Jacobean works are adapted, translated, and transformed. We will cover at least three of the great tragedies – Macbeth, Othello, King Lear – along with a late-career romance, a “problem play,” and films by Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, and Derek Jarman. The course will conclude with a short foray into the spaces of digital Shakespearean performance on the web and in contemporary video art.

Jeffrey Todd Knight