From Akiri Kurosawa to Tom Stoppard, from Giuseppi Verdi to Julie Taymor, creative artists around the world have remade Shakespeare’s plays in new media and cultural contexts. Why this enduring fascination? How have the stories been transformed by their movement across time and space? And why is Shakespeare’s rival playwright Christopher Marlowe lurking in the background? We will study the texts and remaking of Shakespeare as modes of cultural and artistic collaboration. Working with old and new media, students will gain a deeper understanding of dramatic performance, literary analysis and research methods—as well as the fun of “Shakeshifting.” Source texts to include Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Edward II and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and The Tempest; the modern field defies description.
