Shakespeare at the Movies

Shakespeare wrote for the page and the stage, but the last century has taken him to the movies. This course introduces his language and theatrical imagination through their translation into films, from Romeo and Juliet in Verona Beach to Macbeth in feudal Japan. We will take up Shakespeare's great subjects-love, tyranny, revenge, redemption-while developing our powers of attention to the forms of three media, writing about the plays, acting them out, and making short films of our own as we go. We will study the performance conventions of his time and ask whether there was such a thing as cinematic imagination before the invention of cinema.