HONR209R: Mr. Shakespeare Goes to Hollywood

Honors College Spring 2013 Online Course

HONR209R: Mr. Shakespeare Goes to Hollywood
  Kimberly Coles, Department of English
  TBA (WEB ONLINE)

With the success of Shakespeare as a screenwriter, this online course will explore Shakespeare in film. Through readings of Shakespeare plays and their cinematic adaptations, we will consider whether (and how) the storytelling is aided, or inhibited, by the conditions of filmmaking—and indeed how Shakespeare himself has become our contemporary. In spite of Jonson’s claim that “He was not of an age, but for all time,” Shakespeare had a very local habitation. What precisely is interesting about Shakespeare, then, is not that he is “timeless” but how—and perhaps more importantly, why—he is reinterpreted at various times. A sustained inquiry of the course will be the various media, in different periods, in which Shakespeare has been produced. Assignments will involve comparing printed play-texts with the various filmed versions and thinking about the choices made as Shakespeare is produced in a medium he never could have imagined. Filmmakers will include: Kenneth Branagh, Akira Kurosowa, Baz Lurhmann, and Orsen Welles.

The class is entirely situated in an online environment, and students will be assessed on their participation in class discussion (conducted on discussion board), blog entries and collaborative work. Students will be asked to write short response papers and three essays of 4, 6, and 8 pages respectively.