ENGLISH 45N: The Shakespearean Stage

Course Description

The text of Shakespeare's plays, as we now read them, are edited and concrete, stabilized in printed form. Yet, in their own moment, Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts were anything but stable; they were messy, fluid, mutable, and subject to the capricious nature of the playhouse. To uncover the production process of early modern theater, we read a selection of plays that engage in metadrama, including Shakespeare's Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, and Jonson's Bartholomew Fair.