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Murder, madness and marching trees, encounters with witches and narrow escapes, dark prophecies, a ghost, madness, death in various shapes and forms, a battle and a coronation – Macbeth has it all. This course will combine a close reading of this play with attempts at hands-on acting. We shall consider historical and cultural contexts as well as questions relating to the staging Macbeth, both in Shakespeare’s time and today. We shall also look at works of art (mainly paintings) inspired by Macbeth and cinematic adaptations, including a Japanese and a Bollywood version.
Please buy this edition and none other: William Shakespeare (edd: Pamela Mason and Sandra Clark), Macbeth, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (Bloomsbury), ISBN: 978-1904271413)
You will need the text from the first week of the seminar, so buy your book as soon as possible and start reading. Do not waste your money on other editions without substantial annotations as these would be useless for the purposes of this course. Useful background knowledge on key cultural and literary contexts of Shakespeare’s time can be found here: Christoph Heyl, Kleine Englische Literaturgeschichte. J.B. Metzler. ISBN-13: 978-3476045096.
Requirements: Good preparation for each session (as always: think, enjoy, annotate, and look up things if necessary), active participation, including quite a bit of sighing and screaming, and of course doing any amount of wild, exciting and outrageous things on stage. You will get a chance to turn into a witch, a tyrannical Scottish king, his sleepwalking, murderous wife, an outrageously funny gatekeeper and a wide variety of other characters. Health warning: may contain small parts. There will be walking trees.
Just in case your application is rejected by the LSF system: If you want to do this course because you are genuinely interested, you will be most welcome, no matter what LSF says. Please get in touch with claudia.hausmann@uni-due.de who will enrol you manually. The worst that might happen to you is that you cannot do a Leistungsnachweis if you lack the formal requirements.
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