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To be or not to be in this seminar – that is not the question if you are interested in drama and if you like Shakespeare. Murder and madness, passion and poison, an ex-widow and ex-students from a German university: Hamlet has it all. This course will give you an opportunity to immerse yourselves in a close reading of this play, combined with a great deal of hands-on acting. We shall consider historical and cultural contexts as well as questions relating to the staging of the play, both in Shakespeare’s time and today. We shall also look at cinematic and other adaptations and works of art inspired by Hamlet.
Please buy this edition and none other: William Shakespeare (ed.: Ann Thomson and Neil Taylor), Hamlet. Revised Edition. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (Bloomsbury), ISBN 978-1472518385. 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. A great deal of background knowledge of 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. You will get a chance to turn into a confused and tormented prince, a ghost, a young woman going mad, a gravedigger … and these are just some of the options.
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. |
