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A faithful wife and a madly jealous husband, a baby cruelly abandoned on the shores of a far away country that does not really have a coast, a murderous (and perhaps also rather funny) bear, a love story, a bit of confusion and an undead queen: The Winter’s Tale has it all. This course will give you an opportunity to engage in a close reading of this play. 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 this tragedy.
Please buy one of these two editions and none other: William Shakespeare (ed.: John Pitcher), The Winter’s Tale. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (Bloomsbury), ISBN 9781903436356 or William Shakespeare (ed.: Stephen Orgel) The Winter’s Tale. The Oxford Shakespeare, ISBN 978-0199535910. 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. Very 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: Thorough preparation for each session, active participation, including quite a bit of sighing and shouting plus doing any amount of wild, exciting and outrageous things. You will get a chance to turn into a jealous king, an innocent queen, a living statue or a roaring bear. Also anything that might be required according to yor Modulhandbuch / Studienordnung. As always: think, enjoy (!), annotate, and look things up if necessary.
Depending on the further development of the pandemic, this seminar may or may not be taught face to face on campus. Our worst-case scenario is that we will have to continue in online mode. This is not ideal, but the last three semesters have shown that it is doable, and that there are ways of turning your Zoom window into your stage. In any case teaching will be in real time, so do not double-book this time slot.
Please join the seminar´s Moodle room (Exit, pursued by a bear: William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale). You will receive further information, including the Moodle password, via e-mail. Please make sure to use and check your official university e-mail addresses at all times. Do not use any other addresses, and do not have e-mails sent to your university address forwarded to other addresses. Our experience in the last semester has shown that using non-university addresses / forwarding mails will lead to our messages bouncing back in very many cases.
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. |
