Introductory description

Have you ever been Shakespearienced?

The likely answer is yes. If you've ever watched The Lion King or Black Panther, or listened to Taylor Swift or Radiohead, then you've experienced Shakespeare. The playwright's characters, language and plot are woven into the fabric of modern popular culture and, since he set quill to parchment in sixteenth-century England, his stories have travelled across the world, impacting on the lives of countless communities and individuals.

This impact is felt on both global and local levels and, on this module, you will have the opportunity to engage with key artists who adapt Shakespeare within such local and global contexts, including climate activists, film-makers, graphic novelists, podcasters and rappers. You will interrogate how Shakespeare, as a global playwright, can be indigenised and used as a platform for community identity and as a tool to explore contemporary issues of politics, race, class, gender and culture.

You will also be invited to explore notions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and the impact of technological innovation on the development of interdisciplinary performance forms. The dissemination of performance across cultures and technologies will be a key consideration of the module and, as a result, you will work in real time on a group practical project, create your own podcast episode and share the development of creative materials.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week 1: Welcome to the Bio-Speare

This first seminar introduces you to Shakespeare’s life as a working playwright in the local space of London and his increasingly globalised world. You will gain an understanding of the theatrical and social environments in which Shakespeare wrote and the growing diversity of Tudor England. We will also reflect on how Shakespeare’s life has been interpreted in various forms of biographical fiction across media and consider the different Shakespeares which modern creative artists produce.

Read: Del Col, Anthony and Conor McCreery (2010), Kill Shakespeare: A Sea of Troubles. Comic book series which re-imagines Shakespeare’s heroes and villains fighting to track down their author.

Watch: Roberts, Gareth (2007), “The Shakespeare Code”, Doctor Who. TV Episode of the science-fiction series in which The Doctor and Martha Jones time-travel to Elizabethan England where they meet Shakespeare.

Recommended reading: Kaufmann, Miranda (2017), Black Tudors: The Untold Story, Simon and Schuster.

Further reading:

Brataas, Delilah Bermudez (2021), ‘Gods and monsters: authorial creation in Gaiman’s Sandman and McCreery and Del Col’s Kill Shakespeare’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 12 (5): 606-629.
Hatfull, Ronan (2020), ‘“That’s One of Mine”: Upstart cannibalism in the BBC’s Shakespearean biofiction’, Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 7 (3): 45-64.
Wardle, Janice, (2019) ‘Time Travel and the Return of the Author’, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, 12 (1).

An optional screening of the Doctor Who episode "The Shakespeare Code" will be available.

Week 2: Add-rap-tation (feat. The Sonnet Man)

In this seminar, we tackle arguably the most intimidating and archaic aspect of Shakespeare's work: language. In order to do so and make the language accessible, we will focus on key sonnets which reflect his legacy as a poet, and explore how the poet's words have been embraced and reshaped by hip-hop artists and theatre-makers, such as Akala (Natives), Nas (Illmatic) and Q Brothers (Othello: The Remix). This session will pose questions about Shakespeare's legacy and cultural ownership, provoked by these artist's creative output. It will also feature the Shakespearean actor, educator and rapper Devon Glover, who works as the Sonnet Man in schools and universities across North America, including appearances for the Shakespeare in Yosemite project. He will introduce you to key methods of Shakespearean adaptation, the linguistic connections between Shakespeare and hip-hop and the important of a pedagogic approach to Shakespeare which can cross international barriers to reach both local and global learners. Glover will also reflect on his own experience as a Shakespearean learner and how, through his own pedagogic practice, he opens doors to Shakespeare through his decolonisation of the Western curriculum.

Read: Glover, Devon and Ronan Hatfull (2022), Shakespeare and Hip-Hop: Adaption, Citation, Education. Cambridge University Press.

Watch: Devon Glover's adaptations of Sonnet 18 and Sonnet 130.

An optional screening of Othello: The Remix will be available.

Week 3: Shakespeare in the Anthropocene (feat. Professor Paul Prescott and Professor Katie Brokaw)

This collaborative session with UC Merced will be jointly taught with Shakespeare scholars Professor Paul Prescott and Professor Katie Brokaw, who will discuss their creative and critical work on eco-Shakespeare through the Shakespeare in Yosemite project.

• What is the position of Shakespeare today in our rapidly changing world?
• Who are the stakeholders in the processes of change in which Shakespeare’s works is involved?
• What are the methods by which Shakespearean performance can be made to be eco-friendly?
• How does the project seek to decolonise Shakespeare through casting practices aimed at promoting diversity in Shakespearean productions?
• What dramaturgical choices did Brokaw and Prescott make in their adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known tragicomedies?

The session will invite you to present your own theories of sustainability and reflect on textual examples from Shakespeare which resonate with the concerns surrounding climate change, with a focus on Shakespeare's late romance play Cymbeline. This plays offers us the further opportunity to start questioning genre definitions within playwright's canon, given that Shakespeare traverses comedy, tragedy and history during Cymbeline.

Read: Shakespeare, William (1610-11), Cymbeline.

Watch: Brokaw, Katherine, Paul Prescott and Billy Wolfgang (2022), Imogen in the Wild. Shakespeare in Yosemite’s contribution to the Cymbeline in the Anthropocene project. Performed and film on location in the Yosemite National Park. Available on YouTube.

Recommended reading: https://yosemiteshakes.ucmerced.edu/

Week 4: Shakespeare in the Park?

This session will begin with an introduction to the many ‘Shakespeare in the park’ events which take place across North America, following the previous week’s focus on site specific, eco-friendly, event-led performance. We will then turn to how this concept provided an impetus for the absorption of Shakespeare’s work and presence into the ubiquitous pop culture event of the present moment: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This will involve interrogation of Shakespeare’s place in various entries in this blockbuster film franchise.

• Why did Marvel hire Shakespearean actor and director Kenneth Branagh to direct Thor?
• What does Tony Stark mean when he refers to Thor as ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ during The Avengers?
• How does Black Panther echo Hamlet and configure the play for a more diverse audience?

The session will invites you to explore these questions and more, exploring how Shakespeare’s work has become increasingly globalised and heterogenous for modern audiences through its presence within franchises such as the MCU. In the second part of the session, you will be invited to explore these ‘Shakespop’ crossovers in a practical workshop setting, staging extracts from plays which directly resonate with the MCU and constructing your own creative pitch of how you imagine a Shakespeare play might be adapted within a blockbuster context. The seminar will conclude with a discussion of how such ‘Shakespop’ connections were used by various companies during the Covid-19 pandemic to produce digital lockdown productions, including ‘Henry the Thorth’ by Hatfull’s theatre company Partners Rapt.

Watch: A selection of clips from the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Thor, The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World, Black Panther, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Avengers: Endgame, WandaVision and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

Read: Hatfull, Ronan (2019), ‘“Shakespeare in the Park?”: William Shakespeare and the Marvel Cinematic Universe’, Foundation, 48 (4): 45-57.

Recommended reading: Extracts from Ayanna Thompson's Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race and Contemporary America and Douglas Lanier's Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture.

An optional screening of Black Panther will be available.

Week 5: Quarantine Lear

In this seminar, we focus on King Lear, which entered meme status during the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020, due to the claim that Shakespeare wrote it whilst quarantined during the plague. The seminar follows the end of our previous session by delving deeper into Hatfull's lockdown theatre initiative Partners Rapt Read Plays and invites you to consider the role of Shakespeare during the pandemic and further examples of Shakespearean memeification. It will profile the creation of 'Jurassic Lear', a Shakespeare mash-up performed live on Zoom, and ask how artists adapted to online media during a time of isolation.

The seminar will then turn to a full-length adaptation of King Lear created during the pandemic: BEDLAM. The series, which consists of three pilot episodes that combine the play with Shakespeare's comedies The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Merchant of Venice, to produce a series which blends the playwright's words with contemporary language and draws on the atmosphere, characterisation and settings of modern prestige television such Euphoria, Succession and The Sopranos.

The seminar offers us the opportunity to:

• reflect on why King Lear spoke to the lockdown age in particular;
• explore BEDLAM's crucial repositioning of Shakespeare's play within a LGBTQ+ context;
• begin creating your own Shakespeare/pop culture mash-ups.

Read: Shakespeare, William (1606), King Lear.

Watch:

A selection of episodes from BEDLAM : https://theatrebedlam.vhx.tv/products/bedlam-series-pilot.
Champion, Emily and Ronan Hatfull (2020), "Jurassic Lear". Available on YouTube.

An optional screening of BEDLAM will be available.

Week 6: Performance Field Trip

This week, we will take a theatre trip to a local Shakespeare production. There will be an onus you to document aspects of the experience that could not be gleaned from distance, allowing you to become anthropologists and documentarians of the local. Themes of witnessing, reportage, memory, situation of self in relation to performance will be foregrounded prior to the trip. This session will encourage cultural materialist documentation of theatre spaces and invite you to produce digital images, capture audio some of the invisible givens of events and reflect on paratextual materials such as programmes, food and foyer spaces. The documentary process will feed into your podcasts.

Week 7: Shakesprep Part 1

In this first preparatory session, ahead of your Week 9 group assessments, we will begin with a discussion of the field trip and sharing of the paratextual materials gathered. I will then introduce you to a number of devising techniques, building on the examples and methods of Shakespearean adaptation studied, before you begin working on your own adaptations.

Week 8: Shakesprep Part 2

In this secondary preparatory session, you will have the opportunity to develop further and rehearse your devised practical projects and share any preliminary ideas with me and the rest of the group.

Week 9: Student Devised Practical Project

In this final session, student-devised practical projects will be shared, either in the form of live performance or recorded screenings. We will then hold a roundtable Q&A in which you will have the opportunity to discuss and reflect on your artistic choices and the adaptation process with myself and your peers.

Week 10: Shakespod (feat. Austin Tichenor)

In this final session, we will explore how Shakespeare has been reinterpreted and repackaged within audio contexts, focusing on podcasts. We will be joined by the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s Artistic Director, Austin Tichenor, who will explain the journey from the company’s six-part 1994 BBC radio series to his long-running Reduced Shakespeare Company Podcast, which has released weekly episodes since 2006. The seminar will invite you to consider how podcasts might help to make Shakespeare accessible to both local and global audiences. We'll use Tichenor’s work as a case study for how the podcast format possesses several utilities which not only bridge the gap between perceptions of Shakespeare as highbrow or lowbrow, but also to entertain and educate in equal measure. Finally, you will have the opportunity to start developing the podcasts which form the second assessment component. These may focus on any aspect of the course (e.g. your experience of attending the live performance). We will conclude by reviewing and critiquing major intellectual and cultural themes of the module.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Develop an understanding of the principles of Shakespearean adaptation for performance from a range of source materials (seeing the play in the source)
• Develop an understanding of the principles of dramatic structure, character development, conflict and theatrical environment
• Establish how local and global factors affect the processes and products of adaptation
• Create an adaptation for performance from a different genre, art form or historical event
• Conduct background research necessary to develop an adaptation
• Work collaboratively in developing an adaptation
• Prepare and deliver a presentation/podcast which develops the conversation surrounding Shakespearean adaptation
• Conduct field research which leads to the creation of a presentation/podcast
• Reflect on the creative process of adapting Shakespeare

Indicative reading list

Bennet, Susan and Christie Carson, eds. Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment. Cambridge, 2013.
Bickley, Pamela and Jenny Stevens, Studying Shakespeare Adaptation: From Restoration Theatre to YouTube. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2021.
Brown, Sarah Annes, Robert L. Lublin, Linsey McCulloch, eds. Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Bruhn, Jorgen, Anne Gjelsvik, and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen. Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Cartelli, Thomas, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. London: Routledge, 1999.
Cartmell, Deborah and Imelda Whelehan, eds. Adaptations from Text to Screen, Screen to Text. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Carroll, Rachel. Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009.
Danson, Lawrence, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare and Modern Culture. New York: Anchor Books, 2008.
Gerzic, Marina and Aidan Norrie, eds. Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptions. New York: Routledge, 2020.

Hansen, Adam and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., eds. Shakespearean Echoes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Hartley, Andrew, The Shakespearean Dramaturg: A Theoretical and Practical Guide. Basingstoke, 2004.
Hodgdon, Barbara, and W.B. Worthen, eds, Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Oxford, 2007.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Kennedy, Denis. Looking at Shakespeare. Cambridge, 2003.
Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, New York: Routledge, 2009.
Lanier, Douglas. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Leara, Margherita. Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Murphy, Vincent. Page to Stage: The Craft of Adaptation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.
Nielson, Lara D. and Patricia Ybarra, eds. Neoliberalism and Global Theatre: Performance Permutations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Purcell, Stephen. Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern Stage. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Purcell, Stephen. Shakespeare & Audiences in Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Radosavljevic, Duska. Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text Performance in the 21st Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Shaughnessy, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Taylor, Gary, Reinventing Shakespeare: a cultural history from the Restoration to the present. London, 1990.
Thompson, Ayanna, Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race and Contemporary America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Wells, Stanley and Sarah Stanton, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage. Cambridge, 2002.

Research element

All students will have the opportunity to carry out research and reflection using research tools and resources, including specialist archives, and reference material

Interdisciplinary

The object of study requires a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach, combining literary and theatre studies with national and local history, sociology, film and television studies, adaptation theory, cultural studies, intermedia studies etc. The module will be open to students from any department, but is clearly best suited to those with an interest in theatre and/or internationalism and/or cultural politics, and who want to work collaboratively.

International

Discussion of Shakespeare as a global playwright, politics of international and intercultural performance, nationalism, appropriation/adaption.
How might different global locations and media spaces affect the performance of Shakespeare?
What aspects of a production might be considered place-less/globalised?
How might the text/s be interpreted differently in order more fully to represent current concerns or regional/civic identity?

Subject specific skills

1. Extend their understanding of Shakespearean texts and the history of Shakespearean performance;
2. Deepen their understanding of how Shakespeare operates as a global force, and of themselves as 'global' learners and performers;
3. Learn to apply key concepts from areas such as translation studies, transnational and intercultural studies, and theatre historiography;
4. Enhance their understanding of how technology can be used to disseminate knowledge and develop practical performance work;
5. Apply their understanding of the relationship between theory and practice in the development of practical performance work.
6. Expand their knowledge of a different culture and reflected on its identity etc as expressed both through its relationship with Shakespeare and the nature of its higher education
7. Understand the contexts and processes of theatrical adaptation both as spectators and creative practitioners
8. Feel confident in expressing informed opinions about live performance and know where they might publish written reviews of these performances
9. Understand how Shakespeare functions as a cultural event
10. Broaden their appreciation of the multiple media across which Shakespeare's plays and poetry have been adapted for live and recorded performance

Transferable skills

1. Reflect on their own and others’ creative and analytical processes
2. Communicate with their peers and with academics both in person and virtually
3. Work within teams and successfully collaborate on projects
4. Use research tools and resources, including specialist archives, and reference material correctly
5. Articulate arguments orally and through well-argued reflective essay writing, supported by wide reading and research
6. Manage time to meet a series of deadlines as an individual and team member
7. Develop collaborative skills of listening, giving and receiving feedback, and achieving resolution
8. Make productive links between theoretical ideas and practical applications, and appreciate the practical value of learning through workshop performance
9. Solve problems creatively and with originality
10. Reflect on their own and others’ experiences as participants in a creative and international learning process
11. Weigh and compare evidence from historical and contemporary sources in order to make informed but independent judgements
12. Identify issues, formulate questions and engage in problem-solving, including own independent research
13. Imaginatively respond to dramatic stimuli (texts, films, ideas) to aid group learning and performance.
14. Critically evaluate texts and other material