The Shakespearean Stage

The texts 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 primary source theatrical documents alongside plays that engage in metadrama, including Shakespeare's Hamlet, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. We will then use this knowledge to adapt and perform Hamlet as a full-class production.