Professor Alexander Huang, Director of Dean’s Scholars in Shakespeare and Associate Professor of English, George Washington University

Seminar Description

Voodoo Macbeth? Heir apparent of the Denmark Corporation in Manhattan? A pair of star-crossed lovers from feuding families selling chicken rice in Singapore? A world-class and truly global author, Shakespeare continues to be the most frequently performed playwright. In the past century, stage, film, and television adaptations of Shakespeare have emerged on a wide range of platforms. The multilingual World Shakespeare Festival during the 2012 London Olympics brought global Shakespeares home to the U.K., and beyond the Anglophone world, his plays and motifs are present in the performance cultures of Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Asia/Pacific, Africa, Latin America, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, and far-flung corners of the globe. In fact, the history of global performance dates back to Shakespeare's lifetime. What is the secret of Shakespeare’s wide appeal? Has Shakespeare always been a cultural hero? How do directors around the world interpret such timeless tragedies as Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, As You Like It, and Romeo and Juliet? This course examines the aesthetics and techniques of interpreting Shakespeare, with an emphasis on the conversations between Shakespeare's modern collaborators. Specifically, the course considers the tensions between claims for originality and poetic license, text and representation, and between interculturalism and nationalism. Special consideration is given to the cultural history of the Shakespearean corpus. The final list of plays and productions will be sent to students prior to the start of the session.

Texts

A reliable edition of the Complete Works (Arden, Oxford, Pelican, Riverside, New Cambridge); Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (Routledge); Alexander Huang, Chinese Shakespeares (Columbia). Optional: The Tempest app for iPad (http://luminarydigitalmedia.com/). We will also be using English-subtitled films in the open-access archive Global Shakespeares, ed. Alexander Huang and Peter Donaldson (http://globalshakespeares.org/), as well as other books, online resources, and videos that will be on reserve at Lincoln College Oxford.

Schedule

Week 1 How to Do Things with Shakespeare

Peter Holland, “The Theatrical World,” William Shakespeare--Romeo and Juliet (Penguin, 2000), pp. ix-xxiv
Alexander Huang, Prologue and Chapter 1, Chinese Shakespeares
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, chapter 1

For Reference Only


Sarah Hatchuel, Shakespeare, from Stage to Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004): ch. 1 “Shakespeare, from stage to screen: a historical and aesthetic approach” (pp. 1-32)

W. B. Worthen, “Performing Shakespeare in Digital Culture,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 227-247

Katherine Rowe, “Medium-Specificity and Other Critical Scripts for Screen Shakespeare,” Alternative Shakespeare 3, ed. Diana Henderson (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 34-53

Mark Thornton Burnett, “Appropriation,” Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader, ed. Ewan Fernie Ramona Wray, Mark Thornton Burnett, Clare McManus (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), pp. 145-210

Week 2: Romeo and Juliet in America and Gender Identities

Watch before class: William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, dir. Baz Luhrmann (Library; highlights on VITAL)

Reading
Courtney Lehmann, “Strictly Shakespeare? Dead Letters, Ghostly Fathers, and the Cultural Pathology of Authorship in Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.2 (2001), pp. 189-221
Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, chapter 2 (forms)


Watch before class: Chicken Rice War, dir. Chee Kong Cheah (DVD in the Library; highlights on VITAL)

Reading
Introduction to the Penguin edition of Romeo and Juliet
Introduction to Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace, ed. Alexander Huang and Charles Ross (Purdue UP, 2009).




Week 3: King Lear and the Question of Redemption

Watch before class: Ran by Kurosawa Akira (Full video on VITAL)
Watch before class: Lear Is Here, dir. WU Hsing-kuo (Full video on VITAL)
Bilingual Lear, dir. David Tse (Full video on VITAL)

Reading
Introduction to the Penguin edition of King Lear
Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, chapter 3 (adapters)
Huang, Chinese Shakespeares chapter 7
Coppèlia Kahn, “The Absent Mother in King Lear”. In Rewriting the Renaissance

For reference only (videos and texts)
The King is Alive, dir. Kristian Levring (Library)
King Lear, dir. Grigori Kozintsev (Full video on VITAL)
Multilingual Lear, dir. ONG Keng Sen
Alexander Huang, "Asian Shakespeares in Europe: From the Unfamiliar to the Defamiliarised." Shakespearean International Yearbook 8 (2008): 51-70


Week 4: Othello and Racial Identities
Watch before class: Othello, dir. Oliver Parker (Library)
Stage Beauty, dir. Richard Eyre (excerpts in class)

Reading
Introduction to the Penguin edition of Othello

Watch before class: "Che cosa sono le nuvole?" (What are the clouds?), an adaptation of Othello directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1967), available on YouTube:
Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLgw66mhZSI&feature=related
Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H67u4ZEA_WE&feature=related
Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuWjshXeUac&feature=related

Othello, dir. Geoffrey Sax online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1JKyvryCrc   (excerpts in class)
O, dir. Tim Blake Nelson (excerpts in class)
Huapango, dir. Ivan Lipkies (excerpts in class)

Reading
Ania Loomba, “Othello and the Racial Question,” Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism

For reference only (video and text)
Thunderbolt (dir. Tunde Kelani, Nigeria, 2001)
Alfredo Michel Modenessi, “Of Shadows and Stones: Revering and Translating ‘the Word’ Shakespeare in Mexico.” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2007)
Sonia Massai, "Subjection and redemption in Pasolini's Othello." In World-wide Shakespeares: Local appropriations in film and performance, ed. Sonia Massai (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 95-103.


Week 5: Macbeth and Desire

Watch before class: Scotland PA, dir. Billy Morrissette (Library)
Watch before class: Lady Macbeth, dir. and perf. TIAN Mansha (VITAL)

Reading
Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, chapter 4 (audiences)
Introduction to the Penguin edition of Macbeth

For reference only (videos and texts)
Maqbool, dir. Vishal Bhardwaj (Bollywood film)
Macbeth, dir. Rupert Goold (starring Patrick Stewart)
The Throne of Blood, dir. KUROSAWA Akira (VITAL)
Kingdom of Desire, dir. WU Hsing-kuo (VITAL)

Robert Hapgood, “Kurosawa’s Shakespeare Films: Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well, and Ran,” Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television, ed. Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells (Cambridge UP, 1994), pp. 234-249

Week 6: Hamlet in the World

Watch before class: The Banquet, dir. FENG Xiaogang (Library)
Watch before class: Hamlet, dir. Michael Almereyda (VITAL)

Reading
Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, chapter 5 (contexts)
Introduction to the Penguin edition of Hamlet


Reading
Huang, Chinese Shakespeares, Epilogue
Huang, ed. Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue with online film clips, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (2009), <http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/&gt;

For reference only
Laura Bohannon, “Shakespeare in the Bush,” Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, eds., James Spradley and David McCurdy (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1971).