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). The Moodle password is WinterstaleWS21-22 (but of course you already know this because you are here). You will receive
further information 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.
