Love, confusion, a cruel duke, a fairy king and a fairy queen (yes,
plus other weird supernatural beings), a magic love-juice, a spectacular
transformation (man into ass), a play within a play, a lion who may not
really be a lion, entertaining confusion, theatrical despair and lots
of people getting married: A Midsummer Night´s Dream has it all. This
course will give you an opportunity to engage in a close reading of
this comedy. 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 this edition and none other: William Shakespeare (ed.: Sukanta Chaudhuri), A Midsummer Night´s Dream. The
Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. (Bloomsbury), ISBN 978—1-4081-3349-1.
You will need this book from the first week of the seminar. Do not waste
your money on other editions without substantial annotations as these
would be useless for the purposes of this course.
Requirements: Thorough preparation for each session, active
participation, including quite a bit of shouting, falling in and out of
love, transformations plus doing any amount of wild, exciting and
outrageous things. Depending on how we may or may not be able to get the
pandemic under control, all of this may have to be done online – but we
are going to have a go at it anyway. You will get a chance to turn into
a fairy queen, an ass or a lion (which is not really a lion), and your
Zoom window will be your stage. You also need to do anything that might
be required according to your Modulhandbuch / Studienordnung. As always: think, enjoy (!), annotate, and look things up if necessary.
The seminar will probably be conducted entirely online and entirely
in real time - it all depends on the conditions imposed by the pandemic
which are not really predictable right now. In this case, we will meet
via Zoom each week of the semester at the time of the seminar. You will
receive further information concerning the Moodle room and the Zoom link
for this course once you have registered. 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.
