SS Course 2009: "All the World's a Stage": Actors, Artists and the Shakespeare Phenomenon

Course 231
Date: Monday 26–Wednesday 28 January
Time: 3.30 pm
Full Price: R162,00 Staff: R81,00 Reduced: R40,00

"All The World's a Stage": Actors, Artistsm and the Shakespeare Phenomenon
Presented by Angela Lloyd, freelance historian, writer and lecturer

At the time of his death in 1616, Shakespeare was only one of several successful writers for the stage, less well-connected to the court and society than his contemporaries Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and therefore with a lesser reputation. Yet within a century he had outstripped them all, and today his impact is universal. This three-lecture course will suggest how that happened.

The particular focus will be on Shakespeare as a man of the theatre: actor, manager, proprietor, and above all playwright. It was through his plays that his reputation grew, and it was actors and artists who brought to life the ‘infinite variety’ of his stage world.

After the Restoration, theatre flourished, and new techniques of printing made the work of artists accessible to an ever-increasing public. The course will trace the great actors and managers of the 18th and 19th centuries, the plays they presented, the roles they chose, and the way they were depicted in works of art by artists of their day. The plays themselves will be explored, for they provided themes for paintings, political, satirical, or narrative, and became a limitless source of inspiration for the Romantic Movement.

In the 21st century millions visit Shakespeare’s birthplace, while the Bard straddles countless websites. David Garrick, trudging through the mud after his disastrous Great Shakespeare Jubilee, would have been amazed to know what forces he had set in motion.

LECTURE TITLES

1. ‘My picture is my stage’: David Garrick with Hogarth, Hayman and Zoffany.
2. ‘All the splendour of the stage’: John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons, with Reynolds, Lawrence, Blake.
3. Imagination à la Shakespeare: Romantic Europe, Imperial Britain and the ‘Universal Genius’.
   
   

SS Course 2009: Fantastical Magical Shakespeare

Course 213
Date: 26–30 January
Time: 9.15 am
Full Price: R270,00 Staff: R135,00 Reduced: R70,00

Fantastical Magical Shakespeare

Presented by Nigel Bakker, School of Education, University of Cape Town

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest have been subject to many interpretations. Some studies argue that they are pre-eminently plays of magic and fantasy, farce and romance. But recent interpretations have suggested that there are much darker ways of ‘making sense’ of them. This course will look at these two of Shakespeare’s most frequently staged plays by exploring them primarily as scripts rather than academic texts: moments of theatre that need actors and audiences to become the theatrical experiences for which they were created. In that context, some interpretations might seem to offer no sense at all, while others may provoke ways of seeing that enrich a production for a modern audience.

LECTURE TITLES

1. ‘Of imagination all compact’: Shakespeare and the theatrical imagination.
2. ‘This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard’: What makes A Midsummer Night’s Dream funny?
3. ‘Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief?’ Evil patriarchs? Wife battering? Bestiality?
4. ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’: The theatricality of The Tempest.
5. ‘Sounds and sweet airs’: Renunciation and reconciliation.
   

Recommended reading

• Butler, M. The Tempest. Penguin Books, 2007.
• Holland, P. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Orgel, S. The Tempest. Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Wells, S. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Penguin, 2005.