This is a course on Shakespeare’s career, given at Brandeis University in the spring of 2010, by William Flesch. It covers several representative plays from all four genres: comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. We consider both the similarities and differences among those genres, and how his more and more radical experimentations in genre reflect his developing thought, about theater, about time, about life, over the course of his career. In terms of texts, any complete Shakespeare will suffice, including this free version online from MIT. The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, is also recommended.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "The Taming of the Shrew" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "The Tempest" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

This is a teacher and students' resource pack for Shakespeare's The Tempest. The resource is for the F.E.T phase, grade 10-12. It contains summary notes and resources for constructive engagement by both students and teachers.

“Tragedy” is a name originally applied to a particular kind of dramatic art and subsequently to other literary forms; it has also been applied to particular events, often implying thereby a particular view of life. Throughout the history of Western literature it has sustained this double reference. Uniquely and insistently, the realm of the tragic encompasses both literature and life.
Through careful, critical reading of literary texts, this subject will examine three aspects of the tragic experience:    

the scapegoat
the tragic hero
the ethical crisis

These aspects of the tragic will be pursued in readings that range in the reference of their materials from the warfare of the ancient world to the experience of the modern extermination camps.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Hamlet" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of King Lear to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Macbeth" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Othello" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Romeo and Juliet" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Twelfth Night" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

This workshop is an introduction to how actors build characters and relationships, transforming the written words to actions and presence on stage. Students will explore Shakespeare’s use of words, rhythms, and language in Twelfth Night through activities that exercise vocal acting skills. This resource contains a Short Video with the actors discussing this topic, an example in the Full Workshop Video, an Excerpts Video containing examples from the full play, and a walk through in the Lesson Plan.

Expose middle school students to a first taste of Shakespeare from the angle of the ghost story and launch into the subject of verbs. In this lesson, they learn how Shakespeare uses verbs to move the action of the play. Students then distinguish generic verbs from vivid verbs by working with selected lines in Hamlet's Ghost scene. Finally they test their knowledge of verbs through a crossword interactive puzzle.

Poster for Federal Theatre Project presentation of "Will Shakespeare" at the Hollywood Playhouse, Vine at Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, Calif., showing portion of a building, possibly the Globe Theatre.

This reading looks at utilizing Shakespeare and theater to examine modern day violence.

This lesson asks students to dig into a select scene to examine the complex and stereotype-defying character of Lady Macbeth.

This lesson serves as a pre-reading activity for the play, Macbeth by William Shakespeare with a focus on gender roles and the portrayal of women in this famous play.

Adaptation is a vital topic of study because students, like texts, are always already in process of adapting themselves to their environments. Texts and students change over time according to place, ideology, expectation, medium. New Haven’s achievement gap concerns me like so many other teachers in New Haven: I propose to involve students’ subjectivities and political alertnesses with studies of power and violence, here in Orson Welles’ and Akira Kurosawa’s adaptations of Macbeth . My students have always responded passionately to the play, particularly to the questions of gender it invokes. I propose to study shifts in power and gender roles in the play and the two films. I expect students to finally locate themselves, their imaginations, their critical lenses, their ideologies, their roles, their subjectivities as these elements play themselves out in the narratives I have chosen.

This semester, we will read writing about travel and place from Columbus’s Diario through the present. Travel writing has some special features that will shape both the content and the work for this subject: reflecting the point of view, narrative choices, and style of individuals, it also responds to the pressures of a real world only marginally under their control. Whether the traveler is a curious tourist, the leader of a national expedition, or a starving, half-naked survivor, the encounter with place shapes what travel writing can be. Accordingly, we will pay attention not only to narrative texts but to maps, objects, archives, and facts of various kinds.
Our materials are organized around three regions: North America, Africa and the Atlantic world, the Arctic and Antarctic. The historical scope of these readings will allow us to know something not only about the experiences and writing strategies of individual travelers, but about the progressive integration of these regions into global economic, political, and knowledge systems. Whether we are looking at the production of an Inuit film for global audiences, or the mapping of a route across the North American continent by water, these materials do more than simply record or narrate experiences and territories: they also participate in shaping the world and what it means to us.
Authors will include Olaudah Equiano, Caryl Philips, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Joseph Conrad, Jamaica Kincaid, William Least Heat Moon, Louise Erdrich, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.
Expeditions will include those of Lewis and Clark (North America), Henry Morton Stanley (Africa), Ernest Shackleton and Robert F. Scott (Antarctica).