Brave New World? Shakespeare 400 years on

In the last act of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Miranda who has lived her whole life in island exile, first meets a group of real, live, new people: ‘O brave new world,/ That has such people in’t!’, she says; ‘ 'Tis new to thee.’ sighs her world-weary father, Prospero, who has seen a bit too much plotting in his life.

Four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, someone, somewhere in the world is always encountering his words for the first time. This panel explores some ways in which Shakespeare continues to live and to be reinvented; it also examines the joys - and the frustrations - of living with Shakespeare 400 years on.

Deana Rankin will consider the complex ways in which Shakespeare’s words are woven through contemporary British culture and politics, from Irish-English relations to current debates around EU membership.

Preti Taneja will consider the troubled but vibrant legacy of Shakespeare in India and reads from her acclaimed new novel We that are Young, a contemporary retelling of King Lear set against the incendiary anti-corruption protests that swept across the world’s youngest and fastest growing democracy in 2012.

Wes Williams, after his recent theatre project with a youth theatre, academics and film and music makers based in Oxford, asks what Shakespeare might bring to the debates about communities, islands and border-crossings which engage so much of the world today.

This unique five-and-a-half week programme offers conservatoire-style theatre training combined with academic content delivered by experts in Shakespearean theatre and performance. It offers you the chance to develop a deeper understanding of Shakespeare's plays through a parallel approach of performance practice and academic study.

You will form a company of actors to explore a Shakespeare play, culminating in a final performance. Alongside your rehearsals with expert Directors, you will attend skills-based workshops in movement and voice, designed to equip you in your practical approach to the plays. International Shakespeare experts will deliver master classes and seminars on specialist skills (such as Elizabethan and Jacobean dance or stage combat) and the history and context of Shakespeare’s London.

During the programme, you are invited to create a reflective journal, to chart your personal experience of the programme and the ways in which you have developed a methodology for understanding Shakespeare through performance combined with study of the text. This journal is intended to help you explore and develop your performance and scholarly practice, complementing the rest of the programme.

All classes will take place at Queen Mary University of London, giving you the opportunity to experience London’s vibrant theatre scene and to explore the city in which Shakespeare lived and worked.

By the end of the programme you will have developed a deeper understanding of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as building a tool kit of practical skills in performance and scholarship that will enrich your future work on stage and beyond.

Thursday 10 March
16:00
Wolfson Research Exchange, Room 3

Dr Velda Elliott (University of Oxford)

The main post-16 qualification in England, the A level, has undergone substantial reform in the last two years. One (highly popular) qualification offers the option to study 'Elements of Crime Writing' or 'Elements of Social and Political Protest Writing', both genres with arguably recent origins. Within these options students may opt to study Hamlet or Henry IV Part 1 respectively. The question arises as to whether these choices are a convenient way to shoehorn further Shakespeare study into the qualification -a way of attracting students to the study of Shakespeare through identification with a popular genre or one which is linked to the politically active inclinations of young people. This paper explores whether viewing the plays through the lens of these genres can be helpful or interesting, and whether it is pedagogically appropriate for A level students to retrofit genre to Shakespeare in this way. These issues will largely be considered through the case of Hamlet as Crime Writing, with additional argument from Henry IV as necessary. I will also consider what the effect may be when students who have read Shakespeare in this way move on to study literature at university.