| Description: | Shakespeare, the greatest English-language dramatist of all time, set approximately one-fourth of his plays in Italian cities such as ancient Rome, Verona, and Venice. He had good reason to be so interested in Italy: Romeo and Juliet is a great love story, but also has much to say about the tensions between family and community allegiances in Renaissance Verona. The Merchant of Venice depicts the heartbreak of a fabulously flawed character, but also sheds light on racial and ethnic tensions in Venice, a city at the crossroads of the Eastern and Western worlds. In this course, we will focus on a small selection of the "Italian plays", also reading the source materials that inspired them to see how Shakespeare combined truth and fiction, past and present, for dramatic effect and social commentary. Treating these texts not simply as literature, but as blueprints for performance, we will perform scenes in order to come to a more complete understanding of what the plays say to us about Italy, Elizabethan England, and about our own times as well. |