Global Shakespeares: Re-Creating the Merchant of Venice

Learn how performance of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice provides occasions for creative, thoughtful communication across personal, historical, and cultural boundaries on topics including language and theatricality, gender relations, and religious prejudice.

Global Shakespeares: Re-Creating the Merchant of Venice

Learn how performance of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice provides occasions for creative, thoughtful communication across personal, historical, and cultural boundaries on topics including language and theatricality, gender relations, and religious prejudice.

William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright on the globe; this course brings his play The Merchant of Venice into the 21st century by comparing multiple recent performances, from film and television stagings to an international production that marked the first performance of the play in the former Jewish Ghetto of Venice, Italy. Students will:

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This course provides a rare opportunity to see how artists and performers today grapple with a play that is dramatically challenging in its mixture of comic and tragic elements, as well as its portrayal of gender relations and ethnic and religious prejudice. Along the way, Students will learn to read and understand Shakespeare with the help of recorded vignettes on historical and theatrical context by scholars and theater professionals, as well as performance tutorials and reflections delivered by the actors themselves.

Students will also put into practice what they have learned, recording and producing short performances of selected scenes or speeches, and will be asked to consider and reflect upon how their choices foreground questions of historical context, gender relations, and/or the variability of dramatic modes.

This course is of interest to anyone interested in Shakespeare and the theater, those who want to learn about the history of Shakespeare’s life and times, or those who desire a greater understanding of dramatic performance and their own creative process. This module may also function as an instructional aid for educators at the high school and university level with a focus on adapting Shakespeare for the theater or screen.

Image by: Cathleen Nalezyty

What you'll learn

  • Acquire clearer understanding of your own creativity and self-analysis
  • Read challenging material and express your thoughts in oral and written communication
  • Increase your consciousness of ethical, historical, political and artistic issues in what you read, hear and see
  • Encourage your understanding of Shakespeare, especially as an occasion for communication across personal, historical, and cultural boundaries

Prerequisites

None

Meet your instructors

  • Featured image for Diana Henderson
    Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Featured image for Michael Lutz
    Lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Who can take this course?

Because of U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) restrictions and other U.S. federal regulations, learners residing in one or more of the following countries or regions will not be able to register for this course: Iran, Cuba, Syria, North Korea and the Crimea, Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic regions of Ukraine.