Daily Archives: 16 January 2014

Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Text, Performance, and Culture – Free Online Short Course

Shakespeare’s Hamlet: text, performance and culture online course starts this week courtesy of Futurelearn. It is planned and delivered by the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford and features many of their expert Shakespearians.

About the Course

Started on 13 January
Duration: 6 weeks, 4 hours per week

This course introduces the many ways in which Hamlet can be enjoyed and understood. Six weekly videos discuss the play’s fortunes in print, and its own representations of writing and theatre; its place in the Elizabethan theatrical repertory; its representation of melancholia and interiority; its fortunes on the modern stage; its appeal to actors; and its philosophy.

Course Requirements

A basic ability to read and understand Hamlet is a must for all students. Otherwise, a curiosity about this play and why it has remained such an important and iconic element in Western culture for four centuries is the sole prerequisite for the course.

Professor Richard Strier, University of Melbourne, Free Public Lecture

University of Melbourne, Free Public lecture
“Mind, Nature, Heterodoxy, and Iconoclasm in the Winter’s Tale“, Professor Richard Strier (University of Chicago)

Date: Friday 24 Jan 2014
Time: 2:30–3:30PM
Venue: Room 106, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne**

The argument of this presentation is that the mind’s independence from determination by reality is presented as the source of tragedy in The Winter’s Tale. Richard Striers argument is that the play treats this issue with philosophical precision but also with an overwhelming sense of pathology. The realm of “belief” is the focus. This realm is shown to be both a source of terrible danger and a source of potential redemption, and the play provides a mechanism for moving from one to the other. The relation of nature to the mind turns out to be the heart of the play’s religious as well as its philosophical dimension.

Richard Strier is the Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor emeritus from the English Department, Divinity School, and the College of the University of Chicago, is the author of The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (2011) – which won the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Literary Criticism – Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (1995); and Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (1983).

He has co-edited a number of interdisciplinary collections including, most recently, Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation Among Disciplines and Professions (with Bradin Cormack and Martha Nussbaum); Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England (with Derek Hirst); Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540-1688 (with Donna Hamilton); The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576-1649 (with David L. Smith and David Bevington); and The Historical Renaissance: New Essays in Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (with Heather Dubrow). He has published essays on Shakespeare, Donne, Luther, Montaigne, and Milton, and on formalism and twentieth-century critical theory.

**Professor Richard Strier will also be delivering this lecture at the University of Sydney (4 Feb.)