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This course is a study of the dissemination of Shakespeare’s plays across a range of cultures and sites from the early seventeenth century to the present, with a focus on the development of Shakespeare as a “global” author. Concentrating our attentions on three plays, Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest, we consider: 1) the intersection of Shakespeare’s plays with early modern “global” culture; 2) live stagings of Shakespeare’s plays outside of early modern London; 3) the textual network in which Shakespeare’s plays have been disseminated; and 4) the electronic networks which have facilitated the dissemination of Shakespeare’s plays to unprecedented numbers of people worldwide.

In addition to acquiring a close understanding of the plays both in their earliest and selected subsequent cultural moments, students will be introduced to the following set of issues: the relationship between the spread of English as a global language and the development of Shakespeare as a global author; the tension between the purportedly “universal values” expressed in Shakespeare’s plays and the local meanings and motivations of their staging or refiguring; the shifting economies and ideologies of cultural production and transmission; the conceptual and practical challenges of transferring content from one language to another; and the transformation from linguistic to visual, musical, and other media, as well as the role of these media in the production of meaning in a given cultural moment.