The Shakespearean Stage
Course Description
The text of Shakespeare’s plays, as we now read them, are edited and concrete, stabilized in printed form. Yet, in their own moment, Elizabethan and Jacobean play texts were anything but stable; they were messy, fluid, mutable, and subject to the capricious nature of the playhouse. In this class, we will analyze how a play is transformed through the production process of the early modern playhouse after it leaves the playwright’s hands, now influenced by extemporaneous clowns; bombastic leading men; rivalrous stage-keepers and book-keepers; mercenary theater managers; scrupulous state censors; and arbitrary patrons. No Shakespeare play is entirely authorial — something of which Shakespeare himself was keenly aware. He and his fellow playwrights responded by parodying, within their plays, actors, backstage personnel, and noble patrons who sought to bend dramatic performance to their will. We will read a selection of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays that engage in metadrama in order to understand the dynamics of the early modern stage, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, as well as supplementary materials on early modern acting companies, government censorship, props, music, and dance. Staged readings of scenes will be a routine part of class, including a class performance at the end of term in which students will take on either acting or non-acting roles.
Meet the Instructor: Caitlin Hubbard
“I am a scholar of early modern theater and performance history with interests in Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century court masque, and Restoration drama. My research focuses on the way that the practicalities and materiality of the stage space affect dramatic literature at the level of form. My current book project, Reading Between the Scenes: Spectacle as Action and Idea in Early Modern English Theater, analyzes how the evolution of theater architecture and set design throughout the seventeenth-century, including the move from outdoor to indoor theaters and the introduction of changeable scenery, formally restructured both the craft of playwrighting and the experience of reading drama.
“Originally from San Diego, where I grew up watching Shakespeare at the Old Globe Theatre, I come to Stanford after pursuing degrees at University of Chicago, Oxford, and Yale.”
