ENGL 312, Shakespeare: Plays

Royal Shakespeare Company production. Captured live in Stratford-upon-Avon, this adaptation evokes imperialism at its most grandiose, creating a vivid spectacle from the conspirators’ extreme act of violence.

Gregory Doran relocates Shakespeare’s tale of power and corruption to post-independence Africa. Featuring an entirely Black British cast, this screen adaption based on the Royal Shakespeare Company production acquires timely urgency in its modern setting.

BBC Studios. Cast: Richard Pasco, Charles Gray, Keith Michell, Virginia McKenna, David Collings, Sam Dastor, and more.

MGM Film. Cast: Features John Gielgud, James Mason, Marlon Brando, Greer Garson, Deborah Kerr, Louis Calhern and Edmond O'Brien. Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz

Presents a performance history of a controversial play, moving from its 1599 opening all the way into the new millennium with particular emphasis on its twentieth- and twenty-first-century incarnations on stage and screen.

This book explores traditional approaches to the play, which includes an examination of the play in light of current history, in the context of Renaissance England, and in relation to Shakespeare's other Roman plays as well as structural examination of plot, language, character, and source material. Julius Caesar: Critical Essays also examines the current debates concerning the play in Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, queer, and gender contexts.

Audio version. Digital Theatre+ in association with LA Theatre Works.

Context of the play, about the playwright, plot summaries, characters, themes and more.

Royal Shakespeare Company production. Shakespeare’s romantic comedy gets a modern-day makeover with music, cross-dressing and physical comedy in this energetic production from the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Captured live in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2019, Kimberley Sykes’ production invites audience participation as the ensemble brings the Forest of Arden to life.

As You Like It .... is reimagined here with darker, more sombre undertones.
This production was captured by Digital Theatre live at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s temporary space, the Courtyard Theatre, in Stratford upon Avon. It was directed by the RSC’s then Artistic Director, Michael Boyd, and starred Jonjo O’Neill as Orlando and Katy Stephens as Rosalind.

Cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, Kevin Kline, Alfred Molina, Brian Blessed, Romola Garai, Adrian Lester, Janet McTeer, David Oyelowo

BBC Studios. Cast: Tony Church, Arthur Hewlett, Dame Helen Mirren, Brian Stirner, Richard Pasco, and more

This edition provides a detailed history of the play in production, both on stage and on screen. The introduction examines how changing conceptions of gender roles have affected the portrayal of Rosalind, one of Shakespeare's greatest comic heroines. The striking differences between the British tradition and the freer treatment the play has received abroad are discussed, as well as the politics of court versus country. The commentary, printed alongside the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the text, draws on primary sources to illuminate how costuming, stage business, design, and directorial choices have shaped the play in performance.

Bedford Shakespeare Series

Audio version. Digital Theatre+ in association with LA Theatre Works

Characters, plot summary, language, context, playwright and more.

Royal Shakespeare Company production. Captured live in Stratford-upon-Avon, Simon Godwin's fresh retelling, set in an unnamed African state, sees Paapa Essiedu shine in the title role, becoming the first Black actor to play Hamlet for the RSC.

Summary: Called "the greatest Hamlet of his generation" by Guardian reviewer Robert McCrum, Scottish actor David Tennant headlines this edgy film version of the acclaimed 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company stage production. Tennant is supported by a host of gifted players-including the impeccable Patrick Stewart as Claudius and Oliver Ford Davies in an astonishing performance as a doddering yet strangely leonine Polonius. Modern costumes, shrewd textual abridgements, and a recurring motif of high-tech video surveillance all connect the play to 21st-century anxieties, but these attributes in no way eclipse Tennant's forceful mixture of rage, sorrow, and manic humor.

BBC Studios. Cast: Sir Derek Jacobi, Claire Bloom, Sir Patrick Stewart, Eric Porter, Lalla Ward, and more.

Critical contexts, critical readings and resources.

The guide includes: an introductory overview of the text, including a brief discussion of the background to the play including its sources, reception and critical tradition; an overview of the narrative structure; chapters discussing in detail the representation of the key characters including Hamlet, Gertrude and Ophelia as well as the more minor characters; a conclusion reminding students of the links between the characters and the key themes and issues and a guide to further reading.

Audio version. Digital Theatre+ in association with LA Theatre Works

Context of the play, about the playwright, plot summaries, characters, themes and more.

Royal Shakespeare Company. Captured live in Stratford-upon-Avon, Iqbal Khan’s adaptation was the first at the RSC to cast a Black actor, Lucian Msamati, in the role of Iago.

English Touring Theatre’s stylish reimagining of Shakespeare’s tragedy unlocks the play for a contemporary audience, presenting an Othello forced to conceal his Muslim faith in order to survive and thrive in Venetian society.
The claustrophobic staging enhances a feeling of surveillance and paranoia as the innocent joy of Othello and Desdemona’s early relationship is replaced and juxtaposed by the violence which ensues - a violence all too familiar to a modern audience.

Cast: Laurence Fishburne (Othello), Irene Jacob (Desdemona), Kenneth Branagh (Iago), Nathaniel Parker (Cassio), Michael Maloney (Roderigo), Anna Patrick (Emilia), Nicholas Farrell (Montano), Indra Ove (Bianca), Michael Sheen (Lodovico), Andre Oumansky (Gratiano), Philip Locke (1st senator), John Savident (2nd senator), Gabriele Ferzetti (Duke of Venice), Pierre Vaneck (Brabantio).

BBC Studios. Cast: Anthony Pedley, Bob Hoskins, Geoffrey Chater, Sir Anthony Hopkins and more.

Including twenty-one groundbreaking chapters that examine one of Shakespeare's most complex tragedies. Othello: Critical Essays explores issues of friendship and fealty, love and betrayal, race and gender issues, and much more.

Shakespeare’s rarely told story of an epic journey and dramatic reunion is given a new lease of life in this production from Stratford Festival, in which a tempest both gives love and takes it away.
Filmed live at the festival in 2016, Evan Buliung takes on the eponymous role, transforming and evolving before our eyes, while Deborah Hay plays both wife and daughter.

BBC Studios.
Cast: Mike Gwilym, John Woodvine, Robert Ashby, Valerie Lush, Patrick Allen, Amanda Redman.

Shakespeare's last seven extant plays are discussed in detail in dedicated chapters, from Pericles to the other late co-authored works, King Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The plays are situated in the context of Shakespeare's financial investments, his focus on the practice of reading, the changing nature of his acting company and the pressing issues of contemporary politics and urban life. The book also goes on to explore the relationship between Shakespeare and his audience and considers the dominant themes in his final works. Analysing and responding to the latest criticism in the field, this volume brings to light a vital re-examination of what it means to discuss'late Shakespeare'.

Set of 2 CD's.
Cast: Sir John Gielgud (Gower), Nigel Terry (Pericles), Stella Gonet (Thaisa), Julie Cox (Marina), Siobhan Redmond (Dionyza), and more.

Royal Shakespeare Company. Captured live in Stratford-upon-Avon, this adaptation was created in collaboration with Intel and in association with The Imaginarium Studios, and featured the very first live motion capture performance in a major classical stage production.

BBC Studios. Cast: Michael Hordern, Warren Clarke, Sir Nigel Hawthorne, David Dixon, Andrew Sachs, Alan Rowe, Pippa Guard, and more.

This critical edition of Shakespeare's The Tempest contains the play and 21 additional selections representing major critical and cultural controversies surrounding the work providing you with more insight into the play's critical issues and cultural debates about literature itself.