London: The City on Shakespeare's Stage

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This version of “Shakespeare Survey” (ENG 220) will explore the various ways that Shakespeare’s drama “staged” England, and London in particular, as evolving from a medieval backwater into a “modern” global power. At the center of the trip will be visits to several play performances at London’s renowned theaters. Students will also see Renaissance-era portraits of English luminaries hanging in the National Gallery and projecting the nation’s wealth, sophistication, and territorial ambitions. Westminster Abbey will allow discussion of the monumentalization of English nobility, clergy, and poets, many of whom appear in the plays.

We will plan to tour Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and see an early modern play performance in a “private” space to study the ways in which space shaped the presentation of dramatic ideas of domesticity and empire. Scheduled walking tours of different performance sites and the Inns of Court will reveal the various interests of a wide variety of gentlemen, merchants, servants, and laborers as they sought to assert themselves and their values in London’s changing commercial landscapes. And a visit to London’s Tower will afford a perspective on how English history is packaged to tell a distinct story of national power. In all, we will examine the way the city was represented on stage as the bustling and exuberant center of an ambitious nation.