Documentary Film: Q1 Hamlet’s Shakespeare, Criticism, and Performance
ENGL 4520.02: Special Topics in Shakespeare
Q 1 Hamlet: Shakespeare, Criticism, and Performance
Professor Sarah Neville
We are excited to announce our upcoming performance 4520.2 class for Lord Denney’s Players. Students are going to produce a documentary film about the three texts of Hamlet in November 2020.
Course Description
Did you know there are three texts of Hamlet? This Special Topics course is designed to give students an opportunity to explore the relationship between literary texts, criticism, and performance through a deep investigation into one of the most discussed – and controversial – texts in the English language. Students in this course will study the theatrical and critical history of the 1603 text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which famously has Hamlet uttering not, “To be or not to be, that is the question”, but “To be or not to be – ay, there’s the point.” In figuring out how this early version of Shakespeare’s play could have been displaced by the later but better-known version of 1604-5, students in 4520.02 will explore topics like Renaissance books in print, theories of textual transmission, performance criticism, theatre reviewing, and Shakespeare’s use of popular and historical sources. Our weekly class work will be a mix of synchronous and asynchronous discussion, short writing assignments, and guided discovery.
Complementing these traditional classroom activities, Lord Denney’s Players, the theatre company of the OSU English department, is producing a documentary film about the three texts of Hamlet in November 2020, and students in 4520.02 will form the film’s production team. All work on the film will be completed remotely to conform with safe social distancing guidelines. As part of their class assessment, students will work to explain central textual and performance variants between the Hamlet texts as part of an “act” of the documentary. In consultation with the professor, student groups will direct their act’s initial concept and script development, conduct and film interviews, adapt relevant illustrative scenes, determine those scenes’ casting, costumes, lighting and sound design, and explain how these choices fit into their act’s overall dramaturgy. The combination of the LDP documentary and students’ individual work in the class will serve as a joint “laboratory” to test some of the claims Shakespeare critics have made about the performability of Shakespeare’s 1603 Hamlet text, providing a lasting resource for other students and scholars of Shakespeare. All students in ENGL 4520.02 will take part in (and receive credit for) the making of the Hamlet film but they may choose whether or not they ultimately appear onscreen in the finished product.