Fall 1996 - Winter 1997: Group Contract
Sponsors: Rudy Martin, Kirk Thompson (coordinator)
Enrollment: 48 Faculty: 2
Level: Freshman through senior
Prerequisites: Signature required:

• Continuing students: submit recent evaluation indicating strong reading and writing skills
• Freshmen and transfers: submit best academic paper

Special expenses: Theater tickets
Part-time options: No
Internship possibilities: Consult faculty
Additional course allowed: Consult faculty

Meeting by accident on Red Square during the time of program planning, faculty members Rudy Martin and Kirk Thompson mentioned to one another that they both want to teach Shakespeare before they graduate (retire) from Evergreen. They began jotting a list of questions they might be able to address:

• What is a 'play,' and how does a play work in relation to its audience?
• Why do modern readers, performers, and audiences still attend to Shakespeare's plays (habits of tradition and ethnocentrism; continued intellectual and emotional excitement)?
• What rituals, civic functions, and cultural aspirations did Shakespeare's theater replace / fulfill / foreshadow?
• What is it like to take a role in a Shakespeare play? To direct and rehearse a scene?
• How does Shakespeare's work develop, in style and content, through time?
• Did Shakespeare deal with ethical dilemmas like ours - or are his moral questions alien or 'other,' in relation to our times?
• How might we compare the ethnic/racial, class, and gender relations in Shakespeare with those we experience today?
• What makes Shakespeare's language so exciting? (Is it a kind of "music"? Is it "richer" than ours - have we "lost" something - or is artful modern speech just as complex and exciting?)
• Can any single writer (or filmmaker) capture the spirit of our times as completely as Shakespeare did for Elizabethan England? (Who / where? Why / shy not? Do we have present-day Shakespeares? How could we find or make them?)
• When you know the text of a play and then see a performance, what happens to you? (Experiment: See some plays first, then read text; then read the texts first, and then see the films or performances.)
• What can we learn about interpretation and adaptation from Shakespeare and his plays?

These questions are our planning ideas. To help us develop them, we invite interested students to converse with us or write to us before the program begins. We can't promise to cover all these questions, nor to give them equal emphasis. We promise only that six months' study of the world and works of Shakespeare will be time well spent. An extended period of a studies surrounding one important author can have a life-long effect on a committed student's heart, mind, and endeavor.

We faculty members have backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences - more specifically in American studies, literature, writing, and drama (Martin); and in psychology, social and political thought, and comparative literature (Thompson). We caution potentially interested students that this is primarily a program of academic study, not a performing arts venture. But students who master the material will have good background for subsequent performing arts projects (for example, internships in Shakespeare productions and festivals).

Students who have completed the Fall-Winter contract will have an opportunity to enroll in Spring with one of the faculty members for a small-group contract, to develop an individual project or a student-originated study.

Academic credit will be in Shakespeare, English Literature, Psychology, English/American History and Cultural Studies.

Go back to program home page.