HarvardX: Shakespeare's Life and Work

• The cultural significance of Shakespeare's plays and their performance
• How Shakespeare’s work was considered in his own time and in the present, in his own country and around the world
• Different approaches to textual interpretation
• How to consider authorial intention, historical context, and present relevance
• How to analyze Shakespeare's plays on the page and in performance
• Foundational knowledge on Shakespeare that can be applied to his specific works

Part 1: Biographical Interpretation

In this unit, we'll learn more about Shakespeare's life and think about the interpretive possibilities that open up when we read with the author in mind.

By the end of this unit, you will be able to:

• Describe Shakespeare's childhood, education, and family life, determining how the facts of his life might have informed his playwriting.
• Evaluate different viewpoints on the "author problem," which relates to how relevant the author and his/her intentions are to interpreting a text.
• Generate an original interpretation of The Comedy of Errors that relates to Shakespeare's life and/or intentions.

Part 2: Historical Interpretation

In this unit, we’ll focus on historical interpretation by placing Shakespeare’s texts in their historical context.

By the end of this unit, you will be able to:

• Describe Shakespeare's unlikely entry to the theater world, as well as the facts of London, the Bankside, and the increasingly professionalized theater industry.
• Assess the viewpoint that Shakespeare's plays are embedded in their time and so require historical analysis to unlock what they "mean".
• Analyze a Shakespeare play or passage through knowledge of historical context.

Part 3: Presentist Interpretation

In this unit, we’ll cover presentist interpretation--what can we reveal about Shakespeare’s plays by placing them in a modern context?

By the end of this unit, you will be able to:

• Describe original performance practices, Shakespeare's death, and his legacy.
• Analyze a Shakespearean scene in performance, contrasting different approaches.
• Evaluate the viewpoint that Shakespeare's plays belong to the present, and that we should interpret/perform them as they are most "relevant" now.

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