Shakespeare and Theatre MA/Diploma/Distance learning

All on-site students will study three core modules plus three optional modules and a dissertation. Core modules include:

• Shakespeare’s Theatre (delivered on-site over three weekends in Semester 1)
• Research Skills (delivered on-site in Semester 1, 2 hours per week)
• Practice as Research/ Research in Practice (delivered on-site in Semester 2, 2 hours per week – to be taken in the final year of study for part-time students)

Distance learning students will study two core modules plus four optional modules and a dissertation. Core modules include:

• Shakespeare’s Theatre (Either available online or delivered on-site over three weekends in Semester 1)
• Research Skills (delivered either on-site in Semester 1, 2 hours per week or online)

Full module descriptions are available below.

On-site study is in Stratford-upon-Avon. Distance learning students can choose to study through a combination of on-site modules and online distance learning modules (please note that it is not possible to combine these methods of study within a single module). The schedule of delivery allows access to all modules through a range of modes over any three-year period, although some are not available to study via distance learning.

There are three components of this module. The first is a close reading of text that will lead to a consideration of the theatrical function and distinctive qualities of Shakespeare's language. The second is a study of Elizabethan and early Jacobean stages and performance; and the third is an extension of the historical perspective, including Shakespeare's medieval inheritance, that will inform inquiry into the contemporary and continuing theatrical life. Plays studied include some or all of Hamlet, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, Richard II, Titus Andronicus, Henry V, Cymbeline and The Tempest.
Assessment: Two 2,000-word essays

This module will provide you with essential research skills training applicable in the fields of Shakespeare studies, with a particular emphasis on performance studies. You will actively assess the different kinds of evidence and methods used in these fields and critically evaluate the epistemological assumptions that underline them. The work undertaken in this module will help inform the direction and methodology of your research during the MA, particularly in the dissertation stages.
Assessment: Two written assignments

This module is designed to support MA students in developing their dissertation research topic, and to equip them with the skills and experience that they need to present and communicate their research to an academic audience. The module will develop students’ understanding of Practice as Research – both in terms of rigour and ethics. It will help them to gain confidence in speaking to an audience and responding to questions. Students will be supported through archive tasks, designed to help them with undertaking research into past theatre productions. This module is co-taught with the RSC.
Assessment: Conference-style paper presentation and reflective essay.

On-site students will choose three optional modules and distance learning student’s four optional modules from a range which typically includes:

Early Modern Drama: Middleton and Jonson (on-site and distance learning)

This module will introduce and contextualise two of the most significant dramatists working in the same period as Shakespeare. The module will emphasise the particular interpretative skills that can be developed to understand the distinctive and often un-Shakespearian qualities of the plays studied.
Assessment: 4,000-word essay

This module will consider trends of acting and directing Shakespeare from the Restoration to the present day, and will exploit the Stratford archives to undertake studies of individual actors and directors from the eighteenth century onwards. Subjects of study might include Colley Cibber, David Garrick, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, Laurence Olivier, Peter Brook, John Barton and Sam Mendes. There will be opportunities to analyse and interpret primary evidence and to consider the cultural context(s) of performance. Plays studied include some or all of Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Assessment: 4,000-word essay

Shakespeare’s plays often present the body as the site of competing or co-existing structures of thought, knowledge and belief. This module will investigate the ways in which such bodies of knowledge are dramatized corporeally through a range of disciplines, including anatomy and dissection; disease and humoral theory; models of gender and race; teratology (the study of ‘monstrosity’); natural history and cosmology; witchcraft and demonology; heraldry, burial and commemoration; post-humanism and early robotics; colonial discourse; and much more! Through these disciplines Shakespeare’s bodies stage their own liminality, and are shown to inhabit the spaces between life and death; remembering and forgetting; the natural and the supernatural; the human and the animal; the corporeal and the technological; the masculine and the feminine; and old worlds and new.

Using a range of historical, contextual and illustrative material – from spectacular funerary monuments to anatomical manuals; from the archaeological remains of magic to the wonder literature of early modern monstrosity; from communal rituals of bodily humiliation to early modern automata – we’ll plunge into the hidden recesses of Shakespeare’s strange, wondrous and compelling bodies of knowledge.
Assessment: 4,000-word essay

Early modern dramatists typically wrote with particular companies, performance spaces and audiences in mind. This module therefore approaches Shakespeare through the culture of the early modern playhouse. Our central aims will be to ask how the social, cultural, spatial, professional and technological make-up of venues such as the Globe and Blackfriars shaped early modern drama by Shakespeare and others, and to consider the significance of the playhouse to wider early modern culture and society. Using a range of methods drawn from literary criticism, cultural history, theatre history, sensory and affect studies, textual studies and material theatre, we will examine plays in relation to the conditions of playing at outdoor amphitheatres and indoor candlelit venues, always keeping in mind the social dimensions of play-making, involving countless interactions amongst playgoers, actors, musicians and other company members. We will give particular consideration to playhouse sensations, stage technologies, effects and spectacle, audience expectations, actorly skill, company practices, music, documents of performance, and repertory, among other topics. A range of plays by Shakespeare will be studied in direct conjunction with other early modern drama both canonical and less familiar.
Assessment: 4,000-word essay

This module is intended to convey, from a variety of standpoints, a sense of how Shakespeare worked. We will explore a selection of plays from across his career in order to highlight the fluidity of his creativity in terms of such elements as language, structure, mood, adaptation of source material, and how they are made to function in innovative ways alongside the more pragmatic considerations of live performance in the early modern theatre. Alongside these historical, textual, and dramaturgical issues we will also consider how such questions of craft may influence performance practice today.
Assessment: 4,000-word essay

This module considers the adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare’s plays, persona, and possessions from 1660 to the present day, paying particular attention to how changes and developments in theatre practice, aesthetic tastes, social concerns, political events, the heritage industry, and commercial markets have shaped the history of Shakespeare’s ‘afterlife’. The module looks at trends broadly chronologically, focusing on particular examples as it traces how the plays (and other Shakespeariana) were received and reinterpreted in light of different artistic, intellectual, and commercial movements from the late seventeenth to early twenty-first centuries. The distinction between ‘adaptations’, ‘appropriations’, ‘translations’, and ‘versions’ will be questioned, and you will be invited to consider the extent to which the different adaptations you read or see rely upon the original Shakespearian text for context and meaning.
Assessment: 4,000-word essay or 3,000-word creative writing project and 1,000-word reflective commentary

The module will develop a critical awareness of the textual foundations of Shakespeare's plays. Topics covered include: the relationship between a modern edition of a play and the earliest printed texts, the nature of the printing process that first made the plays available to readers of books, the characteristics of Shakespeare's dramatic composition, the treatment of the text in the theatre (including censorship, revision and adaptation), and Shakespeare as a collaborator. Plays studied include some or all of Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Sir Thomas More, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, King Lear, Measure for Measure, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Timon of Athens.
Assessment: 4,000-word essay

Performing Shakespeare in Asia (distance learning only)

Shakespeare is by far the most produced and adapted western playwright in East Asian theatre cultures. Approaches to translating, performing and re-writing his plays have changed over time, and are now at their most diverse and experimental. Correlatively, connections and relationships between Asian and Anglophone performance histories have also matured. Using translated and annotated archival recordings, this module examines the historical contexts and theatrical concerns of East Asian Shakespeare performances, relating them comparatively to Anglophone and European textual and performance histories. It is jointly taught by the National University of Singapore and The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham as a distance learning module.
Assessment: 1,500-word assignment (40%), 3,000-word research paper (60%)

This module considers the ways in which Shakespearean language and drama bears on experience, with a view to making the experience of Shakespeare more available to contemporary Shakespeare scholarship and creative practice. It is, above all, a shared experiment in experientially alert and susceptible close reading. In a series of intensively collaborative workshops, special course blog and in seminars, it will dwell and linger in Shakespeare’s language and stagecraft in order to explore how its complexity produces experiential meanings, in readers, audience members and in character. “Shakespearience” will be about reading as process rather than product, and as such, experientially exciting and adventurous.
Assessment: 4,000-word essay

The course will combine a historical overview of the main developments in Shakespeare criticism from the 1590s to the present with detailed investigation of key texts, covering: the canonisation of Shakespeare; character criticism; biographical criticism; imagery and symbolist criticism; critical study of the plays as created artifacts; the relationship between criticism and performance; historicist criticism; and new critical approaches. You will read weekly set texts for discussion in seminar, and a weekly lecture will place these texts in their historical context. You will be expected to undertake independent reading around the topics after the seminar discussion, guided by topic‐specific reading lists which are circulated each week.

You are encouraged to engage with, and to see the relationship between, the plays and poems Shakespeare wrote in the sixteenth century, in which the dominant genres were comedies and histories, with tragedy an emergent presence towards the end. The module will cover the first half of Shakespeare’s career in chronological order, from 1591 to 1600. Learning is via student presentation and response, with a preliminary lecture on each study day. This module can be studied as a standalone module or with Play and Poems B.
Assessment: 4,000-word essay

You are encouraged to engage with, and to see the relationship between, the plays and poems Shakespeare wrote in the seventeenth century, in which the dominant genres were tragedies and tragicomedies. The module will cover the second half of Shakespeare’s career in chronological order, from 1601 – 1613. Learning is via student presentation and response, with a preliminary lecture on each study day. (Plays and Poems A is the pre‐requisite module for Plays and Poems B.)
Assessment: 4,000-word essay

This module will provide you with experiential knowledge that will inform the way that you interrogate and interpret performance evidence in a variety of media. Through a series of workshops and performance assignments, you will explore three different systematic approaches to performing the language of Shakespeare: the first approach is rooted in the verse and text work of John Barton, Peter Hall, Cicely Berry and Patsy Rodenburg; the second approach explores the legacy of Stanislavski in Shakespearean performance; the third approach brings the work of key movement practitioners to a creative examination of Shakespeare’s text.
(Please note: because of the nature of this module it cannot be delivered via distance learning.)
Assessment: Either two performance assignments and a 2,000-word research paper, or one 4,000-word research paper

On successful completion of the six taught modules, MA students will enrol on the dissertation.

In this module you will undertake a substantial piece of independent research. This may be based on but will extend work undertaken for previous modules in the programme. There should be some element of originality in the research and the research may make a contribution to the field of study. You will report your research in a dissertation of 15,000 words in appropriate academic English. In designing, carrying out and writing up the study, you will be supported by a supervisor.

Please note that the optional module information listed on the website for this programme is intended to be indicative, and the availability of optional modules may vary from year to year. Where a module is no longer available we will let you know as soon as we can and help you to make other choices.