Mondays from 5:30 – 7 p.m.
$125 for the 4-part series or $35 per lecture
January 13: Mix-ups and Shenanigans
February 10: Love and Masking
March 17: The Problems
April 14: The Romances
The worlds conjured in William Shakespeare’s comedies are rich, magical, playful, diverse, and sparkling. England’s greatest writer, Shakespeare fashioned some of the most distinctive and memorable comedic characters in world literature, putting them into action in such places as the streets of Verona and the forests outside Athens. Those characters’ reactions and discourses on the situations they encounter remain fresh to this day. In this master class series, Professor Taylor Hagood delves into the Shakesperean comedy in its varied forms, from the zany Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Comedy of Errors to the pastoral A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, to the so-called problem comedies The Merchant of Venice and All’s Well That Ends Well, to the plays now considered “romances,” such as Cymbeline and The Tempest. Along with providing portraits of the plays, their production and publication history, and their outstanding characters and dimensions, Professor Hagood will discuss the function and form of comedy for Shakespeare and his time as well as the relevance of his comedic visions in our own time.