17398 Proseminar / Übung

Manfred Pfister

Shakespearean Comedy: Text - Stage - Screen

Drama in general and Shakespearean comedy in particular is more than just printed words on pages. It involves actors and an audience, a stage and a theatre; it scripts gestures and movements, voices and intonations.

To learn to read dramatic texts in such theatrical terms will be one of the main objectives of this Proseminar; others are to makes us aware of the rich nuances, the stylistic range and the subtle allusiveness of Shakespeare’s language and its differences to modern English, of the resources of the Elizabethan stage and its performance practices, and of what comedy meant in the 16th century and what it can mean today. To do all this properly and in some depth, we shall concentrate on one single comedy, to my mind Shakespeare’s most perfect achievement in this genre, Twelfth Night, or What You Will.

Our close reading of the text and its dramatic and theatrical conventions and structures will be complemented by an equally close attention to recent performances of the play on stage and screen. And again we shall focus our attention on one single example each: Christoph Marthaler’s Zurich stage production, which was televised at the Berliner Theatertreffen last year, and Trevor Nunn’s film version of 1996.

You are expected to have read the play on your own when we meet the first time in the first week of term, to reread and study it closely during term, to contribute actively to the discussions in class, to take on a ’Kurzreferat’ to be presented in the course of our seminar and to submit your ’Proseminar-Arbeit’ not later than two months after the end of term. Individual tasks will be allocated at our first two meetings; preparative work for each seminar session will be indicated from week to week.

For easier reference I suggest one particular edition of this play, the ’Oxford Shakespeare’ Twelfth Night, edited by Roger Warren and Stanley Wells and available reasonably priced as a ’World’s Classics’ paperback (Oxford University Press, 1995) at nearby ’Buchexpress’ or other Berlin bookshops. For introductory reading I recommend the editor’s introduction to this edition, my own chapter on "Die heiteren Komödien" in the Shakespeare-Handbuch, ed. Ina Schabert (Stuttgart (Kröner) ⁴2000, pp. 381-439), and an anthology of essential articles, the ’New Casebook’ on Twelfth Night, ed. R.S. White (London (Macmillan) 1996).