COURSE DESCRIPTION
The purpose of this course is to offer a comparative perspective on several contemporary
adaptations and appropriations of Shakespearean tragedies while foregrounding adaptation as a
hybrid genre. Issues such as “authorship”, “fidelity”, “intertextuality”, “sociohistorical contexts” of
the “source text” and “adaptation” will be addressed. The problem of adapting a canonical
playwright as a “tribute” or a way of “supplanting” a cultural “authority” (Hutcheon 93) figure will
also be focused on, given the context of adapting Shakespeare.
COURSE SYLLABUS
Week 1: An introduction to “intertextuality” and “intergeneric relations”
Week 2: Forms of rewrite: “adaptation” and “appropriation”
Week 3: Shakespearean plays, legacy and authority
Week 4: Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as appropriation of Hamlet
Week 5: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, screening as film adaptation
Week 6: Midterm
Week 7: Welcome Msomi’s uMabatha as Zulu adaptation of Macbeth
Week 8: Ann-Marie Macdonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)as appropriation of
Othello
Week 9: Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)as appropriation of
Romeo and Juliet
Week 10: Djanet Sears’s “Harlem Duet” as Afro-Canadian adaptation of Othello
Week 11: Shakespeare In Love (film) screening
Week 12: Shakespeare In Love as biopics and screen adaptation
Week 13: Recent trends in adaptation studies
Week 14: Final exam