Shakespeare After All: The Later Plays (A Free Course from Harvard)

Taught by Har­vard Eng­lish pro­fes­sor Mar­jorie Gar­ber, this course–entitled Shake­speare After All: The Lat­er Plays–“focus­es on Shakespeare’s lat­er plays begin­ning with Mea­sure for Mea­sure and end­ing with The Tem­pest.” The course descrip­tion con­tin­ues as fol­lows:

Build­ing on the dis­cus­sions of indi­vid­ual plays in Mar­jorie Garber’s book Shake­speare After All, this course takes note of key themes, issues, and inter­pre­ta­tions of the plays, focus­ing on ques­tions of genre, gen­der, pol­i­tics, fam­i­ly rela­tions, silence and speech, and cul­tur­al pow­er from both above and below (roy­al­ty, nobil­i­ty, and the court; clowns and fools). Designed as part lec­ture-pre­sen­ta­tion and part dis­cus­sion, this is a course that is meant to be inter­ac­tive, tak­ing up top­ics gen­er­at­ed by stu­dents as well as by the instruc­tor. We dis­cuss a play each week, along with the rel­e­vant crit­i­cal read­ing.

The thir­teen lec­tures are avail­able on Youtube (watch them above), and you can also find them in oth­er for­mats (Quick­time, Flash video, MP3 audio only) on this archived page. Each lec­ture runs about 2 hours.

Shake­speare After All: The Lat­er Plays has been added to our col­lec­tion of Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.