English 90hc. Hamlet, Act 1

Instructor: David Levine
Spring 2027
TBD | Location: TBD
Spring 2026
Tuesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 14 students

Students will gain facility with reading, speaking, performing, and directing Shakespeare through a simple task: attempting to stage the first act of Shakespeare's Hamlet. 

Hamlet comes with a lot of baggage. First performed in 1601, the subject of infinite interpretation and adaptation, it sits squarely at the center of Anglophone culture, considered the greatest English play by the English language's greatest playwright. But underneath all that baggage there's a script, a script that assumes certain things about human nature, power, grief, and the public.

How do we discover those assumptions? How do we communicate them to an audience? How can a 500-year-old play, written in arcane English, become an experience as compelling as sports, the movies, or a video game? We'll attempt to answer these questions using just  the text, our bodies, our voices, and the minimal resources of the theater.

This workshop course is open to all students. No previous experience with literary studies, performing, or directing is required. The workshop culminates in an invited performance, after which Shakespeare, Hamlet, and Renaissance drama generally will hopefully feel more approachable both to you and our audience. 

This course satisfies the “Pre-1700 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.