I am retiring after 45 years at ACU. While it certainly sounds a long time, I remember vividly my first days on Castle Hill Campus in 1977 and then the flow of new literature students, through Castle Hill, then Mount Saint Mary and occasionally MacKillop. Every year a wonderful crop of new faces, new enthusiasms!…
Category: Shakespeare Plus
Best Final Summative Entries 2022 Shakespeare and the Renaissance…
These are the best of a wonderful bunch of final blogs by students of ENGL210 in 2022. These blogs show the depth of appreciation for Shakespeare and the Renaissance that these students have uncovered for themselves through writing informally and creatively and through interacting with their peers. Some of the best learning in all my…
Best Blogs First Round 1 “Show and Tell”- Shakespeare and the Renaissance 2022- ENGL210
Here are some of the amazing blogs and peer reviews produced by mid-semester: This is a feast of responses to the art that was around in Shakespeare’s time, to the impresssions gleaned from the Shakespeare Room at the Mitchell Library and the amazing Shakespeare statue which sits in Shakespeare Place, outside the MItchell, but now…
Shakespeare and the Renaissance: 2nd Blog Topics 2022
Choose one painting seen in the Renaissance selection studied at the gallery today. Describe the painting in details and say how this painting has expanded your understanding of the Age of Shakespeare. If you missed the visit you can still do this topic by focussing on one of the paintings on the document provided for…
Shakespeare and the Renaissance 2022
First Blog Topics. Try to stick close to the word length (i.e. 200 words + 50%). While you won’t be penalised for going over the limit you will only get marked on the permitted length. If possible illustrate your blogs (with images either your own or those available on Google), but be sure to identify…
Protected: Shakespeare Visit to the NSW Art Gallery and to the State Library, 14th April 2021.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Coronavirus perceived through the filter of Hamlet or Ophelia!
Students studying Shakespeare this semester have been asked to write a response to the global situation as perceived by Hamlet or Ophelia. This has led to some extraordinarily creative and heart filled descriptions of global condition from the perspective of our 2020 university students. Enjoy: Thank you Alexandra: https://s00240376.wordpress.com/2020/03/15/to-you-with-love-ophelia/ To you, with love-Ophelia March 15, 2020The…
The Winter’s Tale 2020
This is one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays that brings into focus the talent that enabled him to show the world how art could be redemptive. This is the story of chaos created by human emotions (jealousy in particular here) and the way that art can be an agent in resolving some of the pain created…
NSW ART GALLERY VISIT TO RENAISSANCE ROOMS.
Please find audio files for the talk in the Renaissance Rooms. Please also find the images in the file immediately following.
State Library and Shakespeare Room “Virtual” Visit
Blog Topics for week 5 You are welcome to create your own topic centring on any aspect of our visit to the State Library. Here are a couple of additional topics :*What impression did you get of the importance of Shakespeare to Australia from our visit to the State Library? *Write a short poem in tribute to…
Hamlet Lecture Week 4
Hello All, well this is the beginning of our totally on-line teaching for Shakespeare. And we begin with a short video (myself lecturing you from home) and from there we will turn to audio focussing more closely on the key sections of the play. Having worked through all these pieces, keep your ears and eyes…
Week 3 Shakespeare Audio
This week the lecture moved from a consideration of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146 and its relevance to Hamlet through to a survey of how the language of drama is a very specific literary genre and how, in the case of Shakespeare, it embraces ALL the genres. Enjoy! First Blog Topic- Questions: 1/Post a review of your…
Audio recordings for Shakespeare & The Renaissance 2020 Week 2
Audio Recordings Week 1 2010
Please find here the recordings for the lecture and tutorials for week 1: Introduction to Shakespeare and his world:
Best Shakespeare Blogs 2019
Thank you all for some wonderful Shakespeare Blogs. This has indeed been a feast. Please check out some of the wonderful contributions listed below Shakespeare in a Rainbow! Best Summative Entry- with a focus on why Shakespeare continues to be important in our own time: https://georgiahoulihan.wordpress.com/2019/05/06/summative-entry-shakespeare-and-renaissance-literature/ Thank you Georgia! Honest Summative Entry reflecting on the…
Merchant of Venice Week 11
Please find attached the audio commentary on The Globe Theatre production of The Merchant of Venice- enjoy! See you all at the Parramatta Riverside Theatre at 12.30pm on Saturday 18th May, for The Merchant of Venice live!!!!
Week 10: Shakespeare- The Merchant of Venice.
This week we started exploring the world of Shakespeare’s mid career play The Merchant of Venice. We also looked at episodes from the Globe Theatre’s amazing recent production: Here is the link for the play: https://globeplayer.tv/videos/the-merchant-of-venice-english and here is the audio for our lecture in Week 10. Slides for this lecture you will find in LEO!
Some fabulous Blogs coming out of The Clemente Mount Druitt class! Please comment on their blogs!
Hi All, I am just working my way through the blogs produced by our Mount Druitt, Clemente contingent. Many of these students are coming to study for the first time, or are returning to study from many years ago. They will love any comments you will give them, and there are some fabulous entries there.…
The Tempest – Take 3: Musick and Masques
Hi All, today we covered the core ideas of music (Musick!) and the Masque in The Tempest. These are the central clue to the deepest meaning of this play. In particular we explored the way that Ariel (pictured on the right) manages to persuade Prospero (on the left) to bring more empathy into his relationship to…
Tempest Take 2! Shakespeare Plus
Today we surfed through some more of that amazing, wonderful production of The Tempest by the Globe Theatre. What a miracle of dramatic recreation that performance is. Highly recommended. Here is the content for today’s session. There will be no new blog topics this week as you are beginning to prepare for your major essay.…
Shakespeare’s The Tempest 1
Today we broached Shakespeare’s last great masterpiece The Tempest, the play which presents some of his greatest poetry within a story that can stand as a model for humanity’s quest for harmony within a world of chaos. We watched the opening act of the play in The London Globe Theatre’s latest performance. The link for this performance is…
Shakespeare’s Poetry and Sonnets….
Despite the fire alarm and the emergency exodus we had a profitable day exploring Shakespeare’s dramatic theories as argued and exemplified in his amazing Prologue to Henry V in which he calls to the heavens for a “Muse of Fire”! Listen to the audio of this adventure below: This was followed by a tutorial on…
The Shakespeare Room and Shakespeare Resources in the Mitchell Library + Renaissance Art for Shakespeare Plus Students at ACU in 2019
Shakespearean Art in the NSW Gallery 2019 Thank you ALL for your outstanding attendance today- just about 100% – that is a record!!! The State Library with its wonderful Shakespeare statue outside (in one-time Shakespeare Place”) was a delight to be involved with- despite the life-endangering freeway that one has to cross to get there!!!!.…
Ben Jonson’s Shakespeare and More About Midsummer!
We had a wonderfully dramatic day today with hours spent on Ben Jonson’s extraordinary poem in praise of his rival William Shakespeare, followed by much hilarity watching Egeus challenging Theseus to help him tame his recalcitrant daughter into marrying the man she DOES NOT LURVE!! We then finished with a beautiful poetic rendering of the…
Some Gems from the first crop of blogs
Here is a beautiful description of a / Coleridgean apprecation of nature in the Australian context: https://anthonydigges.home.blog/ – Thank you Anthony! Here is a companion piece to Anthony’s: https://julieisajunkie.home.blog/ Thank you Julie for sharing your passion for the stillness of the Australian bush! Here is a wonderful account of a Wordsworthian moment in Nepal:…
Shakespeare 2019 Week 3: The Play within a Play- All the World’s A Stage
Today we homed into this aspect of Shakespeare’s subversive and controversial writing. Shakespeare loves to dramatize the way in which we all spend so much of our energy play acting, both to ourselves and to others. Where is the real “me” we may all well ask- and Shakespeare seems to be challenging us with this…
Shakespeare 2019- Week 2
See Judi Dench in the full video right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSDQjEJTPzg Hi All, well we made it finally into A Midsummer Night’s Dream through the gateway of The Sonnets and Shakespeare’s many-sided sexuality! And we also learned about his deep and passionate belief in the power of art, of literature, of poetry to transcend the ravaging effects…
Shakespeare Week 1 2019
Hello All: a great start! Thank you all for your keen participation in our introduction to the world of Shakespeare and to the theme of love as it played out in two of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Christopher Marlow and Sir Walter Raleigh. Here are the recordings for our class this week: enjoy. And here a few…
Shakespeare Blogs 2018
Hello All, I have had a wonderful day trawling through the ePortfolio/ Blogs produced by the Shakespeare Class of 2018. Such talent and inspiration is hard to find anywhere else. The top 6 ePortfolio/Blogs (all scoring High Distinctions) were as follows. I would encourage you all to scroll through these as powerful examples of what…
Shakespeare’s The Tempest Week 2- Summary and Blog Topics
Today we focussed attention on the Globe Theatre’s recent production of The Tempest. What a wonderfully powerful production this is! In Tutorials we concentrated on a couple of poems by George Herbert which provided a nice balance to the intensity of dramatic confrontation in the early scenes of The Tempest. Here is a useful link to…
Shakespeare’s The Tempest 2018
This is Shakespeare’s most imaginative and meaningful piece of theatre. Today we began watching the Globe Theatre’s amazing recent production starring Roger Allam. This production takes you into the heart of the Globe Theatre and presents the play as close as one can imagine to how it would have appeared in Shakespeare’s own time. See…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream- performance rehearsal & Shakespeare Sonnets 18, 65 & 73
Hi All, Scroll to the bottom of this blog for audio files for today’s tutorials and lecture (which was mainly a workshop). But before you go there, please listen to this amazing discussion about the nature of BEAUTY- a topic so close to Shakespeare’s heart- here spoken about by the late Irish poet John O’Donoghue.…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Part 2
Le Painting by Henri Fuseli This week we explored many of the “languages” of the play: rustic, lovers, aristocratic, fairy… and we also focussed closely on that most mysterious speech by Bottom about Bottom’s dream. We came to no clear conclusion on this speech, but, in the context of Hypollyta’s response to Theseus at the…
Shakespeare and the Renaissance- Blogs Take 1: Some of the Highlights
HI All, THE SHAKESPEARE AND RENAISSANCE GROUP OF STUDENTS 2018 there are some outstanding bloggers amongst this group; this is a small showcase of some amazing work by creatively gifted and talented students. It has been so good to see many of you making your blog space your own, using it both to flex your…
Shakespeare Week 7: Marlow, Ralegh, Shakespeare ( A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
We covered some really interesting ground in class today through exploring the Pastoral tradition as presented by Marlow (in “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and as knocked down by Ralegh (in “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”). So these poems are presenting critically the whole idea of the Pastoral world: is it a great…
Shakespeare Week 6- from Classical Tragedy to Romantic Comedy: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Today we broached one of Shakespeare’s most loved plays, his celebratory fantasy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We explored the ways in which Shakespeare in his opening scenes ricochets his audience from the high-sounding, poetical iambic pentameter of the Greek court through to the passionate language of the Romantic lurvers and then down into the depths of…
A Day of Shakespeare!
ACU Students had a feast of Shakespeare in Australia yesterday! As is well known one of the first plays to be produced in Australia, back in 1800, was Shakespeare’s Henry IV, with a convict cast. What an amazing historic event that was, is, and remains. To have Shakespeare’s subversive political stance, his hatred of officialdom,…
Shakespeare 2018 Week 3: Becoming Antony, Cleopatra and their host of followers!
Wow, what a gas! Today we plunged right in to the world of Antony and Cleopatra, workshopping some of the key scenes from the early part of the play and identified some of the complex emotional interactions that this play embodies in “living lines”! (as Ben Jonson so rightly observed.) This was a wonderful opportunity…
Shakespeare 2018 Week 2: Heading into Egypt!
We accelerated our entry into the world of Cleopatra today by looking closely at the scene (in Act 2.2) where Enobarbus describes Cleopatra in terms that evoke her amazing attractive power: The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold, Purple the sails, and so perfumed…
Shakespeare Plus 2018!!!
This semester’s Shakespeare unit has at its focus the wonderful Antony and Cleopatra which is being presented by Bell Shakespeare later this month.And we are all off to see their production on Friday March 23rd- Yoo Hoo! Accompanying us will also be a group of around 15 students from the Clemente Program(for those experiencing multiple disadvantage)…
Shakespeare Annual Blog Time!
Again we have some marvellous entries from our Shakespearean cohort of bloggers. This year I am going to share with you all some individual blogs, what they have to illustrate about the creative power of blogging as part of literature studies. Here is one of the best commentaries on what blogging can lead to. Take…
Shakespeare’s The Tempest
This is Shakespeare’s most imaginative and meaningful piece of theatre. Today we began watching the Globe Theatre’s amazing recent production starring Roger Allam. This production takes you into the heart of the Globe Theatre and presents the play as close as one can imagine to how it would have appeared in Shakespeare’s own time. See…
The Benefits of Blogging in University Education.
Just thought I would share with you what has underpinned my passion for Blogging with my students for decades! PDF version: Blogging Poster JPG Version:
This fellow is wise enough to play the fool
These are Viola’s words about Feste the fool in 12th Night a play which strangely mirrors the insanity of our own world today. To Viola prior to this wonderful summation of Feste’s talents, he says to her: “Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun; it shines everywhere”. And almost in the same…
Awakening the Sacred
Don’t miss out on this amazing conference coming to Sydney on July 7/ 8. This is the fifth in the series of conferences that bring Literature and the Arts together with a focus on the Sacred. This particular conference is VERY SPECIAL because it includes a 3 hour conversation between indigenous elder Miriam-Rose Ungenmerr from…
12th Night and Shakespeare’s Sonnets
What a wonderful gift to have Professor Barry Spurr gracing us with his extraordinarily insightful lecture on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Barry provided a rich intellectual context for seeing how Shakespeare’s sonnets (and plays), emanating from an author with a middle-class background, were deeply subversive of the hierarchy in England and also of the Italian influence. It…
Ben Jonson, Thomas More, Roger Ascham, Thomas Hoby (Castiglione), Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, Francis Bacon: Humanism…
What a wail of a day we have had coursing through this amazing gallery of Renaissance delights! Ben Jonson’s wonderful poems about his dinner table and the reading he supplies for his guests- and then his savage poem about eating too much “On Guts” : Gut eats all day, and lechers all the night…. Lust…
King Lear- Final
Reading Shakespeare’s King Lear in the context of Erasmus’ amazing Praise of Folly brings the depth of this play into focus. Erasmus, writing about the state of the world in the 16th Century, could be writing about the world today and Shakespeare really seems to pick up on these insights: “ Now, what else is the whole…
Renaissance Art (at the NSW Gallery), The Shakespeare Room & Shakespeare Resources at Sydney’s State Library
The high point of our “outing” yesterday was seeing “in the flesh” the original first folio edition of Shakespeare’s works. There was a stillness and expectancy in the room as this $5,000,000 treasure was unveiled and positioned on a pillow. With gloves the first pages were turned until we arrived at the wonderful celebratory poem…
Richard III & Sir Walter Ralegh
Shakespeare’s play Richard III while it was set over 100 years before it was performed in the 1590s was a starkly contemporary reflection of the realities of what life and politics must have been like during Shakespeare’s own time. We get a hint of the savage brutality that was part of the reigns of all…
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