This course introduces students to Shakespeare’s plays as works of theatre. We will study the spaces and performance practices for which these texts were originally written and explore how subsequent generations of theatre makers approached, adapted, and repurposed them for different performance venues and styles, and from different aesthetic, cultural, and political perspectives, from the seventeenth century to our own time, in Britain, North America, and beyond the English-speaking world. The course will include screenings of select landmark productions.