Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds

Shakespeare never published any of his plays. They were too bound up in the tumult of performance, in the collaborative work of playing companies, in the electricity of a new kind of public, in mixed classes of people, in “low” entertainment, and in experiments with a staggering range of scenarios and ideas. The endings of those plays try not to rock the boat too much: bad guys get their due, baffled lovers work it out, the ancestors of defeated regimes fall at the hands of the ancestors of the current regime. In the meantime, though, radical alternate pasts and futures crack open and spill across the stage. Kings discover, to their horror, that they are only regular people with special clothes. Religions fall to festival, or to philosophy. Fathers submit to their daughters, or have to be rescued by them. Gods and devils mix with humans, semi-humans, post-humans, and enchanted humans. And everywhere there are new worlds at hand.

However much of this open range came from Shakespeare’s brilliant, magpie alertness to anything that could be put on stage, none of it would have been possible without the blizzard of heterodox ideas in which he lived. The Renaissance was more alive with strange angels and wild systems of thought than perhaps any other period in human history: neighborhood heretics, itinerant preachers, radical mystics, secret atheists, self-conning alchemists, “masterless men,” pirates, utopianists, necromancers, memory artists, rogue astronomers, Independents, Levellers, Diggers, Ranters—these loose bands of free radicals kept lively what Raoul Vaneigem called “the movement of the free spirit,” through three centuries as western empire and capital heaved themselves into shape.

This course presents Shakespeare’s plays as experiments in radical imagination, drawing everywhere on the carnival of such experiments playing out around him. We will read four plays—Hamlet, Measure for Measure, King Lear, and The Tempest—alongside short excerpts from the list of rogue thinkers and practitioners above. Our focus will be on Shakespeare as an artistic hinge point at one of the last moments when western history might have swung in very different directions. In the performance, poetry, and provocations of the plays, we will find opportunities to ask not only what might have been, but what might still be.

No previous experience with Shakespeare is necessary for this course. If you have lots of previous experience with Shakespeare, that’s great too, and you are just as likely to come away with something wholly new.