Drama: Plays & Players - Online Courses

This online Literature course will look at three of Shakespeare’s female characters: Rosalind (As You Like It), Ophelia (Hamlet) and Lady Macbeth (Macbeth). We will consider their wit, madness and ambition, exploring Shakespeare’s language, the historical context, and the plays in performance.

This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Read or seen the play but want to know more? This course examines the background to Shakespeare's 'Cymbeline', discusses characters, identifies themes, draws parallels with Shakespeare's other plays, looks at language and analyses key scenes.

This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

This course will explore the concerns,styles and influences of 4 key dramatic texts from the late 19th and 20th centuries and how they reflect the times in which they were written. Texts studied include Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, A Streetcar named Desire by Tennessee Williams and Travesties by Tom Stoppard.

This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

An exploration of four plays, in which Shakespeare (and at least one collaborator) presents and interrogates the uses and abuses, the fantasies and the profundities, of love in various extreme contexts. Although these texts are rarely at the forefront of Shakespearean criticism, they richly repay detailed study, especially in an era when sexual relations and definitions are in a state of considerable flux.

This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

This online Literature course explores Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth and Julius Caesar, taking a close look at the ghosts that feature in these plays – Old Hamlet, Banquo and Julius Caesar - as a way of investigating some of their wider themes and concerns, including memory, grief, revenge, agency, power, ambition, guilt and the psyche.

This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Oscar Wilde was perhaps the most controversial writer of late Victorian Britain. He was famed for his wit, extravagant lifestyle, and sexual adventures. His plays and his sensational novel The Picture of Dorian Gray were celebrated and admired. But his scandalous trial and conviction “for gross indecency with men” ruined him, and he ended his life in Paris, destitute and alone.

This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.