Why shakespeare matters

In this introductory course, you will learn how Shakespeare uses emotion in his plays, how his characters experience and manipulate emotions, and how the emotional resonance of the plays makes them powerfully relevant to the modern world.

Each week of the course will focus on a different emotion. You will learn how to read a Shakespeare play and gain the tools you need to interpret its language. Catalog Humanities Courses. Humanities Courses. Watch the video Play Video for Shakespeare Matters.

Play Video for Shakespeare Matters. There is one session available: 13, already enrolled! After a course session ends, it will be archived. Shakespeare would be amused at how famous he is in Before anything else, he was a businessman: an actor, a shareholder in his company, as well as a playwright whose priority was to sell tickets.

Shakespeare is embedded in our history. His plays were performed consistently in Australia throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and remain some of the most frequently adapted stories in Hollywood. Some of the earliest silent pictures were of Shakespeare plays. King John , for example, made it into film as a short feature as early as There is also a quirky side to Shakespearean history.

Vital technology for winning the war thus owes a debt to Shakespeare, in a way. They are not just reflections of his own life within the confines of his own times. Of course, social factors did have some influence. The Elizabethan audience, for example, believing in witches, would have gained a lot from Macbeth. These factors were never the main focus of his works, though. You may question why we study the works of a writer who died over years ago. But if you take into consideration that we quote him everyday and can still relate to his characters, stories and themes, the answer becomes a lot clearer.

See more by Sumantha McMahon. Sumantha is an education and training specialist with over ten years' experience in developing and delivering adult and secondary level education.