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Shakespeare:  The Word and the Action, by Peter Saccio; a Teaching Company lecture

For accessible, serious, high-quality, adult-level educational materials (DVD, tape, mp3 downloads) it's hard to beat The Teaching Company.  Tonight we finished the last lecture of Shakespeare:  The Word and the Action, a course which easily ranks as one of my favorites.

Here are the titles of the 16 lectures:

  1. Shakespeare's Wavelengths
  2. The Multiple Actions of A Midsummer Night's Dream
  3. The Form of Shakespeare's Sonnets
  4. Love in Shakespeare's Sonnets
  5. Love and Artifice in Love's Labor's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing
  6. As You Like It
  7. The Battles of Henry VI
  8. Richard III and the Renaissance
  9. History and Family in Henry IV
  10. Action in Hamlet
  11. Coriolanus—The Hero Alone
  12. Change in Antony and Cleopatra
  13. The Plot of Cymbeline
  14. Nature and Art in The Winter's Tale
  15. Three Kinds of Tempest
  16. History and Henry VIII

I find it easy to be intimidated by Shakespeare; despite the efforts of my high school teachers, the glories of the Bard didn't begin to open to me until a few months after my 50th birthday, when I saw Kenneth Branagh's version of Henry V.

Saccio's lectures aren't this inspiring, I will admit.  But most of the plays he teaches I have never seen nor read, and every single lecture left both of us eager to experience the play, which is no small accomplishment.  I highly recommend this course.

Posted by sursumcorda on Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 4:35 pm | Edit
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Sorry; I once again forgot to include a link to the YouTube video when I first posted this so those who are viewing it through Google Reader or Facebook won't see it.



Posted by SursumCorda on Sunday, January 31, 2010 at 10:13 am
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Excerpt: Theatre Shoes, by Noel Streatfeild (Dell, New York, 1983) This wasn't on my reading list at this time, but the combination of (1) hearing a Teaching Company lecture about The Tempest and remembering the part it plays in this book, and (2) a dreary...
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Date: February 1, 2010, 4:51 pm
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