David leads this subject amazingly, his wealth of knowledge and gentle, spoken teaching style made this subject extremely engaging! I thought the subject did a great job at attending to the history of Shakespeare, as well as its persistence in contemporary culture. Very focussed on the performance aspect, be prepared for this subject to be your crash course in theatre criticism! I loved watching the more contemporary experimental Shakespearean productions - I think without the subject's focus on the modern transmutations of Shakespeare in present society, this subject wouldn't have made me appreciate the genius of his plays/play texts. I enjoyed the weeks that changed things up and included guest lectures, each lecturer had their own unique relationship to Shakespeare and provided new insights. My only qualm with the subject was the size of the Seminars. While I liked the split between online learning to be completed independently, and the in-person teaching of content, I felt that individual tutelage was compromised. In such a large group, it was easy to take a back seat and not engage with class/group discussion as the teaching staff weren't able to learn everyone in the room. Also- be prepared for quite open-ended assessments, which allow anything from performances, redrafting of scenes, podcasts, or more traditional research essays! I would take the subject again if I could, and I'm always looking for other subjects taught by David!

David is easily the best lecturer I've ever had. Andrew was a wonderful addition as a tutor with a strong history as a dance and theatre critic. Each week had some digital content to complete before class, which was usually opened a couple hours after the previous seminar so you had a whole week to get through it. The seminars on zoom were great (covid), would be even better in person. I personally loved the digital content/seminar split, as it become a refreshing way to dip in to do a bit of your work as you can and return to it later. I would take this subject again if I could, and I'd would recommend it to anyone who wants to expand their Shakespearean knowledge, strengthen their confidence in developing their own interpretations, challenge their lit skills or learn something new about landmark performances. Couldn't recommend this highly enough, and I wouldn't have known this was right up my alley until I had taken it. After completing this, if David had a class on the history of socks I'd probably take it. Also -- don't buy the plays, unimelb students (at time of writing) can access the New Oxford Shakespeare for free as well as recordings of a plethora of productions and films. The assessments were quite open-ended in that you did not have to do an essay each time; I drafted an email, recorded a podcast episode, and filmed a reinterpreted scene.

This subject was a pleasant surprise. David and LJ are fantastic tutors with an insane amount of knowledge on Shakespeare and adaptations of Shakespeare. The assessments weren't too difficult, and there's plenty of creative options instead of an essay. If you're concerned about the performance aspect of the subject, don't be. It is a 5 min presentation of a single scene, where you can have a script and there's honestly minimal acting required. It's more about performance choices. Highly recommend this subject!

I've discovered that I'm not a fan of seminar-based subjects so I'm a little biased, but in my opinion, this subject would be better run in the traditional way with lectures and tutes. David (the lecturer) has a wealth of knowledge about Shakespeare but instead we got to hear the opinions of (the same) bunch of undergrads (like me!) on each text we looked at for 2 hours each week. No one did the online activities (let's face it, it's human nature) and so everything had to be repeated in class anyway or skipped. I really admire David's efforts to adapt to modern teaching/learning but, to be honest, modern teaching/learning doesn't really work - at least for me anyway (maybe it will for you?). This all said, the subject does deal with some great Shakespeare texts (and because each one gets two weeks, gets to go into considerable depth about performances and adaptations of them) and the performance assessment is lots of fun. Please note though that this is not a literature subject - it doesn't do close analysis of texts and so forth; rather, it analyses performances and adptations of the original Shakespeare plays) - so don't take it if that is what you are after.