This four-week summer series treats film not as illustration, but as a medium that radically rethinks Shakespeare’s spatial imagination—how worlds are created, traversed, and undone. Through a focused set of films—including Chimes at Midnight, Prospero’s Books, and Antony and Cleopatra—we explore travel, exile, imperial ambition, and the collapse of political authority. These cinematic works do not simply adapt Shakespeare; they interrogate his plays by reimagining space, movement, and power through the visual language of film.

Attention is given to borders and imagined geographies—how bodies move through unstable worlds, how authority fractures across distance, and how exile becomes both a political condition and a philosophical stance. Film allows Shakespeare’s worlds to expand, dissolve, and reconfigure, revealing space itself as a site of meaning.

The series concludes with Hamnet, which opens a vital counterpoint. Turning away from empire and outward travel, it explores an inward, domestic geography shaped by grief, memory, and absence. Together, these films reveal that travel in Shakespeare is not only geographical, but emotional and temporal—mapping how loss, imagination, and displacement generate new worlds.

Films:

• Chimes at Midnight 

• Prospero’s Books 

• Antony and Cleopatra

• Hamnet

Important Details:

• Please download the SLACK app to access reading materials and bring your laptop. I am happy to help set up SLACK during the first week of class.

• Extra readings will be posted on SLACK. Although not required, these materials will enhance our understanding of the context in which these plays were written.