What Writers Can Learn from Shakespeare

This is a course for playwrights, fiction writers, and screenwriters. The course explores specific techniques of William Shakespeare's character creation, with the aim of enlarging our own technical repertoire as contemporary writers. Techniques we explore include: the most fundamental method Shakespeare uses to build his characters (defined by John Barton); the use of key-words and key-rhythms in a character's language; obscuring a character's motives; the eloquence of inarticulacy; making minor characters spicy; and the creative use of stock characters. Course work for individual students culminates in a major writing project in the student's chosen genre (for example, a play, screenplay, or piece of fiction). There are also weekly writing exercises on the character techniques discussed in class; these exercises are the same for everyone, regardless of the genre of their major writing project. The writing project and other revised exercises comprise the portfolio to be turned in at the end of the course. Course requirements also include reading several Shakespeare plays, including Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and Measure for Measure.