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 important thing to know about how Shakespeare builds his characters (developed by John Barton), using key-words and key-rhythms in a character's language, obscuring a character's motives, Frank Kermode's concept of Shakespeare as a virtuoso of openings, 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, piece of short fiction, or piece of long fiction). There are 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 the weekly exercises comprise the portfolio to be turned in at the end of the course. Course requirements include reading several Shakespeare plays (including Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, and Measure for Measure), as well as the weekly writing assignments and the major writing project.