Welcome to the world of Shakespeare! I’m Dr. Barry Thorne, a Shakespearean Specialist for many years and a dedicated lover of the famed Bard. I hope you will find our adventure with him in this course as wonderful as I do. Reading the early Shakespeare, of course, is a deceptive challenge because of (to us) the artificiality of the conventions and poetic language of the late 1580s and early 1590s. But take heart. You will find that an osmotic learning process will lead you, almost without recognizing it, into a familiarity with Shakespeare and a comfort level with the magic of his words and wisdom that will surprise you by the end of the course. This is because both you and Shakespeare are changing as you experience the evolution of his dramatic career. Shakespeare’s language “naturalizes” (from our point of view), as he advances through the comedies and histories toward the tragedies and late romances and holds “the mirror up to nature.

As Shakespeare reminds us and dramatizes in many ways, “All the world’s a stage,” and we quickly discover, as we read and view him, that his stage is truly a world as well, which we can easily share, because it so resembles our own. By entering his “kind nursery” and embracing Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” we will discover in Shakespeare and his wondrous creations a world we had not known to exist. “We are such things as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep,” Prospero says poignantly in The Tempest. So “Brush Up On Your Shakespeare” and discover the magnificence of the poetry and insight into the human condition characterizing the unsurpassable “Swan of Avon.”