Course Description
Harold Bloom credited William Shakespeare with “inventing the human.” The Bard’s colossal impact on Western culture invites this kind of hyperbole. In this course, we will explore five of Shakespeare’s great plays and five contemporary plays that are heavily indebted to them. These ten lectures, lavishly illustrated with slides and clips from all ten plays, will focus on the way in which the translation from Renaissance play to contemporary drama highlights and comments on aspects of our present culture, particularly revealing the shift in our attitudes to art, society, identity and the past.
Course Director
Phillipa Sheppard
Dr. Philippa Sheppard received her DPhil in English Renaissance Drama from the University of Oxford, where she was a Commonwealth Scholar. She has been teaching Shakespeare and Modern Drama at the University of Toronto for over twenty-five years. Dr. Sheppard’s book, Devouring Time: Nostalgia in Contemporary Shakespearean Screen Adaptations, came out from McGill Queen’s University Press in 2017. Additionally, she has published chapters in several books. Dr. Sheppard has also published articles in Literature/Film Quarterly, Notes and Queries, The Shakespeare Bulletin, Quill and Quire, The Globe and Mail, and The National Post. She has given talks and written programme notes for the Stratford Festival since 2007, always a highlight of her year.
Phillipa Sheppard
Term and Time
Fall 2026 – starting September 11
10:00 a.m. on Friday morning
Room A002 in York Hall
Course Outline
Two weeks before the course starts, you can download a printable PDF giving the 10-week detailed course outline.
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Lecture Notes
Links to resources such as additional reading or play lists are provided here as the Course Director makes them available during term. Like the course outline, lecture notes open in a new browser tab so that you can download and print them.
Return to the list of Courses for 2026-2027 to check out another course.
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