This interdisciplinary course, taught in conjunction with a full-scale Carleton Players production, will explore one of Shakespeare’s greatest and most complex works, Twelfth Night. We will investigate the play’s historical, social, and theatrical contexts as we try to understand not only the world that produced the play, but the world that came out of it. How should what we learn of the past inform a modern production? How can performance offer interpretive arguments about the play’s meanings? Mixing embodied and experiential learning, individual and group projects may involve dramaturgy, stagecraft, literary analysis, music, and research in Special Collections.
Projects can be viewed below. Some posters can be seen in person as part of the Twelfth Night lobby display in the Weitz Center for Creativity and some essays are in the Twelfth Night program – Now through Sunday, May 11, 2025.
Twelfth Night opens Thursday, May 8 and runs through Sunday, May 11. Visit the Events page for more details and to reserve your (free) ticket!
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Brown, Micah – An Introduction to the Music of Carleton’s ‘Twelfth Night’ (30.6KB PDF Document) -
Brown, Micah – How Jazz connects New Orleans to Renaissance England (32.3KB PDF Document)
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Cooper, Caroline – Feste the Fool Poster (1.8MB PDF Document)
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Galaviz, Ambar and Brown, Tony – Courtship Poster (394.3KB PDF Document)
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Lenzer, Sophie – “Dear Elizabeth” – ‘Twelfth Night’ as an Ode to the Virgin Queen” (49.6KB PDF Document)
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Pennell, Ben – Class and Social Mobility Poster (298.0KB PDF Document)
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Rees-Hill, Elinor – Twelfth Night in Elizabethan England (3.2MB PDF Document)
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Social Hierarchy Dramaturgy Project (272.1KB PDF Document)
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Wiener, Valentine – Puritans Poster (828.1KB PDF Document)