Let’s Read Shakespeare

NEW! Let’s Read Shakespeare with Chris Griffin
An appreciation class for non-actors and actors alike

Shakespeare on the Page – A Close Reading of Shakespeare’s Othello
One of the best ways to enhance our experience of seeing a Shakespeare play is to enter the theatre equipped with a clear understanding of what the heck are they saying up there! Too often we get the general gist of a scene, but large swaths of dialogue go by as if in a foreign language: “The native act and figure of my heart/ In compliment extern.” Come again? This class (the first in a series) provides a chance to look closely at the language of a play, to understand how language yields up meaning and character, to see that in Shakespeare what a character says reveals who that character is. After an overview of Elizabethan theatrical conventions, we will explore Structure, Character, Language and Imagery, all in the context of a close reading of Shakespeare’s Othello, with special emphasis on Iago – certainly one of the most spectacularly evil characters ever conceived – and how his WORDS reveal to us who and how he IS – or is not.

Class meets Tuesday afternoons from 2:00-3:30 pm for 6 weeks
Dates: Oct. 9, 16, 23, 30, Nov. 6 and 13
Cost: $96 (Includes Folger Shakespeare Edition of Othello)

About the Instructor:
Chris Griffin is a teacher at Palm Valley School in Rancho Mirage. He holds an M.A. in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of specific study and interest include Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, William Blake, John Keats, Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde. He has also lectured on leit motifs in opera composer Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Niebelung at Arizona Opera and at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. For most of his adult life he worked in the film and television industry, in New York and Los Angeles – first as an Assistant Director and then as a Producer. He produced several movies for television, as well as three seasons of the television series Nip/Tuck. He is a member of the Directors Guild of America.