All Program Dates
April 16, 2025 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
April 30, 2025 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
May 7, 2025 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
May 21, 2025 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
June 4, 2025 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
Registration
Tuition for this course is $250. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.
A welcome email from the instructor three weeks before the course begins. Zoom links will be sent for the course one week before the first meeting.
This program is for those 18 and older.
Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Friday, March 14, for Rosenbach members on Friday, March 21, and for the general public on Friday, March 28. Registration opens at 12:00 p.m. ET.
Description
If we include high school and community theater productions, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is likely the most-performed Shakespearean play in the United States. The play is funny and fantastical, with many companies drawn to the performative potential of the fairies (especially when they hope to attract an audience that includes children!). But Elizabethans did not see fairies as the tiny, adorable Tinkerbells that we think of today. Instead, they viewed fairy folk as fickle, alien, and often frightening figures, blamed for innocent pranks and malicious ill-fortune. And like this conception of fairies, the play is more complex than one might think, especially as we consider its themes of genre, gender, nature, love, and power. This course will explore the humor, depth, and beauty of this vibrant and entertaining text, with close attention given to the work’s language, imagery, and folklore. This course will be an interactive experience and will rely on your participation, enthusiasm, and free-flowing conversations. Each time we meet, we will practice a variety of reading techniques that will enable you to begin experiencing Midsummer (and eventually all of Shakespeare’s plays) more deeply and effectively on your own.
Instructor
Dr. Jim Casey is a Fulbright Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities grant recipient, Past President of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, editor of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (2019), and co-editor of the collections Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare (2017) and Shakespeare and Comics (2024). Before retiring from full-time teaching in 2020, he taught more than 100 graduate and undergraduate courses over more than 20 years. Although primarily a Shakespearean, he has published peer-reviewed essays on such diverse topics as fantasy, monstrosity, early modern poetry, medieval poetry, pedagogy, textual theory, performance theory, postmodern theory, adaptation theory, digital humanities, old age, comics, film, anime, masculinity, grief, the supernatural, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Ovid, Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica. His current projects include Shakespeare and Science Fiction, co-edited with Brandon Christopher (Arden Shakespeare) and Fantasy Literature through History (Bloomsbury). Dr. Casey has previously led three Shakespeare courses for the Rosenbach (Macbeth, Hamlet, and Shakespeare and the Fantastic).