Bringing Shakespeare to Education Media OnLine
An agreement between Jisc and Channel 4 Learning makes available a new collection of films which bring to life Shakespeare’s plays and shed light on staging Shakespeare productions for screen and stage. Not previously available online, the films will support media studies, English literature, theatre studies, the performing arts and creative industries by bringing award-winning programmes to the desktops of all in FE and HE free of charge.
The films include recent productions of Macbeth directed by Michael Bogdanov and Twelfth Night directed by Tim Supple that give fresh insights into the plays and seek to challenge assumptions about Shakespeare’s work. The collection also includes behind-the-scenes documentaries which explore the production of Channel 4 Learning’s Twelfth Night from initial idea to finished film. Theatre craft and production are further explored through behind-the-scenes features on Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) productions of Measure for Measure, The Spanish Tragedy, Much Ado About Nothing and The Tempest.
Photograph © Channel 4 Learning
Christie Carson, Research Fellow and co-founder of the Centre of Multimedia Performance History at Royal Holloway, and co-editor of King Lear on CD-ROM, welcomed the news, saying: “The Shakespeare materials made available through Channel 4 Learning provide students and scholars with access to a range of important and scholarly resources. The two full productions, of Macbeth and Twelfth Night, present unusual and challenging interpretations by important contemporary directors. The Behind the Scenes at the RSC and the Making of Twelfth night programmes offer useful insights into the processes of theatre and film production. Together these resources add significantly to the materials currently available online and allows for new kinds of research and teaching.”
Photograph © Channel 4 Learning
Liam Earney, Jisc Collections Manager, who led the negotiations with Channel 4 Learning to make the resources available, said: “This resource explores not only the plays of Shakespeare but also the craft and the process behind staging them, giving students important insights from everyone involved in putting together a successful production. Being able to download parts or all of the work, use individual images, and include them in assignments and course materials make this a resource with enormous potential in the classroom.”
Performance Shakespeare will be available from the Jisc’s Education Media OnLine service, a Jisc-funded set of collections of film and video, containing several hundred hours of high-quality material based at the EDINA national data centre.
For details of how to access Performance Shakespeare and Education Media OnLine, please click on the following link: EMOL access
The British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) created the encodings and metadata for all of the productions in this collection.