Post-Graduate Taught Courses

Please contact us if you would like your course, or know of a course, which should be included on this list: touchstone@bham.ac.uk. 

Shakespeare Studies MA. The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, Stratford-upon-Avon
The MA is designed for those wishing to undertake a year's full-time postgraduate study of Shakespeare. It is intensively taught between September and May, and then requires four months' supervised study during which students write a dissertation. The course focuses on criticism, textual study, and performance. Special reference is made to the performances currently on stage at the Royal Shakespeare Company's theatres in Stratford-upon-Avon and other productions in the region.

Shakespeare and Theatre MA/Diploma. The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, Stratford-upon-Avon
Shakespeare and Theatre is an exciting and innovative course which gives primacy to how Shakespeare’s plays work in performance. It encourages an historical perspective upon interpretation and styles of presentation and it promotes the value of close reading as the basis for evaluating the plays on the page, stage and screen.  The MA and Diploma can be studied by distance learning.

Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon and the Cultural History of Renaissance England MA.  The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, Stratford-upon-Avon.
This course offers the opportunity to study some of the most exciting areas of English history and literature in an interdisciplinary way. It offers two main areas of study: firstly, the analysis of Shakespeare and his drama in the context of the society which he lived in and observed; and secondly, the exploration of the small town society of Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon and the ways in which it adapted to the dramatic social and cultural changes of the Elizabethan and Jacobean era.

Shakespeare and Education MA/Diploma
Shakespeare's work and its impact on education.
Available on a full time and part time.

MFA/MA in Staging Shakespeare, University of Exeter
One year full-time, two years part-time, School of Drama and Music
Department of Drama.  This is a Drama Department, and therefore committed to doing things as well as talking or writing about them. For a variety of reasons, the performance of Shakespeare's plays is of particular cultural significance. This course is the outcome of placing those two sentences in academic relationship to each other. Its aim is to explore the staging of Shakespeare historically and through practice.  It is not in anyone's interest that the course should be frozen into perpetual predictability. It will change with and adapt to the quirks and quiddities of its participants; but changes and adaptations will take place within the framework approved by the University.

PGCert Contemporary Shakespeare in Theory and Performance, University of Central Lancashire
All classes are taught through the Internet using a learning environment called WebCT, which is one of the best-known e-learning systems in higher education. This will give you access to interactive tools that will allow you to communicate directly with your tutors and with other students taking the course. You will also be able to review previous workshops and submit assignments electronically. WebCT is designed to give you a good learning experience that replicates some of the dynamics of classroom teaching for distance learners.

M.A. in Shakespeare Studies: text and playhouse.  King's College, London and the Globe Theatre
This MA offers a unique opportunity to study the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the academic and theatrical environments of King's College London and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Students examine the Shakespearean theatre in its textual, material and theatrical contexts, looking at the texts, the writers, the playing companies, the repertories, the buildings, the cultural contexts and the urban locations. The MA offers students with an interest in early modern drama to study the drama of Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights in London, assessing contemporary approaches to the recovery and representation of that drama and benefiting from the remarkable facilities of Shakespeare's Globe. The course welcomes applicants with interests in any aspect of the study of Shakespeare from close textual analysis to performance studies.
Website: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/gsp09/programme/102

MA in Renaissance Studies: Shakespeare and the Northern Renaissance, Queen Mary, University of London
One year full-time, two years part-time
This MA brings the European Renaissance of 1450-1650 into focus and prepares you for specialised work in English and other vernacular literary traditions. The only language required is English; non-examined options in Latin, Italian, French and Spanish are normally available.

MA Shakespeare, Royal Holloway 
Spans Shakespeare's entire career as a dramatist and poet, and includes courses devoted to the critical and creative reception of Hamlet and The Tempest, and the performance of Shakespeare on stage and screen. The hallmark of the programme, which encourages students to range widely in their choice of texts and topics, is its detailed engagement with the works themselves. The theatrical, historical and theoretical issues are allowed to emerge out of the student's direct encounter with the plays and poems, rather than being established in advance as avenues of approach. Videos of film versions of Shakespeare are used throughout, and theatre trips to London productions will be arranged.

MA Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, Sheffield Hallam
One year full-time, two to six years part-time.
Modules include 'Editing a Renaissance play', 'Marlowe, Shakespeare and the British empire', 'Elizabeth’s men: poetry and prose 1558–1603' and 'Research methods'. You study a range of authors including Shakespeare, and are introduced to the central critical debates and issues.