Workshop in Ateneu Barcelonès
29.12.2025
We would like to share with you the course organised by the Ateneu Barcelonès, led by Josep M. Oroval, President of the Shakespeare Association of Catalonia. Below is the course abstract, which you can find in full here.
The course will present the life of William Shakespeare in the context of the English Renaissance, outline the genres he cultivated and the characteristics of his work, and explain how his legacy was constructed.
We will trace the stages of the author’s life within the political, social and cultural framework of England in his time. We will explore the personal and family circumstances that shaped his work and that did not follow the general patterns of writers of the period. In each session, we will present a representative work from the corresponding stage.
Shakespeare was a poet by vocation and a playwright by profession. He had a gift for language, but earned his living through the theatre. We will analyse his poetry in its three forms—narrative, lyric and dramatic—and will also present the different genres of his dramatic work: history plays, comedies, tragedies and romances.
Finally, we will explain how his legacy has been constructed. There is a vast distance between the William Shakespeare who lived at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the figure of William Shakespeare as he represents today, throughout the world. We will examine the process that accounts for this transformation.
