Just a little bit before we get going.

These are lectures on Shakespeare.

They're called Approaching Shakespeare, if everybody's in the right place.

And their aim is to give you a sense of some Shakespeare plays you might not already know,

but also a sense of kind of methodology, how you might try and turn these plays around in your mind

as you come to work towards the portfolio.

One important thing about the lectures is that they're all recorded.

They'll be on iTunes You, where there are already 21 lectures on other plays that I'm not going to be talking about this term.

So if you have a very distinctive cough that you want to copyright, come and speak

to me about it because you'll hear it on the recording. More seriously, the only disadvantage to you,

I think, is that one thing I've learned from doing these lectures in the past is never to refer to a

handout in the lecture itself

because people just email and say where is that handout and I've absolutely no idea.

So you've got a handout, nobody else who listens to it will get one, you just have to try and keep up.

And if the handout isn't very clear, try and email me in the week and I'll see if I can do a better job of it next time.

In addition to that, we won't have questions after the lecture. I think that's quite a relief

anyway, because it seems one of the most excruciating Oxford genres, the post-l lecture questions.

But that doesn't mean I'm not interested in your questions. And again, email me. I haven't booked my email address by mistake on the handout, but it's

always what you would expect, Emma. Smith at Hartford.

Okay, so I'm going to do a really sort of stilted takeaway. That's all not going on the tape,

and then we're going to start. Okay, does everybody feel happy with where we are and does everybody have a hand out?

Okay, so this is the first lecture in the latest series in the series called Approaching Shakespeare.

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