SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA OF REDEMPTION: READING THE WINTER'S TALE

Tuesday, February 3, 2026

6:00 PM

Course meets on Tuesdays: Feb. 3, 10, 17, 24 from 6-7:30 p.m. at Village Presbyterian Church, 6641 Mission Rd., Prairie Village, KS

Jewell's Center for Faith and Culture and partner congregations sponsor a series of Personal Flourishing classes. All are welcome to register using the link below.
 

Course Description

This course explores Shakespeare’s late romance through the theological and cultural imagination of redemption, asking how art dramatizes the possibility of renewal in a world marked by loss and fracture. Situating The Winter’s Tale within conversations about grace, forgiveness, justice, and the mystery of restoration, we will draw from Christian thought as well as early modern and contemporary interpretive lenses. Students will engage the play through close reading, performance analysis, and theological reflection, considering how Shakespeare invites audiences to reckon with the cost—and gift—of transformation.

About the Instructor

Dr. Sara Morrison is a Professor of English; Culture, Society, and Justice Division Head; and Dean for the Core Curriculum at William Jewell College. She received a B.A. in English and Religious Studies from Swarthmore College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her area of specialty is Renaissance/Early Modern literature; her interests also include women writers, gender studies, film, and critical theory. She co-edited the book Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theater (Ashgate Press, 2013) and contributed an essay to that collection. She is currently interested in relic qualities of the blazon in early modern drama and poetry and in early modern women’s wills. Dr. Morrison teaches British literature and critical theory.