Lectures on Shakespeare and reading of his best works.

Shakespeare’s poems and plays are relentlessly unsettling, sublimely beautiful, deeply moving, rigorously brilliant, and compulsively meaningful: they complicate everything, they simplify nothing, and for 400 years, they have been a touchstone—indeed, something like an obsession—for literary artists from Milton to Goethe, from George Eliot to Proust, from Emily Dickinson to Louis Zukofsky, from Brecht to Sarah Kane; and for philosophers and theorists such as Hegel, Marx. Freud, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, and Zizeck. We will be especially concerned with six large issues: compassion; political representation and its discontents; the nature of identity and subjectivity; colonialism; Shakespeare’s deviation from conventional dramatic practices; and the relation between the ways Shakespeare’s plays make meaning and the ways they produce emotional experience. Readings will include Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and The Tempest.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills