Spring 2023
ENGLISH 117S 001 - LEC 001
Shakespeare
Oliver Maxwell Arnold
Class #:30925
Units: 4
Instruction Mode:
In-Person Instruction
Offered through
English
Current Enrollment
Total Open Seats:
2
Enrolled: 139
Waitlisted: 0
Capacity: 141
Waitlist Max: 20
No Reserved Seats
Hours & Workload
2 to 3 hours of instructor presentation of course materials per week, 9 hours of outside work hours per week, and 1 to 0 hours of the exchange of opinions or questions on course material per week.
Final Exam
FRI, MAY 12TH
07:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Latimer 120
Course Catalog Description
Lectures on Shakespeare and reading of his best works.
Class Description
Shakespeare’s plays are relentlessly unsettling, sublimely beautiful, deeply moving, rigorously brilliant, and compulsively meaningful: they complicate everything, they simplify nothing. As we puzzle over the way Shakespeare represents compassion, desire, identity, republicanism, colonialism, racism, anti-Semitism, freedom and unfreedom, and work, we will keep two overarching questions percolating: how does Shakespeare conceive theater (its uses, its value)?; and what makes Shakespeare SHAKESPEARE? That is, what makes Shakespeare distinctive and what makes him a strange colossus, a touchstone for literary artists from Milton to Goethe, from George Eliot to Proust, from Emily Dickinson to Sarah Kane, from Brecht to Toni Morrison and for philosophers and theorists such as Hegel, Marx. Freud, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, and Zizeck?
We will read a few handfuls of sonnets and roughly 10 plays, including The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and The Tempest. We will also devote some class time to watching scenes from films and filmed performances of the plays.
Requirements: two short assignments, one of which will include creative options; a final paper; and a final exam.
Class Notes
Book List:
I have ordered the third edition of The Norton Shakespeare (ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al; ISBN: 978-0393264029). If you already own another complete Shakespeare (e.g., The Riverside, The Pelican, the first or second edition of The Norton Shakespeare, etc.), you are welcome to.. show more
I have ordered the third edition of The Norton Shakespeare (ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al; ISBN: 978-0393264029). If you already own another complete Shakespeare (e.g., The Riverside, The Pelican, the first or second edition of The Norton Shakespeare, etc.), you are welcome to.. show more
Book List:
I have ordered the third edition of The Norton Shakespeare (ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al; ISBN: 978-0393264029). If you already own another complete Shakespeare (e.g., The Riverside, The Pelican, the first or second edition of The Norton Shakespeare, etc.), you are welcome to use it for this course. Good single-play editions—Signet, Folger, Arden, Oxford World Classics, Pelican, Cambridge—would also serve you well. show less
I have ordered the third edition of The Norton Shakespeare (ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al; ISBN: 978-0393264029). If you already own another complete Shakespeare (e.g., The Riverside, The Pelican, the first or second edition of The Norton Shakespeare, etc.), you are welcome to use it for this course. Good single-play editions—Signet, Folger, Arden, Oxford World Classics, Pelican, Cambridge—would also serve you well. show less
Rules & Requirements
Repeat Rules
Course is not repeatable for credit.
Requirements class fulfills
Meets Arts & Literature, L&S Breadth
Reserved Seats
Current Enrollment
No Reserved Seats
Textbooks & Materials
See class syllabus or https://calstudentstore.berkeley.edu/textbooks for the most current information.
Guide to Open, Free, & Affordable Course Materials
Associated Sections
None