A chronological survey of Shakespeare's career.

Shakespeare’s poems and 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—and complicates our understanding of—labor, freedom, compassion, republicanism, identity, colonialism, racism, grief, and desire, we will keep two overarching questions percolating: how does Shakespeare conceive theater (its uses, its value)?; and what makes Shakespeare SHAKESPEARE? The particular focus of English 117B is the second half of Shakespeare’s career, when he turned from writing mostly comedies and histories to writing mostly tragedies and tragi-comedies. We will be especially concerned with the ways in which Shakespeare shattered the conventions of tragedy and, then, at the very end of his career, developed a new dramatic genre that transcended tragedy.

Book List:

3rd edition of The Norton Shakespeare: Later Plays (ISBN: 978-0-393-93858-6) and the Signet edition of Julius Caesar (ISBN: 978-0451526892)

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills