Lectures on Shakespeare and reading of his best works.

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, 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 six plays, including Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest. We will also devote substantial class time to watching and discussing scenes from film adaptations and filmed performances of the plays.

The Norton Shakespeare: The Essential Plays (ISBN 978-1-324-07173-0)

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills