Immersive study of an author, genre, form, or literary historical issue. Topics vary from term to term.

Even Francis Bacon, in an essay explicitly characterizing revenge as an illegitimate and destabilizing form of extrajudicial violence, cannot quite bring himself to say that acts of vengeance are unequivocally unjust. Rather, he writes, “revenge is a kind of wild justice.” In this course, we will explore the ambivalence of revenge—its frightening allure and its pleasing terror—by returning to the early modern theater and to those plays which sought to celebrate, to interrogate, and to capitalize upon our perennial fascination with getting even. We will read quintessential examples of the revenge tragedy genre—The Spanish Tragedy; Hamlet; The Revenger’s Tragedy—as well as seventeenth-century plays that have a more skeptical and revisionary relationship to that genre’s ideologies, politics, and themes—The Atheist’s Tragedy; The Tempest; Samson Agonistes. We will read these texts both as historical documents that capture distinctly early modern anxieties about violence and power in a moment of political instability and also as provocations that continue to inspire playgoers and readers to grapple with complex questions about the nature of revenge, the (il)legitimacy of state violence, the limits of forgiveness, the relevance of free will, and the capacity of literature to create the conditions for a more just world.

Book List: Katharine Eisamun Maus, ed., Four Revenge Tragedies;

Shakespeare, Hamlet; Shakespeare, The Tempest

This class satisfies the "pre-1800" requirement for the English major

https://english.berkeley.edu/major-requirements

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills