Autumn 2023 Early Shakespeare W.R. Streitberger LOW 101 A-510 Padelford
TuTh 12:30-2:20 English 323 A streitwr@
Text: The Norton Shakespeare, The Essential Plays/ Poems, 3rd ed. ISBN: 978 039 393 8638
Films:
Much Ado About Nothing (1993), dir. Kenneth Brannagh
Hamlet, (2000), dir Michael Almereyda
The Course: This is a junior-senior level majors course in which we will learn a fair amount about Shakespeare’s life, times, theatre, and about the criticism of his plays. In his early period Shakespeare was primarily a writer of poetry and of comedies and histories. These poems and plays provide exciting reading challenges. They are brilliant, moving, meaningful, and profoundly unsettling. They complicate everything and simplify nothing. And because they have inspired literary artists from Emily Dickinson to Proust, playwrights from John Webster to Samuel Beckett, and philosophers and theorists like Hegel, Marx, Freud, Derrida, and Lacan, they have become woven into the fabric of our culture. We will focus on the artistry in Shakespeare’s texts—the use of language and poetry, the ideas of dramatic construction, the understanding of genre—to gain insight into how his poetry and plays deviate from conventional practices, how they attempt to shape his own culture’s social and political reality into art, how they make meaning, and how they produce emotional experience. We’ll begin with a selection of his Sonnets and then trace his development as a comic dramatist from the very early Two Gentlemen of Verona, through A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night. We’ll also read selections of Richard II, and 2 Henry IV and all of 1 Henry IV and Henry V. We’ll finish by reading Hamlet.
Requirements: This is a lecture-discussion course. I will lecture from time to time, but we will discuss the material we read in every class period. I will assign leading study questions for each class meeting. Your job is to give some purposeful thought to these questions. Come to class prepared to discuss them and other questions you may have. Participation is important. You need to contribute to our ongoing conversations--an opportunity to prod the conversation in a direction you find interesting. You must bring your text to every class meeting.
Essay 1 (5 pp. 40%). Focus on Much Ado About Nothing, 4.1.255-334. Be sure that you clearly address Shakespeare’s evolving understanding of the relationship between friendship and heterosexual relationships in the Sonnets, Two Gentlemen, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado, and Twelfth Night (40%). Due 14 November.
Report (2-3 pp. 20%). In answer to one or more of the study questions of your choice about 1 Henry IV or Henry V. See the Study/Discussion Questions for 14, 16, 21. and 28 November. Due 28 November.
Essay 2 (5 pp. 40%). Read Michele de Montaigne, “Of the Inconstancy of Our Actions”. Focus on Hamlet, 3.2. 153-213. Be sure that you clearly address Montaigne’s and Shakespeare’s concerns about the depth and complexity of human ‘interiority’, the inconsistency and unpredictability of human action, and how this is related to Shakespeare’s treatment of ‘thought’ and ‘action’ in the play (40%). Due 7 December