ENGL 323 A: Shakespeare To 1603

The course surveys the major works of William Shakespeare thought to be produced in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Our focus will be performance spaces: the long-lost theatrical culture of Greek and Roman antiquity, the itinerant medieval stagecraft that Shakespeare inherited, the newly (and wildly) popular public theaters of Renaissance England, and the numerous “private” and political sites of performance that competed with or complemented Shakespeare’s Globe: boys companies, court masques and Tudor pageantry, the performance of identity in language, the drama of early modern social relations, clothing/fashion, and spectacles of power. We will explore the broad spectrum of early comedies, histories, and tragedies such as Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merchant of Venice, 1 Henry IV, and Twelfth Night, and we will conclude with Hamlet, the familiar tragedy first published in 1603 (though not in the form most familiar to us).