This course will explore, analyze, and deepen our understanding of eight of Shakespeare’s major plays. In doing so, we’ll consider these works’ powerful cultural allure—in Shakespeare’s historical moment and in our own world today. We’ll explore Shakespeare’s plays from a number of vantage points: historically, textually, in terms of Shakespeare’s own sources of inspiration, and in light of his cultural afterlife.
We’ll read Shakespeare’s works through the lens of genre—across comedy, tragedy, and romance—considering the ways that Shakespeare’s plays both adhere to and resist classical and popular conventions of genre. Along the way, we’ll get to explore a number of questions: who gets to have a happy resolution at the end of Shakespeare’s comedies, and are there others who are denied those resolutions? Are tragic outcomes the result of qualities that are innate to the tragic hero—a missing of the mark, a tragic flaw? In Shakespeare’s plays about great downfall and ultimate resolution, we’ll consider what it means to track the arc of a human life against the demands and constraints brought about by politics, gender, race, religion, and class.
We’ll also read the rich source material that informed Shakespeare’s thought and art—including the ethnographic sources that shaped ideas about racial and religious difference in the early modern world. In doing so, we’ll ask how racial and religious outsiders challenged notions about multicultural and diverse communities, both in Shakespeare’s time and in our own cultural moment.
Just as Shakespeare himself adapted many of his stories from earlier source materials, you’ll have the opportunity to imagine your own interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays, both critically and creatively. In addition to argument-based essay options, you can choose to write—either individually or in groups—a creative adaption of Shakespeare or a dramaturgical analysis of a Shakespeare production from a global context of your choosing.
Required text
The Norton Shakespeare, third edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. 2 volumes. (ISBN: 978-1-324-07179-2). Link.
You’re also welcome to purchase access to the Digital Norton Shakespeare instead of or in addition to the hardcopy edition.