Winter 2025 Shakespeare after 1603 W.R. Streitberger CMU 326 A-510 Padelford
Tu Th 9:30-11:20 English 324 A streitwr@
Texts: I have ordered The Norton Shakespeare, Essential Plays, The Sonnets 3d ed. (2016). ISBN 978-0-393-93863-0. In our class sessions, I will ask you to read much of the general introduction and the introductions to the plays we cover. Other editions will not work.
The Course: This is a junior-senior level majors course in which we will learn about Shakespeare’s life, times, theatre, and about the criticism of his plays. In his late period Shakespeare was primarily a writer of tragedies and tragicomedies. These 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 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 read seven plays in all, beginning with the so called “Great Tragedies”: Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet. We’ll then go on to read three tragicomedies: Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.
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. You must bring your text to every class meeting.
I will assign study questions which will be the subject of our discussions. Your job is to give some purposeful thought to these questions. Come to class prepared to discuss them and other questions you may have (10%).
Two exams (50%). See syllabus for dates.
Two 3-5 pp essays, one on a topic from Group 1, and the other on a topic from Group 2.