Shakespeare after 1603 Spring 2026
W.R. Streitberger streitwr@uw.edu
English 324 A SAV 166
Office: A-510 Padelford Tu Th 10:30-12:20
The Course: 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 six plays in all--the so called ‘Great Tragedies’: Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, King Lear--and two tragicomedies--Measure for Measure, and The Tempest. This is a performance oriented course. We will view filmed adaptations of four plays.
Materials needed:
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.
Films (find free online or rent). Julie Taymor, dir. The Tempest (2010). Oliver Parker, dir. Othello (1995). Franco Zeffireli, dir. Hamlet (1990). Trevor Nunn, dir. King Lear (2008).
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.
Grades are based on:
Three short essays on interpreting the plays
Two exams