Fall 2006 Courses

English 140-01: Introduction to Shakespeare (Tarnoff)

M/W/F 9:40-10:40am, Old Main 001

...‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings

In the Prologue to Henry V, Shakespeare entreats us to turn ordinary actors into royalty, the narrow space of the stage into "the vasty fields of France," and words into the objects they are meant to evoke. As we engage with a set of texts written for performance, we will be asked to see the very things that we do not see and, at the same time, to think about the work of reading as a highly dynamic and collaborative endeavor.

We will consider the theater as a public space that gives license to acts of voyeurism and explore how acts of looking or spying are figured differently across the genres we survey (comedy, tragedy, romance, history play). We will also explore the ways in which spectatorship serves to construct notions of the public and the private as well as give rise to erotic encounters, cases of mistaken identities, and outbreaks of violence.

Fall 2006 Course Listings