Spring 2004 Courses

English 311: Shakespeare: Coupling and Doubling in Shakespeare's Comedies and Romances (Ingram)

Why do so many of Shakespeare's comedies concern twins and mistaken "doubles"? "Twinning" is also a notion connecting two lovers' souls, and used in expressions of close friendship, as with the "twin'd lambs" of Polixenes and Leontes in The Winter's Tale and the "double cherry" of Helena and Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The platonic merger fantasy of making "one soul in bodies twain" circulates throughout Shakespeare's comedies and romances. With an equal emphasis on staging and performance techniques as well as on the poetry of Shakespeare's plays, we will examine the vexed issue of "coupling" on the Renaissance stage, whether it be manifested as a heterosexual romantic ideal, a homoerotic desire, or as the actual physical doubling onstage of identical twins. In all cases, there arises a poignant sense of self-loss, mixed with the anticipation, shared by theatre-goers, of watching identity serendipitously return.

Our readings will be paired with "twinned" screenings of film versions of the plays: in class, students will test and compare their own stagings of particular scenes with two different screen adaptations of those same scenes. In the process we will take the stagings back to the page, where Shakespeare's words often lend themselves, too, to dualistic and varied readings. Our texts, taken from The Norton Shakespeare, will be: The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. Two papers and a final exam.

Spring 2004 Course Listings