Spring 2006 Courses

English 311: Shakespeare: Comedy and Romance (Krier)

T/Th 1:00-2:30 OLRI 301

This course examines Shakespeare’s achievements and ideas about the comic in his drama, over the span of his whole career. The survey takes us not only into the comedies, but also into all his other genres, in which he used comic elements because he loved hybrid genres, and loved startling the genre expectations of his audiences. We’ll look at samples of the romantic comedies (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night); a tough-minded problem comedy (Measure for Measure); one or two history plays that morph toward some different genre by developing incongruously comic characters (Richard III, where Shakespeare is discovering tragedy, or 1 Henry IV); one tragedy that turns comic conventions inside out (Lear); tragicomedy (The Winter’s Tale); romance – mythological, non-realistic, seeking possible renewal and restoration after the tragic vision (The Tempest).

Sometimes we’ll have brisk one-day tours through plays we can’t study in depth, so that you can ground yourself in Shakespeare’s whole career (Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Comedy of Errors); sometimes we’ll look at a cluster of writings, films, and work by performers (Much Ado about Nothing). We’ll learn about Shakespeare’s depth and resonance, surprisingly, from Hollywood comedies and melodramas of the 1930s and 40s. We’ll think about what love’s got to do with comedy, and family dynamics in different kinds of comedies; we’ll learn about the great medieval and Renaissance traditions of fools and folly, and about English Renaissance holiday customs; we’ll consider why it feels right when comedies end with song and dance (remember the jubilant and witty karaoke party at the end of Shrek); we’ll think about issues of gender; about wealth and prosperity, conditions much desired but also feared and fled by comic characters; we’ll think about feasting and drink and food generally, in comedy, and the concern of the comic with bodily appetites and control.

Two essays; study questions, especially at the start, to inform your reading and fuel discussion; a final exam. This course can be taken to fulfill the senior seminar requirement for majors. Please contact Prof. Krier for information.

If you have occasion between school terms, view these comedies: Shall We Dance (the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers film from the 1930s, not the Japanese film of the same title); Shrek I; The Philadelphia Story; His Girl Friday; Fargo.

Spring 2006 Course Listings