Spring 2007 Courses

English 140-01: Shakespeare (Krier)

TH 2:45-4:15pm, Carnegie 305

In this course we trace the development of Shakespeare's stagecraft and poetic imagination, by reading major plays spanning his entire writing life. We'll look at his handling of theatrical resources, language, characterization, genre (comedies, histories, tragedies and so on). For our focus, we'll study Shakespeare's representations of families, a matter that obsessed him: fraught relationships between fathers and daughters or mothers and sons; foundlings separated from their parents by tempest, shipwreck, and violence; characters at a threshold between adolescence and adulthood, or nostalgic about a golden childhood innocence; sisters, brothers, twins, cousins, uncles, step-parents; conception, birth, the rearing of children, wedding; incest, murderous rivalry; families broken up, families re-united. We'll also do some reading about families: social arrangements for courtship, child-rearing, households, servants.

There will be two essays, and once everyone has some resources to think about families in Shakespeare's day, a third piece, both historical and creative, in which you create your own detailed, fictional family living in some exact year and some exact location of Shakespeare's England. There will also be a final exam. Plays will include A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Twelfth Night; 1 Henry IV; Macbeth; Hamlet; Pericles; The Winter’s Tale, and more. If you own a good complete Shakespeare, you're welcome to use it, but I'll order individual paperbacks of our plays, preferable because they are easier to carry around, and their pages are more welcoming to underlining, note-taking, and other crucial forms of reader responsiveness.

For majors, this course meets either the gateway requirement, or the requirement for a pre-1700 course.

Spring 2007 Course Listings