Spring 2008 Courses

English 311-01: Shakespeare: Comedy and Romance (Krier)

M/W/F 2:20-3:20pm, Carnegie 304

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 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 farce, romantic comedy, civic comedy, a history play broadened by comic characters, tragicomedy, romance. We'll study A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Richard III, Othello, Antony & Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, perhaps Measure for Measure. Occasionally 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); we'll view two different productions of Much Ado about Nothing. We'll think about what eros has to do with comedy, and family dynamics in different kinds of comedies; we'll study 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, but also what's disquieting about some comic endings; we'll think about issues of gender, wealth and prosperity, physical pain, food and drink, and the broad concern of the comic with embodiment, bodily appetites, and control. We'll attend the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Guthrie.

Three essays, developing skills, intuition, and language to describe and analyze Shakespeare's plays; occasional study questions; a mid-term test and a final exam. This course fulfills the major requirement for a course in pre-1700 British literature; it also fulfills the College's Writing (W) requirement.

Spring 2008 Course Listings