Major Authors, Beginning to 1700: Shakespeare--Capstone eligible

Cross listed with MDVL_REN 4105-02 and 7105-03

Please contact adviser Mary Moore if you need a Capstone permission number.

Why do people break?  How can broken people heal?  In this course we will read seven Shakespeare plays—five tragedies and two plays often labeled as “romances”—that deal with those fundamental questions.  We will also read a considerable chunk of Shakespeare’s sonnets.  We will read with an eye toward the connections the plays make between personal disorder and cultural systems.  Tragedy focuses upon individuals and their pain, but it also asks us to connect that pain to broader cultural patterns.  So while we will consider a wide range of issues raised in the plays, we will pay especial attention to the issue of the boundaries of the individual as set next to the boundaries of other constructs such as the family, “race,” the state, and the universe.  What kinds of worlds do the plays present?  What do those worlds do to people?  What do the plays protest? 

We will read in an approximate chronological order, and start with some basic questions about tragedy and about what drama was like in late sixteenth-century England.  We will also attend regularly to how the plays address questions of gender—how men and women were defined in this culture, and the ways that those roles led to either pain or solace—and questions of race, thinking about how people created “others” and what the consequences of those racial creations were. 

             Despite the timeless nature of the above questions, we can’t understand Shakespeare’s plays well without considering them in terms of their own historical moment.  So we will plunge into the world of the Renaissance--its history, its literary traditions, its cultural fixations, its gender constructions--in order to feel the imaginative force of these plays.  I will expect you to work on the historical context of the plays as well as the exact language of the plays themselves.  With luck and with hard work, the often-alien nature of these texts, which at times can be so troublesome, can be transformed by into a so