Renaissance and Seventeenth Century Literature--Capstone eligible, Online [***]

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

Welcome to the Renaissance!  Taking a deep dive into the language of this period—largely Shakespeare’s versions, but others’ as well—is a journey like no other.  By spending the whole semester in this time period, learning the moves of the writers, getting a feel not only for the literary arts but also for the ways the language captures the period’s social changes, you will become conversant in the fluidity of language and in its enormous rhetorical powers.  And, I think you will have some fun. 

We will be reading some of the period’s great poetry, in an early module that will look at the forms of the sonnet and the epigram.  But our main reading will be five plays by William Shakespeare, each of which we will consider from a number of angles.  Each play will be introduced with a particular literary or historical focus, and then we will proceed act-by-act, asking specific questions about the play’s language and the thematic concerns.  We will look at film clips of a range of productions and adaptations of the plays, and we will also look at several poems by other authors that can shed light on the poetic approaches and social issues found in our plays.  Students will respond to prompts for discussion exchanges, discuss issues in the plays with me, recite a memorized poem or speech, and then write a longer essay at the end of the course.  Those with an interest in teaching this literature, including teaching Shakespeare, will have opportunities to explore that interest throughout the term.  Those in the seven-thousand level section will write a longer final paper.