English

How did William Shakespeare's tragedies, which he wrote as scripts for performance in the vital, commercial world of the early modern London theater, arrive in the 21 st century as perhaps the most widely revered element of the western literary canon? What traditions and sources contributed to these plays, and what makes a tragedy a Shakespeare tragedy? What's the nature of power? Is there any such thing as moral rule? How does our species approach death? What does "history" mean? In this course, we'll comb through some of the playwright's greatest hits (and some of his B-sides) to explore these questions and more, approaching the texts from the perspectives of Renaissance culture, bibliography and the book trade, performance history, and personal dramatic interpretation.

The explosion of English drama in the late sixteenth century, the quality and influence of the output of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and their contemporaries, and the revolutionary impact they had on the dramatic genres and on English literature have all tended to obscure the fact that these playwrights grew organically from a set of traditions in English drama. This course will examine those seminal traditions: late medieval religious drama and morality plays; sexy, scatalogical, and satirical secular comedy, both domestic and imported; and rediscovered classical models like bloody Senecan tragedy and bawdy Plautine comedy. These seeds-planted in the rich soil of humanist intellectual inquiry, religious revolutions, and rampant social change-sprouted into the drama of the English Renaissance: often hilarious, frequently shocking, sometimes mind-blowing, and always affecting.

How did William Shakespeare's comedies, which he wrote as scripts for performance in the vital, commercial world of the Elizabethan theatre, arrive in the twenty-first century as perhaps the most widely revered element of the western literary canon? What traditions and sources contributed to these plays, and what are their unique qualities? If "All the world's a stage," do our selves consist of nothing more than a collection of roles? Do all human relationships-interpersonal, commercial, romantic, political, sexual-depend on disguise, deceit, and drama? What's the nature of love? Of power? What's the nature of "the human," and did Shakespeare really invent it, as Harold Bloom has famously claimed? In this course, we'll comb through some the playwright's greatest hits (and some of his B-sides) to explore these questions and more.

Demetrius’s admission that he knows not the power that has drawn him back to Helena is only the most striking assertion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream of its characters’ lack of agency. The comedy gestures to a matrix of unseen agents that work implicitly toward a consideration of the Calvinist doctrine of providential election. The generic uncertainty of the play’s “tragical mirth” parallels the epistemological anxiety of the reformed believer with regard to salvation, itself a question of genre: in the theatrum mundi imagined by Calvin, we do not know whether we are acting in a comedy of election or a tragedy of reprobation. Shakespeare uses the cultural memory of fairy-lore—as he had used that of purgatory in Hamlet—to expose fault-lines in both reformed and traditional theology. The play interrogates reformers’ association of fairies with the discarded superstitions of papists, and asks how they might offer Protestant audiences a therapy for doubt about the workings of an unknowable Providence.