English: Shakespeare: Theatre & Society

Examines Shakespeare's works in intellectual, historical, aesthetic contexts. Topics: Shakespeare and Philosophy; Engendering Shakespeare; Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. May be repeated for credit with different content. Topics vary by offering; periodic offering at intervals that may exceed four years. Prerequisites: Three hours in English numbered 1010 to 1990; minimum Sophomore standing.

Prereqs: 3 hrs ENGL between 1010- 1990 Minimum Sophomore standing PACE students by permission and override

This course is titled “Shakespeare: Theater and Society.” Shakespeare, of course, is William Shakespeare, the Elizabethan poet and playwright. We’ll be studying five of his plays over the semester: The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, and a fifth play yet to be determined (perhaps Measure for Measure). The first word that comes after the colon, “Theater,” can mean the actual physical playhouses, or the way things are done on the stages of those playhouses, or the people associated with those playhouses, or the culture of theatricality that circulates within and around those playhouses, or the theatrical texts themselves. We’ll spend time with all of those theatrical concepts, but, this being an English course, we’ll spend most of our time on the latter – how do these plays work? That is, how do they work at the level of language and embodiment? Then there’s the “Society” part of the title. That concept is even more capacious than “theater.” There’s Elizabethan society, of course, which is tied up in profound and complex ways with the theater (in all its forms). But there is also our society, as in, 2025. It is not just that Shakespeare’s plays, and the issues of Elizabethan society, speak to our own times in profound ways. Indeed they do, and you’ll at times be stunned by how contemporary these 400+-year-old texts are. They are, though, also our texts now. And so we look not only for how they might reflect our own moment, but we bring them with us into our own moment and find a kind of use for them, a value that goes far beyond simply an encounter with the past. It’s a much more active and reciprocal relationship than just staring at our reflection. It’s work, all that thinking. But it’s good work, and it will take many forms. You’ll read critically (silently and aloud); you’ll watch critically; you’ll listen critically; you’ll write critically (where “critical” means the intellectually disciplined and creative process of actively, carefully, thoughtfully, even speculatively, observing, interpreting, and performing texts in ways that matter). And we’ll all pay attention to each other with kindness and patience and good humor and in the generous spirit of inquiry these amazing plays inspire.

In this course, it is my hope (and expectation) that we will • Relish the opportunity to do a deep dive into a few texts • Foster an intellectual community in the classroom that invites and supports a variety of viewpoints • Write well and with purpose • Appreciate the way literary form works to facilitate meaning • Practice reading aloud • Engage in a variety of critical ways of approaching the same text • Consider the relationship between language/performance and society • Explore what motivates our cultural preferences for certain kinds of stories • Discover contemporary meaning in early modern texts as we approach the texts as living documents

Grades in ENGL 2322 are based on your performance in four different areas of the course: 1. Weekly Response Journals - 35% (7 entries x 5%) 2. Play Portfolio • Scene study – 10% • Recorded monologue and commentary – 10% • Playbill feature essay – 15% 3. Final Exam – 20% 4. Class Participation - 10%