Summer 2009

E f321 • Shakespeare: Selected Plays

Course Description

Please refer to the course schedule for course days, time, room location, prerequisites and possible cross-listings: http://registrar.utexas.edu/schedules/

Seven years after Shakespeare's death, two fellow players gathered his available works into a single volume, the monumental First Folio of 1623. For the sake of expediency, they divided thirty-five plays into only three genres - comedy, history and tragedy – thereby creating curious anomalies: The Tragedie of Richard the Third under history, the history of Julius Caesar under tragedy. Yet the audacious playwrights of the late Elizabethan age were feverishly experimental, blending old models to create newfangled forms in their bid to retain audiences and expand their art. As old Polonius comically concedes in Hamlet, the "best actors in the world" can play “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.” In this summer program, we shall expand the Folio sub-division to include two new genres, the “Roman play” and the “Romance,” and over the course of five weeks we will compare and contrast five plays that best characterize Shakespeare’s professional progress as he explored these different styles and developed his artistic genius.

Grading Policy

Weekly blog (min. 200 words): 20%; Comparative film analysis (1500 words): 20%; Textual performance analysis (1500 words): 20%; Final Paper (3,000 words): 30%; Class participation: 10%. NO INCOMPLETES WILL BE GIVEN.

Texts

Bevington, The Necessary Shakespeare. Plays to be read [in order]: Henry IV, Part 1, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, The Tempest.

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