Courses
Shakespeare Curriculum
The Department of English has a strong faculty group whose professional expertise is in the Renaissance, particularly Shakespeare, as well as specialists who teach, research, and publish on drama from either a literary or theatrical perspective. The Department offers a rich array of drama courses at every level, and virtually all undergraduate majors study Shakespeare in one or more courses.
Here's a list of regularly offered courses:
Undergraduate Courses
E 321 Shakespeare: Selected Plays. A representative selection of Shakespeare's best comedies, tragedies, and history plays.
E 366K Shakespeare: Selected Tragedies. This course examines a number of Shakespeare's tragedies through a focus on their generic elements: what makes such plays as Romeo and Juliet, Julius, Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth tragedies. Questions of literary form are joined by investigations into the construction of character and the manipulation of dramatic language.
E 678S Shakespeare at Winedale. Shakespeare at Winedale is a course dedicated to the study of Shakespeare's plays through performance. This course offers an educational and theatrical experience of great intensity, as well as a unique opportunity for group interaction and self-exploration, to students from any discipline or major. Please visit the Winedale website for further information.
T C 357 Shakespeare in Performance. This Plan II Honors seminar focuses on Shakespeare as a man of the theater, a player as well as a creator of many roles. Students attend screenings of plays and live productions, present scenes to the class, and engage fully with the week-long residency of Actors from the London Stage (AFTLS), a troupe of five classically-trained British actors who perform a Shakespeare play four times and teach many classes and workshops.
E 379M Shakespeare Through Performance. The Spring Shakespeare at Winedale course focuses on a particular genre or aspect of Shakespeare's work. Students spend three weekends at Winedale over the course of the semester, as well as working intensively in class on exploring Shakespeare's texts through performance. Students study several plays and then perform one of them in the final weekend of April at the Winedale Historical Center.
Graduate Courses
E 387R Shakespeare and Renaissance Rhetoric. In the Renaissance, rhetoric was central to formal education; it consequently offers us insight into the social and political, philosophical and artistic, indeed the period's basic anthropological assumptions, principles, and values. While evaluating Shakespeare's plays, we will view plays not as collections of rhetorical tropes and figures or as repetitions of oratorical structures, but as modelings of rhetorical interactions which actualize the prescriptions for such interactions found in rhetoric treatises. We will specifically relate those plays to rhetoric as it was defined in the Renaissance.
Visit the English Department website for detailed descriptions of undergraduate courses and graduate courses.