HON 214 - Honors Shakespeare

Semester Hours: 4

This Honors introductory course, designed for non-English majors and English majors alike, investigates the dramaturgy and stagecraft of William Shakespeare, the English language’s greatest poet-playwright, in the four dramatic genres of tragedy, comedy, romance and history play. The syllabus offers eight specimen plays (of his thirty-seven), by which we may trace Shakespeare’s development as a poetic writer for the theater in a dynamic age of public stage presentations of ancient and contemporary stories. Throughout the course, we shall consider Shakespeare’s continued impact on our own time and experience. Course work will concentrate on the texts themselves and their critical reception. The instructor will screen film examples of the plays, in their entirety or in selected clips to illustrate the performance nature of the writing.

Intellectual Perspective: HC