English 309: Shakespeare: Earlier Plays

Professor Barbara Bono

MW 4:00- 5 :20P.M., Alumni 90

Reg. No. 267670

This Fall Semester course on Shakespeare's earlier works will begin with his self-conscious gestures of mastery in two inherited genres: chronicle history play with the villainous self-fashioning of Richard III (1592-93) and romantic comedy with the near interchangeability of Romeo and Juliet (1594-96) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1594-96). During the course of the semester we will then go on to treat his second tetralogy of history plays-Richard II (1595), I Henry IV (1597), 2 Henry IV (1597-98) and Henry V (1598-99)-and his series of romantic comedies-The Merchant of Venice (1596-97), Much Ado About Nothing (1598-1600), As You Like It (1599-1600), and Twelfth Night (1599-1600)-as complementary treatments of the fashioning of authority from without, through the recreation of a myth of divine kingship, and from within, through the reproductive consent of women. Toward the end of the semester we will focus on the looming crisis of political succession and a growing anxiety toward the reproductive power of women in transitional late-Elizabethan plays such as Julius Caesar (1599) and Hamlet (1600-1601).

Format:

Lecture and discussion. Attendance and participation grade. (No more than 6 permitted absences.) Frequent informal response papers graded S/U. Two medium-length (c. 5-10 pages) formal, graded, analytic and interpretative papers. Midterm and cumulative final examinations.

Texts:

The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et. al. (or any good student edition of the plays you may happen already to know-if you have questions please consult the instructor at the beginning of the course) and The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents, ed. Russ McDonald.