01    TTH4  CAC 65296  LEVAO  SC-135

02    MW6  CAC  73067  BARTELS  MU-210

01-This course will be devoted to eight of Shakespeare’s plays written during the reign of King James I. The approach will be eclectic, including some discussion of historical context, sources, and a variety of literary, psychological, and ethical perspectives. The primary emphasis, however, will be on the pleasures and challenges of the readings themselves. Plays included will be Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and  Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.

Grading will be based on two hourly examinations and a three-hourfinal examination.

02- In this survey of Shakespeare’s Jacobean plays, we will use the issue of race as a pivot point to think about how and why Shakespearean drama was relevant in its own day and how and why it is especially relevant to us now.  Looking at Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, we will interrogate the complex and changing meanings of “race”—its inscription as a marker of family, royal lineage, nationality, ethnicity, species, temperament, and alterity.  We will investigate the ways “race” competes with more personalized forms of identity, substituting for, obscuring, supplementing, or otherwise intersecting with more established constructs of self.  Who has “race” on Shakespeare’s stage?  How is race performed?  Under what circumstances do racial identities figure? to what ends?  Why and how are questions of race so central to Shakespeare’s plays? Which questions and races are at stake?   In pursuing these issues, our goal will be to understand the matter of Shakespearean drama not as timeless and universal but as intricately connected to its own historical and dramatic moment—to controversies and constraints that significantly define the early modern period and the early modern stage.  In reading Shakespeare and race into history rather than out of it, we will be in a better position to recognize the peculiarity of our own historical moment and the specificity of our own conceptions and constructions of race.  We will also be in a better position to understand the potency of Shakespearean plays, in their form and content, as innovative and risky cultural performances then and now.

Requirements will include a major writing project, carried on throughout the term, as well as a midterm and a final examination.  Course format will include lectures as well as discussion sessions, meeting during the scheduled class hour.  Attendance is mandatory.