Spring 2026 Undergraduate English Courses

01     TTH4     CAC    12252     FULTON      MU-114 This course provides a survey of Shakespeare’s great plays written in the later half of the playwright's career. Written during the reign of James I, and as the playwright for the "King's Men," these plays explore a wide generic range. Attention will be given to Shakespeare’s context, reception and critical history, and especially to film and stage interpretation. Since plays are written to be performed rather than read in silence, we will spend some time in...

01    MW5   CAC   12253  LEVAO      HH-B3 Metaphysical Poetry The course will consider the exceptional qualities of “metaphysical poetry,” a constellation of Renaissance poems whose tendencies and obsessions have attracted both the admiration and perplexed antipathy of readers over the last four centuries. Metaphysical poems often put a high premium on surprise, complexity, the paradox of serious play, morbidity, intellectual passion, egotism, and pious humility, terms themselves susceptible to...

01  W3F4     CAC    12266   LEVAO    ABW-2100  Shakespeare’s dramas in all genres show a fascination with the doubling, mirroring, and twinning of characters, tendencies rooted in and cross-pollinated by philosophical, mythic, and poetic tradition and practice. Doubling represents some of the most important ways in which early-modern writers tested the limits of what historians sometimes call “Renaissance (or early-modern) Individualism,” serving as a pivotal image of antithetical impulses: a turning back...