Shakespearean Comedy

‘Get thee a wife, get thee a wife. There is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn.’ So Benedick cheerfully encourages Don Pedro to marry, just as he will, by re-imagining the inevitability of infidelity in reverential terms. We’ll take this as our point of entry into the middle comedies and look back at how Shakespeare got here and forward at least as far as the problem comedies, from his plot structure, his sense of verbal play, his idea of gender relations and social concerns to the assumptions underlying the qualified optimism of his endings. We’ll consider a number of the comedies. In addition to Much Ado About Nothing we’ll give attention to The Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, I and II Henry IV, Twelfth Night, and Measure for Measure. There will be some forays into theory: Frey, Barber, Bakhtin, etc., and some other readings--a selection of the sonnets and Venus and Adonis. We’ll be interested in contemporary approaches to the plays from the margins as well as from the middle. Requirements: collaborate with seminar colleagues in leading the discussion on one of the scheduled topics. Write a critical paper or complete a project( an editing project, a bibliographical study, a website, a lesson plan) of medium length on any course related subject of interest.