Though he is most often discussed as a dramatist, William Shakespeare considered himself a poet first and foremost, who turned to playwriting as a way to make money, and as a natural extension of his acting career. In addition to producing the language?s most respected corpus of plays and of poetry, the bard?s work has also been an inspiration to hundreds of artists in genres as diverse as painting, ballet, opera, filmmaking, sculpture, architecture, and many others. This class will consider Shakespeare?s poetry, with a heavy emphasis on the sonnets; we will read descriptive passages and speeches from nearly all the 36 plays, with an ear tuned to his unique language and image-making. We will also consider him as a cultural touchstone, reading adaptations, listening to symphonies, and criticizing paintings inspired by his work. In order to understand his composite gifts of characterization and narrative structure, we will read, in addition to principle selections from all the major plays, three in their entirety.

The goal is not to read all the Shakespeare we?ll ever need to read in the span of one class, but to qualify ourselves as readers of his poetry, that we might open to his language, reading, at any later date, with appetite and comprehension.


The written assignments for this class will involve the following, which total between 17-22 pages, and which should all be revised in response to instructor feedback in accordance with the university's (w) requirements.

1. a response to a critical work which you will have selected, in which you demonstrate your ability to make scholarly use of secondary sources and to engage academic interpretations of the work on its own terms.
2. an interpretive paper wherein you demonstrate your ability to read and understand the material, to make claims about texts, and to support those claims with primary evidence.
3. a group assignment on some aspect of the supplementary topics listed on the syllabus.
4. Optional extra credit: Seattle is full of first-rate Shakespeare productions, and will be especially so during our quarter together. Go see one, and report back from the front lines an analysis of the staging, adaptation, or artistic choices that make up the production.

The edition from which you choose to read can be a "Complete Shakespeare" from any major press (these can be found by the pile in used book shops), so longs as it includes full texts of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "The Tempest,""King Lear," and the sonnets.