“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.” So says Theseus at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For Summer quarter, we will be examining the notions of madness, love, and the poetical figure in the works of Shakespeare. We will begin with Shakespeare’s early poetry, his sonnets and Venus and Adonis. We will then read Shakespeare’s most famous story of young love Romeo and Juliet, analyzing the affair of these “star-crossed lovers,” while also paying close attention to “romances” in this text that you may have overlooked in a first reading. From here, we will move on to plays that explore altered states of consciousness, feigned and true insanity, and the implications of these illusions and realities in Shakespeare’s dramas. We will also be working with modes of production, including film and art, and will be seeing a stage performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays. The main goals of the course are to help you learn to “decode” the language of Shakespeare through close readings and to make you more confident readers of the great Bard. In addition, we will negotiate the difference between the works as they perhaps might have been understood in Shakespeare’s own culture and how they have been understood since. Issues of gender and sexuality will continue to arise.