The course surveys the major works of William Shakespeare thought to be produced in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Our focus will be performance spaces: the itinerant medieval stagecraft that Shakespeare inherited, the newly (and wildly) popular public theater of Renaissance England, Shakespeare’s Globe, and competing “private” or political sites of performance. We will cover the broad spectrum of early comedy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night, a central history play in 1 Henry IV, and we will conclude with Hamlet, the familiar tragedy first published in 1603 (though not in the form most familiar to us).