Together, we're building an archive of creative and critical responses to Shakespeare through the generations since his death. There is hardly an area of humanistic concern which has not been affected by his thought: music, dance, painting, and film owe to him debts almost as sizable as does literature itself. Alongside careful reading of the plays themselves, our task in this course will be to gather these reverberations and to consider their interpretive usefulness.

The principal assignments then, gleaned from individual and group research, will be annotated bibliography, book review, and weekly work logs. The class format is hands-on: be prepared for archival research, presentations of same, lectures, special collections, and net-based mixed media.

Principal Texts:

Anthony and Cleopatra

The Tempest

Macbeth

The Winter's Tale

All's Well that Ends Well

The Sea and the Mirror by W.H. Auden

[get any copies of these that you like; try the used bookstores around the city for sturdy editions]