LIT 320 Advanced Seminar in Shakespeare

'He was not of an age, but for all time!' - Ben Jonson

So far Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's admiring rival, has been right. That is partly why reading Shakespeare is so challenging and rewarding. How shall we understand his love sonnets, for example? By our understandings of 'love', or by his? How did he - or his culture, many contemporary critics would say instead - understand 'love'? Or history, or gender, or nationhood, or religion, or our very concepts of the self and the universe? How do we accomplish an understanding of Shakespeare's writing within the context of his culture? Is that even possible, or worth trying to do? Are there other ways to read Shakespeare, and what were and are they? If nothing else, we ought to start with a little humility, given all those questions.

We'll start by closely reading select poems and plays from the 1950s, the climactic decade of the Elizabethan era. Then we'll closely read select tragedies and one romance from the early 17th century, the dawn of the Jacobean era. We'll pay attention not only to the socio-historic context but also to the long history of Shakespeare criticism.