English 117S

Other Readings and Media

Shakespeare, W.: The Norton Shakespeare (2nd Edition)

Description

Shakespeare’s poems and plays are relentlessly unsettling, crazy beautiful, deeply moving, rigorously brilliant, and compulsively meaningful: they complicate everything, they simplify nothing, and for 400 years, they have been a touchstone—indeed, something like an obsession—for literary artists from Milton to Goethe to George Eliot to Joyce to Brecht to Zukofsky to Sarah Kane and for philosophers and theorists from Hegel to Marx to Freud to Derrida to Lacan to Zizeck. We will be especially concerned with five large issues: compassion; political representation and its discontents; the nature of identity and subjectivity; colonialism; and the relation between the ways Shakespeare’s plays make meaning and the ways they produce emotional experience. We will read Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Henry V, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, Coriolanus, and The Tempest. If you already own a good single-volume edition of the plays (for example, The Riverside Shakespeare or The Arden Shakespeare), don’t feel at all obliged to buy The Norton Shakespeare.