English N117S

Book List

Shakespeare, William: The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition: Tragedies

Other Readings and Media

I will make a number of secondary readings available through our course website.

Description

In his great book on Shakespearean Tragedy (1905), A. C. Bradley writes that, when we experience one of Shakespeare's tragic plays, "We seem to have before us a type of the mystery of the whole world, the tragic fact which extends far beyond the limits of tragedy. Everywhere, from the crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power, intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came into being for no other end." In this course we will look at several of Shakespeare's tragedies in order both to see how they work as individual plays and to relate them to ideas about the nature of tragedy from Aristotle to the present. We'll want both to understand Shakespeare's sense of the tragic as a response to his time and to see how Shakespeare's tragedies might help us to see something larger and still true about the experience of the tragic in life and literature.

This course will be taught in Session A, from May 23  to June 30.