English 217

Other Readings and Media

Shakespeare, W: The Riverside Shakespeare

Description

This class is an introduction to the criticism of Shakespeare at the graduate level. I've decided to perform that introduction this semester by following the development of Shakespeare criticism into a professional practice, tracing the reception history of the plays since their first performances. I'm particularly interested in the recursiveness of that history—its circularity and anachronicity—and in the way that the solecistic charge of anachronism has been deployed both against the playwright and against his critics within that history. So we'll be focusing on a dozen or so plays and poems that thematize the difficult relations of chronology to memory and futurity, probably including Othello, the sonnets, Titus, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Hamlet, and Winter's Tale.

I have ordered the Riverside Shakespeare at the bookstore. You may use any scholarly edition of each play, however, as convenient to you ('scholarly'= has annotations and an introduction, has a first copyright date after 1960, and says who edited the text). We will refer to the original printings in on-line facsimile as well.