01:25P-2:30P MW (30) 3 cr.
TOPIC: SHAKESPEARE'S (AND OTHER PEOPLE'S) TEXTS
WARNING: This is not going to be your normal undergraduate Shakespeare course and if you are planning to take it only or primarily to satisfy a requirement, E302 might prove to be an easier and better option. Nor will this L313 be a course in Early Shakespeare alone, as is customary. Instead we shall use this course to study how Shakespeare's texts have come down to us, what difference that transmission process makes to our understanding of the plays, what it is we think we are reading or seeing when we read or see a Shakespearian play, and indeed whether textual questions can be made to interest anyone other than aged scholars who have devoted their lives to such matters (the instructor plainly believes it is possible). We shall focus, then, on several of Shakespeare's textually "troubled" plays and read them in their different versions, to see what that can tell us about Elizabethan/Jacobean acting, production, and printing conditions, and subsequent editorial practice.
Reading list is likely to include Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew alongside The Taming of A Shrew, both the First and Second Quartos of Hamlet, and Pericles (Shakespeare's most textually-damaged play) alongside the prose romance closely connected to it, perhaps one other. We'll start the course with a viewing of Shakespeare in Love, which sounds like mere fun, but we may well take some of the fun out of it as we examine what even it can tell us about production conditions in Shakespeare's time. While we shall cover relatively few plays, you will know those plays very well--and not simply the plays, but the means by which the plays have become the plays they have become. If you have any qualms about this course description, come in during office hours and see the antic figure writing it, before enrolling in the course. No exams, but a good number of shorter writing exercises and a ten-page essay examining one of the plays we study in significant detail.