ENGL 4270 - Advanced Seminar in Shakespeare

(HB) (LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

This course may be used as one of the three pre-1800 courses required of English majors. Co-meets with ENGL 6270.

B. Correll.

Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, Titus Andronicus, Rape of Lucrece: some of Shakespeare’s best works are about ancient figures and events. Shakespeare transmits a classical cultural heritage to his early modern audience, he actively adapts it in thought-provoking and innovative ways. Shakespeare’s major characters in these plays represent classical authority and yet are profoundly in conflict with it. While remaining attentive to complexities and indeterminacies in these texts, what responses—resistance, identification, affirmation, accommodation—are available to an author? What is the political charge of Roman (republican) plays in the context of English monarchy? What can we say about the cultural and sexual politics of Shakespeare’s adaptive practices? What political, biopolitical, and cultural questions, past and present, do they raise?