FALL 2000
This information effective for Fall 2000.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
Instructor(s): Michael Warren
Fall 2000
Introduction to Shakespeare is designed to be valuable to students in many ways: it satisfies the T4 requirement; it fulfills a lower-division requirement for the literature major; it provides excellent training in reading and writing about literature. Above all it introduces students to major works by one of the most important figures in Western literature, a writer whose works have played a major part in cultural debates inside and outside the English speaking world, one of the great verbal artists whose work still challenges and gives pleasure.
I presume no prior knowledge of Shakespeare, although nearly everyone coming to the class seems to have read at least one play before, usually Romeo and Juliet. I do require students who take the course to have fulfilled the Subject A requirement in advance.
The class will meet on MWF 2:00-3:10 pm for lectures. There will be mandatory assigned discussion sections led by TAs at various other times. The sections will enable students to discuss the plays and poems, or poems and passages from the plays, in small groups. I require regular and prompt attendance at all lectures and sections.
In Fall Quarter 2000 the texts for the course will probably be:
Sonnets
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Twelfth Night
Measure for Measure
King Lear
The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with
Documents
I have chosen these plays because their interpretation involves important historical and interpretive issues: relations between the sexes and the nature of marriage; the concept and the rights of authority--the nature of order, law, and justice in society; the role of art in human culture. They are all full of brilliant language, and each usually provides exciting experiences in the theater.
It is desirable that we all use the same editions of these plays. I shall order Pelican editions at the Bay Tree Bookstore; they are inexpensive. Some will be available in the new Pelican format; the new Pelican edition of King Lear that I shall order contains both the Quarto and Folio texts, unlike any other inexpensive edition, and is therefore irreplaceable. The Bedford Companion is a supplementary book of materials about the age of Shakespeare, history, social customs, playhouse structures, etc; it is relatively inexpensive.
My method is to begin with a couple of lectures on the Sonnets in which I exemplify the kind of attentive reading that students should learn if they wish to be sensitive and successful readers of literature and especially of poetry and drama. After that about six lectures are devoted to each play, so that we explore each text thoroughly. I pay particular attention to questions of interpretive choice in relation to the language in performance, since I believe in attending to the origins of these plays in the Elizabethan playhouse and to their production in theaters today. In this connection I use videotapes from time to time in lectures to illustrate problematic passages by showing different interpretations. There will also be some showings of videotapes in the evenings, attendance at which is not mandatory, although seeing the tapes in the company of other members of the class brings great benefits.
Written work for the course will consist of: four brief quizzes, one on each play; three papers, each of four to five pages, one on a sonnet, the others on a specific passage or a scene from the plays or on an interpretive topic; a midterm, and a final.
In advance of the class I would urge interested students to see any Shakespeare productions that they can during the summer, and especially Shakespeare Santa Cruz's productions of Love's Labor's Lost and Cymbeline (playing mid-July to the end of August).