FALL 2000
This information effective for Fall 2000.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
This senior seminar will focus on the issue of text for performance in relation to the four Roman plays of Shakespeare: Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Titus Andronicus. Students will study the plays as performance texts (with some attention to film and video versions), but in the context of learning about the history of the texts, the current theoretical arguments about the nature of editing, and the practice of the editors in the editions assigned.
Although most students will probably possess copies of these plays already, I intend to make some specific recent editions the objects of study; other previously acquired copies will be useful for acts of comparison, but the assigned texts will be required.
Since this is a senior seminar, enrollment is limited to 22 students. Some prior experience of studying or performing Shakespeare is desirable but not essential. Each student will be required to complete a substantial major writing project appropriate to a senior seminar (about 25 pages); some assigned exercises will make up part of that project.
Books will be ordered through The Literary Guillotine, and will include:
Russ McDonald, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents
Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism
G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. David Bevington (The Cambridge Shakespeare, 1990)
________________, Coriolanus, ed. R. B. Parker (the Oxford Shakespeare, 1994)
________________, Julius Caesar, ed. A. R. Humphreys (The Oxford Shakespeare, 1984)
________________, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (The New Arden Shakespeare, 1995)
There may be a reader assigned for the course. Additional material may be provided by xerox.