Cowell College - Spring 1999

Cowell 131: Reading Drama

This is a 3-unit course

Time: Wednesdays 9:30 am -12:10pm

This course will be devoted to three Shakespeare texts that date from between 1600 and 1604: Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure.

Students in undergraduate courses on Shakespeare are not accustomed to thesound of what they read; they have little personal experience of the dramatic potential of what they read, or of the demands that spoken language makes on them. I wish to continue the experiment which I began in 1996 and continued in 1997 with readings of the two tetralogies of English history. In this class group reading of the play is a major focus of class activity; first we read and then we discuss--what we have read, how we interpret the text, what group reading has produced or made evident, what alternative readings could produce, the nature of interpretation after oral reading. Students will be assigned roles a week in advance and will be expected to have read the play and studied their own roles before the class meeting.

All students will be expected to participate fully in reading and discussing the plays; attendance will be mandatory. Each student will submit one eight-page paper on a subject of his or her choice related to the matter of the course.

The course is open to students from all disciplines; students from Cowell College enjoy priority of enrollment. However, this is an upper division course, and students should have some prior experience in Literature or Theater Arts. I shall not allow first year students to take the course without a personal interview with me.

I shall expect all students to use the same editions of the plays, since it is essential that we all read from the same text of the play (editions vary textually). I have still to select the editions, however. All three books will be available (in paperback) from The Literary Guillotine on Locust Street.

Revised 7/30/04.