Texts:

Class meetings:

Weekly written assignments:

For ten of the semester's twelve and a half weeks, I want from you a short written response to our reading. I'll explain the details of this in class.

Final project:

A ten to twelve page paper, with a research component (i.e. reading in background materials and criticism as part of your formulation of your 'thesis' about a play or plays we have read). Due during the last week. In some cases this assignment can be modified into a project with some kind of performance or presentational element in it. Presentations will mainly be scheduled for the final week. All project topics need to be cleared with me between April 10 and April 17. This can be done in one of two ways: a written proposal (handed in April 10 and returned within a week) or a conference in my office. I can be found in Rice 30 (x8576, e-mail FYOUNG@oberlin.edu), at the following times: Monday and Wednesday, 12-1, and Th. 1:35-2:30.

A few words about this structure and emphasis of this class.

Shakespeare can be daunting as a subject of study, partly because he looms so large culturally, partly because studying playscripts that are about four hundred years old isn't what a lot of our reading and writing has trained us for. At the same time, it's rewarding to take on this challenge because the literary eminence of the material is no accident: something really interesting and creative was going on when these plays got written and produced and it is still available to us, in good productions and through careful study.

I don't propose to eliminate or suppress any facet of your interest in this material, but I think we'll be more successful as a group if we have a center of interest, something to link one play with another. Any artist's development is a matter of considerable interest, and Shakespeare is no exception. Thus we'll read more or less chronologically, seeing what choices he made as he moved on from one project to the next.

At the same time, our chronology will be selective. We can't read all the plays in one semester, and we must choose some aspect that links a number of them if we are to fine-tune our sense of the artistic development.

The aspect I've chosen has to do with this artist's favorite sources. Again and again, and with an increasing self-consciousness about it, he returns to a certain kind of story, a hugely popular narrative form called romance. Romance narratives supply the basic plots and situations of his plays, usually his comedies, though the designation "comedy" becomes more and more tricky as he words forward; after calling some of his mature comedies "problem plays," critics finally give up and label the late work "romances," by which they partly mean "tragicomedy" and partly acknowledge the frank foregrounding of the features and characteristics of narrative romance in the last plays he wrote.

We'll therefore spend some time getting acquainted with the romance tradition as a preliminary to our study, and we'll continue that emphasis by reading excerpts from the particular romances that were used as sources for particular plays. Hence that packet you need to buy at the Department Office to which I've given a characteristically Elizabethan title.

In your weekly response papers you may well want to address this ongoing topic whereby we look over Shakespeare's shoulder, so to speak, as he makes his choices about source materials. You may also want to address other issues that reading the play of the week has posed for you. In fact, I'd suggest you try to divide your response papers about 50/50 between these two options. That will keep our discussions partly focused on our linking structure and partly open to issues that lie outside that structure, which is how I hope we'll always be able to proceed: following a path but able to stray from it whenever we find exciting and interesting distractions.

If I'm right about how all this should work, you should have good payoffs, when you get to Lear and the late romances in the second half of the course, having insights you could not have come to without the preparation of the first half. That's not to say, of course, that there isn't plenty of rich material in the first half, but I wanted you, as you struggled with some of the romance excerpts and with the shortcomings of the first playtext we'll read, to be able to look ahead to our semester-long design.

In general, with your reading, you need to read the play once through to get the general sense of it, then begin to go back over it looking at language, characterization and dramaturgy in more detail. The introductions in the Bevington text are helpful, as is the front matter dealing with historical context. My "read" and "reread" instructions for each week's assignment are shorthand for a more complex process during which you will also want to factor in the source excerpt. If you would like to form a small group or groups to read the plays out loud (say, on weekends), I would strongly encourage that and would be glad to join you for some of your sessions.

SCHEDULE OF ASSIGNMENTS:

Wed. Feb. 4: Brief Introduction.

Fri. Feb. 6: Read the excerpts from Longus, Heliodorus, and the tale of Apollonius, King of Tyre in Curious Cabinet (hereafter CCDD).

Mon. Feb. 9: Read The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Wed. Feb. 11: Read the excerpt from Diana Enamorada in CCDD.

Fri. Feb. 13: Reread Two Gentlemen.

Mon. Feb. 16: Read The Merchant of Venice.

Wed. Feb. 18: Read the excerpt from Il Pecorone in CCDD.

Fri. Feb. 20: Reread Merchant.

Mon. Feb. 23: Read As You Like It.

Wed. Feb. 25: Read the excerpts from Rosalynde in CCDD.

Fri. Feb. 27: Reread As You Like It.

Mon. March 2: Read Twelfth Night.

Wed. March 4: Read the excerpt from the Tale of Apolonius & Silla in CCDD.

Fri. March 6: Reread Twelfth Night.

Mon. March 9: Read All's Well That Ends Well.

Wed. March 11: Read the excerpt from Painter in CCDD.

Fri. March 13: Reread All's Well.

Mon. March 16: Read Measure for Measure.

Wed. March 18: Read the excerpt from Cinthio in CCDD.

Fri. March 20: Reread Measure for Measure.

SPRING BREAK

Mon. March through Fri. April 10: This is a two-week unit on King Lear. During this time you should read around in the source materials collected by Bullough in Volume VII of Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. This and other Bullough volumes are on reserve. I would especially like you to be acquainted with Sidney's story of the blind king of Paphlogonia in The Arcadia.

Mon. April 13: Read Pericles.

Wed. April 15: Review the third selection in CCDD and browse through the relevant section of Bullough, Volume VI, for the rest of the story and the other sources and analogues.

Fri. April 17: Reread Pericles.

Mon. April 20: Read The Winter's Tale.

Wed. April 22: Read around in Greene's Pandosto, Bullough, Volume VIII.

Fri. April 24: Reread The Winter's Tale.

Mon. April 27: Read The Tempest

Wed. April 29 and Fri. May 1: Reread The Tempest.