Graduate Courses - ENG 553: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
Prerequisite(s): Graduate standing or permission.
Recent offerings:
Spring 2009, Brucher
This course offers relatively broad reading in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama (roughly 1587 – 1642) and scholarship. To develop a sense of this once popular (and still provocative and pertinent) drama we’ll explore the conventions of revenge tragedy, domestic tragedy, and comedy of social life. Repeatedly the plays raise issues of class and gender, and justice and desire. We’ll consider Shakespeare as a working dramatist among his contemporaries, sometimes using him as a foil for his contemporaries. Oral presentations and class discussions will define interpretive problems and test effects of the plays against critical principles and historical evidence.
Spring 2009, Brucher