Subject Area: English

The course is an opportunity for you to enjoy and understand Shakespeare’s tremendous achievement in comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. Studying the vocabularies and rhetorical strategies that Shakespeare himself studied and mastered, you will understand aspects of his creative process and acquire powers to describe his dazzling script with precision. You will consider Shakespeare’s aesthetic choices as they were enabled and constrained by the traditions of theatre and historiography in which he was schooled, and which he plundered. You will also benefit from some of the great commentary on Shakespearean drama provided by Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bradley, Frye, Eliot, and Bloom. The focus will be on the script, but you will also learn things that are essential to both strong performance and effective directing of the plays in schools, on stage, and on screen. By the end, you will see why Shakespeare is better than Game of Thrones, and why an astonishing array of Shakespearean performances is coming soon to cinemas and theatres near you and across the globe.