ENG 242 - Introduction to Drama

Introduction to Shakespeare
This course serves as a general introduction to Shakespeare’s drama. We will read major plays in the principal genres of comedy, history, and tragedy, charting the development of Shakespeare’s craft over the course of his career by contrasting early and late examples of his work. We will examine how Shakespeare’s language emerged from and interacted with early modern English culture, in particular the culture of the commercial theater. Given the breadth and variety of Shakespeare’s artistic production, we will ask ourselves what shared themes and characteristics allow us to identify a work as ‘Shakespearean’.

Shakespeare Altered
The works of William Shakespeare play an outsized role in education, theater, and culture, despite the fact that Shakespeare lived and wrote over four-hundred years ago in a world substantially different from our own. Both a symptom and a cause of this longevity, dramatists’ choices to alter, adapt, and appropriate Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate their evolving cultural significances. By comparing Shakespeare’s plays with the dramatic works they have inspired, we can discern the ways in which both stagecraft and society have changed over time. This course attends to twentieth and twenty-first century dramatists’ reworkings of Shakespearean sources as a means to analyze shifts in staging, structure, and character across early modern and contemporary plays. We will read early modern plays (such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Tempest) in dialogue with adaptations from the past fifty years (such as James Lujan’s Kino and Teresa, dead center’s Hamnet, Arnold Wesker’s The Merchant, Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré’s Desdemona, and Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête). Throughout the course, we will ask ourselves how both sets of plays engage with Shakespeare’s early modern England and our own world today.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken up to 4 times for credit if different topics.
Notes:

Not all topics offered every year.
Review schedule of classes for availability.
Review descriptions for specific applicability to department requirements.
Genre: Drama
Introduction to Shakespeare: This course applies toward the department’s pre-1700 requirement.

Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).