ENGL 418

Fall 2023 All Classes

All Classes

Shakespeare

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Credit: 3 OR 4 hours.

Survey of the plays and poems of William Shakespeare. Reading assignments will reflect the generic diversity and historical breadth of Shakespeare's work.

3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.

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ENGL 418 class schedule data for fall 2023
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	40436	Lecture-Discussion	1G	11:00AM -12:15PM	TR	132 Davenport Hall	Newcomb, L	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/21/23-12/06/23 Credit: 4 hours Section Info: FA23 ENGL 418 Shakespeare - Lori Newcomb: We start with the insight that in Shakespeare’s lifetime (1564-1616), professional drama was a new form of entertainment in a new kind of venue, the commercial stage. Like many of today’s entertainment forms, plays were products of collaboration among playwrights, actors, and audiences. The plays, written as scripts for performance, were popular culture: first performed live, only later published for readers, and much later reimagined as ‘literature.” Today, the plays live on as entertainment, heritage, and challenge, allowing users to engage with recurring human dreams and nightmares, with harmony and tyranny, with disorder and with reconciliation. In part because the language and stage action is very open to interpretation, and in part because they demand actors’ and audiences’ collaboration, the plays give later interpreters unusual leeway for variation and reimagining. Societies in turmoil, which must include our own, continue to find them powerful tools for communicating about difficult issues, bringing difficult memories into the immediate present, and imagining alternatives to the status quo. We’ll read 5 to 7 plays in depth, getting a sense of the linguistic freedom that makes them fantastic to read, their daring explorations of the period’s family, political, gender/sexual, religious and racial tensions, and their openness to reinterpretation today. We’ll make our interpretive approaches as active as possible. Thus, when we consider the plays in performance, we’ll get on our feet and do some performance exercises. We’ll learn to close read the diction of the plays, and later consider the printed play as itself a new technology. When we explore historicist and feminist, queer-studies, and anti-racist perspectives, I’ll bring you key nonfiction documents, too, to see how issues are engaged in different kinds of texts. Beyond the classroom, you’ll visit the Rare Book Library and Skeuomorph Press, and you’ll write an academic analysis of a live theater production. Written work includes some informal writings at first, two closely focused short papers, a longer paper with guided research (8-10 pp.), and a final exam. Primary textbook: Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays and Sonnets, 3rd edition. Contextual and critical readings. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
	32335	Lecture-Discussion	1U	11:00AM -12:15PM	TR	132 Davenport Hall	Newcomb, L	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/21/23-12/06/23 Credit: 3 hours Section Info: FA23 ENGL 418 Shakespeare - Lori Newcomb: We start with the insight that in Shakespeare’s lifetime (1564-1616), professional drama was a new form of entertainment in a new kind of venue, the commercial stage. Like many of today’s entertainment forms, plays were products of collaboration among playwrights, actors, and audiences. The plays, written as scripts for performance, were popular culture: first performed live, only later published for readers, and much later reimagined as ‘literature.” Today, the plays live on as entertainment, heritage, and challenge, allowing users to engage with recurring human dreams and nightmares, with harmony and tyranny, with disorder and with reconciliation. In part because the language and stage action is very open to interpretation, and in part because they demand actors’ and audiences’ collaboration, the plays give later interpreters unusual leeway for variation and reimagining. Societies in turmoil, which must include our own, continue to find them powerful tools for communicating about difficult issues, bringing difficult memories into the immediate present, and imagining alternatives to the status quo. We’ll read 5 to 7 plays in depth, getting a sense of the linguistic freedom that makes them fantastic to read, their daring explorations of the period’s family, political, gender/sexual, religious and racial tensions, and their openness to reinterpretation today. We’ll make our interpretive approaches as active as possible. Thus, when we consider the plays in performance, we’ll get on our feet and do some performance exercises. We’ll learn to close read the diction of the plays, and later consider the printed play as itself a new technology. When we explore historicist and feminist, queer-studies, and anti-racist perspectives, I’ll bring you key nonfiction documents, too, to see how issues are engaged in different kinds of texts. Beyond the classroom, you’ll visit the Rare Book Library and Skeuomorph Press, and you’ll write an academic analysis of a live theater production. Written work includes some informal writings at first, two closely focused short papers, a longer paper with guided research (8-10 pp.), and a final exam. Primary textbook: Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays and Sonnets, 3rd edition. Contextual and critical readings. Restriction(s): Restricted to English or Creative Writing or Creative Writing major(s) or minor(s). Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.