- ENG 373, Shakespeare's Plays
English 373.01
Shakespeare's Plays:
Forms of Power and the Power of Forms
Course Syllabus
Professor John Cox
Office: Lubbers 316
Phone: 395-7612 (home: 392-2986)
E-mail: cox@hope.edu
Office hours: MWF, 11-12, 1-2; TR, 10-11, 2-3, or by appointment
Course objectives:
At Hope, Shakespeare is taught as a separate upper-division course under the category "Literary Forms and Reformulations." The objectives of the course are therefore determined in part by the category it belongs to. (See p. 169 of the current catalog.) More specifically, as a result of taking this course, students will know:
- a lot about thirteen of Shakespeare's thirty-six to thirty-eight plays
- a lot about Shakespeare's poetry (in both plays and sonnets)
- quite a lot about the way Shakespeare's plays have been performed recently
- quite a lot about the culture in which the plays were originally written and performed
- quite a lot about generic theory (i.e., theory about the various kinds of play that Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote)
- how to understand Shakespeare's language
- how to interpret Shakespeare's poetry
- how to understand and analyze a Shakespearean performance
Resources:
- David M. Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare
- Videotapes of Shakespeare's plays (annotated list in Van Wylen Library is on the web un-der English 373)
- World Wide Web resources: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/ren.html
- Videotapes of Shakespeare's plays (annotated list in Van Wylen Library is on the web un-der English 373)
Course requirements
We will be reading about one play every week. A thorough knowledge of the assigned plays will be expected, particularly since most of class time will be given to discussion. Shake-speare wrote his plays for the theater; in fact he would be surprised to see them being studied in a classroom. So a very good way to grasp the essentials of a play when first encountering it is by watching it being performed. This can now be done easily by means of videotape. Van Wylen Library has tapes of all the plays we will be reading this semester. The course requires viewing productions of at least four plays. In one of the papers you write, you may choose to analyze a performance.
A take-home mid-term exam will be completed by March 6 and a take-home final exam by April 30, the date set by the registrar for the final exam in this course. (Anyone wishing to write in-class exams instead of take-home exams may do so; further expla-nation to follow.)
Two short papers (1,000 to 1,500 words) will be required in addition to the ex-ams. The first will be a poetry explication; the second, a choice of another poetry explication or an analysis of a Shakespearean performance. They will be due on Jan. 25 and April 15, respec-tively. Four short reports on some aspect of a performed play will be due on Feb. 8, Feb. 22, March 29, and April 25. Further information about these written exercises will be handed out closer to the time they are due.
Absenteeism
Class attendance is expected at all times, for two reasons: (1) absentees suffer themselves, even if they can get a good grade in the course despite being absent, because they inevitably gain less from the course by being present less than others; (2) absentees make others suffer in two ways?both by depriving them of their insights in discussion of the plays and by making them feel foolish (whether they intend to or not) for attending regularly. If you have to be absent for an excusable reason, please let me know; otherwise, I will assume you don't have a good reason to be absent. If necessary, absenteeism will be discouraged by unannounced quizzes. These will be brief, so they won't take up much class time. They will either consist of multiple-choice and true-or-false questions about a given play we're reading, or they will consist of questions about a previous session's discussion of the play. The proportion of points assigned to the quizzes will depend on the number of quizzes given during the semester, and that will depend, in turn, on the amount of absenteeism. The number of points to be earned by completing other as-signments will be adjusted accordingly.
Basis of evaluation
Each of the short reports will be worth 5% of the final grade (for a total of 20%). The two short papers and the exams will be worth 18% each (total: 72%). This four-credit course meets only three times per week, so the fourth credit will be earned from watching plays in per-formance and writing short reports about them. Four such reports are required, but you are en-couraged to watch more performances than four, as you find the time. Each student will be ex-pected to contribute at least eight times to the online discussion board for this class. Each contribution will be worth 1% of your grade, for a total of 8%. The following grading scale will be used for all other assignments and the final average: A (94-100), A- (91-93), B+ (88-90), B (85-87), B- (82-84), C+ (79-81), C (76-78), C- (73-75), D+ (70-72), D (67-69), D- (64-66), F (0-63).
Academic honesty
No one can learn who is not engaged in learning. All exercises in this course are de-signed to assist learning and must therefore be done by the individual student alone. This does not rule out other aids to learning, such as talking to one's fellow students, consulting secondary sources, or seeking assistance in matters of style and composition. When actually writing papers and exams, however, direct dependence on others' work (unless duly acknowledged) will be regarded as dishonest, since it defeats the purpose of learning. Copying directly without acknowl-edgment is plagiarism; so is paraphrasing without acknowledgment. If you are uncertain about plagiarism in particular cases, especially where internet resources are concerned, be sure to seek advice before proceeding. The section on plagiarism in The St. Martin's Handbook, pp. 576-79, is helpful.
Schedule of readings and assignments
The schedule on the following page is arranged according to the order in which scholars think the plays were written. This is not the way the plays are arranged in Bevington's edition of the Complete Works, so you will have to skip forwards and backwards to find the plays we're reading. The reason for reading the plays in simple chronological order is to em-phasize Shakespeare's experimentation with dramatic form. The following questions will oc-cupy us as we read and discuss the plays: What influenced Shakespeare to write comedy and tragedy? Where did those forms come from, and why did he use them? What other forms did his plays take? Where did the other forms come from? How do they relate to comedy and trag-edy? Did he likely understand the form of his plays in the same way we do, and if not, what's the difference, and who is right?
A complementary set of questions concerns how Shakespeare's plays were themselves forms of power in their own culture. What social status did playwrights enjoy? What social and political pressures shaped them as playwrights? What was the social function of theater during Shakespeare's years as a playwright? For whom did he write plays, and why? What is the so-cial status of characters in his plays, and why? In general, what was the center of power, how did playwrights relate to it, and what difference did it make to Shakespeare's plays in particular?