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Subject: English (UG) (ENGL)
CRN: 21017
Lecture
St Paul: Murray-Herrick Campus Center 211
Old Core Requirements Met:
UG Core Literature/Writing
Toward the end of THE TEMPEST, Miranda exclaims: “Oh, brave new world / That has such people in it!” The brave new world of Shakespeare’s England was also a world of upheaval, dislocation, and bewildering changes in religion, politics, and social life. Literature reflected all those changes, and it expressed the anxieties that many felt in a newly volatile and uncertain time. In particular, Shakespeare’s works are strongly marked by such concerns, sometimes expressing a profound skepticism about our ability to achieve certainty in such a world—a skepticism that could be sometimes comic, sometimes tragic. In this course, we’ll contextualize Shakespeare’s work by reading some groundbreaking texts from his and the previous generation, including Machiavelli’s THE PRINCE, More’s UTOPIA, and selections from Montaigne’s ESSAYS. That context will help illuminate Shakespeare’s thought, and will enrich our appreciation of the plays. This course counts both as an early British literature course and as a Contexts and Convergences course for English majors. Prerequisite: ENGL 201, 202, 203, or 204.
4 Credits