ENGL 113 SC - Weird Shakespeare

2023 marks four centuries since the publication of the First Folio, the book that memorialized Shakespeare as the “soul of the age.” This course seeks to expand students’ sense of the Shakespeare canon by ranging beyond his most famous works. We will read lyric and narrative poetry that was not included in the Folio as well as plays from each of the major genres, while acknowledging that genre was itself an unstable category for Shakespeare as well as his editors and critics. Our discussions will consider plots and characters that we—or the characters themselves—might define as “weird” or “wayward,” and examine how Shakespeare shapes and upsets our normative assumptions. We will situate the plays amidst the complexity of early modern print culture, and explore their surprising transformations under different editorial hands. We will also study a selection of Shakespeare’s literary and historical sources, and consider how more recent scholars and artists have revisited his work in new and provocative ways

Course Credit: 1.0

Please refer to the course schedule on the Scripps Portal for current course offerings and details.