Shakespeare

Shakespeare here isn't treated as a monument to admire but as a working playwright and poet whose texts have to be argued with — you'll learn to read the plays simultaneously as literature on the page and as scripts shaped by Elizabethan stagecraft, genre conventions, and political pressures. Expect close-reading discussions across the sonnets, a tragedy, a comedy, a Roman play, a history, and a romance, with two exams, a paper proposal, and a term essay that pushes you toward an independent critical argument. As a required third-year course, it cements the analytical vocabulary you've built in earlier literature surveys and gives you a canonical anchor for later electives in drama, criticism, and adaptation.