ENGL 22015 - Shakespeare: War and Memory

Course Credit: 1
Maximum Credit: 0

SHAKESPEARE: WAR AND MEMORY “Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?” We’ll examine how Shakespeare’s plays answer this question (from the Prologue of Henry V) of how to represent wars–historical, legendary, and fictional–in the theaters of his time and our own. We’ll consider both the staging and the remembering of wars across a variety of Shakespearean genres, including English and Roman histories such as Henry V and Antony and Cleopatra; the national and personal tragedies of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello; comedies with contemporary settings like All’s Well that Ends Well; and Cymbeline, a romance that combines and reinvents many of the above categories. (And selected Sonnets.) Throughout the course we’ll use techniques of close reading, analytical writing, and creative interpretation to investigate the following questions, and others that arise: How do leaders present war to their friends and their subjects, and how do those audiences respond and remember? How and why do current fighters recall past conflicts? How does war appear in different genres, and how does it transform characters of various ethnic, gendered, and racialized identities? How does Shakespeare glorify, condemn, or aestheticize war? Does it matter that Shakespeare’s England was experiencing a time of relative peace compared to its immediate past and future? By way of our thematic focus, the course provides an introduction to Shakespeare and his world. [Before 1800] [AH]