EN1106: SHAKESPEARE (Autumn 2010)
Tutor: Dr Ewan Fernie
This is a full unit, running in term 1.
For Single Honours first year students only. Joint Honours students take this course
in their second year.
This innovative lecture-led course opens with the Elizabethan Shakespeare of the
comedies and histories. The latter half of term is then devoted to the tragedies and late
plays of the Jacobean Shakespeare.
You will be studying: The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Henry
IV Part I, Henry V and then Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, The Winter's Tale and The
Tempest.
It is essential that you read all of these plays before the start of the course.
Unless you intend to buy most of the plays in individual editions you will need to
have a copy of Shakespeare's complete works. We recommend that you buy The
Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt.
When you are studying particular plays in depth, you will also need to make use of
the editions of individual plays. The Oxford Shakespeare and the New Cambridge
Shakespeare (both available in paperback) are the series we recommend. These will
be available in the campus bookshop.
Teaching: Three hour-long lectures a week incorporating a critical overview of the
text; collaborative close reading of the text in question; and lectures on the plays in
performance.
Coursework: One essay.
Assessment: One two hour exam or take-home exam (100%).
Short bibliography of Shakespeare Criticism
Shakespeare Quarterly is available online through JSTOR via Metalib
A. General studies of Shakespeare's works always worth consulting
Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997)
David Bevington, Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002)
Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986)
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate,
1999)
Frank Kermode, Shakespeare's Language (London: Allen Lane, 2000)
Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare, 3rd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
B. Classic criticism
A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan, 1992)
G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy
(London and New York: Routledge, 2001)
C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1959)
C. Modern criticism
(i) Overviews, textbooks and anthologies
Dympna Callaghan (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell,
2000)
Kate Chedgzoy (ed.), Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender (Basingstoke and New
York: Palgrave, 2001)
Richard Dutton and Richard Wilson (eds.) New Historicism and Renaissance Drama,
(London and New York: London, 1992)
Thomas Healy, New Latitudes: Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London,
Melbourne and Auckland: Edward Arnold, 1992)
Russ McDonald (ed.), Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)
Michael Taylor, Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001)
Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)
Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin (eds), Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003)
(ii) Modern classics
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of
Shakespeare and his Contemporaries 3rd edn. (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New
York Palgrave, 2004)
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
(Chicago: Chicago University Press)
----------------------, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in
Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)
----------------------, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York
and London: Routledge, 1990)
----------------------, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2001)
John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge,
1985)
Terence Hawkes (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares 2 (London and New York:
Routledge, 1996)
Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)