We will look closely at only five plays in this course - Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest - concentrating somewhat on what Shakespeare might be "saying," but much more on how we go about the act of reading such rich texts. By the end of the term, you should be able to apply what you have learned from the rhetorical analysis of these plays to any other Shakespeare play - and to most other prose and poetry written since then. You should also have learned to love Shakespeare.
Since we read only five plays, multiple readings of each is expected. Since writing is the best way to engender thinking, you will write often:
-- three 3-page close textual analyses (CTAs) of short passages (4 to 16 lines of poetry);
-- 2-page responses to the CTAs of each of the other members of your writing groups;
-- a 4-page analysis of a single scene from a play not to be covered in class;
-- and a 7-page paper on that play as a whole.
There will be a final exam.
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