EN1106:
SHAKESPEARE
(ONE UNIT - TERMS ONE AND TWO)
For Single Honours first year students only. Joint Honours students take this course in their second year.
The most important thing to do at this stage is to read the texts of the plays themselves. You will also find it very helpful to watch the plays in performance in the theatre or on video. In the first term you will be studying a selection of Shakespeare's comedies and the second tetralogy of the history plays:
| The Merchant of Venice |
| As You Like It |
| Twelfth Night |
| Richard II |
| Henry IV Part I |
| Henry V |
In the second term you will be studying:
| Hamlet |
| Othello |
| King Lear |
| The Winter's Tale |
| The Tempest |
It is essential that you read all these plays before you arrive.
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 (Norton paperback 1997) and that you also read over the summer Greenblatt's General Introduction (to Shakespeare's life, work and world) and the short introductions to the plays you will be studying.
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, but these will be available in the campus bookshop.
Coursework: One essay 1,500 words, 1 critical commentary 1,000-1,500 words, plus one timed essay.
Assessment: 3 -hour exam (100%)
Short
bibliography for Shakespeare and Shakespeare Criticism
EN1106 Shakespeare
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)
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