FALL 2007 HONORS COURSES

HONR 258K Shakespeare in History and in Performance: Words and Swords
Monday/Wednesday 3:00 – 4:15 p.m.
Maynard Mack, Jr., Department of English

Students cannot earn credit for both HONR 258K and ENGL 205.

In large part we create, and sometimes destroy, ourselves through the languages we speak and understand. By studying intensely a few of Shakespeare's plays we will explore the ways the characters in the plays--like people in our world--exist as much through their art, imaginations, and languages as through biology and physics.

Through reading, writing about, enacting, and seeing a few Shakespeare plays, we will try to come to a fuller understanding of the power, and helplessness, of language to create truths and shape lives. The role of imaginative language in creating the ideas of love, marriage, city, country, pastoral, forgiveness, and endurance will be considered. Our goal will be to get Shakespeare's languages up off the page and into our heads and bodies so we can make the fundamental choices about belief and disbelief, imagination and reality, words or swords that define each of us as a human being.

Assignments: Regular short papers, scene work, a play review, etc. will constitute the formal assignments for the course.

Tentative reading list:
Hamlet
Othello
King Lear
Antony and Cleopatra
The Winter's Tale
The Tempest

CORE: Literature (HL)