ENGL 342 - Studies in Shakespeare

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2015/16b: Wholly Hamlet! ”Are the commentators on Hamlet really mad,” inquired Oscar Wilde, “or only pretending to be?” It has been said that “Hamlet invented modern subjectivity”; that Hamlet engages us “not as a work by Shakespeare but as a work of western culture,” “a field of operation for thoughtful play,” “a poem unlimited.” The Hamlet story survives in medieval folk tales and in a thousand modern redactions, including three substantially different “Shakespeare” scripts (1603, 1605, 1623). In this interdisciplinary seminar we shall consider folk Hamlets, stage Hamlets, printshop Hamlets, burlesque Omelets; Hamlet as transposed to the painter’s canvas and to the silver screen; Hamlet in textual scholarship, literary history, classroom editing, dramatic theory, art history, psychiatry, anthropology, philosophy, gender studies, queer theory, kiddie lit, theology, Bardolatry, anti-Stratfordianism, pop culture, world culture, and the Internet. Nor shall Ophelia drown without notice. Mr. Foster.

One 2-hour period.