Discovering Tragedy and Shakespeare
This unit will start with our poetic investigation of the sonnet form, its history and its intricacies. You will explore poetry by Petrarch, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and a couple of modern sonneteers (McKay, Frost, Robinson)—all of this leading (hopefully!) to your own original sonnets. The sonnet work will also aid in learning about Shakespeare’s verse style and stylized syntax, his life, and his culture’s history and influences. In reading Hamlet, the issues of the previous unit remain prominent, in that Hamlet struggles with issues of crime and punishment—both personal and societal. All of this questioning will circle around the issue of what makes a tragedy—tragedy in the classical sense defined by the works of the ancient Greeks; therefore, main issues at stake in each reading will surround pride and deceit (often, self-deception). While reading Hamlet, you will read selections and summaries of critics from John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to T. S. Eliot and Frank Kermode, as well as photocopies of extended line notes from the Appendix to the renowned Arden edition. Work on the play will include the following: practice with how to explicate a passage; research on the critical history of Hamlet; and a unit exam that tests your knowledge of Shakespeare’s life and times, his style and language use, and a short answer response to the criticism that presents an original critical interpretation.
Outside Reading for Unit 3 (please select from this list for outside reading or run your choice by me):
Doctor Faustus (1592?), by Christopher Marlowe [80 pp.]
The Rape of Lucrece and/or Venus and Adonis (1593?), by William Shakespeare (these are long poems)
The Merchant of Venice (1596?) and Twelfth Night (1602?), by Shakespeare (comic? plays) [60 pp. each]
Richard III (1597?) and Henry V (1599?), by Shakespeare (history plays) [60 pp. each]
Measure for Measure (1603?) and King Lear (1608?), by Shakespeare (tragic plays) [60 pp. each]
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), by Thomas Middleton (or Cyril Tourneur?) [80 pp.]
The Maid’s Tragedy (1609?), by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher [80 pp.]
Volpone (1604), by Ben Jonson [60 pp]
The Duchess of Malfi (1614), by John Webster [50 pp.]
Things Fall Apart (1958), by Chinua Achebe [220 pp.]