Studies in Shakespeare (339-0-20)
Topic
Shakespeare's Environmental Questions
Instructors
Laurie J Shannon
847 4913643
University Hall Room 214
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 2-335: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
This seminar will work across Shakespeare's genres (comedies, tragedies, and tragicomic hybrids), reading representative plays that show Shakespeare's preoccupation with humanity's cosmic place and his assessment of an ambivalent environmental situation for human beings. For critical context, shorter readings - from Genesis to the Anthropocene - will fuel our discussion.
The course will explore Shakespeare's troubled sense that humankind, alone among all creaturely kinds, does not quite "belong" to nature. We'll assess how his understanding of "Nature" and our relation to it changes over time and how it varies in the distinct ecologies of tragedy and comedy. The critical concept of Shakespearean "green worlds" first arose to describe the retreats into nature (and away from civilized society) that typically occur in the comedies. In Shakespearean comedy, a removal to the green world (getting ourselves "back to Nature") counteracts one or another social ill, which in turn enables a rebalanced, healthier socio-political life to be restored. But how does this traditional and sometimes pastoral sense of a natural equilibrium hold up in a closer reading of the plays, especially if we consider comedies and tragedies together? Against what, exactly, is the human social order defined and established, and from what threatening "laws of nature" is it supposed to defend us? How does our grasp of more contemporary human impacts on the environment illuminate Shakespeare's premodern vision of human existence as a calamity of exposure - to both hard weather and our own worst instincts? This inquiry into Shakespeare's environmental vision will, finally, tell us something about the longer philosophical history of wondering what it means to be human.
Teaching Method
Lecture and discussion.
Evaluation Method
Sustained and substantive class participation, occasional assignments, and two short papers.
Class Materials (Required)
Readings will center on Shakespeare's As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale. The recommended editions are from the affordable Pelican series: A Midsummer Night's Dream, ISBN: 978014312858; As You Like It, ISBN: 9780143130239; King Lear, ISBN: 9780143128557; and The Winter's Tale, ISBN: 9780143131748. Contextual readings in early modern genres, pastoral poetry, natural history, theology, and political thought will be supplied by the instructor, as will twentieth- and twenty-first-century materials re-examining humanity's place in - or agency over - Nature.
Class Attributes
Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area