Shakespeare's tragedies

Lecture Transcript and Course Guidebook - This course offers an introduction to tragedy as a literary genre and outlines the main characteristics of Shakespearean tragedy. The lectures acquaint students with themes that Shakespeare almost obsessively revisits and reconfigures across the span of his six mature tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. It contextualizes the plays by suggesting some ways in which we might speak tot he anxieties and preoccupations of the playwright's 17th - century audience, and it it also offers detailed and thought-provoking explorations of individual plays on their own terms. Last but not least, the course illustrates the power and audacity of Shakespeare's poetry and stagecraft.