ENGLISH 112: Making Shakespeare

Course Description

This seminar investigates how Shakespeare become "Shakespeare," how the actor, poet, playwright, and person living and working at the turn of the seventeenth century in England came to be thought of as representing universally across time and space. We will consider the collecting, editing, printing, and marketing of Shakespeare's plays and poems - especially Hamlet, King Lear, Cymbeline, Twelfth Night, and Julius Caesar - alongside changing philosophical, political, and cultural forces that have made and un-made our senses of the most famous writer in English.