Shakespeare 1 is an elective for third-and fourth year students. This course aims to introduce the life and work of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare I focuses on Shakespeare’s life, the time he lived in, and his tragedies. In this one-semester course, Romeo and Juliet and Othello, two plays relatively accessible to a young audience, are studied and discussed in class, so as to help the students develop a vision to see into the core of the Bard’s dramatic world. In order to give the students more fun in the process of learning, visual aids, including drawings, videos, and DVDs, will be heavily used for teaching. Rehearsals and short presentations of Shakespeare’s plays will also be carried out in class.

I expect the students to achieve the following objectives by the end of the course: 1) To develop a clear understanding of some of the important social and cultural events that took place in Elizabethan England. 2) To become more aware of the expressive power of his language and the impact his drama has made upon the world. 3) To be able to appreciate and analyze some masterpieces of his tragedy, as well as to observe the distinctive theatricality in them. 4) To contextualize the relationships between a writer (a playwright), his work, and the time he lives in.

Romeo and Juliet, Updated Edition, Edited by G. Blakemore Evans, Cambridge University Press, 2003

Macbeth, Cambridge University Press, 2003