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Course Objectives/Goals

The aim of the course is to introduce students to Shakespeare’s drama through the analysis of representative plays taking into consideration the historical, social and theatrical context of the Renaissance society. Emphasis is also placed on the ways by which contemporary literary theories have affected the reading of his plays regarding the treatment of important issues such as gender, race, power relations. Close study of Shakespeare’s language, themes and genres will be combined with resources drawn from film, visual art and other media.

Course Outcomes
By the end of this course students will:
a. recognize, understand and demonstrate knowledge of the fundamental issues in the study of Shakespeare and situate the set plays within their historical, material, and cultural contexts.
b. use close reading skills for the critical analysis of a wide range of Shakespeare’s writing and relate critical arguments from secondary sources.
c. reflect critically upon their learning experience and produce well-structured arguments supported by appropriate literary and theoretical evidence.
d. use information-technology skills such as word-processing, and access electronic data.
e. communicate effectively in speech, individually and in group contexts.

Primary Bibliography

We will focus on the following plays:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Hamlet

Twelfth Night

King Lear (if time and unforseeable circumstanes permit it)

Please read the assigned texts in advance of each class and please make sure you bring a hard or digital copy with you each week as will be engaging with the plays during close reading exercises and group work.

You may borrow any edition of the plays from the library or read the texts on line at

https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/?chapter=4

OR
http://shakespeare.mit.edu

If you wish to consult scholarly editions which include informative and accessible introductions and a breadth of annotations then William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London: Norton and Co.) OR William Shakespeare, The Oxford Shakespeare, ed. Wells and Taylor (Oxford, OUP) are recommended.

Assessment Methods

ASSESSMENT

This course will be assessed by a two-hour exam at the end of the semester. The exam will consist of two essay questions. Please note that the essay topics will be formulated to build on our work in class throughout the course, but also – and very importantly – to encourage you to develop your own skills as independent researchers and thinkers.

You also have the opportunity to gain extra credit by participating in a ten-minutes group presentation.

Presentation (Weeks 3-13)

Working in pairs or groups of up to 4 members, students will develop oral presentations that identify and synthesise key debates, ideas and problems in material for their week. Presentations are in two parts: a tutorial the week prior to presenting and a 10 mins. presentation comprising a formal presentation followed by questions from the audience. Your presentation should summarize your topic, method, and findings. You may find it easiest to write-out your presentation and perhaps even memorise sections of it or to speak from an outline or notes or, if relevant, to illustrate your findings through some type of visual aids or power point presentation.  I am happy to consult with you on effective presentation strategies if this type of presentation is unfamiliar to you. 

On the week when you are not giving your presentation, your job as a listener is to come up with two to three questions about the presentations you hear.  After the presentation is complete on a given day, the listeners will then offer their questions/comments to the presenters in order to spark a round-table discussion about the given findings of the presenters in regard to such aspects as topic, ideology, related cultural events, and terminology.

The combination of the presentations and the listeners’ questions is designed to emulate a specialised conference where you have the benefit of sharing your insights and of learning about how they relate to the primary research findings of your peers.

Extra Credit assignement changed due to COVID-19 outbreak:

As presentations will be logistically tricky to manage online, I have decided to offer the opportunity for extra credit (up to 2 points depending on quality) for 4 x 200 word entries. The blog entries can be uploaded on the eclass blog or emailed to me as word documents. The deadline for blog entries is the last day of class in June. If anyone has already submitted a blog entry they could use this for the extra credit even if it is over the word limit. I copy below information on blog entries I included in a previous message.

Once per week, each seminar participant can if she/he wishes, make a short
contribution to the class blog and all class members are encouraged to continue
discussion outside of class by commenting on one another’s posts. The posts can take
any form at all: they might be an argument about the week’s reading; a close reading
of a single passage; a set of discussion questions in dialogue with other posts; or
a more creative critical engagement of your own design. You might also find and
electronically “clip” into your blog entry a piece of Elizabethan writing, art, or
mass culture that you see as relating to what we’ve read. (In this case a word about
the relation would be appropriate.) You may vary the form of your entries over the
term. Please note these entries and forum participation are NOT MANDATORY and will
not contribute towards your final grade. The aim of these snippets of writing is to
enable us to continue a vivid class discussion on our set texts without being
hindered by technology (or its lack). Only those students wishing to gain extra
credit will need to provide three blog entries by the end of the semester. If,
however, you choose to write blog entries every week then you should notify me of
which three entries you wish to supply for additional credit.
I repeat that participication in blogs and the forum is not mandatory and
non-participation is not penalised. However, I encourage you to make the most of the
tools we have at hand in order to enhance our learning experience.

Instructional Methods

There will be a short lecture each week introducing main themes, contexts and critical approaches to the text at hand. The lecture will be followed by seminar discussion where we will engage in close reading and thinking deeply about the words on the page. Students are expected to work individually or in pairs and groups in each seminar to discuss themes and topics concerning our primary reading.

Class Participation

Often good participation is expected of students in a class, but sometimes class members may be uncertain about what constitutes good participation.

Some hints for strong class participation would include:

1. Coming to class having completed all reading assignments on time and also having had time to reflect on the reading before class.
2. Coming to each class with a question and/or a comment about a reading.
3. If very shy, the golden rule is to come to class with at least one comment/question to make per class.
4. If very talkative, the golden rule is come to class with no more than one comment/question to make per class.
5. If you are shy, talkative, or in between, I may talk to you individually outside of class with specific suggestions for your seminar participation.Such conversations occur every semester. By reflecting on our discussion practices, we can collaboratively deepen our understanding of critical questions and course materials.
6. If shy, talkative, or in between, be mindful that listening is as important, if not more so, than speaking is in a discussion-based course.This means our common goal is to build a handful of sustained topics for discussion in each class where the comments of one person build off of the comments and ideas of the other course members.  This might take the form of agreeing, of complicating, of alluding directly to the text, of challenging, of introducing a new or a related topic, etc.

Course Leader

 I am teaching 'Nineteenth-Century Fiction' and 'William Shakespeare' this semester at the Department of English Language and Literature. I am the author of Spiritualism and Women's Writing: from the fin de siècle to the neo-Victorian (Palgrave, 2009) and editor of Women and the Victorian Occult (Routledge, 2010). I have co-edited The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult (Ashgate, 2012) and I have written essays and articles on Wilkie Collins, Florence Marryat, sensation fiction, spiritualism, psychic detectives and the Society for Psychical Research. My main research interests focus on Victorian spiritualism, the occult, late Victorian popular authors, haunting and spectrality, death studies and childhood, Victorian material culture, fin de siècle periodicals and ephemera, gender and performativity. 

'William Shakespeare' draws on research interests in the supernatural, psychoanalysis, mourning and melancholia, filial relationships, gender performativity.

Please feel free to email me with queries and questions regarding the course at tkontou[at]enl.uoa.gr and drop in to see me during my office hours. Date and place for office hours will be confirmed next week

Online resources and scholarly digital editions of Shakespeare's works

Online Shakespeare Archives/Libraries

• https://www.bl.uk/people/william-shakespeare

 Discovering Literature is a free online learning resource that provides unprecedented access to the Library’s unique literary and historical collections. This phase of the project explores the works of Shakespeare and Renaissance writers in relation to the social, political and cultural context in which they were written, and examines the ways in which these plays and poems have been transformed and interpreted over the last four centuries. Through a diverse range of collection items, including rare printed books, unique contemporary manuscripts, annotated play-scripts, playbills, pamphlets, maps, photographs and paintings, the site gives users new insights into the images and ideas that shaped these writers' imaginations and that reflect their legacy. Users can also view over 100 articles by leading scholars and explore a range of teachers’ notes.

• The Folger Shakespeare Library

The collection's two great strengths are materials related to the early modern age in the West, from about 1450 to the mid-1700s, and materials related to William Shakespeare and the theater, up to the present day. The Folger's collection of Shakespeare materials, much of it originally acquired by Henry and Emily Folger, is the largest and finest in the world.

• The Horace Howard Furness Shakespeare Library

A selection of primary and secondary sources, including both texts and images, that illuminate the theater, literature, and history of Shakespeare, Shakespearean texts, theatrical production, and criticism have been made available for class and research use and to draw attention to the richer resources available in the Library as a whole.

• The Shakespeare Quartos Archive

The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is a digital collection of pre-1642 editions of William Shakespeare's plays. A cross-Atlantic collaboration has also produced an interactive interface for the detailed study of these geographically distant quartos, with full functionality for all thirty-two quarto copies of Hamlet held by participating institutions.

• Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive

Find Victorian-era illustrations of Shakespearean plays and characters