Over the course of his dramatic career, Shakespeare shows a tendency to re-visit certain themes, plots and character conceptions. When we look at his plays as early or late Shakespeare, we can clearly see that some plays are more connected than others, as if the later drama served as a 2.0 version of his early work. While this is true for many of his plays, we will look at two, i.e. four examples, of how certain plays seem to stand in a closer connection to each other and we will try to do this for two of the major genres, comedy and tragedy. Therefore, we will read Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew from appr. 1591 with and/or against his later play, Much Ado About Nothing from 1599. It has often been observed that Beatrice in Ado is a shrew like Katerina and Benedick a misogynist like Petruchio and we will put that theory to a test. Our examples from tragedy will be Richard III and Macbeth. While the former is technically a history play from appr. 1592, the latter is a tragedy from 1606, yet both seem remarkably similar – especially when it comes to the construction of villainy. We will read all four plays in the attempt to find out how Shakespeare manifests certain plots that have since then irrevocably shaped the face of the history of literature in English. All students are requested to read all four plays before the beginning of term. You can choose any edition.

Kurs im HIS-LSF