This course will focus on a selection of works from the second half of Shakespeare's literary career (approx. 1599-1613). We will approach the texts in a variety of ways: (1) close analysis and explication of individual works; (2) discussion of a text as an example of one of the three major genres -- comedy, tragedy, and Romance -- that Shakespeare was primarily working in during this period; (3) examination of the work's relationship to contemporary Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural issues.
Text: The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et. al. 2nd. ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.