ENGL 218 - Shakespeare and the Limits of Genre: Problem Comedy and Romance

FC ARHU WINT

4 credits
This class will study Shakespeare’s most inscrutable plays: the disturbing “problem comedies” (All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and Merchant of Venice) and the dazzling “romances” (Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale). In both tragicomic modes, Shakespeare experiments with the limits of genre: crafting “happy endings” to plays that resist them, and thereby speculating on the nature of dramatic representation and fiction-making itself.