All the World's a Stage: Seventeenth-Century Drama

Readings of representative English and continental plays of the 17th century including Shakespeare, Jonson, Corneille, Molière, Tasso, Calderon, and others. How do dramatists represent and negotiate oppositions between art and nature, imagination and reason, myth and history, freedom and fate through dramatic form and metaphor? Why is the stage such a powerful metaphor for the world?