The Renaissance Imagination: Reading Shakespeare and Spenser

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course focuses intensely on William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser, two of the Renaissance period's most influential writers. Both writers reflect on the work that fiction can do in addressing our deepest desires and fears; both theorize the imagination's powers as well as its distortions and limitations. Both writers are also deeply concerned with the processes of interpretation that are at the heart of the English major; good readers of Spenser and Shakespeare promise to be good readers of much else. Probable texts: Shakespeare, Hamlet, As You Like It, Henry V, and The Tempest; Spenser, The Faerie Queene and selections from the Amoretti