Shakespeare and Italy

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course entails the study of five of Shakespeare's plays in order to assess how he located and historicized his Italian-based drama. Thanks to the Rome location, students will be able to directly compare the archaeology of Shakespeare's creativity with the splendors of ancient and Renaissance Italy that are integral to the works covered by the course. Throughout, the course will track the intersections of Shakespeare's dramatic narrative with the notion of Italian cultural difference in Shakespeare's time, allowing students to learn how he dramatizes the Italian ''Other''. In doing so, they will read his primary sources and evaluate how Shakespeare's creative brilliance responded to the writings of historians such as Plutarch and Macchiavelli and story tellers such as Ovid, Matteo Bandello and Giovanni Fiorentino. The course will also attempt to gauge whether, within Shakespeare's Italian plays, there exists a veiled critique of the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts in which his work was widely circulated. The course will also explore how filmmakers have documented Shakespeare's obsession with Italy, and how their work both subverts and confirms Shakespeare's imaginative settings and Italianate compulsions. This is a reading and writing intensive course. Students in 200-level literature classes are required to produce 4-5,000 words of critical writing.