King Lear

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Wherever we place it in the pantheon of great plays and in spite of Tolstoy's loathing of it, King Lear is a very extraordinary play. This course will explore its extraordinariness by concentrating on it unremittingly. It will do so in two steps. For the first half of the semester we will slow-read the play together, thinking about anything and, insofar as we can, everything that it provokes us to investigate, from Shakespeare's sources to early stagings and revisions, from its views on power, gender and the spiritual to its verse and vocabulary, and so on and on. In the second half of the semester we will engage with the play in performance and reimaginings through film versions and a variety of adaptations from Nahum Tate to Jane Smiley and beyond.