Prof. Crawford

In the year 1600, as a new century began, William Shakespeare was 35 years old and at the midpoint of his life as a writer. Already he had an astonishing career behind him: he was the most successful playwright working in the booming (and viciously competitive) London theatrical scene, and he had achieved a dazzling mastery of his art. In the previous five years alone he had produced Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Henry IV, Henry V, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Much Ado about Nothing, and The Merchant of Venice. These plays made a remarkable experiment in representing the subtleties of human character, and they rendered human speech with unprecedented beauty and vigor. Audiences flocked to see them.

But in 1600, Shakespeare found his way into strange new territory. In Hamlet, which he wrote that year, we find him working in a powerful new idiom. His characters become more enigmatic, more darkly fascinating, more frightening and complex. His language becomes more weird and prophetic. His explorations of the human experience seem to penetrate deeper and deeper into the bedrock of who we are. He seems to have plunged into crisis, and in the tragedies that follow Hamlet we find evidence everywhere of a man obsessed with sadism, damnation, madness, patricide, sexual betrayal, and fear.

This course is about those great tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. We will read those four plays, slowly and in depth, and we will work to think about them as a single artistic project. Inasmuch as these four plays do constitute a single project, they amount to one of the most astonishing attempts ever made to explore what it is to be human. Our hope will be to think with Shakespeare, to follow him into the strange territories he discovers in these great tragedies. No experience with Shakespeare is required or expected: just a willingness to join your colleagues and our author as we make our exploration.