Shakespeare's New Worlds

Catalog description

Shakespeare's career (c. 1590-1613) overlapped with what has been characterized as the 'age of discovery', when English explorers and merchants came into contact with alien spaces and foreign peoples, and began working out ways to describe and categorize them, trade with them, and dispossess them. Knowledge about places far beyond Europe was becoming ever more commonplace in London, and Shakespeare's contemporaries were beginning to imagine themselves as global players. This course asks how Shakespeare's drama staged these alien spaces and foreign peoples for his audiences. We will read The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale.