This class will give you an opportunity to engage in a close reading of Henry V and King Lear. One focus of our discussions will be early modern concepts of legitimate kingship/ order and disorder and Shakespeare’s ways of using these in his plays. We shall also study some film adaptations of Henry V, particularly the famous version with Sir Laurence Olivier produced during World War II.
Please buy a good current critical edition of both texts (i.e. either in the Arden Shakespeare series or the Oxford World’s Classics series) and read Henry V before the beginning of the semester semester. No other editions please – do not waste your money on texts without substantial annotations as these would be useless for the purposes of this course.
Requirements: regular attendance, reading the assigned texts, active participation, and written work according to your particular Studienordnung. As always: read, think, enjoy (!!), annotate (!) and look things up if necessary. |
