Shakespeare's Comedies and Romances (I) (Pre-1800)

In this course we will appreciate and closely analyze the development of Shakespeare’s comic vision which distinguishes itself from the tragic vision by insisting that the most important thing about human beings is not that we die but that we fall in love, marry, and have children. We will move from the early Comedies, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Merchant of Venice, through the major comedies, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Much Ado About Nothing, (and a Problem Play, Measure for Measure) to the final Romances, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, where Shakespeare searches for a way to reconcile the tragic and the comic visions by asking how life can be understandable when it presents us both with the joy of new birth and with the pain of loss and death.