Welcome to “Shakespeare’s Comic and Tragic Modes,” my Spring 2025 Shakespeare courses that will cover, respectively, these two sets of four plays: at MAB2, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, King Lear; and at Aliante Public Library, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Troilus and Cressida, Romeo and Juliet, Timon of Athens.
The weekly session at MAB2 begins Monday Feb. 3 at 11:00 AM, Room TBD, while the weekly session at Aliante Public Library begins Tuesday Feb. 4 at 1:00 PM. See the respective syllabi for details: Mon. at MAB2 | PDF, and Tues. at Aliante | PDF. If you’re coming to the Aliante location, just ask the librarian where the room is.
This website is meant to be useful to students of Shakespeare in and beyond OLLI, so I encourage you to visit the site’s various sections: the Home page; the OLLI page especially for students enrolled in a current Shakespeare course (this is where you’ll find copies of the course syllabus along with links to many of the most immediately useful materials; the Questions section for my study questions; the Commentaries section for my commentaries on the plays we are studying (and others); the Guides page for study guides, and the Links page, which offers more than 600 links to materials relevant to Shakespeare and Elizabethan-Jacobean studies.
A note on editions of Shakespeare texts: for this semester, on the syllabus I recommend particular editions, but you’re welcome to use any edition that contains adequate text- and content-based notes. If your edition doesn’t have such notes, you may want to supplement it with a Shakespeare lexicon such as David and Ben Crystal’s Shakespeare’s Words: a Dictionary, Shakespeare Glossary by C. T. Onions (Perseus), or Shakespeare Dictionary by Alexander Schmidt (Perseus). These books are also available in hard-copy editions.
Please be aware that many of Shakespeare’s plays exist in more than one version — for about half of them, the 1623 First Folio edition is the only one in existence (see this Page # Key to look up individual plays in Folger’s online copy), but other plays offer editors a choice of one or more “quarto” editions in addition to the First Folio, and that gives modern editors room to produce texts that may vary considerably in terms of line numbers due to inclusion/exclusion choices, scene parameters, and so forth. Your Riverside Shakespeare (or Oxford, or RSC, or Arden, or Bevington, etc.) copy of, say, Hamlet or King Lear may or may not be the same as someone else’s Norton Shakespeare copy.
Last Updated on November 28, 2024 by ajd_shxpr