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Course Description

Summary

We will immerse ourselves in reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets and his Neoclassical poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Shakespeare invented his own style of the sonnet, originally popularized by Petrarch in the 14th century. In the 154 sonnets published in 1609, Shakespeare dazzles us with his lexical, semantic, aural, syntactic, and rhetorical virtuosity. Nevertheless, he was not immune to a bad romance. As we expand our understanding of Shakespeare’s persistent themes, narrative strategies, ekphrastic innovations, and poetic techniques, we will examine the critical reception of these works, including biographical, Feminist, Queer Theory, and Post-structural approaches. Our most pressing objective is to become more agile, precise, and imaginative close readers of—and writers about—Shakespeare’s poetry.