Admission requirements
None.
Description
It has sometimes been said that William Shakespeare “reinvented” the English language. This course offers the opportunity to explore Shakespeare’s linguistic creativity, in the context of the formal, social, and cultural resources of early modern English, as well as early modern poetics. Special topics for investigation will include: Shakespeare’s pronunciation, metrics, diction, and grammar; Renaissance rhetorical theory; neologisms and Renaissance “Latinity”; puns, malapropisms and other Shakespearean wordplay; language and gender; the problem of the “unspeakable.”
Course objectives
This course trains students in the analysis of both the linguistic and the creative aspects of Shakespeare’s language. Through primary source materials and secondary critical studies, students will learn to identify and interpret Shakespeare’s use of early modern English. The course includes hands-on, in-class exercises, where students will be able to speak in “original” Shakespearean pronunciation, invent new English words using Renaissance principles of word-formation, and write a Shakespearean sonnet. Students will gain special expertise in a formal, philosophical, political, theoretical, or cultural aspect of Shakespeare’s language, as well as literary and/or linguistic research skills, in the writing of a final research paper.
Timetable
The timetable will be available by June 1st at www.hum.leidenuniv.nl/engels.
Mode of instruction
One two-hour seminar per week
Assessment method
Short essays, quizzes, exercises, creative assignments (40%)
Class participation (10%)
Final paper proposal and class presentation (10%)
Final paper (40%)
Blackboard
This course is supported by Blackboard.
Reading list
William Shakespeare, Sonnets. ISBN 978-0300085068
William Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost. ISBN 978-0743484923
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar. ISBN 978-0743484932
William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew. ISBN 978-0743477574
William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus. ISBN 978-0671722920
Catherine M.S. Alexander, ed. Shakespeare and Language. ISBN 978-0521539005
Erasmus, De Copia. ISBN 978-0874622126
Russ McDonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language. ISBN 978-0198711711
Registration
Students should register through uSis.
Contact information
Departmental Office English Language and Culture, P.N. van Eyckhof 4, room 102C. Tel. 071 5272144; mail: english@hum.leidenuniv.nl.
Coordinator of Studies Master: Ms. K. van der Zeeuw-Filemon, P.N. van Eyckhof 4, room 103C.
Remarks
No remarks.