"The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth": Love and Desire in Shakespeare's Works
Shakespeare’s works present love and desire in all their glorious and painful variety—as transformative and enduring, destructive and fickle—and sometimes ridiculous and irrational. This course will explore how Shakespeare imagines longing as both a creative and destabilizing force—capable of inspiring devotion, provoking mischief, crossing boundaries of gender and identity, and exposing the tensions between individual desire and social expectations. We will consider how romantic passion, lust, friendship, obsession, and self‑fashioning intertwine in Shakespeare’s works, and how these texts invite us to question what it means to love, to desire, and to be desired. Likely texts include Venus and Adonis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Much Ado About Nothing. In addition to close readings of the texts, we will also look at various filmed productions (theatrical and cinematic adaptations) in order to analyze how directors transform and reinterpret Shakespeare’s scripts to reflect particular moments in time.
TR 12:30-1:45 hybrid
Susan C. Staub
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