This seminar will concentrate on four of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello. While taking into account language and theatricality, we shall approach plays from the perspectives of plot and characterization. This line of inquiry will enable us to explore the plays’ action and at the same time focus on the psychology and morality of the tragic protagonists. In this way we shall move beyond the misguided idea of the “tragic flaw” of characterization and attend to the ethical, theological, and philosophical questions that all tragedy raises: the relationship between moral excellence and human fate. Keats perhaps said it best when summed up King Lear as the “fierce dispute between damnation and impassioned clay.”
Meet Your Instructor
PETER E. MEDINE is Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona, where he served in the English Department from 1969 to 2014. He has written, edited, or coedited seven books in Early Modern English studies. His most recent coedited book is Visionary Milton: Essays in Prophecy and Violence (2010). He is the recipient of several Humanities Seminars Superior Teaching Awards and the College of Humanities Award for Outreach Service.
Location
POETRY CENTER
Dorothy Rubel Room
1508 E Helen
Tucson, AZ 85721
United States
Located on the SE corner of Helen Street and Vine Avenue, one block north of Speedway and three blocks west of Campbell Ave.
