Summer Shakespeare II

Course Overview

Throughout five years of course offerings in English, the Scholars Online program covers a fair amount of Shakespeare. A student who has taken World Literature, English Literature, and AP English will have read:

• World Literature:
  • The Tempest
• English Literature:
  • Richard III
  • Much Ado About Nothing
  • Macbeth
• Senior English:
• Henry IV, Part 1
• Henry IV, Part 2
• Henry V
• Hamlet
• Measure for Measure

I have not yet figured out a legitimate way of incorporating Shakespeare into either Western Literature to Dante or American Literature. Failing some major historical upheaval, I suspect that this will not change.

Accordingly, a student can read eight or nine plays. While this certainly represents a good deal more Shakespeare than the average high school student will study formally, still, as Harold Bloom argues, Shakespeare has a unique place at the center of the Western literary canon, and it is nearly impossible to get too much of him.

Accordingly, this course is designed to follow Summer Shakespeare I in filling in some of the larger gaps in our Shakespeare offerings. We will cover, at the rate of one per week (and three one week), a total of ten more plays, thus considerably augmenting the number a student has before college. Of course, at this pace, we cannot even pretend to be exhaustive — it’s intended to be a fun course in any case. But I am hoping that it will foster a cheerful familiarity with Shakespeare, and an awareness of the shape of his corpus as a whole. Taken together with the nine above, this will bring the student’s coverage to eighteen plays — more than half of Shakespeare’s total production. (Summer Shakespeare I provides another nine plays, bringing the total to twenty-eight, while Summer Shakespeare III completes the canon.)

Accordingly, this course will include:

• Comedy:
  • The Comedy of Errors
  • The Merry Wives of Windsor
  • Love’s Labour’s Lost
  • All’s Well That Ends Well
  • A Winter’s Tale
• Tragedy:
  • Coriolanus
  • Antony and Cleopatra
• History:
• Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3

Because time is at a premium during the summer, and we would like to accomplish as much as we possibly can, I’d like to hit the ground running with a play discussion the first week. Therefore, do not delay to enroll, and get the books as soon as possible.

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