Welcome to the Course!

Welcome to our Fall 2025 installment of Shakespeare's tragedies! This class will focus on tragedies about tyrants, usurpers, and the so-called ruling class--the people who are supposedly more brilliant and important than the rest of us, but who really just use their money and power as an excuse to get up to all sorts of mischief. This semester, we'll read some of his most famous plays, all of which are based on actual people/rulers, though most of them take enormous liberties with the source material. 

Be sure to buy the books for the class ASAP, especially the short book, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction, which we'll start using next week. See you in class! 

Guiding Quote for the class: “Real life does not speak for itself. It has to be turned into words, stories, and plots. It is only when these are lifted out of the unstoppable flow that they hold our protracted attention…We need from [tragedy] an insight—we might even wish to add, a foresight—into the way we should expect things to happen…Tragedy is in this sense thoroughly realistic. It tells us the truth about the way things are going to be—probably, inevitably (Poole, Chapter 1, Tragedy).