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Course Description

Summary

We will immerse ourselves in reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets and his Neoclassical poem, Venus and Adonis. Shakespeare invented his own style of the sonnet, now called the English sonnet. The word sonnet comes from the Italian sonetto, which means “a little sound or song”; it was a poetic form originally popularized by Petrarch in the 14th century. In the 154 sonnets, first published in 1609, Shakespeare dazzles us with his lexical, semantic, aural, syntactic, and rhetorical virtuosity. Despite this poetic brilliance, the poet was not immune to a bad romance. As we expand our understanding of Shakespeare’s themes, narrative strategies, poetic innovations, we will examine the critical reception of these works, including biographical, Feminist, Queer Theory, and Post-structural approaches. Our most pressing objective is to become more agile, precise, and imaginative close readers of—and writers about—Shakespeare’s poetry.