Students in this course will collectively choose the Shakespearean tragedy of the early 1600s: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, or Macbeth. We will closely examine this selected play and pay particular attention to the issues of devastating arrogance, jealousy, the quest for power, the desire for revenge, and the consequences of suffering that all three plays address. Of course there needs to be a fiction to film element too, so depending on the selected play, we will look at Marlon Brando's Julius Caesar (1953), Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948), or Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1972). The comedy will come from across the Channel as we read Molière's Tartuffe. Like the Bard, Molière was a careful observer of life and manners and satirically depicted the French upper-class and religious zealots in his play that would prove the prototype for centuries of comic playwrights to follow. 

Departmental approval is required for this course.