Shakespeare's Tragedies
Zell Kravinsky profile
TR 3-4:30
"What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?" asks the Prince of Denmark, pondering the directions for the journey his mother describes as "passing through nature to eternity." All of us ought to want to accomplish that passage, eluding the zone of corruption between;
Shakespeare's tragedies could conceivably supply us with the protocols of proper motion. By the end of this course, you may not yet know what you're going to do -- between time and eternity -- but you will have asked the question.
Conceivably the answer, the good and useful protocols, are t There is one protocol which the teacher of this class considers himself to have already received, before the class begins: it constrains him to regard each student as an instance of God's beauty and genius, and to conduct the class in such a fashion as to exalt and celebrate each of us and demean none of us. Whatever our phenomenal operations in the class -- and the students will have considerable say in determining these -- we will attempt to create the lovingkind community Hamlet's Elsinore (so tragically) is not.
Gentleness will be, in Renaissance parlance, the genius of the place, and none of us -- regardless of what you might have thought a course in tragedy would entail -- need die in the end.
The instructor welcomes questions at 573-5102 or at his home in 100 Baird in the Quad. (Note: See also English 35, 337, & 35.601 [CGS].)
updated 2006-02-19
