Shakespeare’s Tragedies

We’ll read and discuss three of Shakespeare’s tragedies—Hamlet, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra—with an eye to how they work as aesthetic objects and how they shed light on the nature of tragedy. In addition to exploring Shakespeare’s sense of the tragic as a response to his own time, we’ll explore how his plays might help us understand what remains true about the experience of the tragic in literature, history, and life.

Kent Puckett is the Ida May and William J. Eggers Jr. Chair in English, and a winner of Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award. He is the author of Narrative Theory: An Introduction; War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939-1945; and Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel.