Prof. Lawrence Danson
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Prof. Lawrence Danson |
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Ph.D. Yale '69. Shakespeare, drama, late 19th-early 20th century literature. Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeare's Drama of Language; The Harmonies of "The Merchant of Venice"; ed. On "King Lear"; Max Beerbohm and the Act of Writing; co-ed., Middleton, The Phoenix; Wilde's Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism (1997). Shakespeare's Dramatic Genres (OUP, 1999).
Princeton University Courses:
Lit131 -- The Plays of Shakepeare : An introduction to the plays of Shakespeare as literary, dramatic, and cultural texts; and an introduction to writing clear, well-argued, critical prose. The reading and the writing are two parts of a single activity; the aim is to make us sensitive audiences, self-aware readers, and interesting, articulate responders.
Eng310 -- Shakespeare I : Plays from the first half of Shakespeare's career, from the bursting comic energy of Love's Labor's Lost through the more sceptical questing of Hamlet, with some attention to the Sonnets. This is Shakespeare in love--with theater, with language, with his own irrepressible creativity. We'll think about the plays both on page and on stage, with attention to theatrical conditions and performance in Shakespeare's time and in ours.
Eng311 -- Shakespeare II : The plays Shakespeare wrote after his thirty-fifth birthday constitute the most unsettling, beautiful, troubling, deeply moving, penetratingly intelligent, compulsively meaningful body of work in the English literary canon. These plays complicate everything; they simplify nothing. We will discuss many issues, but our study will be guided by five general rubrics: the nature of identity and subjectivity; geriatric romance; the relation between erotic love and colonialism in the late plays; political representation and its discontents; and monarchy.
Eng316 -- The English Drama to 1700: The plots are lurid - murder, rape, incest, satanism, and scams of all sorts - and the plays are among the greatest ever written. We concentrate on Elizabethan and Jacobean theater - the theater of Shakespeare's contemporaries, of Marlowe, Kyd, Webster, Jonson -- with some attention to the religious drama of the medieval period and to the differently-sexed theater of the Restoration.
Eng523 -- Renaissance Drama: Marlowe-Shakespeare-Jonson: A study of the three most consequential playwrights of the English Renaissance stage, with attention to mutual influence, experimentation in genres, verse and prose styles, ideas of theater and performance. Some consideration of trends in criticism and issues of canon-formation.