English III / IV Syllabus
Shakespeare in the Wild (H)
2024-2025
“And this our life, exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”
— William Shakespeare, As You Like it, 2.1.15-17
Course Overview
In this course, we will navigate the environmental landscape of early modern England, using Shakespeare’s work as our north star. While some openly embraced England’s growing power to map, transform, and dominate the natural world during this period, others decried it, raising concerns about resource extraction, land enclosure, pollution, species loss, and deforestation — concerns that still persist today. While some turned to Christian doctrine to defend humankind’s right to master the earth, others feared the cost of trafficking in this rhetoric, reminding us that Christian doctrine also urges us to steward and take care of the earth. Still others called for more creative thinking — asking us to imagine alternative ways of inhabiting, managing, and caring for the earth. With Shakespeare at the center of our course, we will deepen our understanding of his work as a record and rebuke of the modes of thinking, practices, and policies that shaped the early modern English landscape.
Through close readings of Shakespeare’s plays, we will encounter forests and trees, earth and sea, stone and sky, listening carefully to the stories we tell about them. We will brave the “blasted heath” with Macbeth and marvel at the “moving grove” that foretells his fall, weather Prospero’s storm and seek peace on the island’s shore. We will be undone by Lear’s despair for having “ta’en / Too little care of this,” and remade by the Duke’s deep love for “sermons in stones, and good in everything.” Along the way, we will engage with ecocritical literary theory and sample environmental writing from across literary history to situate Shakespeare in a long, ongoing conversation about nature, ecology, and humankind’s relationship with the earth. By the end of the year, we will have a deeper, more comprehensive view on Shakespeare’s ecological thinking and, more broadly, the role stories play in shaping our perceptions and treatment of the natural world.
The course will focus on these essential skills, which students need to excel in their future studies and in any profession or trade:
Oral, written, visual, and digital literacies and communication skills;
Critical reading and analysis skills;
Techniques for effective collaboration;
Habits of mind that reinforce creativity, curiosity, and innovation.
It bears repeating that this is an Honors seminar, meaning that students are expected to complete a substantial amount of reading, writing, and research this year. Students will engage with a range of poems, short stories, plays, novels, and essays from across literary history aimed at deepening students’ understanding of the sciences. These texts will springboard class conversation and writing assignments. At this level, it is assumed that students are proficient in the basic conventions of academic essays and English grammar, and our study of literature will be an occasion to further refine these skills.
Most homework will be reading assignments, often accompanied by quizzes, analytical reflections, and essays to help students understand the text’s central ideas, themes, and questions. Thus, most classes will consist of “close reading” seminars. Students will be expected to come to class prepared to ask and answer questions about the readings.
While class discussion will be a central feature of virtually every class, I will occasionally implement alternative discursive approaches, such as debates or collaborative presentations, to keep things fresh and challenging. No matter the form, the goal of these activities is to help students become more comfortable with sharing their thoughts in a public setting. For some, this is difficult, even frightening. Once a shy student myself, I know that confidence, like algebra, can be learned. If we have established a healthy, non-competitive classroom environment, students will embrace “mistakes” or logical wrong turns. The point of humanities discourse is not to dominate competing views with some final word on the subject — we will never stop talking about The Tempest or the moral implications of dropping atomic weapons on civilians. The point is that by sharing our ideas and enlarging the conversation — by encouraging each other to share good-faith and credible insights about the texts — we all learn.
Course Topics & Readings
The reading schedule for this course will be posted in each unit’s module on Canvas every Friday by 5pm. The course texts listed below are physical books that I will provide students on the first day of class. All other texts for the course, indicated by an asterisk (*) below (e.g. short stories, poetry, films, articles, essays, videos, or podcasts), will be available on Canvas downloadable PDFs or weblinks.
Students must bring their texts to class each day in order to participate in class discussions. Some texts will be substantive and require a few weeks to read. Others will be much shorter and can thus be read in a short time frame. Please read the assigned pages before class in order to facilitate discussion.
Course Introduction: Historicism & Ecocriticism
(*) Ada Limón, “The Origin Revisited”
James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
Unit 1: The Forest as Stage
William Shakespeare, As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(*) Selected primary texts and scholarly articles
Unit 2: Knowledge, Power & the Sea
William Shakespeare, Pericles and The Tempest
(*) Selected primary texts and scholarly articles
Unit 3: “Upon this blasted heath”
William Shakespeare, King Lear and Macbeth
(*) Selected primary texts and scholarly articles
Unit 4: Healing in the Wilderness
William Shakespeare, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale
(*) Selected primary texts and scholarly articles
Content Warning: This course deals with topics such as discrimination, forms of extreme violence, and racism, which are emotionally challenging and difficult to confront. If students find the material upsetting, I encourage them to talk to me about it. However, bear in mind that a liberal arts education is designed not only to confront us with historical realities that are often discomforting or that challenge our worldviews, but also to encourage us to engage thoughtfully with difficult content.