Shakespeare: Tragedies and Sonnets

Works

Plays

• Julius Caesar
• Hamlet
• Macbeth
• King Lear

Sonnets: 5 and 6, 73 and 97, 29 and 30, 18 and 65

Topics

The Shakespeare courses are structured differently from the other courses in this series. Rather than each lesson focusing on one literary topic (such as character or conflict), each lesson examines various aspects of the play or sonnets (two sonnets are examined in each sonnet lesson). The following topics are covered in this guide, some in a general way, and others particular to the plays and/or sonnets:

• Shakespeare's life
• Schools of Shakespearean criticism
• Shakespeare's language (blank verse, irony, soliloquys, bombast, register, stage direction, alliteration, assonance, simile, metaphor, imagery, personification, repetition, puns, antithesis, oxymoron, allusion)
• Theme
• Character
• Symbolism
• Elizabethan theater
• Elizabeth I and James I
• Authorship of the plays and sonnets

Recommendations

This course is especially recommended for the following students:

• Students who have already taken at least two previous high-school level Lightning Literature courses
• Students studying Renaissance history
• Students interested in Shakespeare

These should not be viewed as restrictions; this course can profitably be used by high-school students of any grade regardless of which previous Lightning Literature courses they have completed. Generally speaking, this course is more difficult than the two American Literature courses, Speech, British Christian Literature, and the two British lit courses and about the same as British Medieval Literature. Much depends on student interest in the material, however.