Department of English

    In the more than 40 works he wrote in roughly 20 years, Shakespeare uses the word like and various forms thereof nearly 2400 times (he uses imitate and forms thereof 22 times).
    With this word, his native English word that derives from the Anglo-Saxon word for “body,” he examines as he dramatizes one of the inescapable questions of human being: what shall I (be) like? When, for example, King Henry V asks Katherine of France, “Do you like me, Kate?,” her response serves, in effect, as a figure of the ontological condition of the Shakespearean protagonist — “Pardonnez moi, I cannot tell vat is ‘like me’ ” (Henry V 5.2.107-8). Though, obviously, she means she has trouble understanding the English words “like me,” she also says, what every Shakespearean protagonist also says at one time or another, I do not know what I (am) like.
     “Shakespeare’s Theater of Likeness” will study a wide range of the writings (plays and poems both) with a view to devising a method for analyzing and expressing the work of the word like in the corpus. In the process, a number of other methods — psychoanalytic criticism, “new historicism,” and “WerkImmanente Bedeutung” (“work-immanent meaning”), to name a few — will also be studied and tested.
    Each student will be responsible for reporting on the work of like in one play and for writing two short essays, one based on the report, and another, at the end of the term, on a related topic of his or her own choosing.

   Final Note For those students considering a track in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, this course can serve as relevant background for several other courses in the area of MEMS.

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