Assignment due December 15th 

Your final short assignment for our class is open-ended: you may write on anything you’d like that pertains to our class or Shakespeare more broadly. If that thought terrifies you (it scares me a little!), then here are some suggestions about how you can approach this final assignment:

-Extend an of your previous short assignments into a 10-page paper. You can (and perhaps should) revise the portion of the paper that you have already written and add on 4-5 additional pages that further develops your analysis. One of the advantages of this choice is it would give you a draft of a  paper that you could potentially present at a conference. There are a number of ways to approach this revision. You could, for instance, add in additional research to Assignment #1 that engages with the scholarly response to the play you were writing about. Alternatively, you could develop Assignment #2 by further analyzing the play and presenting an argument that somehow engages with the ideas in the “critical conversation” you were exploring.

-Take on the question of presentism vs. historicism in a reading of one of our plays from the term. You might decide that you’d like to do a deep historicist reading of the play, or that you want to emulate one of the critical approaches we saw in our readings this semester.

-Develop an idea or argument that came up in one of our seminar discussions that you find interesting and would like to pursue further. I am also open to experimentation for this final assignment. We have seen several examples this semester of professional scholarly writing, including personal essays, essays that address current events and social issues, and even scholarly calls to action. If any of this work has moved you please feel free to adapt it into your own voice through this assignment.

Whatever you choose to do, you should incorporate some kind of research, strive as best as you can to make a compelling argument in your paper, and format your final draft using our style guide.