Assignment due Wednesday, May 4th

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 either Assignment #1 or #2 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 an approach modeled in one of the first three assignments and apply it to a different play than you wrote on in that assignment. You could do a “scholarly conversation” assignment on Q1 Hamlet, for instance, or use the methodologies from assignment #1 to read Macbeth, or even write a review of a film production of one of the plays we read this semester (a riff on assignment #3).

-Develop an idea or argument that came up in one of our seminar discussions that you find interesting and would like to pursue further.

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