THPERF 387: Shakespeare 2 — Plays after 1599-1600

Sources and References

Primary textbook — Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds.), The Norton Shakespeare (W.W. Norton). Supplementary texts — Stephen Greenblatt Hamlet in Purgatory; A.C. Bradley Shakespearean Tragedy; Jan Kott Shakespeare Our Contemporary; Stanley Cavell Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare; Harold Bloom Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human; Marjorie Garber Shakespeare After All; G. Wilson Knight The Wheel of Fire. Online resources — Folger Shakespeare Library digital editions (folger.edu); Royal Shakespeare Company education resources; Open Source Shakespeare; MIT Global Shakespeares.

1. Late Shakespeare — Context and Career Shift

The hinge around 1599–1600 marks one of the most decisive turns in Shakespeare’s working life. By 1599 the Chamberlain’s Men had moved into the newly built Globe on Bankside; Queen Elizabeth was visibly aging without an heir; the Earl of Essex’s rebellion would soon expose how brittle the Elizabethan settlement had become. Jonathan Bate and James Shapiro have both argued that this year of crisis pushed Shakespeare from the sunlit comedies and patriotic histories of the 1590s toward a darker, more philosophically strained dramaturgy. The plays written after 1599–1600 are the ones modern readers often think of first when they think of “Shakespeare”: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, the so-called problem plays, and the late romances.

Three overlapping contexts shape this late career. First, the Globe itself: a large amphitheatre with a mixed audience but also a sophisticated two-tiered stage that could stage ghosts, storms, descents, and discoveries. Second, the accession of James I in 1603, which turned the company into the King’s Men and placed Shakespeare under royal patronage, with access to the indoor Blackfriars theatre from around 1608. Third, intellectual turbulence: the spread of skeptical writers such as Montaigne (translated by John Florio in 1603), the lingering trauma of the Reformation’s abolition of Purgatory, and new humanist anxieties about conscience, interiority, and political legitimacy.

Marjorie Garber notes that the late plays think aloud about what it means to be a self in time, while A.D. Nuttall calls Shakespeare “the thinker” precisely because the post-1600 drama treats the stage as a laboratory for moral and metaphysical experiment. G. Wilson Knight’s famous image of “the Shakespearean tempest” captures another feature: storms, both literal and figurative, as purgative machinery. What unifies this period is not a single tone but a willingness to push character, genre, and language until each begins to crack open and show its seams.

2. Julius Caesar — Republic, Rhetoric, and Conscience

Julius Caesar (1599) is the threshold play, written for the opening season of the Globe and standing between the histories and the great tragedies. Its subject is Roman republican politics, but its real preoccupation is how language constitutes political reality. Shakespeare takes Plutarch’s Lives and compresses a long historical crisis into five acts of tight forensic debate. The play asks whether Caesar is tyrant or savior, whether Brutus is hero or self-deceiving ideologue, and whether rhetoric can ever be trusted when the stakes are highest.

Harold Bloom reads Brutus as a prototype of the Shakespearean interior self: a man who overhears his own thoughts and cannot bring his public role into alignment with his private principles. Brutus’s orchard soliloquy — “It must be by his death” — is an early example of the reasoning voice that Hamlet will perfect. Garber emphasizes how the play dramatizes the failure of Stoic self-control: Brutus’s attempt to murder “the spirit of Caesar” while sparing the man is both morally elegant and practically absurd, since the spirit promptly survives the killing and returns as a literal ghost.

Antony’s funeral oration is the most famous rhetorical set piece in Shakespeare. It is a lesson in how irony, repetition, and staged reluctance can turn a hostile crowd into a mob. Terry Eagleton points out that the play exposes the instability of any political order founded on symbolic authority: once the body of Caesar is opened to view, meaning proliferates uncontrollably, and the republic dissolves into civil war. The play’s structural innovation is to kill its title character at the midpoint and then track the long wake of that killing, a technique Shakespeare will reuse in Macbeth. Julius Caesar also introduces the late-career motif of the haunted conscience — the slain figure who returns not to accuse but to unsettle the survivors’ sense of themselves.

3. Hamlet I — Melancholy, Revenge, and Being

Hamlet (c. 1600–1601) is the pivot of the late career and arguably of Western literature. It revises an older revenge play (the lost “Ur-Hamlet”) and an inherited genre — Senecan revenge tragedy — that Shakespeare had already touched in Titus Andronicus. What is new is the protagonist’s capacity to delay, to reflect, and to speak his own interiority into existence on stage. Bloom’s much-quoted thesis that Shakespeare “invented the human” turns specifically on Hamlet as the character who listens to himself and changes by doing so.

A.C. Bradley’s early twentieth-century reading located Hamlet’s tragedy in a constitutional melancholy triggered by his mother’s remarriage; the Ghost’s command merely activates a grief already threatening to dissolve him. Later critics, from Ernest Jones through Jacques Lacan, have explored the Oedipal charge between Hamlet and Gertrude. Stephen Greenblatt, in Hamlet in Purgatory, reframes the question historically: the Ghost arrives from a theological no-place, since Protestant England had officially abolished Purgatory, yet the audience inherited a deep emotional grammar of prayer for the dead. Hamlet’s paralysis reflects an unresolved mourning in a culture that no longer knows where the dead reside.

The soliloquies are philosophical experiments. “To be or not to be” is less a suicide meditation than a rehearsal of the problem of action under uncertainty: how do I decide anything when the afterlife is unmapped and knowledge is always mediated by report, rumor, and theatrical show? “How all occasions do inform against me” measures the gap between example (Fortinbras) and self-knowledge. Nuttall argues that Hamlet is the first Shakespearean character to treat his own mind as an object of inquiry, and that this recursive self-awareness is what keeps the play inexhaustible. The play’s moral world is neither purely Christian nor purely Stoic; it hovers in the skeptical middle air that Montaigne had just made available to English readers.

4. Hamlet II — Performance, Theatricality, Ghosts

Beyond soliloquy, Hamlet is saturated with performance. Hamlet feigns madness (“an antic disposition”), stages The Mousetrap as a trap for Claudius, coaches the players on diction and restraint, and reads himself like a part he is trying to learn. The play obsessively thematizes acting: Polonius’s advice to Laertes, Hamlet’s critique of the travelling company, the gravedigger’s professional patter, Osric’s courtly performance. Garber notes that the play is a treatise on theatrical representation disguised as a tragedy, and that its self-reflexivity is what allows it to stage the very problem of sincerity.

The Ghost is the play’s most theologically charged stage effect. He arrives in armor, at midnight, on the battlements — iconography borrowed from medieval dumbshow and Senecan tragedy alike — and speaks a language of suffering that reviewers still find chilling. Greenblatt’s historical reading argues that the Ghost activates the audience’s suppressed Catholic memory, while Protestant Hamlet must test the apparition (“The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil”). The play’s famous oscillation is between believing the Ghost and needing further evidence, which is why the interior play must be staged at all.

Performance also shapes the play’s politics. Claudius is a superb rhetorician, managing the court with oily couplets and well-crafted public speeches. Gertrude’s reality is almost entirely mediated by what she is told and shown; her closet scene with Hamlet is the rare moment when a private emotional truth is forced into visibility. Ophelia’s madness is another kind of performance — a symbolic, musical, half-liturgical language that the court cannot interpret but the audience cannot forget. Jan Kott reads Hamlet as a political play about a rotten state whose every interaction is theatrical maneuver; Cavell, by contrast, reads it as a drama about skepticism, about the impossibility of acknowledging another mind. Both readings are available because the text is as layered as any in the canon.

5. Troilus and Cressida — Problem Play, Problem World

Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602) is the most acidic play Shakespeare wrote. Set during the Trojan War, it takes Homer’s heroes and reduces them to politicking generals, self-pitying lovers, and unglamorous brawlers. Ulysses is a cunning bureaucrat, Achilles a sulking narcissist, Ajax an oaf, Helen a flirtation, Thersites a scatological chorus who names every form of decay. Garber calls it a “play of disenchantment,” and F.S. Boas’s category of the “problem play” was coined partly to describe it: a comedy that refuses to conclude, a tragedy that refuses to ennoble.

The play’s central philosophical set piece is Ulysses’s “degree” speech in 1.3, which defends cosmic and political hierarchy in language of stunning grandeur — then proceeds to act on none of it. The speech is rhetorical bait: the characters who preach order are precisely those manipulating the disorder for personal advantage. Eagleton reads the play as Shakespeare’s sharpest exposure of ideological self-deception, in which noble language is always a cover for interested action.

The love plot between Troilus and Cressida is equally dark. Their brief union is arranged by the cynical Pandarus (whose name gives us the verb “to pander”) and almost immediately undone by diplomatic exchange. Cressida’s betrayal in the Greek camp has been read for centuries as a moral indictment; more recent criticism, including Garber and Carol Rutter, reads it as a study in how women are traded and coerced inside male political economies. Troilus’s horrified voyeurism at 5.2 (“This is, and is not, Cressid”) captures the play’s metaphysics: identity, fidelity, and value all reveal themselves as unstable under pressure. Troilus and Cressida is often staged as a brutal anti-war play; Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary read it in 1964 as the most modern work in the canon, and productions since have confirmed that judgment.

6. Twelfth Night and the Festive Late Comedies

Twelfth Night, or What You Will (c. 1601) occupies a curious place in the late career. In tone it closes out the festive comic mode of Much Ado, As You Like It, and the middle comedies, but its melancholy edges point forward to the problem plays. The title names the Feast of Epiphany, the last night of Christmas revels, and the play inhabits that threshold: a holiday about to end. The shipwreck frame, the cross-dressed Viola, the twin confusions, the love triangle of Orsino, Olivia, and Viola/Cesario — these are the engine of the comedy. But Malvolio’s humiliation, Feste’s mournful songs, and Antonio’s unrequited devotion to Sebastian leave much of the play’s audience stranded outside the final couplings.

Bloom regards Feste as the most intelligent clown in Shakespeare and Viola as one of his most self-possessed heroines. Garber reads the play as a meditation on desire’s indifference to the objects it lights upon: Orsino loves the idea of love, Olivia falls for a boy who is a woman, Viola loves a man who thinks she is his page. Shakespeare lets the audience see the arbitrariness of erotic fixation without mocking it. The late-career signature is audible in the final song (“the rain it raineth every day”), which folds the comedy back into ordinary weather and ordinary time.

Alongside Twelfth Night, the “late comedies” in the strict sense are scarce — after about 1602 Shakespeare largely abandons romantic comedy. The mode re-emerges transfigured in the romances of 1608–1611. All’s Well That Ends Well (c. 1604–1605) is sometimes grouped here as well. Its heroine Helena, her forced marriage to the unworthy Bertram, and the “bed trick” in which she replaces another woman in the dark make it more a problem play than a festive comedy. Nuttall calls it the play where Shakespeare tests whether a happy ending can be imposed on material that resists it. The answer is ambiguous, and the ambiguity is the point.

7. Measure for Measure — Justice and the Problem Play

Measure for Measure (c. 1604) is the problem play at its most theologically charged. Vienna’s Duke Vincentio, tired of his lax enforcement of law, withdraws and leaves the puritan Angelo in charge. Angelo reactivates a dormant fornication statute and condemns Claudio to death; Claudio’s novice sister Isabella pleads for mercy; Angelo demands her virginity as the price of her brother’s life. The plot threads this moral outrage toward a wedding finale engineered by the disguised Duke, in which no one quite gets what they wanted and every character’s speech has been compromised.

The play’s title comes from the Sermon on the Mount — “with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” — and the action is a sustained test of that principle. G. Wilson Knight’s classic essay reads the Duke as a Christ figure moving in disguise to redeem a fallen city; many later readers have found this reading too generous, noting how manipulative the Duke becomes, especially in pressuring Isabella into a marriage she never accepts onstage. Cavell’s chapter in Disowning Knowledge makes the play central to his theme of skepticism: Isabella and Angelo both cling to absolute principles (virginity, law) that collapse under the first pressure of lived contingency.

What makes Measure for Measure a late play is its refusal of comedic closure. The “bed trick” rescues Isabella’s chastity but makes her complicit in a sexual deception; Claudio is spared but barely speaks; Barnardine refuses to die on cue, wrecking the play’s machinery from within. Garber points out that the pardon economy of the fifth act is uncanny rather than joyful: offenders are forgiven one by one in a sequence that feels less like grace than bureaucratic triage. The play has become indispensable in modern repertory because its questions about consent, legal power, and public morality read with renewed urgency.

8. Othello — Race, Jealousy, and Domestic Tragedy

Othello (c. 1603–1604) is the most intimate of the great tragedies: the entire catastrophe unfolds in a handful of rooms between a husband, a wife, and the ensign who poisons them both. Shakespeare takes a novella by Cinthio and tightens it into a drama of language, reputation, and the racialized imagination of early modern Europe. Othello is a Moor and a Venetian general, honored by the state, married to the senator’s daughter Desdemona against her father’s will. Iago, passed over for promotion, engineers Othello’s destruction through insinuation alone: no physical evidence is necessary, only the suggestion of a handkerchief.

Bradley’s reading centers on Othello’s nobility and Iago’s “motiveless malignity” (a phrase Coleridge coined). Bloom amplifies this: Iago is the great Shakespearean nihilist, an artist of suggestion whose genius is to know that imagination once set in motion cannot be stopped. More recent criticism has placed the play within the history of race. Virginia Mason Vaughan, Kim Hall, and Ayanna Thompson trace how the play both relies on early modern racist discourse and, by dignifying Othello’s speech and suffering, exposes that discourse to critique. Othello’s own language is the most musical in the canon (“the Pontic sea, / Whose icy current and compulsive course…”) until Iago’s poison reduces it to broken fragments.

Cavell’s essay on Othello in Disowning Knowledge argues that Othello’s jealousy is a species of skepticism: unable to bear the precariousness of knowing another mind, he converts ordinary married love into a demand for metaphysical certainty and, failing to secure it, destroys the object. Eagleton stresses the play’s political subtext: a black man embedded in a white patriarchal state is disposable the moment his usefulness ends. The murder of Desdemona is one of the most devastating scenes in world drama precisely because she speaks in the register of everyday kindness — asking for her nightgown, arranging her wedding sheets — while Othello addresses her as a cosmic symbol. Othello shows, brutally, what it costs when a human being is forced into the frame of an idea.

9. King Lear — Tragedy, Nothing, and the End of the World

King Lear (c. 1605–1606) is the late career’s most extreme statement. Drawing on the old chronicle play King Leir and on the Sidney Arcadia subplot of Gloucester and his sons, Shakespeare constructs a double tragedy in which two old men are stripped of power, family, and eventually sanity, and in which the world itself seems to reject them. The storm on the heath, the blinding of Gloucester, Cordelia’s silence, the “nothing” that echoes through the opening scene — these have become touchstones for what tragedy is even capable of representing.

Bradley called Lear Shakespeare’s greatest achievement and also, significantly, felt it was almost unstageable because of the scale of its suffering. G. Wilson Knight’s “King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque” showed how the play weaves absurdity and anguish into a single fabric: the Fool’s jokes are darker than any tragedy’s curses, and Gloucester’s imagined leap from the Dover cliff is both a suicide and a piece of metatheatre. Jan Kott’s notorious chapter “King Lear, or Endgame” paired the play with Samuel Beckett and made possible Peter Brook’s stripped-down 1962 production, which defined modern Shakespearean performance.

Greenblatt and Cavell each give the play a philosophical reading. Greenblatt sees in Lear’s quartered kingdom and arithmetic of love the catastrophic consequences of mistaking relationships for transactions. Cavell reads the opening scene as a classic moment of avoidance: Cordelia’s “nothing” refuses the public theatricality Lear demands, and Lear cannot bear the reality of a love that will not perform itself. Nuttall argues that Lear is the play in which Shakespeare most directly confronts the possibility that the universe has no moral order at all — that the gods, if they exist, “kill us for their sport.” The closing image of Lear carrying Cordelia’s body is the limit case of Shakespearean pathos: a father who finally understands his daughter only after the language of love has gone permanently silent.

10. Macbeth — Ambition, Gender, and the Supernatural

Macbeth (c. 1606) is the shortest and most propulsive of the great tragedies. Written in the aftermath of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot and under the patronage of the Scottish king James, it draws on Holinshed’s Chronicles and on James’s own writings on demonology. The play compresses the rise and fall of a usurper into a nightmarish five acts in which thought, action, and consequence collapse into each other. Its rhetoric is soaked in blood, clock time, and hallucination: “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” and “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

Bradley made Macbeth and his Lady a central case in his theory of tragic character: they are not villains in the melodramatic sense but people with real imagination who are destroyed by it. Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me here” speech is among the most studied passages in the canon because it stages the violence of gender norms — she must shed femininity to will the murder, and her later sleepwalking is the return of everything she tried to cast off. Janet Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers reads the Macbeth marriage as a dark experiment in mutual unmothering. Garber emphasizes how the play’s language turns the natural world against the protagonists: horses eat each other, owls kill falcons, trees walk.

The Weird Sisters occupy the same ambiguous territory as the Ghost in Hamlet. They are theatrically real and theologically uncertain — predictions that create the conditions for their own fulfillment. Stephen Greenblatt connects them to early modern witch trials and the legal panics of James’s reign, while Nuttall insists that the play refuses to let us decide whether Macbeth is damned by fate or by his own free choosing. Macbeth is often called Shakespeare’s most Christian tragedy (grace is visible in Malcolm, Macduff, and the English court) and also his most existentially bleak (because the protagonist’s final speech empties meaning from language itself). Both descriptions are accurate, and their tension is the play’s enduring power.

11. Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus — Roman Tragedy Revisited

After Macbeth, Shakespeare returned to Plutarch for two late Roman tragedies that could not be more different in tone. Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1606–1607) is lush, expansive, comic in places, and set across the whole eastern Mediterranean; Coriolanus (c. 1608) is astringent, urban, and tightly wound around a single character’s refusal to perform humility.

Antony and Cleopatra is the play that most obviously opens out into a new late-career style. Its scenes are short, its geography huge, and its verse oscillates between military rhetoric and erotic fantasy. Cleopatra is, as Bloom and Garber both insist, one of Shakespeare’s most self-aware characters — a political actor who knows she is performing and turns performance into a form of sovereignty. Antony’s tragedy is his inability to hold together the public Roman self and the private Egyptian self; his suicide is botched, his death is grand, and Cleopatra’s final scene with the asp is staged as her own authored ending (“I have / Immortal longings in me”). G. Wilson Knight reads the play as the “world tragedy” of the late career, in which love is treated as a cosmic principle, and the shabbiness of Octavius’s Rome as the triumph of bureaucratic order over the life of the imagination. Cleopatra is perhaps the only Shakespearean heroine whose voice absorbs death into art.

Coriolanus is the opposite: a study in political intransigence and the physical body of the warrior as an emblem of the state. Martius Coriolanus, a patrician Roman general, cannot bring himself to flatter the plebeians whose votes he needs for the consulship, is banished, allies with Rome’s enemies, and is destroyed when his mother Volumnia persuades him to spare the city. Eagleton has written that Coriolanus is Shakespeare’s most class-conscious play, a cold anatomy of the relationship between politics, language, and bodily self-display. Kott treats it as a preview of twentieth-century totalitarian politics. Volumnia’s speech in Act 5 — in which she kneels to her own son — is one of the great silent moments in Shakespeare: Coriolanus says nothing for long seconds, and his eventual surrender is also his death warrant. The two Roman plays together show how flexible Shakespeare’s late tragic idiom had become: it could accommodate both the vast hedonic sweep of Antony and the clenched political diagnosis of Coriolanus.

12. The Romances — Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest

The plays of the last years — Pericles (c. 1607), Cymbeline (c. 1609), The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610–1611), and The Tempest (c. 1611) — are traditionally called the romances or the tragicomedies. They share a set of features: improbable plots, long time spans, shipwrecks, lost daughters, statues that move, pastoral interludes, reunions that feel like resurrections. G. Wilson Knight’s classic The Crown of Life argues that these plays complete an arc from tragedy into reconciliation — not by denying the catastrophes of the earlier work but by extending their time horizon until healing becomes thinkable.

Pericles, probably co-written with George Wilkins, is the most episodic and the most obviously experimental. Cymbeline mixes British pseudo-history, Roman intrigue, a wager plot borrowed from Boccaccio, and a dream-vision of Jupiter; its heroine Imogen is, for Bloom, one of Shakespeare’s most radiant creations. The Winter’s Tale is the most perfectly realized of the group: Leontes’s spiraling jealousy in the first half matches anything in Othello, while the second half moves to pastoral Bohemia and then returns for the astonishing statue scene in which Hermione is restored to life. Garber calls this the quintessential late-Shakespeare moment: a miracle that is also clearly a piece of theatre, and a forgiveness that is still marked by loss.

The Tempest has become, for better and worse, the play most often read as Shakespeare’s farewell. Prospero, the exiled magician-duke of Milan, controls an island by means of the spirit Ariel and the “savage” Caliban; his storm draws his enemies to shore, where justice, forgiveness, and a dynastic marriage are engineered. Postcolonial readings since the mid-twentieth century (Octave Mannoni, Aimé Césaire, and more recently scholars collected in the Cambridge and Oxford companions) have foregrounded Caliban as a figure of dispossession and the play as an anatomy of colonial power. Greenblatt’s essay “Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne” situates the play against Bermuda shipwreck narratives and early English colonial anxieties. Prospero’s epilogue, in which he lays down his staff and asks the audience for the indulgence of applause, is the theatrical gesture most often read biographically, even though Shakespeare would go on to co-write Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen before retiring. The romances as a group constitute a distinct late mode, both backward-looking (toward Greek romance and medieval miracle play) and forward-looking (toward the hybrid genres of later European drama).

13. Reading Late Shakespeare Critically

The critical tradition on the post-1600 plays is itself worth mapping, because it helps explain why each generation rediscovers Shakespeare as its contemporary. A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) established character-based reading as the dominant mode for the twentieth century and is still the starting point for discussions of Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth. G. Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire (1930) pushed back against character criticism in favor of attention to imagery, symbol, and the play as “expanded metaphor.” Mid-century cultural criticism — Jan Kott, Stanley Cavell, Terry Eagleton — reframed the plays as meditations on politics, skepticism, and ideology rather than on psychology alone. Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicists tied every play to specific archival contexts: ghost-lore, witchcraft trials, colonial pamphlets, theological controversy. Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) revived an unembarrassed humanism that insists Shakespeare’s characters think and speak for themselves. Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All (2004) offers the most accessible synthesis, treating each play as both a literary text and a living stage work.

For a student of the post-1600 plays, several cross-cutting themes are worth tracking throughout the term. First, the reshaping of tragic structure: Shakespeare is willing to kill title characters at midpoint (Julius Caesar), to fracture the action into double plots (Lear), and to compress revenge into panic (Macbeth). Second, the new depth of soliloquy and interiority: from Brutus through Hamlet through Macbeth, characters increasingly think their way into and out of action, and the audience is made co-conspirator of consciousness. Third, a political imagination attentive to power, rhetoric, and class, from Antony’s funeral oration to Coriolanus’s refusal to show his wounds. Fourth, a sustained interrogation of gender and sexuality: Cleopatra, Isabella, Desdemona, Cordelia, Imogen, and Hermione each test what a woman’s voice can do inside worlds that would prefer her silent. Fifth, a philosophical openness that the earlier plays rarely reach: skepticism, grief, conscience, and the impossibility of knowing another mind become dramatic subjects rather than background assumptions.

Finally, the late plays resist any single critical dogma. They reward historicist research, close reading of imagery, performance-oriented analysis, feminist and postcolonial critique, and philosophical reflection in roughly equal measure. The best reading practice is to move between these modes — to ask, for any given scene, what its language is doing, what its stagecraft asks of the audience, what its historical moment makes possible, and what it still refuses to settle. That irreducible openness is why Shakespeare’s post-1600 work remains the central repertoire of world theatre and the inexhaustible case study of literary criticism, and why a course organized around these plays continues to reward a term of careful, comparative attention.