Write the essay on the Winter’s Tale or The Tempest
This essay asks you to explore a question or problem—thematic, ethical, dramatic—that you identify as being important to either The Winter’s Tale or The Tempest. Choose a question or problem in which you have become interested through your reading and thinking about the text.
Parameters (required):
1) At some point in the six pages, your essay should address (in ways you have found compelling for your argument) either a) issues of mediation, remediation, textualization, etc., as these are reflected in the play’s thinking; or b) issues around the body or sensory apparatus (seeing, hearing, touching, etc.), as these are reflected in the play’s thinking. We want you here to be thinking here about issues of embodiment and/or transmission.
2) At some point in the six pages, you should sharpen your reading of some detail that interest you in The Tempest or The Winter’s Tale by referring for clarification to a passage from one of the following plays (Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra). We do not want a comparative essay. Instead, we are asking you to use something small in that other play (probably as your memory picks it up as relevant) as an instrument or lens through which to focus your attention on the main play you’re treating
3) At the end of the writing process, you should identify three words or formal features from Shakespeare’s text that turn out to have been relevant to your argument and which you discover, reading over your work, that you have been taking up.
As you are writing, consider how closely you are attending to language, since that will put you in a better position to isolate the terms with which you’ve been thinking, but don’t choose the words/forms in advance.
These are going to be discovered, rather, in your own process. List them at the end of your paper as “Keywords/Key Forms: A, B, C.”
