Brandeis Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (BOLLI)

Shakespeare and His Circle: Poetry and Society in Elizabethan England

Course Number

LIT12-10-Wed2

Study Group Leader (SGL)

Jan Schreiber

Location

This course will take place in person at 60 Turner Street. The room will be equipped with a HEPA air purifier.

10-Week Course

March 12 - May 21 (No Class April 16)

Description

Far from being a lone genius, Shakespeare lived and wrote in an artistic and cultural ferment unlike anything England had seen before. In the London of his time, poets, playwrights, diplomats, courtiers, and adventurers caroused, composed, and competed to produce a body of work that has endured more than four centuries. In this course we will read and discuss poems by William Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Fulke Greville, Philip Sidney, his sister Mary Sidney Herbert, and Walter Raleigh, and we will learn about the social and political environment that shaped these poets and their work. Class participants will have an opportunity to read background materials on Elizabethan England and to make oral presentations on particular poets and poems. Some familiarity with Shakespeare’s sonnets and with work by some of the other poets is desirable but not required.

Group Leadership Style

More facilitated discussion than lecture.

Course Materials

Recommended text: R.E. Pritchard, ed., Shakespeare’s England: Life in Elizabethan and Jacobean Times. History Press, 2003. ISBN: 0750932112, 9780750932110. 

All poems we’ll study in this course will be provided in the syllabus.

Preparation Time

2-3 hours per week

Biography

Jan Schreiber (PhD Brandeis, 1972) taught at Tufts and UMass Lowell, edited a literary magazine (Canto), and inaugurated the Godine Press poetry chapbook series. A former poet laureate of Brookline (2015-17), he is the author of five books of poetry and many critical articles. He has been an SGL at BOLLI since 2012. He published Sparring with the Sun (criticism) in 2013 and The Poems of Paul Valéry (translations) in 2021. His new critical book, Breath Lines: How Poems Work and Why They Matter, will be published in May 2025. He is an advisory editor for Think magazine.