Shakespeare and friends

Shakespeare did not work in isolation, but amid a remarkable and very varied group of playwrights, fellow-professionals with whom he engaged as collaboratively as rivalrously. This course considers him alongside two of them, at the beginning and end of his career, reading Richard III (c.1594) against Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, and The Tempest (c.1610) against Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist.