I started a five-week course in the tragedies and histories of William Shakespeare down at Yale today. My class meets four days a week from 1:00 to 2:45 in the afternoon, with about a half-dozen viewing sessions scheduled for evenings. Tonight we compared excerpts from several productions of Julius Caesar, the first play we are studying, including the famous early 1950s version starring Marlon Brando as Marc Antony. Now I need to get to work on the first writing assignment. Basically we are expected to write an essay on each of the ten plays we are reading: eight of them relatively brief (2 pages or so) and two more developed (around 8 pages).
