Syllabus

Shakespeare's Hamlet: The Ghost is a course designed to give you an in-depth look at Shakespeare's Hamlet, whether you are a first-time reader or have experience with the play already. It is the first in a series that includes Shakespeare's Life and Work, Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice: Shylock, and Shakespeare's Othello: The Moor. In this course, you'll discover historical contexts for the play, view performances throughout history, study primary texts and artifacts, and generate original interpretations. You may take the course as a stand-alone module or as part of the Shakespeare's Outsiders XSeries.

Course Overview

This course consists of six parts:

Introduction—This part gives you an overview of the course and its learning objectives, familiarizes you with the edX platform, and sets the stage by thinking about the work of remembering the dead.

Part 1: Spirit? Apparition? Illusion? —This part looks at the appearance of the Ghost in Act 1 with special attention to the themes, language, and motifs it sets up for the rest of the play. It also looks at a variety of productions.

Part 2: Imagining the Afterlife—In this part, you'll learn about historical and anthropological contexts for the play, including the controversy surrounding Purgatory after the Protestant Reformation.

Part 3: The Theater of Mourning—The third part takes you into the Bodleian Library to look at representations of death in early modern books; you'll also get a chance to reflect on Shakespeare's theatrical art.

Part 4: The Texts of Hamlet— In the final part, we use the special collections of Harvard's Houghton Library to get a handle on the earliest printed versions of Hamlet, considering how the play survives through editions and adaptations.

Conclusion—To wrap up the course, you'll turn to the modernist novel Ulysses to think about the enduring legacy of Hamlet's Ghost. The final assignment allows you to combine interpretive methods learned in the course to devise an original interpretation of Hamlet.

Learning Outcomes

This course will prepare learners to:

• Unlock the meanings of Hamlet through close analysis of one important figure: the Ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father.
• Discover the historical context—including religious beliefs, cultural practices, books, and objects—that shaped both how Shakespeare wrote the play and how his audiences interpreted it.
• Challenge the assumption that the play is only about revenge through close readings focused on remembrance, death, and mourning.
• Analyze the Ghost’s continuing resonance through diverse performance interpretations, dramatic/film adaptations, and literary appropriations.
• Compare the earliest, wildly different texts of Hamlet that "live," like the Ghost, even four hundred years later.

Prerequisites

This course is for everyone! Whether you have studied all 38 (give or take) of Shakespeare's plays or you've never read a word of them, you'll enjoy this course—and have something to contribute, too. We've also built some exercises into the Course Appendix to help familiarize you with the edX platform and the different assignment types. If this is your first edX course, we suggest that you also take the edX demo course.

Workload

The course design allows you to go at your own pace; the lectures are pre-recorded (on location in England!) and may be watched at any time. We estimate the course takes 3-4 weeks for most learners to complete.

This course contains the following activities:

Polls, Surveys, Word Clouds, and Free Response Questions—These interactive activities are a chance to see what you and your peers think about certain topics and issues throughout the course.

Discussions—Each part has at least one discussion board, a chance to share ideas, respond to your peers, and debate questions of method and interpretation. We encourage you to be respectful, thoughtful, and engaged with the course and its community on our discussion boards.

Participation Checks—These questions are designed for you to self-report on your participation in the Dicussions.

Annotation Assignments—In each part, you'll also find a passage from one of Shakespeare's plays. You can write comments and questions directly on the passage using our Annotation Tool. You can also highlight, underline, and respond to the annotations of your peers. We encourage you to test the possibilities of the methodologies you're learning in each part to through your annotations.

Comprehension Checks—These short quizzes see what you've learned after each lecture video.

Writing Assignments (ORAs)—Finally, you'll wrap up each part with a longer writing assignment. You'll be asked to respond to a prompt, demonstrating your mastery of the lecture material and the interpretive method(s).

Note that Participation Checks, Comprehensions Checks, and Writing Assignments will only be available to verified learners. These assessments are made available to all learners in the Introduction to allow you to determine whether or not you want access to these activities in the rest of the course. For more information on upgrading to the verified track and receiving a certificate, see the section titled "Certification."

Assessment

You must achieve 65% in the course overall to pass. The grade breakdown is as follows:

• Participation—40%
• Part 1 Assignment—10%
• Part 2 Assignment—10%
• Part 3 Assignment—10%
• Part 4 Assignment—10%
• Final Assignment—20%

Assignments that count toward Participation include Participation Checks, Comprehension Checks, and Annotation Assignments.

Writing Assignments

Writing Assignments (ORAs) are scored via peer- and self-assessments. For the Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 Assignments, you must assess at least two assignments by your peers to recieve your own grade on that same assignment. For the Practice Assignment and Final Assignment, you must assess at least three assignments by your peers. The Writing Assignments in this course will be scored using the following rubric.

Note that the rubric includes a criterion for using sources. The purpose of this criterion is to ask you to integrate material from the course and connect your ideas to the wider community of thought and scholarship in your responses. As you evaluate the responses of your peers, keep in mind that not all responses require extensive integration of sources. Use your best judgement and determine whether or not the response warrants the use of sources and, if so, whether or not those sources were used appropriately when assigning a score. Sources include material from the course, the text of the play, other literary works, and scholarly articles.

Be thoughtful and courteous in your peer feedback and always justify a lower score with rationale and suggestions for improvement. When in doubt, use the golden rule: Grade others the way you would like to be graded.

Discussions

Harvard Teaching Fellows will provide constructive feedback in the discussion boards to guide learners through the course. We ask that you abide by community standards in order ensure a positive learning experience:

• Discuss this course and this course only. Restrict your discussion to issues that arise directly from or are directly related to the material under study.
• Draw directly from the course materials. Whenever possible, refer directly to a specific page of a specific document or a specific moment in a specific video. Ground your discussion in the lectures and reading materials.
• Ask questions. If there is anything you want to understand more deeply, ask freely. Questions indicate that you are thinking about the course material deeply, not that you have failed to understand it.
• Answer questions. Take the questions and comments of your fellow learners seriously. Think about the issues they raise. And offer your own thoughts to propose your own solutions to the problems they pose.
• Engage in a discussion. Respond directly to the comments of other learners and pose questions of your own. Avoid turning the discussion forum into a collection of discrete and unrelated posts.
• Express your thoughts in complete and formal English. Use capital letters, punctuation, complete sentences, and, to the best of your ability, accurate spelling and grammar.
• Strive for clarity. Your aim should be to make other discussants understand what you are trying to say.
• Be concise. Use as many words and only as many words as you need to express your thoughts.
• Be respectful. Feel free to disagree with the viewpoints of other discussants, but do so in a constructive and positive manner.
• Accept feedback and criticism. Welcome disagreement as a sign that others take your ideas seriously.
• Refrain from personal insults. Maintain an analytical and scholarly tone in your writing.

Certification

Some content in edX is available only to learners who have purchased a verified certificate. Locked content is marked with a lock icon. When you see this icon, it indicates there are one or more graded assignments on this page. Verified learners will be able to see and complete these assignments, which will count toward their certificate of completion.

In addition, audit learners will lose access to the course after a certain number of weeks. The length of time varies by course, and is noted on the course signup page at edX.org. This time is counted from when you enroll or from when the course begins, whichever is later. Verified learners retain course access indefinitely. You can upgrade to the verified track at any point in the course.

Certification is a good fit for you if you would like access to all of the content in this course, do not want to lose access to the course, and/or intend to put this course on your professional or academic résumé. In order to receive a certificate, you must pass the course.