| Developed by Allison Deutermann, Baruch College, CUNY |
Professor Deutermann uses a lot of open sources in her classes, but always as something she brings in to the classroom and shares with students rather than something students are asked to dig through themselves. She shares images from the First Folio and the early quartos to talk about genre and the relative unimportance of authorship, and she has used a number of the more well-known contextual documents (the Titus drawing, Harvey’s marginalia) to talk about performance history and the evolving place of Shakespeare in the canon.
OER & COURSE ARTIFACT
Shakespeare OER:
As a group project, in preparation for their final papers for the course (which are usually on Shakespeare and something else students have read), Professor Deutermann will ask students to explore one of each of the four categories and present their findings to the class. Categories:
- Playwright
- Actor
- Shareholder
- Shakespeare the poet
- Family
- Legal & property records
- 17th-century legacies
Professor Deutermann might point students toward other sites (Ex: Shakespeare Documents, above) that could help fill in some of the gaps. Each of the groups would then provide a general summary and impression of what the category seems to show before zooming in on a specific document, which they’d share with us in class and walk us through. The key questions would be, who cares? And how does this help us to understand Othello, or any other play.
Faculty Information
Allison Deutermann is an Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY. She specializes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and culture, with an emphasis on theater and gender studies.
Licensing information
The Shakespeare Documented assignment is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
