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For your first essay of the semester, you will choose a topic from either William Shakespeare's play The Taming of the Shrew or Romeo and Juliet; then you will write an argument of approximately one-thousand-words on the topic you choose. You will create a thesis statement that reflects your opinion about what you think Shakespeare is saying concerning the topic you choose. I have suggested four topics below. You may choose one of them, or you may choose your own topic. However, if you choose your own, please clear it with me first via email.

Your essay will support the argument put forth in the thesis. For a thesis to be sound, you should be able to answer "yes" to the following question: Could a reasonably intelligent reader familiar with the plays logically disagree with your argument? Remember also that the thesis must be an opinion about what you believe Shakespeare is saying about the topic, not your views about the topic. Use incidents and lines from the play to support your argument. When you quote lines from the text, document them according to these guidelines:

Introduce the quotation by letting your reader know who is speaking and to whom that person is speaking.
Use present tense verbs in your introduction. Remember that the play is always with us.
For example, in the play the Taming of the Shrew, Katherine, speaking to her father, says the following: "She [Bianca] is your treasure, she must have a husband. / I must dance barefoot on her wedding day, / And for your love to her lead apes in hell" (2.1.32-34). The numbers in parenthesis represent act two, scene one, lines 32-34. The / indicates where one line ends and another begins. The brackets [ ] show that the writer of the paper has inserted an explanatory remark into the quotation to help the reader understand to whom the she refers.
If you choose a quotation of longer than four lines of poetry, then separate the quotation ten spaces from the left margin of your text. You should not use quotation marks for a long quotation. The indentation tells the reader that you are quoting. Such a quotation would look like the following:

In the play The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet tells Romeo that she would give him her love a second time if he asked for it:

But to be frank and give it thee again.

And yet I wish but for the thing I have.

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep. The more I give to thee

The more I have, for both are infinite. (2.1.173-177)

But be sure to double space everything in your essay, including the above sample quotation.
A maximum of 15 % of your paper should appear in quotation marks, and keep your long quotations to a minimum.

If you have trouble understanding what I mean by a thesis, then check out the link on my website dealing with the thesis statement.

The above form of documentation is referred to as in-text documentation. To complement it, you will also include a works cited page at the end of your paper. An example of this appears below:

Of course, if you use any source that influences your essay--whether through direct quotation, paraphrase, or summary--you must give credit to that source, in the text of your essay and in the works cited page. For further information about how and what to document, and how to avoid plagiarism, visit my website on documentation.

1. According to the OED (the Oxford English Dictionary), the term shrew as applied to a person has as its first definition "a wicked, evil-disposed, or malignant man [my emphasis]; a mischievous or vexatious person; a rascal, villain." Only with its third definition does the OED make reference to "a person, esp. (now only) a woman given to railing or scolding or other perverse or malignant behavior; freq. a scolding or turbulent wife." Shakespeare would have been familiar with both definitions--and certainly Elizabethan England would have applied the word to a woman (particularly to a wife) as well as to a man. However, given the order of the definitions stated above, and given Shakespeare's proclivity to doing the unusual, argue that the shrew of the play is not Katherine but Petruccio.

2. In her last significant speech in the Taming of the Shrew, Katherine says to the two wives who at first refuse to appear at their husbands' requests that "thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper" (5.2.150). She then goes on to say that "such duty as the subject owes the prince, / Even such a woman oweth to her husband" (5.2.159-160). How do you interpret these remarks from a woman who at the beginning of the play was independent, rebellious, even cruel? Using scenes that reveal Katherine's character from the beginning through the end of the play, argue either that Shakespeare portrays Katherine as finally "tamed" or that he suggests that Katherine's submission to Petruccio is her deceptive ( shrewd?) way of gaining control over him.

3. Harold Bloom, a leading critic of William Shakespeare's works, says that the play Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare's first great tragedy. In Shakespeare's tragedies, says A. C. Bradley, another leading critic of Shakespeare's works, the characters are the source of their own sorrows. Bradley goes on to say that in Shakespeare "character is destiny." For this essay, assume that Romeo and Juliet are the tragic figures of the play that bears their names, and then argue that Bradley is correct in his belief that the characters themselves are responsble for their sorrows.

4. Some critics believe that Juliet is the stronger (and more dynamic) of the two characters after whom the play is named. A dynamic (or developing) character is one who undergoes change from beginning to end as a result of the events in the plot. In a discussion of Juliet and Romeo, argue that Juliet is the stronger and more profoundly dynamic character than Romeo is.