In this course we will consider theories and histories of embodiment as they relate to the plays of Shakespeare and to the early modern stage.  Pursuing an early modern understanding of embodiment means that we will also address matter and materiality, the passions and the emotions, as well as the ways in which bodies are embedded within environments, social and “natural.”  The plays we read will include: Titus Andronicus, King Lear, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, and Pericles.  As we address these plays, we will touch on the thought of figures ranging from Aristotle and Galen to Robert Burton and Thomas Wright.  We will also turn to more recent interventions in thought concerning embodiment, including those of Judith Butler, Mel Chen, and Geraldine Heng as we discuss topics ranging from disability and the nonnormative body to early modern ideologies of race and gender, from trauma and mourning to dispossession and precarity, from humoral theory and melancholy to the entangled and material mind.