Welcome to English 468 at the University of Delaware
This site was created by an undergraduate research seminar in the English Department at the University of Delaware in the Spring of 2015. We worked in conjunction with the university's Special Collections section of the library. With this sponsorship, we engaged with primary source texts. This experience gave us material upon which we could found new ideas about the historical, cultural, and literary contexts of the Henriad.
The goal of our website is to provide a companion to Shakespeare's Henriad, intended as a pedagogical tool for students and teachers alike. It will provide historical context, sophisticated literary analysis, and performance distinctions in an enthusiastic yet relaxed, accessible manner. Our target readers are curious about Shakespeare and excited about gaining a deeper appreciation of the Henriad, but not necessarily scholars or literary experts.
Because we are in the unique position of students with exceptional resources, we intend to own our individual perspectives by discussing many aspects of the plays, even multiple times with different interpretations and layers. We will examine the Henriad from five angles: Historical Context, Character and Passage Analysis, Performance, and Student Commentary.
We invite you to explore this site according to your interests. You can navigate through it in three ways. First, you can go through the individual plays to read our commentaries. Second, you can search the site thematically by using the thematic site index. And third, if you find an author whose work you particularly enjoy, you can track their commentaries by going through the bio section.
Although we've listed this in our bibliography, we'll say it again here: the online edition of Shakespeare's plays that we used for our commentaries is the Folger Digital Texts, http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/. If you're looking for an online version of the plays as you make your way through our site, that's the one!
The goal of our website is to provide a companion to Shakespeare's Henriad, intended as a pedagogical tool for students and teachers alike. It will provide historical context, sophisticated literary analysis, and performance distinctions in an enthusiastic yet relaxed, accessible manner. Our target readers are curious about Shakespeare and excited about gaining a deeper appreciation of the Henriad, but not necessarily scholars or literary experts.
Because we are in the unique position of students with exceptional resources, we intend to own our individual perspectives by discussing many aspects of the plays, even multiple times with different interpretations and layers. We will examine the Henriad from five angles: Historical Context, Character and Passage Analysis, Performance, and Student Commentary.
We invite you to explore this site according to your interests. You can navigate through it in three ways. First, you can go through the individual plays to read our commentaries. Second, you can search the site thematically by using the thematic site index. And third, if you find an author whose work you particularly enjoy, you can track their commentaries by going through the bio section.
Although we've listed this in our bibliography, we'll say it again here: the online edition of Shakespeare's plays that we used for our commentaries is the Folger Digital Texts, http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/. If you're looking for an online version of the plays as you make your way through our site, that's the one!