This module introduces undergraduate students to key methods for using Shakespeare to consider essential philosophical questions.  The three activities and two assignments should allow students to begin thinking with Shakespeare as he contemplates ideas that we normally take for granted, like certainty and identity.  After mastering these skills, students can use the service learning exercise in this module to teach middle or high schoolers about the social construction of identity.

This goal of this module is to show how Shakespeare “thinks” and to help students understand how Shakespeare can help them think as well. Philosophy is hard, and at times inaccessible for college students. But Shakespeare makes difficult and often unexamined life questions approachable through his drama. In the first assignment here, students are prodded to see how it is important and necessary in philosophy to question even our most fundamental assumptions. Shakespeare’s play forces us to consider if there is a “truth” and, even more, to examine our own desire for that truth. We too often take such matters for granted. Later assignments bring those questions closer to home, as it were, asking students to question the seemingly established and irrefutable truth of the “self.”

As a supplement to this module, we have digitized two early printings of Lear along with Shakespeare’s primary sources (see Digital Texts).  Students can use the Mirador reader for side-by-side comparison of Shakespeare’s play with his sources, or search these digital texts for keywords related to certainty and identity.