Papers for this class should each be about 1500 to 1800 words long, roughly five or six pages, and they should use Chicago NB style. Each paper should develop a thesis about one or more of Shakespeare's works that we have covered in class.

The first paper will address Hamlet and display (at some point) a significant engagement with at least one of the supplemental readings from the syllabus, such as the Greenblatt chapter, the critical history, or one of the Parker chapters. The second paper will address one or two of the other plays we read after Hamlet.

You will find the online Oxford English Dictionary, with its wonderful chronological structure, useful for examining the inflections of single words. (The OED is linked near the bottom of this page.) This and any other outside sources should be cited carefully so that I understand what material comes from those sources and what is your own.

Create a bibliography entry for each paper in Chicago NB style. To format your entry, you can use my quick guide (PDF) or, for more detail, the Purdue Online Writing Lab's page on Chicago style. If you use a tool that generates bibliography entries automatically, that's fine as a starting point, but they often get details wrong. Do the final version of your entry yourself, carefully.