This course, framed as “Shakespeare, the Art and Science of Attention,” introduces Shakespeare’s major works and representative genres, including the English sonnet, narrative poem, occasional poem, comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. Through sustained attention to Shakespearean language, form, and performance, we will consider questions about cognition, artificial intelligence, creativity, and authorship against the backdrop of what may be the most radical textual revolution since Gutenberg’s printing press. Writing during a period of unprecedented technological change, Shakespeare staged the faculties of the mind and body—thinking, sensing, desiring, forgetting, dreaming, grieving—by dramatizing a cognitive ecology where thought emerges not only from the brain but also from the confluence of language, feeling, and the environment. Importantly, Shakespeare’s plays and poems occasion opportunities for us to practice our own cognitive skills, including memory, attention, and ethical reflection, so that we may more fully and responsibly engage multiple intelligences. English 1102 is a prerequisite for this course.