Staging the Renaissance: Shakespeare(Q3059)

(Second Year Course)

Spring 2017

Tutor: to be announced

Room: B227

E-mail:

Office Hours: to be announced

Do come and discuss your essays in your totor’soffice hours

Course Convenor: Prof Margaret Healy (Arts B233, )

Co-ordinator: English Office, Ground Floor, Arts B.

Modes of Teaching: one compulsory seminar per week. Students will be asked to give short group and/or individual presentationsthroughout the course.

Staging the Renaissance studies a range of Shakespeare’s plays (comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies and romances) from different stages of his career, analysing the playwright’s stagecraft, his use of proseand poetry and his reworking of traditional forms for the commercial stage. Although it explores some recent adaptations for stage and screen, it is particularly interested in the plays as produced in their original historical and cultural contexts. The module will thus familiarise students with the drama’s negotiation of the contested social and political issues of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart age. It investigates the social processes of theatre, notably the playhouses used by Shakespeare’s company (the Theatre, the Globe and Blackfriars), and is particularly interested in the interplay of Shakespearean texts and their performance in the production of meaning.Shakespeare’sSonnets will be studied as a drama of interiority. Whilst glancing at past critical approaches to Shakespeare, our discussions will engage most fully with the debates that have been at the forefront of Shakespeare studies since the 1980s. ‘Instability’—the instability of the Shakespearean text, of meanings, and of the plays in performance—will be a recurring theme of the course.

Learning outcomes and their assessment

At the end of this course one extended essay of 3500 words will demonstrate how students are able to: a) analyse questions of genre, language and stagecraft; b) research widely and formulate their own responses to the drama, relating texts accurately to their social, political and cultural contexts; c) contribute knowledgeably to current critical debates about Shakespearean drama; d) competently research, organise, reference and present their ideas in written form.

Essay submission:

Check the exact time and date on Sussex Direct. Charges of plagiarism must be avoided at all costs: it is essential that you reference your work professionally and attribute all quotes and ideas that are not your own to the relevant critics. All essays must be accompanied by a bibliography. Please note that there are very severe penalties for submitting the essay late.

Essential Purchases: William Shakespeare: The Complete Works(1986; Oxford: Clarendon Press, second edition, 2005) eds. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor and John Jowett (alternatively, the more expensive Norton anthology of Shakespeare which is based on this Oxford edition); and Shakespeare: an Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000, ed., Russ McDonald (Blackwell, 2004)—referred to as SACT throughout this module outline.

Recommended: Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide, eds., Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin (OUP, 2003). If you feel confused about historical contexts and /or approaches to Shakespeare criticism there are some excellent essays here. Richard Dutton, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre (OUP, 2011); contains many new articles on theatre companies, playing spaces and theatrical and social practices.Early Modern English Drama: a critical companion, (abbreviated to EMED throughout) eds, Sullivan, Cheney, Hadfield (OUP, 2006). David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass, Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Routledge, 1991).

Simon Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare (Arden, Thomson Learning, 2005): very cogent chapters on Shakespeare’s language and characters. Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: from stage to page (Routledge, 2005).On changes in critical approaches to Shakespeare since the 1980s see T. Hawkes, Introduction, Alternative Shakespeares 2.The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies; A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. D. Kastan (Blackwell, 1999); A New History of Early English Drama, eds. Cox and Kastan (Columbia, 1997); Shakespeare Texts and Contexts, ed., K. Ryan (Palgrave, 2000); G. Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: a cultural history from the restoration to the present (1989); A. Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (1987). Reading Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language: A Guide (Arden Shakespeare; Thomson Learning, 2001). Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (Penguin); David Crystal, Shakespeare’s Words (2002), is a glossary for quick reference; Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare (2001), is maybe the least unreliable Life; Lukas Erne, Shakespeare’s Modern Collaborators (2008), is the best short guide to textual matters; Stuart Gillespie, Shakespeare’s Books (2005), is a useful guide to Shakespeare’s reading and learning; Margaret and Thomas Healy ,eds, Renaissance Transformations: the Making of English Writing 1500-1650 (EUP, 2009).

Invaluable: G. Bullough, The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (1957-75).

More and more books on Shakespeare:Try not to be overwhelmed. Use the library with discretion. Sometimes it is better to use scholarly journals and find out the latest work: Shakespeare Quarterly(available on-line) and Shakespeare Survey are the standard-bearers in scholarship in the field; the former contains an annual bibliography. Do use these.

The Palgrave New Casebooks series: Shakespeare on Film; Shakespeare in Performance; Shakespeare’s History Plays; Shakespeare’s Romances; Shakespeare’s Tragedies. (These are collections of significant essays—a really good resource for essay writing ideas and bibliographies)

On Shakespeare and film see Shakespeare and the Moving Image : the plays on film and television eds Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells (1994); Shakespeare, the Movie : popularizing theplays on film, TV and video, eds Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt (1997). World-wideShakespeares: local appropriations in film and performance, ed., Sonia Massia (Routledge, 2005); Maurice Hindle, ed., Studying Shakespeare on Film (Palgrave, 2007).

Luminariumis an excellent electronic resource; simply key this name into Google.

Week 1.(Mon 30 January to Friday 3 February)Introduction: What is a Shakespeare text?The Rise of Commercial Theatrein Shakespeare’s London.

Essential Reading:

Hamlet (c.1600) (in class we will look at the different versions of the ‘To be’ soliloquy which are on your Study Direct site)

Stephen Orgel, ‘What is a text?’ in Staging the Renaissance, eds., Kastan and Stallybrass (1991); digitised version available on Study Direct.

Paul Werstine, ‘Narratives about printed Shakespeare Texts’ in SACT.

Further Reading:

Wendy Wall, ‘Dramatic Authorship and Print’ in Early Modern English Drama in EMED.

Simon Palfrey, ‘The Soliloquy’ in Doing Shakespeare (Arden, 2005).

Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: from stage to page (Routledge, 2005).

L. Erne, Shakespeare’s Modern Collaborators (2008)

Laurie Maguire, ‘Shakespeare published’ in Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide.

Lucas Erne, Shakespeare and the Publication of his Plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol 53, no.1 (Spring 2002), 1-20

New History ofEarly English Drama, eds. Cox and Kastan (Columbia, 1997) contains some excellent essays on Shakespeare’s playing spaces, audiences etc.

Stephen Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: Licence, Play and Power in Renaissance England(Chicago, 1998).

Roslyn Nutson, ‘Theatre Companies and Stages’ inEMED.

Do visit the on-line Luminarium site.

Richard Dutton, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre (OUP, 2011); contains many new articles on theatre companies, playing spaces and theatrical and social practices.

Tanya Pollard, Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (Blackwell, 2004). This is good for anti-theatrical tracts (propaganda against the new theatres).

Week 2.(Mon 6 Feb to Friday 10 Feb)Staging Hamlet andthe play’s critics

Whose Hamlet have you been reading/ watching?

[Themes: Hamlet as cultural icon; reinventing Hamlet and criticism in history]

‘Hamlet is a monument of world literature but it is a monument built on shifting sands’ (Stephen Greenblatt)

‘The point of Shakespeare and his plays lies in their capacity to serve as instruments by which we make cultural meaning for ourselves’ (Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare, 1992)

Essential Reading:

Hamlet

As you re-read the play consider these questions and record your thoughts before you read the criticism:

Q. Why has this play maintained its appeal over the centuries?

Q. Is it ‘the time’ that’s ‘out of joint’ or Hamlet?

Also Essential Reading:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), ‘Notes on the Tragedies: Hamlet’, Third Lecture.

(digitised version available on Study Direct)

Ernest Jones, ‘The Psycho-Analytical Solution’ in Hamlet and Oedipus(London: Victor Gollancz, 1949). (digitised version available on Study Direct)

A.C.Bradley, Lecture IV Hamlet (esp. section 2 onwards), Shakespearean Tragedy(1904; London: Macmillan, 1929).(digitised version available on Study Direct)

Patricia Parker, ‘Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying and the ‘Secret Place’ of Woman’ in Shakespeare from the Margins: language, Culture, Contexts (Chicago, 1997).(digitised version on Study Direct)

Further Reading:

G. Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: a cultural history from the restoration to the present (1989). How has Hamlet been staged and received over the centuries?

G.Wilson Knight, ‘The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet’, The Wheel of Fire (OUP, 1930).

Kiernan Ryan, ‘Questioning the Consensus’ Ch 3, Shakespeare (Prentice Hall, 1989) pp. 70-5.

Neil Rhodes, ‘Hamlet and Humanism’ in EMED.

Carolyn Sale, ‘The Amending Hand’: Hales v. Petit…and Equitable Action in Hamlet’, Ch. 11, in The Law in Shakespeare, eds, Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (Palgrave, 2007).

Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, 2002).

Week 3.(Mon 13 Feb to Fri 17 Feb) Shaping Fantasies: Shakespearean Theatre

[Themes: festive humour and dark comedy, topicality, new historicism]

Essential reading:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1594-96)

Twelfth Night (1601)

Louis Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture” in Shakespeare: an anthology of Criticism and Theory1945-2000 inSACT; a variation of this is Lois Montrose, ‘AMND and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture’ in Rewriting the Renaissance (11986) eds. Ferguson, Quilligan, Vickers.

Week 4.(Mon 20 Feb to Fri 24 Feb) Words, Wit and Metadrama

[Themes: Shakespeare’s use of language and stagecraft; acting styles; unstable language—deconstruction; the carnival idiom and how it functions in Richard II; different approaches--formalism, new historicism and cultural materialism, deconstruction]

Essential Reading:

Richard II (1595)

Catherine Belsey, ‘Making Histories Then and Now’ in Barker, Hulme and Iverson, The Uses of History (1991). Digitised version on Study Direct.

Stephen Orgel, ‘Making Greatness Familiar’ in Pageantry in the ShakespeareanTheatre, ed., D.Bergeron (University of Georgia, 1981). Digitised version on Study Direct.

M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1968). Introduction about carnival forms; chapters 1-3.

Further Reading:

Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theatre: plebeian culture and the structure of authority in Renaissance England (1985).

‘Introduction’, Political Shakespeare, eds., Dollimore and Sinfield;

Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Introduction’, The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance. M.

E.M.W.Tillyard, ‘The Cosmic Background’ in SACT (but read introduction to this section first)

Jean E. Howard, ‘The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies’ in SACT; also in Dutton and Wilson, New Historicism.

Margaret Healy, ‘Unstable Signs’ in Richard II (Northcote, 1998).

Simon Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare (Arden, 2005).

Inga Stina Ewbank, ‘Shakespeare and the Arts of Language’ in The CambridgeCompanion to Shakespeare Studies (1986).

The Arden Shakespeare. Reading Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language: A Guide, eds., Adamson, Hunter et.al. (Thomson Learning, 2001).

A Companion to Shakespeare (Blackwell, 1999) chs. 14-18. On ‘Writing’.

‘Reading Closely’ section in SACT.

Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: language, culture and context (1996).

Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (Arden, 2004).

Palgrave New Casebooks: Shakespeare’s Histories (a selection of essays)

Week 5.(Mon 27 Feb to Fri 3 March) Friendship, Erotic Desire, Creativity,and the Theatre of the Mind

[Themes: male friendship;desire and writing; formal pleasures]

Essential Reading

Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609)

Plato, Symposium (Penguin, 1999). Especially Diotima’s dialogue with Socrates

Helen Vendler, ‘Formal Pleasure in the Sonnets’ in Michael Schoenfeldt, A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Blackwell, 2007)

Further Reading:

Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago, 2002).

Michael Schoenfeldt (ed.) A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Blackwell, 2007)

Margaret Healy, Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative Imagination (CUP, 2011)

Margareta de Grazia, ‘The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Shakespeare Survey 46 (1993).

Lynn Enterline, ‘Rhetoric, Discipline, and the Theatricality of Everyday Life in Elizabethan Grammar Schools’, in From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, eds. Stephen Orgel and Peter Holland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006)

J. Pequigny, ‘The Two Antonios and ‘Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and the Merchant of Venice’ in Barker and Kamps, eds, Shakespeare and Gender: a history (1995) .

M. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet (1992).

James Schiffer, , ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays (Garland: New York, 1999)

Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Renaissance England (Basingstoke, 2003).

Jonathan Goldberg, Queering the Renaissance (Durham, 1994).

Bruce R. Smith, ‘The Secret Sharer’ in EMED, 684-703.

Kenneth Borris, ed., Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: a sourcebook of texts, 1470-1650 (London: Routledge, 2004).

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985).

Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Renaissance England (Chicago, 1991)

C. Malcolmson, “‘What You Will’: Social mobility and Gender in Twelfth Night”, in Wayne, ed, The Matter of Difference: materialist feminist criticism of Shakespeare (1991).

Reading Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language: A Guide (Arden Shakespeare; Thomson Learning, 2001).

Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (Penguin)

Week 6. (Mon 6 March to Fri 10 March) Power, Gender, Social Margins

[the emblematic theatrical tradition; complex characters or vehicles for ideas?; Shakespeare’s men and women and patriarchy and power]

Essential Reading:

King Lear (1604-5)

Measure for Measure (1603)

Jonathan Dollimore, ‘King Lear and Essentialist Humanism’ in Radical Tragedy (1984), also in SACT.

Terence Hawkes, especially ‘Ruling and loving’, ‘Reason and Madness male and female’, King Lear (Northcote, 1995).

Terry Eagleton, ‘Introduction’, Sweet Violence: the idea of the tragic (Blackwell, 2003).

Lynda Boose, ‘The Family in Shakespeare Studies’ in SACT.

K. Ryan, ‘Men/ are as the time is’, Shakespeare (1995).

Kathleen McLuskie, ‘The Patriarchal Bard’ in Dollimore and Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare (1985).

Alan Sinfield, ‘Give an Account of Shakespeare’ in SACT.

J. Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (1975).

L. Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance (1984), Part 2.

L.Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters (1983).

M. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (1996)

D. Callaghan, ed., A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (2000).

Callaghan, Helms, Singh, The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics (1994).

L. Marcus, ‘London’ on Measure for Measure, in Puzzling Shakespeare (1988).

D. Hamilton, ‘Measure for Measure: the transition to Stuart rule’, Shakespeare andthe Politics of Protestant England (1992).

Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Measure for Measure as Social Text’, James I and the Politics ofLiterature (1983).

Week 7.(Mon 13 March to Fri 17 March) Gender Troubles and the Transvestite Stage

[The Shrew and A Shrew, the unstable text; the effect of the ‘Sly frame’; the shrewish woman; unstable desire; cross-dressing and eroticism; Jonathan Miller’s film adaptation]

Essential reading:

The Taming of the Shrew (1592)

Catherine Belsey, ‘Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies’ in SACT.

Valerie Traub, ‘The Homoerotics of Shakespearean Comedy’ in SACT.

Also think about: Sonnet 20 (1593-1603)

As You like It (1600)

Twelfth Night(1601-2)

For discussion: Jonathan Miller’s Shrew for the BBC (DVD excerpts in class).