English 234 - Fall, 2010

Dramatic Literature

Class Information

Instructor: Bloom, Gina
CRN: 83237
Time: W 12:10-3:00
Location: 248 Voorhies

Description

Performance Studies and the Early Modern Theater


This course approaches early modern plays not as texts for readers but as performed events for theatergoers. One purpose of the course is to develop students’ knowledge about theater history and its methodologies: what do we know about who went to the theater and why they attended plays? How does the availability of evidence shape, for better or for worse, what we have come to conclude about theatergoers and their theater experiences? Our evidence will be drawn from historical documentation of performance (e.g., anti-theatrical tracts, financial records, playgoer diaries) as well as from plays themselves, which showcase and comment on theater practices. But this course also aims to ground students in the field of performance studies and its applications to early modern drama and theater history. To that end we will integrate our readings of plays, drama criticism, and theater scholarship with work by key theorists in performance studies, such as Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Marvin Carlson, Gay McAuley, and Peggy Phelan. Insofar as these scholars base their theories primarily on modern theater and performance, we will be especially interested to see how their insights may be enriched through attention to the unique theatrical culture of early modern London. For instance, how does the practice of seating audience members on the stage (spoofed in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle) speak to McAuley’s claims about the ways space influences the relationships between actors and spectators? How does the early modern theater’s links to seasonal festivities (exemplified in Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday) speak to recent conversations about “untimeliness” in the theater? Other topics, in addition to time and space, will include theatrical information/the staging of evidence and unscriptedness/spontaneous playing.


There will be some assigned essays to be read in advance of the first class meeting; information and downloads will be available in early September through my faculty website page under Courses: http://english.ucdavis.edu/people/directory/gbloom


Tentative play list:

Middleton, A Game at Chess

Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday

Anon., Arden of Faversham

Porter, Two Angry Women of Abington

Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness

Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling

Rowley, A Woman Never Vexed

Beaumont and Fletcher, Knight of the Burning Pestle

Grading

Requirements include a short paper, a final conference-length paper, and leading an hour of class discussion.

Texts

A Woman Killed with Kindness, Heywood
A Game at Chess, Middleton
Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama, Bevington et al.