English 242 - Fall, 2012

16th Century Literature

Topic: Elizabeth I

Class Information

Instructor: Dolan, Frances
CRN: 22567
Time: R 3:10-6:00
Location: 120 Voorhies
Breadth: Earlier British
Focus: Interdiscipline

Description

Although Elizabeth I has been the subject of numerous scholarly books and historical novels, her writings have only recently been systematically collected and edited. As author, Elizabeth challenges many of the assumptions that have shaped her representation. In this seminar, we will study Elizabeth I as a writer, a ruler, a figure dominating the imaginations of her subjects, and a continuing cultural obsession. We will begin with a discussion of how and why recent films and serials, such as Anonymous, Shakespeare in Love, Kapur's Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age, HBO's Elizabeth I,and The Tudors depict the queen. What, we will ask, is our own investment in Elizabeth and Elizabethans? To understand what these fictional accounts emphasize and ignore, we will then turn to biographies of the queen, her own speeches, letters, and poems, and crucial contexts for some of the most important writings. We will also examine how writers including Dekker, Foxe, Heywood, Lyly, Mulcaster, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Stubbes address or depict her. Using Elizabeth as our focus, then, will enable us to survey a range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century genres and writers. There will also be a unit on the relationship between bees and beekeeping and attitudes toward female monarchy, including Caltha Poetarum: Or The Bumble Bee (1599), a pornographic blazon, and Charles Butler's The Feminine Monarchy: or A Treatise Concerning Bees (1609).

Texts assigned will include the Marcus, Mueller, and Rose edition of Elizabeth’s writings, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and a biography of your choice (such as Somerset, Levin, Neale, Starkey, or Weir, or one of two more sharply focused recent books, Tracy Borman's Elizabeth's Women or Trea Martyn's Queen Elizabeth in the Garden). I am ordering copies of the first two but leaving you to select and locate the final book for yourself. Other readings will be available on smartsite. These will include plays such as Sackville and Norton’s Gorboduc, Lyly’s Endymion, and Dekker’s Whore of Bablyon, prose and poetry to, by, and about Elizabeth, and a wide range of scholarship about Elizabeth and her court.

Grading

Students will write a concluding research paper, but will also complete a range of assignments, including some short, focused research exercises (such as comparing different biographers’ treatments of a given episode in Elizabeth’s life) and a teaching exercise (drafting an undergraduate syllabus that somehow addresses Elizabeth and/or Elizabethan literature).

Texts

Twelfth Night, Shakespeare
Elizabeth I: Collected Works, Marcus, Mueller, and Rose