English 189-3 - Winter, 2013

Seminar in Literary Studies

Topic: The Politics of Genre in Tudor-Stuart Drama

Class Information

Instructor: Friedlander, Robert
CRN: 73746
Time: MW 12:10-1:30
Location: 308 Voorhies

Description

The Politics of Genre in Tudor-Stuart Drama

This course will examine some of the best plays written in English during the life of William Shakespeare – just not any plays written by Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s career coincided with a flowering of dramatic talent in 16th and 17th century England, and this course examines how the greatest other playwrights of that era explored its major cultural and political preoccupations: nationhood, gender and sexual politics, social unrest, and economic misfortune. We will be particularly focused on the ways in which dramatic genre and socio-political history interact in these texts. We might ask, for example, to what degree dramatic genre (comedy, history, tragedy, tragicomedy) determines a text’s view of nationhood, or what it means when representations of gender and sexuality differ among plays of the same genre. It is my hope that over the course of the semester we will begin to question the definition of genre in the first place, asking why and how such distinctions are made, what their utility is, and whether we might think of alternate ways of categorizing the texts we read. Similarly, I would like us to unsettle our definitions of the political categories we will be working with, by asking questions like: how are the distinctions we make between rich and poor, man and woman, and our nation and foreign nations different than those made in early modern England, and what can we learn about our own political thought (and theirs) from these differences?

Texts will include Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, and John Fletcher’s Philaster. Assignments will include a short paper, a long paper, regular online response papers and weekly contributions to the class wiki.