Shakespeare and the Renaissance
Term: 2
MWF, 2:00 p.m.
This course will focus primarily on the plays of Shakespeare, with some attention given to other Renaissance dramatic and non-dramatic works. We will discuss cultural history, contemporary religious, philosophical, and political controversy, and elements of domestic life and social interaction relevant for the study of these works. We will explore the conditions influencing production and the participation of these plays in the ideological and theatrical aspects of Elizabethan playing and audience reception. A variety of different critical approaches will be examined, including those of earlier decades, and those more current.
Shakespeare’s theatre can be seen as a commercial enterprise, licensed by the authorities, and dependent on royal patronage, involving complex negotiations of class and subjectivity. It can also be seen as a marginal or liminal space wherein the dilemmas and dreams of Shakespeare’s time and now of our own can be evoked and given form; where competing cultural voices find expression; where “things as they are” can be challenged by the very manner of their representation. The dramatic poetry of Shakespeare is both historical document and unfinished experiment — a boundlessly eventful experiential realm. Students will study six plays, four with full coverage in the classroom and two with briefer coverage in class. We will also consider a handful of the sonnets. To enhance our understanding of the dramatic texts in their time, we will discuss other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, and brief selections from the works of some important figures of the English and Continental Renaissance, such as Spenser, Montaigne, Thomas Hobbes and Machiavelli. Selections from film versions of the plays will be viewed as time permits.
Plays: Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Tempest; Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling
Play texts will be available at the UBC Bookstore. Supplementary readings, such as Montaigne’s essays and Shakespeare’s sonnets, will be available online.
Course requirements: Students will be asked to write one in-class essay (25%), one term paper (40%), and the final exam (30%), and will also be asked to produce a creative presentation (5%). Regarding the latter, students may choose between individual or group work, and will have considerable choice of media and method. Students may prefer to act in a classroom performance of a scene or part of a scene from one of the plays on our list. Students may choose to rewrite, write a related piece of their own in any form, direct rather than act, or work on costumes and props. They may produce visual art, musical pieces (such as songs or interpretive responses), dance performances, set design, film, poetry, puppet shows, talk shows, wrestling matches, folk plays, pantomime, etc. For anyone who is utterly opposed to being involved in a class performance or presenting their art, there is another option: you may write a review of any performance of a Shakespeare play which you have seen recently, on film or in the theatre. The purpose of this exercise is to encourage the reception of Shakespeare’s dramatic art as theatre, or as extra-textual experience, rather than as literature written for the page.
A bibliographical guide to Shakespeare scholarship will be distributed in the third week of term.
