ENGL 348C

Shakespeare and the Renaissance (6 credits)

Instructor: Dr. Katherine Sirluck
Section: 002
Term: 1-2

Office: BUTO 423
Telephone: 822-4268
Office Hours: MWF  1:00, and by appointment.

This course is intended to present the plays of Shakespeare within their aesthetic, intellectual and political context. This means we will spend some time discussing the influence upon Shakespeare and his contemporaries of Petrarch, Montaigne, Machiavelli, Calvin, Giordano Bruno, and other important figures of the English and Continental Renaissance. Attention will also be given to cultural history, including the negotiations of class and gender identity so crucial in this period.  We will consider contemporary religious, philosophical, and political controversy; and various aspects of domestic life and social interaction relevant for the understanding of the plays. We will approach the plays using a variety of critical tools and methods, remembering to encounter these texts as interactive works of imagination.  Finally, we will strive to remain aware of the plays as theatre, and of the conditions governing theatrical production and performance in Shakespeare’s England.  Shakespeare’s theatre can be seen as a marginal or liminal space wherein the dilemmas of his 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  The dramatic poetry of Shakespeare is both historical document and unfinished experiment – a boundlessly eventful experiential realm.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 twelve plays, four with somewhat lighter classroom coverage.

Plays:

Course Requirements: 

Students will be asked to write one term paper, one in-class essay, and a  final exam.

Each member of the class will be required to participate in the classroom performance of a scene or part of a scene from one of the plays on our list.  Students may choose to act, direct, or work on costumes and props.  For anyone who is utterly opposed to being involved in performance, there is another option: you may write a review (1 or 2 pages) 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, rather than as literature written for the page. A bibliographical guide to Shakespeare scholarship will be distributed in the third week of term.