ENG2486HS L0101
Early Modern Theater Theories
Williams, K.
Course Description:
This course asks: how was the early modern English theater theorized by detractors, defenders, playwrights, actors, and audiences? What does early modern drama teach us about how the theater works? And, how can examples from the early modern theater inform or complicate key paradigms of performance theory in the present? This course will serve as an introduction to the broad sweep of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama and a sustained investigation into how the early modern theater develops and refines its formal protocols, concepts that continue to animate theater today. Our inquiry in this course will take shape around three sets of texts: early modern polemical writing about the theater that aims to take stock of its efficacy and perilous possibility (such as anti-theatrical writing by Philip Stubbes, Stephen Gosson, William Prynne, and others); early modern plays that seem especially interested in interrogating how the theater works (including The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Alchemist, The Silver Age, A Game At Chess, and The Roman Actor); and contemporary theoretical work on performance that accounts for the theater’s formal operations (likely including work by Tavia Nyong’o, Peggy Phelan, Joseph Roach, Rebecca Schneider, Bert States, Diana Taylor, and others).
Course Reading List:
Required Texts:
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Andrew Gurr (New Mermaids)
William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine (Folger)
Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Hattaway (New Mermaids)
Philip Massinger, The Roman Actor, ed. White (Revels)
*All other texts (marked with *) available via PDF on our course’s Quercus site or online via UofT library
Course Methods of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
1) Weekly post and engaged participation in seminar discussions [20% participation + 10% reflection post / 30% total];
2) Short essay [20%];
3) Final project [50%].
Term: S-TERM (January 2024 to April 2024)
Date/Time: Tuesday / 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm (2 hours)
Location: Rm: See ACORN or QUERCUS
Delivery: In-Person
ENG2499HS L0101
Shakespeare's Tragedies
Magnusson, L.
Course Description:
This course affords an opportunity for seminar members to read Shakespeare’s tragedies in dialogue with the extraordinarily rich tradition of criticism on the tragedies. Each seminar meeting will focus on a specific tragedy, opening up four areas of discussion. (1) The first topic concerns the structure and larger architecture of each play, considering such topics as generic experimentation, imitation and invention, and elements of plot construction oriented to thematic, rhetorical, or theatrical effect. (2) The second identifies and interrogates major issues that have arisen in the critical conversation, whether interpretive, textual, contextual, or performative. (3) The third focus of discussion will be close reading, experimenting with various rhetorical, linguistic, or critical approaches to a selected scene or episode. (4) Finally, looking to the present and future, we consider new directions and emerging (or unimagined) topics, asking what might constitute productive routes for fresh research. The course should be of interest to all those planning graduate research in Shakespeare and early modern literature, to potential teachers, and to those interested in Shakespeare’s exceptional literary achievement.
Course Reading List:
Texts will include: Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Othello, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus (or selection thereof), supplemented by critical readings.
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
Seminar members will exchange short email “issue” sheets and/or brief “First Word” presentations reflecting on the weekly plays and topics (20%), present one twenty-minute seminar (25%), participate actively in class discussion (10%), and develop a short colloquium paper (possibly for a final class mini-conference), submitting a written version of about 12 pages (10% + 35% = 45%).
Term: S-TERM (January 2024 to April 2024)
Date/Time: Monday / 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm (3 hours)
Location: Rm: See ACORN or QUERCUS
Delivery: In-Person
ENG2509HF L0101
Shakespeare and the Book
Teramura, M.
Course Description:
This course will explore the wide range of ways that Shakespeare and early modern literature intersect with the field broadly known as book history. Since the emergence of the New Bibliography in the early twentieth century, scholarly work on the changing forms of Shakespearean texts, from the early printed quartos to the digital editions of today, has become increasingly shaped by an awareness of the political, economic, social, and aesthetic factors that influence the production, dissemination, reception, and remediation of literary works as material objects, most recently informed by a growing attention to race, gender, and sexuality. Working with both theoretical and historical scholarship, this course will introduce students to a variety of methods for studying the book (broadly conceived) with attention to the new research directions in early modern literature that these methods support. Topics addressed may include the idea of the book in drama, manuscript culture, early modern printing technologies, book design, the economics and politics of publication, reading and book use, theories of editing, authorship and canon formation, global receptions of Shakespeare on the page, archives and libraries, and digital remediations.
Course Reading List:
Primary texts will likely include three Shakespeare plays and a selection of sonnets as well as shorter literary works by other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers. Secondary texts, representing a range of theoretical and historical approaches to book history, may include Margreta de Grazia, Peter Stallybrass, and Adam Smyth on the materiality of texts; Miles Grier and B. K. Adams on race and early modern print culture; Valerie Wayne and Laurie Maguire on feminist editing; Jeffrey Masten on queer philology; Margaret J. M. Ezell on women’s writing and literary history; Claire M. L. Bourne on typography; Zachary Lesser on the early modern book trade; Leah Marcus on colonialism and the global reception of Shakespeare in print; Alan Galey on Shakespeare in digital media. (Subject to change.)
Course Method of Evaluation and Course Requirements:
- Participation 20%;
- Mini-Assignments 20%;
- In-Class Presentation 10%;
- Final Project 50%.
Term: F-TERM (September 2023 to December 2023)
Date/Time: Tuesday / 11:00 am to 1:00 pm (2 hours)
Location: Rm: See ACORN or QUERCUS
Delivery: In-Person