2016-2017 Love, Sex and Death: English Renaissance Tragedy Code: IS252 Category: Humanities Level: 5 Credits: 15 Teaching Pattern Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Seminar 2 x 3hrs 3 x 3hrs 3 x 3hrs 3 x 3hrs Fieldwork 1 x 8hrs *in addition to the above formal teaching sessions you will be expected to do approximately 109 hours of independent study over the 4 weeks. *Additional Field Trip fee of 70.00 Outline The Elizabethan and Jacobean periods in English history were periods of enormous religious and social upheaval. Written against this background of social unrest, the 'Renaissance Tragedies' are some of the most astonishing and memorable dramatic works ever written. In their seemingly persistent overturning and perversion of all social niceties, in their insistence upon violence, cruelty, bloodletting and illicit sexual activity, they can still shock us today. You will study eight of the bestknown and most enduringly popular of these tragedies, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Thomas Kyd s The Spanish Tragedy, Middleton s Women Beware Women, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling, Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy and John Ford s Tis Pity She s a Whore. We will be examining these plays from a range of critical viewpoints, including psychological literary critical theory, feminist and gender theory, ideology and religion, and politics and the relations of power, asking how the plays may reflect contemporary early-modern anxieties and preoccupations. There will be a field trip to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, which is a reconstruction of the original 1599 Globe Theatre, and which will allow you to experience what it meant to be a playgoer in Jacobean London. Week One Texts: The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, This week we will be looking at two foundational texts in the Renaissance Tragedy genre, examining the seminal The Spanish Tragedy in conjunction with the slightly later (and perhaps rather better known) Hamlet, and discussing the society and cultural climate of late Elizabethan England that gave rise to these plays, a time of social, cultural and religious turbulence and fundamental change. Both play texts, plus Hamlet and Humanism and The Spanish Tragedy and Revenge in Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., Patrick Cheney and Andrew Hadfield, Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion. 1 SUMMER Session 2
Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama, esp. Part 1, Unity, Knowledge, Autonomy and Part 2, Silence and speech, and Finding a place ; Janet Clare, Revenge Tragedies of the Renaissance, esp. Revenge and Justice: Elizabethan Revenge Tragedies ; Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, esp. Contexts, and The Disintegration of Providentialist Belief. Week Two Texts: The Revenger s Tragedy and Women Beware Women, both by Thomas Middleton. Good edited copies of these plays are available, and there is also a good website on Thomas Middleton at www.tech.org/~cleary/middhome.html. We will be looking at the plays in connection with various contemporary texts discussing the nature of power and monarchy, religious ideology, and the emphasis upon social and personal discipline. In particular we will be discussing the prevalence of the misogynistic treatment of women in the texts of the period, connecting this with areas such as the performance of masculinity, and the anxieties about social, sexual and moral decadence in early modern England. Both play texts, and The Revenger s Tragedy : Providence, Parody and Black Camp, in Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, Bastardy, Counterfeiting and Misogyny in The Revenger s Tragedy, by Michael Neill, in ELH, Vol. 21, No. 2, and Middleton s Women Beware Women as Anticourt Drama, by Albert H. Tricomi, in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 19, No 2 (Spring, 1989). J. W. Lever, The Tragedy of State; A Study of Jacobean Drama, esp. Tragedy of State ; Revenge Drama: Antonio s Revenge, The Revenger s Tragedy ; Death and the Revenger s Tragedy in Garrett A Sullivan, Jr., Patrick Cheney and Andrew Hadfield, Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion; and Women Beware Women and the Economy of Rape, by Anthony B. Dawson in Studies in English Drama, 1500-1900, Vol. 27, No. 2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring 1984). 2 SUMMER Session 2
Week Three Texts: The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, both by John Webster. Good edited versions of these plays are widely available, and there are also various online sites with full copies of the texts, e.g. http://larryavisbrown.homestead.com/files/malfi/malfi_home.htm. We will be looking at the plays in conjunction with various contemporary texts concerned with the nature of female power and sexuality. We will cover such areas as the conflicting and controversial early modern ideas about women, thinking about the anxieties about patriarchal control of female sexuality and about women s power in a patriarchal society. Both play texts, and Webster: The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, in J. W. Lever, The Tragedy of State; Defining/Confining the Duchess: Negotiating the Female Body in John Webster s The Duchess of Malfi, in Studies in Philology, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Spring, 1990), and Webster s The White Devil and the Jacobean Tragic Perspective, in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 16, No 3 (Fall 1974). Hereward T. Price, The Function of Imagery in Webster, PMLA, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Sep., 1955); Peter Stallybrass, Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers; Incest and Ideology: The Duchess of Malfi, in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, eds. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass. Week Four: 3 SUMMER Session 2
Texts: The Changeling, by Middleton and Rowley, and Tis Pity She s a Whore, by John Ford. Good edited texts of these plays are widely available, and there is a helpful website at www.tech.org/~cleary/middhome.html. We will be examining the plays in connection with linked contemporary pamphlets and other texts, in the context of the prevalent early modern preoccupation with the socially damaging effects of promiscuous female sexuality and moral weakness as a paradigm for social corruption, and the ways in which this corruption is manifested not only through women s bodies but through the prevalence of ambition, treachery and madness. Both play texts, and I ll Want My Will Else : The Changeling and Women s Complicity With Their Rapists, As Tame as the Ladies : Politics and Gender in The Changeling, both in Revenge Tragedy: New Casebooks, by Stevie Simkin; Tis Pity She s a Whore and Incest, in Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Patrick Cheney and Andrew Hadfield, Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion. Donald K. Anderson. Jr., The Heart and the Banquet: Imagery in Ford s Tis Pity She s a Whore and the Broken Heart, in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1700, Vol. 2, No. 2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring, 1962); Judith Haber, I(t) could not choose but follow : Erotic Logic in The Changeling, Representations, Vol. 81, No. 1 (Winter 2003); Larry S. Champion, Ford s Tis Pity She s a Whore and the Jacobean Tragic Perspective, PMLA, Vol. 90, No. 1 (Jan., 1975). Learning Outcomes By the end of the module students will be able to: Identify, analyse and summarise the main themes in the plays studied Recognise, contrast and compare the different literary critical theories studied in conjunction with the playtexts. Apply this knowledge in the evaluation, appraisal and assessment of the language, imagery and symbolism employed by the author. Evaluate, discuss and debate their ideas in seminar group discussions. 4 SUMMER Session 2
Demonstrate the knowledge gained in seminar presentations and the end-of-course assessed essay. Contacts Catherine Parsons Email: C.A.Parsons@sussex.ac.uk Indicative Reading List Each week we will be studying two play texts in conjunction with a variety of secondary critical reading, contextualising the plays within their time of writing and helping us to understand the society in which the plays were written. Texts of all the plays are freely available online, but it would be preferable to have good edited copies if possible, as editor s footnotes will help in the process of understanding the plays. All the secondary reading is available from the University of Sussex Library, to which you will have access for the duration of the module, and all journal articles will be available online via the course online study site, available once you have enrolled. It is recommended that you read the primary texts before the course starts. Students will receive a module reader containing excerpts of relevant contemporary early-modern documents such as pamphlets, together with authoritative pieces of critical writing on the texts, and appropriate literary critical theoretical articles from such viewpoints as feminist theory, gender and queer theory, early-modern politics and the relations of power, and psychological literary critical theory. University Library The Library, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QL Phone: 01273 678163 library@sussex.ac.uk 5 SUMMER Session 2