Renaissance Drama (332-0-20)

Topic

Playing the Globe: Theaters of London and the Worl

Instructors

William West

Meeting Info

Harris Hall L28: Mon, Wed 3:30PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Visiting London from Basel around 1599, Thomas Platter observed that "the English don't much care to travel abroad, but prefer to experience foreign affairs at home, in their plays." One play from the same time asks rhetorically, "Had not ye rather, for novelty's sake, see Jerusalem ye never saw, than London that ye see hourly?" The answer seems to be obvious. At the same time, though, and often in the same plays, playgoers examined the city of London and its customs with a new care. London and the world, the close and the faraway, were used as perspectives for grasping each other as spatial, corporal experiences, through plotting and playing. What was familiar could be mapped onto the far-fetched, and vice versa. In this class we will read plays by Shakespeare and by contemporaries who taught him and learned from him. We will study the construction of the Globe and of globes, plays as maps and maps as plays. Together these different kinds of artifact represent life both close and distant, charting new environments and new experiences linguistically, visually, and physically.

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area