Renaissance Drama (332-0-20)

Topic

Staging the Stage, 1567-1642

Instructors

William West

Meeting Info

Parkes Hall 212: Mon, Wed 2:00PM - 3:20PM

Overview of class

Today we study and perform the plays of Shakespeare, but for playgoers of Shakespeare's time, the play was not the only thing. The business of playing in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries—playwrights, actors, supernumeraries who collected pennies from playgoers and sold them food or beer—participated worked on scales both larger and smaller than the play: the location of the playhouses in London, the yearly repertories of competing companies, genres of plays and kinds of parts in them, but also the working words and gestures of the actors and the worn worlds of prop and costume. Looking at these other aspects of playing at reveal patterns invisible at the level of the individual play. We will approach Elizabethan playing as a self-organizing system made up not just of plays, but of many agents, interests, and objects. In this class we will study plays, of course—but also neighborhoods of London, floorplans of playhouses, lists of props and players' wills, the plays different companies put on to take advantage of trends and slow periods. Looking at how plays were made and what they were made out of, we will develop different ways of looking at "Shakespeare's theater."

Teaching Method

Seminar.

Evaluation Method

Participation, papers, other projects, testing.

Class Materials (Required)

TBA

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Pre-registration -- Reserved for English and Creative Writing students.