UNDERGRADUATE

The Shakespeare Workshop

“The Shakespeare Workshop” explores a selection of Shakespeare’s plays from the perspective of performance. We take the class title seriously: it is a workshop more than a traditional academic course, which means we will meet in a theater space rather than a classroom, and students will be expected to take a participatory, hands-on approach to the texts we study. A willingness to actively take part in discussion and get up on your feet is essential. In addition to considering how each of our plays was staged in its own time and in subsequent eras, the majority of our energy will be invested in exploring how each play might be adapted for performance now. Towards this end, our work will involve careful analysis of language, character, and dramatic design, as well as key thematic and conceptual preoccupations. We will also learn about what is possible in a modern theatrical space and even what counts as a “theatrical space.” Finally, in order to maintain a shared sense of intellectual and artistic mission, our work throughout the semester will be framed by a broad question of topical importance. This year’s question is: “What makes community possible?” We will return regularly to a consideration of (1) how our plays explore this question, and (2) how the question itself might invite innovative approaches to performance and staging. 

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Global Theatricality in Renaissance England

There is an old, but still prevalent, view of the Renaissance as a quintessentially European cultural epoch. But is this really the case? In this course, students will discover that the literary, artistic, and scientific developments that took place in Europe between 1400 and 1700 were in fact global phenomena, the result of sustained interactions with Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Focusing on plays from sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, students will explore the wide array of words, objects, characters, and plots that were global imports. Other topics to be addressed include the way the literary and theatrical marketplace was shaped by an interest in the foreign; the economic and imaginative links between theater and colonialism; and the challenge Jewish and Islamic cultures of “the East” and indigenous cultures of the New World posed to forms of knowledge that were rooted in Christianity. Throughout the course we will be returning to a central question: how does English Renaissance theater fit into the larger history and philosophy of “cosmopolitanism”?

Theaters of Knowledge: Marlowe and Shakespeare 

In this course we will give sustained attention to two of Renaissance England’s greatest stage tragedies: Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. This will involve learning about the differences between classical, Renaissance, and modern definitions of tragedy and assessing where our two plays fall among them. We will also be devoting a considerable amount of time to evaluating differences between the two plays in terms of language and stagecraft. As the title of the course suggests, “knowledge” will be a key theme throughout the semester. At the heart of both plays is a concern with the tragic effects of knowledge. Our job will be to determine what this preoccupation might tell us about Renaissance understandings of religion and science, agency and free will, and the relationship between thought and action.

Shakespeare’s Theater

This course offers an overview of Shakespeare’s dramatic work, addressing plays from across his career in each of the genres in which he wrote. Our primary focus throughout the semester will be on the way Shakespeare’s plays work as theater. This means that while historical and cultural context will certainly be addressed, our primary goal will be to understand the unique ways in which Shakespeare used the material and conceptual resources of performance. Among the questions that will guide our work are: What kind of theatricality does Shakespeare’s language make possible? How are spectators implicated in the world of the plays? What are the theatrical devices through which meaning is generated on Shakespeare’s stage? What is it about Shakespeare’s language and dramaturgy that makes his plays especially speculative?

How Sonnets Work: Lessons from the English Renaissance

This course focuses on sonnets by five major poets of the English Renaissance: Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, and John Milton. Our guiding question throughout the semester will be: how do these sonnets work? The question isn’t as simple as it seems, for in exploring how sonnets “work” we’ll be concerned with several overlapping lines of inquiry. For example, we’ll look at how they work in a formal sense (the way structure, sound, and rhythm contribute to meaning); we’ll look at how they work in a historical sense (the way contemporary developments in law, economics, science, and travel shape language and ideas); we’ll look at how they work in a textual sense (the various ways in which sonnets were written, reproduced, transmitted, and read); and we’ll look at how they work in a philosophical sense (the particular way in which sonnets generate knowledge and pose questions).

POSTGRADUATE

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Marlowe's Theater

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was the most successful and influential English dramatist before Shakespeare. Doubtless the latter would have developed their craft very differently had Marlowe not been there as a standard-setting competitor in the early 1590s. Had Marlowe not died so young – killed in a barroom brawl at the age of twenty-nine – the landscape of English Renaissance drama, Shakespeare’s career included, would probably look much different. Marlowe was among the first professional writers in early modern England and played a major role establishing tragedy as a key genre for popular commercial theater. What’s more, in popularizing “blank verse” (unrhymed metrical lines) he essentially gave English Renaissance drama its voice. Described variously, both in his own time and subsequently, as an atheist, a nonconformist, a sodomite, and an overall sexual and intellectual dissident, Marlowe has an edgy glamour that few writers before or since have equaled. Employed as a government spy for Queen Elizabeth at the same time as he plied his trade as both poet and playwright, his short, eventful, and highly impactful life carries a mysterious allure.

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The entirety of Marlowe’s dramatic career unfolds between 1587 and 1593; like the Beatles, he revolutionized an artistic field in six years before the age of thirty, pushing both the formal and thematic boundaries of English commercial drama as it existed then. His plays deal with topics that are as urgent now as they were in the rapidly changing world of sixteenth century England: the global imagination and cosmopolitanism (Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta); the ethics of individuality and free-will (Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus); religious and ethnic identity (Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, and The Massacre at Paris); and ideas of masculinity, power, and sexual identity (Edward II and Dido, Queen of Carthage). In this discussion-based seminar, we will read all of Marlowe’s plays. Particular attention will be given to how the plays work in performance; the ways in which Marlowe transforms cultural and intellectual concerns of the early modern period into theater; and the social environments that informed Marlowe’s playwrighting, including Cambridge University, scientific and colonial circles, and the London literary scene. We will also, of course, always be attentive to how the plays continue to speak to issues in our own time.

Shakespeare and Selfhood

What is a self? Are we minds that just happen to perceive a body and physical surroundings, or are we bodies whose sensory experience of material reality creates something that feels like an independent mental world? Are we free agents, or are our actions determined by our environment? And if we can figure out who we are, does that make it easier to know how we should live? For example, is there a certain system of governance (monarchy, democracy, socialism) that is more in sync with human nature than others? There have been many attempts to answer these questions in philosophy, politics, science, law, and religion. The premise of this course, a premise shared by many readers and theatergoers from the eighteenth century onwards, is that Shakespeare, too, has something to tell us about selfhood. Focusing on a selection of plays, this course will explore the relationship between Shakespearean drama and the idea of selfhood from two perspectives: (1) Historical: Shakespeare wrote his plays during what is typically taken to be a watershed period in the history of selfhood, a period during which some have argued the modern self—closed, autonomous, interiorized, uniquely individual—begins to emerge. (2) Theatrical: the social and material contexts in which Shakespeare’s plays were performed and the gestural and rhetorical practices used to form character on stage contribute to specific ways of understanding the self.

What Can Theater Do? Thinking with Carly Churchill

Caryl Churchill is without a doubt one of the most influential and prolific dramatists of our time. Her career so far spans about fifty years and at the age of 83 she is not only still writing plays, but also continuing to lead the way in terms of formal experimentation. Churchill’s astounding intellectual and aesthetic range is apparent in the wide variety of themes her plays address. These include, most prominently, issues of gender and sexuality, colonialism, the body, class, identity, money, war, time, genetic engineering, environmental disaster, apocalypse, murder, childhood, and the nature of theater itself. Serving this broad gamut of interests, Churchill has distinguished herself by taking a particularly elastic and inventive approach to theatrical form. Churchill’s plays jump from time period to time period and sometimes seem to be set in no time at all; they can be long and structurally complex or incredibly short and minimalist; they can be naturalistic or highly expressionistic; they can be plot-driven or float freely in the realm of pure ideas. Sometimes Churchill’s plays catch viruses and get stuck in loops with language breaking down mid-dialogue. A committed collaborator and artistic polyglot, Churchill also challenges theatrical form by exploring how dance, music, and song allow ideas to be presented in new ways. At the heart of Churchill’s career, then, is a simple and persistent question: what can theater do? She returns time and time again to a basic consideration of how theatrical events form unique moments of collective and embodied critical thinking. In this seminar, we will think alongside Caryl Churchill, reading plays she produced between the 1970s and the present day and asking ourselves regularly, “what can theater do?” By the end of the seminar students should have gained a renewed sense of what theater makes possible in the world – intellectually, emotionally, and experientially.

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Experiments in Theater, 1950 to the Present

Almost all the major avant-garde movements of western theater had come to fruition by 1950: the realism of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, the Verfremdungseffekt of Bertolt Brecht, the théâtre de la cruauté of Antonin Artaud. So what was left to do? How did playwrights in the second half of the twentieth century forge paths that were challenging and new? This MA seminar sets out to answer these questions by exploring a selection of English and American plays written between 1950 and our own time, each of which advances a new theatrical idiom or uses established modernist techniques in new ways. Samuel Beckett creates absurd worlds that are at once comic and philosophical; Luis Valdez and Caryl Churchill draw on Brechtian techniques to explore modern questions of politics, identity, and gender; Tony Kushner and Suzan-Lori Parks craft plays that combine realist, symbolist, and mythic features; Anna Deavere-Smith pushes naturalism to its radical extreme with “documentary theater”; Howard Barker writes a minimalist, prop-driven play that examines how objects become enchanted, both in the theater and in our lives; and Sarah Kane, in a play that shocked London audiences with its over-the-top violence, tests the limits of what can be represented on stage. By the end of this course, students will have gained four things: (1) a solid understanding of some of the most important playwrights of the later twentieth century; (2) a sense of both the continuities and disjunctions between the pre- and post-War theatrical avant-garde; (3) an understanding of the flexible relationship between theatrical form and spectator experience; and (4) an affirmation of theater’s enduring ability to reinvent itself and challenge audiences.

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The Legal Imagination: Renaissance Texts/Contemporary Questions

That law was a literary and political obsession in the English Renaissance is, perhaps, not terribly surprising. After all, legal concepts such as judgment, citizenship, personhood, punishment, and forgiveness lie at the very heart of how human collectives understand themselves socially and morally, and in the Renaissance period these modes of self-identification were being drastically reshaped by religious conflicts, colonial encounters, and new philosophical ideas about the nature of life. For writers like Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Hobbes, law emerges as much more than a collection of rules and regulations or a loose conglomerate of institutions. Instead, law for these writers represents a potent imaginative resource for confronting some of the most vexing questions of their day. With this in mind, our job in this course will be to pursue three goals. First, we will try to establish some of the unique literary characteristics of each writer’s engagement with legal concepts. Second, we will explore the historical underpinnings of the emergence of a uniquely Renaissance legal imagination. Third, we will consider how Renaissance literature helps us think through present-day debates about the nature of justice.

Renaissance Theatricality

No one finishes a degree in English literature without gaining a sense of the unique theatrical achievement of Renaissance England. And yet students rarely get the opportunity to see just how diverse that achievement was. This is because courses on Renaissance drama (and the anthologies that serve those courses) typically focus on plays written in a more or less “Shakespearean” style for only one or two kinds of commercial theater. In fact, there were many kinds of “stages” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including not only those in a variety of commercial theaters, but also those in royal courts, aristocratic households, and the city streets. Trading in the term “drama” for the more complex and inclusive term “theatricality,” this course sets out to capture this diversity in Renaissance performance culture. We will read plays written for indoor and outdoor commercial theaters, as well as descriptions of masques, entertainments, and pageantry. Underpinning all our discussions will be four key components of theatricality: the physics of performance, or the relationship between time and space on stage; horizontality and verticality; the material stage, or the relationship among bodies and things; and the dynamics of audience judgment.