231211 Identity and Performance: Early Modern English Theatre (S) (WiSe 2023/2024)

In this course, students will engage with four Early Modern English plays. Two by Shakespeare, two by his contemporaries; two comedies, one tragedy, and one which appears to be a comedy, but has such savagery to it that we are never sure whether it might not be a tragedy after all; one-and-a-half Elizabethan and two Jacobean plays; one play set in England, two in Europe, and one in a Green World; two city plays, one country play, and one set at court; four dukes, one duchess, one clown, a few knights, a thief, several nuns, one limitless girl, and one god; several murders and marriages; and quite a bit of bluffing and tricking.
All four plays furiously negotiate one thing: power – who has it, who does not, how to gain and how to keep it, and how quickly it can be lost again. Money and inheritance play as much a role as do status and gender. We will compare and contextualise the performances of identity and control in these plays and explore the rich and often provocative world of London's Renaissance theatre, discuss and question the concept of a literary and dramatic canon and how to contextualise canonised and non-canonised texts for teaching, and discover how dramatic texts are embodied on stage and can be applied in literary practice, and how we may work with a theory of performativity.

Bibliography

Reading List
Especially for Shakespeare, there are many edition available, and you might have one or several of these plays already. Personally, I am biased towards the annotated, scholarly Arden Shakespeare (3rd series)/Arden Early Modern Drama editions and find them to be the best choice, and Norton's Critical Editions series offers great background material. Both Arden's New Mermaids series and the RSC Shakespeare editions offer fine alternatives, though in modernised spelling. Students are asked to obtain recent English-language editions of the following:

• Dekker, Thomas and Thomas Middleton. The Roaring Girl. c. 1607-10. (ed. Panek for Norton Critical Editions, 2011; ed. Cook for Arden New Mermaids, 2003; RSC only offers a prompt book)
• Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. c. 1599. (ed. Dusinberre for The Arden Shakespeare 3rd series, 2006; eds. Rasmussen/Bate, RSC Shakespeare edition)
• ---. Measure for Measure. c. 1603/04. (ed. Braunmuller/Watson for The Arden Shakespeare 3rd series, 2020; eds. Rasmussen/Bate for RSC Shakespeare, 2010)
• Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi. 1612-13. (ed. Marcus for Arden Early Modern Drama 2014; ed. Britland for Arden New Mermaids, 2020)
If you already own other editions that (preferably) come with a line count, by all means, use them – we will find each other on the page and will have interesting discussions on the expectable differences in the text.

Note: If you use an e-reader, make sure you know how to navigate quickly and expertly within the text, how to mark passages (and find them again), how to make annotations, and how to quote properly from an eBook. I advise against working on smartphones for scholarly purposes.

! Please watch before our first meeting !
As You Like It, Dir. Kimberley Sykes 2019, RSC Live
(Drama Online, DOI: 10.5040/9781350993754; 02:39:04; https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/rsc-live-collection)
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