230346 Gorno and Splatstick: The Semiotics of the Fragmented Body on the Renaissance Stage (S) (SoSe 2016)

Any reader of Renaissance literature is aware of the fact that the body on display - be it a monarch's body or a criminal's - had a cluster of political, religious and cultural meanings around it. Fragmented bodies were all-present: in the sonnet (which fragments the Lady's body into beautiful bits), on the scaffold (where the traitor's body was torn to pieces), and of course in religion (where martyrs' tortured bodies become testaments to their faith). In this seminar, we will explore the spectrum of (rhetorically or literally) fragmented bodies in more detail and try to understand why Shakespeare's contemporaries enjoyed the representation of physical and sexual violence on the stage as much as 21st-century cinema-goers enjoy it on the big screen.

Bibliography

We will read excerpts from a number of plays, but our main texts will be:
William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus (c. 1592/3)
Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger's Tragedy (c. 1607)
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (1614)

Each class member must have his or her own copy of each of the main plays under discussion, and these copies must be of annotated critical editions of the plays. (Cambridge, Oxford, Arden, Penguin, Revels, ...) No internet downloads, no photocopies of old-spelling editions or versions without line numbering or act divisions. No English-German versions (Klett et al), either, please. If you want to use translations, you must get them in addition to a proper academic edition of the play.
All three plays are available second-hand through amazon.de.