ENG 323, 324 - Renaissance Plays in Process

1 course unit

This course will involve students in intensive semester-long research projects focused on the social, political, literary, and cultural conditions that informed the composition, structure, and production of one or two plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. It will require students to perform hands-on research on subjects such as the status of women in Elizabethan England; established and evolving views on marriage; legal statutes and judicial practices; crime and punishment; the licensing and censorship of plays; attitudes toward homosexual practices; social mobility; and the legal and social standing of citizens, apprentices, foreigners, and masterless men. The focus will be on plays that are topically or historically oriented, either drawn from the annals of English history, from the news of the day, or from pronounced social anxieties of the time, such as the fear of witches. Students will be required to develop a broad range of interpretive skills and encouraged to bring their enriched understanding of the plays into the present in the form of research papers, study guides, production histories, black-box performances, set-designs, and video projects.
Meets departmental Genealogies approach.
Prerequisite(s): THR 100 Theatre & Society: An Historical Introduction or any 200-level ENG course or permission of instructor.
Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 324.