ENG 323, 324 - Renaissance Plays in Process

Course unit(s): 1
Meets requirement: W when offered as 324
Prerequisite(s): THR 100 Theatre & Society: An Historical Introduction or any 200-level ENG course or permission of instructor.
This course normally explores the making and performance of plays in early modern London, attending closely to such subjects as spectatorship, staging practices, and the conditions of playing, while also focusing on evolving views of marriage and sexuality, culture change and social mobility. Students carry their understanding of the plays forward in the form of production histories, dramaturgical research, text-preparation, speculative set-designs, small group performance, or video projects. We will integrate a pronounced “then and now” perspective, combining social history with contemporary applications, focused particularly on gender, sexuality, and queer emergence. We start with Arden of Faversham, a fact-based drama in which a lusty woman pays neighbors to help kill her boring (but wealthy) husband: an act considered so transgressive that it was recorded in Elizabethan political histories. We then move to Marlowe’s Edward II, which explores the troubled reign, dangerous liaisons, and vicious murder of an unabashedly homosexual king, before engaging in a more sustained engagement with Derek Jarman’s 1991 filmic “violation” of the play, considering how his Queer Edward II screenplay might be repurposed for the stage. Next up is Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, a Jacobean tragedy featuring a powerfully appealing, risk-taking woman, caught up in lurid intrigues fueled by incestuous desires that lead on to acts of terror, murder, and (even) lycanthropy. We then turn to Hotel, Mike Figgis’s remarkably free 2001 adaptation of the play set in Venice, featuring John Malkovich among many others. We’ll finish up with a longer study of The Roaring Girl, another fact-based play that features the famous Jacobean cross-dresser Moll Firth as very much a (wo)man of our time. Satisfies departmental Drama/Transmedia requirement.