Spring 2004 Courses

English 136: Introduction to Drama: Love On Stage (Ingram)

Since the age of Sophocles, the need to dramatize aspects of love, whether the love between husband and wife, mother and child, love of country, or love of self, has occupied and preoccupied playwrights. While examining the tropes, conventions, and the history of drama from Greek and Roman times through the Renaissance, Restoration, and into the twentieth century, we will pause to consider such questions as: is there an identifiable gesture of love? How does the stage villain express his or her sense of love? How does love get transferred as violence, as perhaps in the cases of revenge or jealousy? Focussing primarily on pre-20th century drama, in this course we will explore not only the written text but also the rich traditions of theatrical production, staging, and audience interaction. We will move from the early fractured family relationships in Sophocles and Euripides to the Morality plays and Renaissance depictions of troubled marriage relations and wife-murder in Othello. Up against the cold, spare interactions of Ibsen's characters in Hedda Gabler, we will set the wildly witty romps of Oscar Wilde. Into this range of world and British drama we will introject particularly American expressions of the pressures placed on the love relationship in both Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, and will conclude with the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Night Mother.

Our texts, taken from The Bedford Introduction to Drama, 4th ed., will be: Sophocles (Oedipus Rex), Euripides (Medea), excerpts from Plautus and Seneca, Everyman, Shakespeare (Othello), Moliere (The Misanthrope), Ibsen (Hedda Gabler), Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest), Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard), Shaw (Mrs. Warren's Profession), Williams (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), and Norman ('Night Mother). 1 Paper, a midterm and a final, and a number of group "productions."

Spring 2004 Course Listings