Spring 2004 Courses

English 312: Revengers, Ghosts, and Whores: Renaissance Drama of Shakespeare's Contemporaries(Ingram)

Parades of madmen, female cross-dressing outlaws, talking skulls, adulterers, and devil-worshippers: the darkly sensationalist, bizarre world of Renaissance drama peopled its stages with such characters. We will meet these characters and approach the stages on which they murdered, tricked, schemed with, and betrayed each other. Like the Jack Black slapstick comedies and slasher flicks of today's Hollywood culture, Renaissance drama stuck to trendy "formulas." From the "Revenge Tragedy," with its cycles of murder/mock-play/revenging ghost, to the "City Comedy" set in the crowded London marketplace and laden with tavern-district jokes, these formulas drew eager audiences both to the public Globe theatre and to private coterie theatres with their all-boy casts.

In a country newly flush with the allure‹and the pillaged bounty‹of New World discoveries, wealth and social prestige took on a new availability and new meaning. We will examine how such cultural concerns are merged onstage with the weird conventions of ghosts, adultery, revenge, poison, and incest! Our readings will cluster around four topics: 1) Black magic and Alchemy; 2) Class anxiety; 3) Transgressive women; and 4) Revenge. Our texts, taken from English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, will be: Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy; Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta; Jonson's Volpone, The Alchemist, and Epicene; Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and The Changeling; Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl; Webster's The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi; and Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts. Two papers and a final exam.

Spring 2004 Course Listings