WMST 215 - Pre-modern Drama: Text and Performance before 1800

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

(Same as ENGL 215) Study of selected dramatic texts and their embodiment both on the page and the stage. Authors, critical and theoretical approaches, dramatic genres, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year.

Topic for 2013/14a: Gender Transgression on the Early Modern Stage. This course explores the dramatic representation of challenges to, and disruptions of, the gendered social order of 16th and 17th-century England. We will examine a range of figures, including shrews, witches, cross-dressers, unfaithful wives, murderous spouses, incestuous siblings, and characters whose desires cross the lines of both gender and class. While our focus will be on drama, we will also read a range of materials (legal statutes, ballads, account of trials and executions, marriage tracts), as well as contemporary theory and criticism. Ms. Dunn.

Two 75-minute periods.