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

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

(Same as WMST 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.

Prerequisite(s): open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair. Students applying for permission to elect 200-level work must present samples of their writing to the associate chair. Freshmen with AP credit may elect 200-level work after consultation with the department and with the permission of the instructor. First-year students who have completed ENGL 101 may elect 200-level work with permission of the instructor. Intermediate writing courses are not open to Freshmen.

Two 75-minute periods.