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

Semester Offered: Spring
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 2015/16b: Gender Transgression on the Early Modern Stage. This course explores the theatre as a site for representing challenges to the gendered social order of early modern England. Our subjects include cross-dressing women (and men!), disobedient wives, scolds, witches, husband-murderers, incestuous siblings, and characters whose erotic desires cross boundaries of both gender and class. The plays are varied: some were staged in public theatres or at court, others read in private homes; some plots were drawn from history and legend, others “ripped from the headlines;” some were written by men, others by women. Our approaches to them will be various as well: we will situate them in their historical and cultural contexts, examine their structure and language, and read them through the lens of contemporary theory and criticism. Throughout the semester we’ll pay special attention to the plays as plays, learning to read them as scripts for performance, watching videos, and occasionally performing scenes ourselves. Ms. Dunn.

Two 75-minute periods.