English 317MD - Early Modern Drama

"All the world's a stage." This course surveys the era of literary history that invented this powerful idea. The drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is obsessively self-conscious, bursting with disguises, confidence tricks, cross-dressers, masques, and plays-within-plays. Reading several playwrights, we will situate Shakespeare among his rivals and peers: Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, and others. More generally, we will explore early modern notions of performance and theatricality, considering how they were entwined in conceptions of desire, evil, gender, and politics.

Prereq: ENGL-199/ENGL-200 and ENGL-210, ENGL-211, or ENGL-212.