Theatre Arts 334EA - 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 a drama obsessively self-conscious, bursting with disguises, confidence tricks, cross-dressers, rituals, masques, and plays-within-plays. Reading Shakespeare as well as his rivals and peers (Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, and others), we will consider how theater, and the idea of theater, illuminates such concepts as desire, evil, gender, and ideology. Plays will likely include Titus Andronicus, Doctor Faustus, The Alchemist, and The Duchess of Malfi.

Prereq: ENGL-199 or ENGL-200 and either ENGL-210 or ENGL-211.