Module Identifier | EN31420 | ||
Module Title | ELIZABETHAN DRAMA:HIERONIMO TO HAMLET | ||
Academic Year | 2002/2003 | ||
Co-ordinator | Mr Michael J Smith | ||
Semester | Semester 1 | ||
Course delivery | Seminars / Tutorials | 20 Hours 10 x 2 hrs | |
Assessment | Semester Assessment | Continuous Assessment: 2 essays (2,500 words each) | 100% |
Supplementary Assessment | Resubmit any failed elements and/or make good any missing elements. |
Outline programme
1-3 Theatres of War: Shakespeare, Henry VI Part One and Henry V
4-6 Justice Gone Wild: Thomas Kyd,. The Spanish Tragedy; Shakespeare, Hamlet
7-8 Through Roman Spectacles: Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar
9-10 Crime and Punishment: anon, Arden of Faversham; Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness
Students will need to possess a copy of Arden of Faversham (New Mermaid, ed. White); Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness (New Mermaid, ed. Scobie); Kyd, Spanish Tragedy (eg. New Mermaid, ed. Mulryne); the Shakespeare plays, either in individual editions, or in a complete works (Oxford Compact, ed. Wells & Taylor cautiously recommended).
A splendid introduction to the theatre of the 1590s is Michael Hattaway's Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance (RKP, 1982). The latest edition of Stanley Wells' Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide (Oxford 1990) is an indispensable aid to navigation through the oceans of Shakespeare criticism. The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare (ed. David Scott Kastan, 1999) and the Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (ed. A.R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway, 1990), both available in paperback, are excellent collections of survey essays.
Detailed bibliographies will be distributed at the beginning of the course. I will be glad to give students further information about the course on request.