Module Identifier | EN36220 | ||
Module Title | RENAISSANCE TRAGEDIES OF ROME:MARLOWE,SHAKESPEARE AND OTHERS | ||
Academic Year | 2002/2003 | ||
Co-ordinator | Dr Paulina Kewes | ||
Semester | Intended for use in future years | ||
Next year offered | N/A | ||
Next semester offered | N/A | ||
Course delivery | Seminars / Tutorials | 20 Hours Seminar. (10 x 2 hr workshop/seminars) | |
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. |
Programme:
1. The Question of Genre: Tragedy and History
On the basis of extracts from Aristotle's Poetics and Renaissance and modern criticism, we shall begin the discussion of tragedy as a genre which we shall continue throughout the module
2-3. Epic, Tragedy, Satire: Founding Myths and Racial Others
Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe, Dido, Queen of Carthage (1586) [Book IV of the Aeneid]
4-6. Tragic Poem, Tragic Play: Woman as (Historical) Subject and the Foundation of the Roman Republic
William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece (1594); Thomas Heywood, The Rape of Lucrece (c.1607)
7-9. Tragedy of the Individual, Tragedy of State
Civil War: William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (1599); Living in a Police State: Ben Jonson, Sejanus his Fall (c. 1603); Anatomy of Tyranny: Philip Massinger, The Roman Actor (1626)
10. Conclusion: Varieties of Tragic Experience
In advance of the last seminar I shall be showing Gladiator, the most recent film about love, sex and politics in ancient Rome, and asking you to consider whether in our postmodern era the classical past can still be constructed in tragic terms.
Recommended Editions
the Marlowe-Nash Dido: The Complete Plays, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett (Everyman, 1999)
Shakespeare's Lucrece and Julius Caesar: the New Arden Shakespeare
Jonson's Sejanus: Manchester University Press
Heywood's Rape of Lucrece, Massinger's The Roman Actor, and extracts from Virgil's Aeneid will be provided in photocopy.
Select Bibliography
Rebecca W Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theatre in the English Renaissance (1990)
Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632-1642 (Cambridge, 1984)
Lawrence Danson, Shakespeare's Dramatic Genres (Oxford, 2000)
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (1984)
G.K. Hunter, English Drama, 1586-1642: The Age of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1997)
Coppelia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (1997)
J. W. Lever, The Tragedy of State (1971, reprinted 1987)
Donald R Kelley and David Harris Sacks (ed), The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1997)
Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance (1975)
J.G.A. Pocock, 'The Sense of History in Renaissance England', in William Shakespeare: His World, His Work, His Influence, ed John F Andrews, 3 vols (New York, 1985), I: 143-157.
Clifford Ronan, 'Antike Roman': Power Symbology and the Roman Play in Early Modern England, 1585-1635 (Athens, Ga., 1995)
Albert H Tricomi, Anti-Court Drama in England, 1603-1642 (1989)
R.D. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto, 1990)
R.D. Woolf, 'The Shapes of History', in David Scott Kastan (ed) A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford, 1999)