This is a course I will teach in Winter 2017. For more information, contact me. Its prerequisites are English 302 and one of 240 or 340. To see if you are eligible, contact the Department of English and/or the Arts Students’ Centre.
English 412 is, in its official description, “A survey of drama from 1558 to 1603, including works by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.” In this course, you’ll read and analyze Elizabethan plays by these and other authors. But you won’t just learn particular plays; you’ll learn to read texts critically and imaginatively, for the ideas they provoke and the performances they inspire. We’ll focus on revenge tragedies, the blockbuster genre of the Elizabethan theatre. It demanded more collaborations among writers than any other genre — famous playwrights like Marlowe and Shakespeare, and the letter-known Thomas Kyd, George Peele, John Marston, Henry Chettle, and Thomas Middleton. You’ll learn about their collaborations and competitions for theatre audiences, and their adaptations of ancient sources to modern contexts.
- The course outline is on Desire2Learn [for UofC users only].
- Here’s the BBC Radio 4 podcast for January 12th: “In Our Time: Elizabethan Revenge.”
- Here’s our collaborative notes document on Google Docs.
- Here are our supplementary readings (PDFs) on Dropbox.
- We also have a course blog, but if & how we’ll use it remains to be seen.