Shakespeare: Text and Performance

English 425/10476
3 Credits
Tuesday and Thursday 2.00 – 3.15 pm
Keystone Hall 106
 

M. G. Aune
Office Hours: TTh 8.00 – 9.15 & W 2.00-4.00
and by appointment
aune(at)calu.edu
724.938.4341
223 Azorsky Hall

Calendar

Part One: Editing as Mediation

 

Week 1 19-21 January

Topics: Taming of the Shrew, Development of Early Modern Theater, Key dates: 1558, 1564, 1576, 1603, 1616, 1623, 1642, Mediation

Read: Taming of the Shrew Induction & Act 1

 

Week 2 26-28 January

Topics: Textual editing, quarto, foul papers, fair copy, playbook/promptbook, bad quarto, copy text/control text, First Folio, memorial reconstruction, gloss, textual variant, through line number, textual crux

Read: Taming of the Shrew Acts 2-5; Norton Shakespeare, “The Dream of the Master Text” (68-78)

 

Week 3 2-4 February

Topics: Print and manuscript publication, collaboration, authorship, canon, apocrypha, Stationers’ Register

Read:  Romeo & Juliet

 

Week 4 9-11 February

Topics: Shakespeare’s poetry, Passionate Pilgrim, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, “A Lover’s Complaint,” sonnet, sonnet sequence, stigma of print, patronage, dark lady, fair youth, rival poet

Read: Sonnets 1-5, 18, 20, 127-138, Introduction pp. 1937-45

 

Week 5 16-18 February

Topics: Shakespeare’s Biography, education, Catholicism, Lost Years, St. George’s Day, fantasies, power and representation, patronage, Tudor Myth, anti-Stratfordians, collaboration, rivals

Read: Merchant of Venice, Norton Shakespeare. “Shakespeare’s Life and Art” (42-67).

 

Week 6 23-25 February

Topics: Early modern culture, everyday life, death, money, commodities, enclosures, sumptuary laws, social class, gender, primogeniture, print culture, the Reformation, the Bible, otherness, dowry, family metaphor

Read: Hamlet; Norton Shakespeare. “Shakespeare’s World” (2-30).

 

Week 7 2-4 March

Topics: soliloquies

Read: Hamlet

Due: Editing Project (4 March)

 

8-12 March Spring Break

 

Part Two Performance as Mediation

 

Week 8 16-18 March

Topics: the material theatre, amphitheater, hall theater, metatheater, subversion, Master of Revels, lords’ rooms, yard, galleries, tiring house, trap, heavens, frons scenae, discovery space, costumes, visual/verbal

Read: King John; Norton Shakespeare “The Shakespearean Stage” (79-94)

 

Week 9 23-25 March

Topics: actors and acting, Lord Chamberlain’s Men, King’s Men, joint stock company, cross-dressing, traveling company, the Globe, Blackfriars, boy companies, formalist/realist, doubling, clowns

Read: Macbeth, Norton Shakespeare “The Shakespearean Stage” (94-99)

 

Week 10 30 March (1 April no class)

Topics: Holinshed

Read: Macbeth

 

Week 11 6-8 April

Topics: Performance project and groups

Read: As You Like It

 

Week 12 13-15 April

Topics: how to watch Shakespeare, performance cruces, modernizing, cross-gender casting, point of view, omissions/additions, open silences

Read: As You Like It

Screen: As You Like It (2006)

 

Week 13 20-22 April

Topics: As You Like It, performance project rehearsal, conclude discussions, clips

Due: Review Project (20 April)

 

5 May (Wednesday) 1.00 – 2.50 (Final Exam Period) Performance Projects, regular room

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