2008-09 AM Power Plays, or: Life of the Courtiers on the Early Modern Stage
| Reader: Power Plays |
|---|
- Lecturer: Dr. Isabel Karremann
- Contact: [1]
- Time: 09.-13.02.2009
- Venue: A10 1-121a
Language and Power on the Early Modern Stage
Life as a courtier was an exciting, difficult, at times frustrating and always deeply dangerous business in the early modern age. This seminar is going look at the 'power plays' that courtiers were of necessity involved in and how the contemporary stage represented those in or close to power. In order to make this wide issue more manageable, we will focus on the issue of language as an instrument of domination. Stephen Greenblatt was one of the first critics to draw our attention to the workings of language as an instrument of domination, be it national, racial, or sexual domination. In this course we are going to read three to four plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries which revolve around the issue of the power of language: language as 'the white man's magic' and colonialism in Shakespeare's The Tempest; slander and its relation to race and gender in Othello or Webster's The Duchess of Malfi; Machiavellian strategies of simulation and dissimulation in Henry IV, as well as the polyphony of the carnivalesque (Bakthtin) as a strategy of resistance to authority. We are going to approach this issue with the help of historical contexts (e.g. essays by Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon) as well as the critical concepts developed under the aegis of New Historicism and Cultural Studies. The course is designed as a one-week 'Blockveranstaltung' which will be held in February 2009. There will be a preliminary meeting on Tuesday, 2/12/2008 in A6 2-212, 16 c.t., at which the course program will be presented in greater detail. Registration via email.
Class requirements
- regular attendance and active participation (you may miss no more than two sessions)
- being an 'expert': you will give a short oral presentation of an historical or critical text and, based on this, prepare three questions which will form the basis of our discussion of the Shakespeare play in that session
- a term paper (developing further your expert-topic or any other issue discussed in the seminar)
NOTE
- fulfilling the first two requirements will earn you a total of three credit points (3 KP)
- fulfilling all requirements will earn you a total of six credit points (6 KP)
Course texts
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest
- ---, Othello
- ---, Henry IV, Part 1
alternative choices:
- Christopher Marlowe, Edward II
- John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
- Ben Johnson, Sejanus His Fall
PLEASE NOTE: we are not going to discuss ALL of these texts but probably only three or four. The definitive selection will be announced in our preparatory meeting on Tue, 2/12/08
Please get a CRITICAL EDITION of the plays, preferably the Arden Sharespeare Third Series (which contains a lot of historical material) or the New Cambridge Shakespeare. New Mermaids is the best edition of the Webster play, and there is a very good, reasonably priced anthology of Marlowe's plays by Oxford University Press. Don't buy the texts before the definitive course program comes out in December - there might be changes.
