Admission requirements
Admission to the MA Literary Studies or resMA Arts, Literature and Media.
Description
This course will give you the opportunity to meet Virginia Woolf’s most provocative creation, Shakespeare’s fictional sister, Judith, in the flesh. Critics have ploughed through archives to prove Woolf wrong: the cruelties of patriarchy did not succeed in smothering Judith. In our course we will have a closer and sometimes sceptical look at some of the issues that underlie the recent incorporation of female-authored texts in the literary canon. We will study a variety of prolific women writers such as Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, and Aemilia Lanyer, whose works demonstrate that, as Diane Purkiss has adequately put it, female authors in the Renaissance were neither “Shakespeare in drag”, nor were they “as comprehensively silenced as Virginia Woolf’s tragic heroine”. Attention will be paid to the different genres in which the ‘otherness’ was cast, in a variety of both female-authored and male-authored texts, such as plays, closet drama, pamphlets, poetry, letters and the masque, which was in the early Renaissance the only medium that allowed female actors on stage. Various representations of gender and sexuality in the Renaissance will be discussed, exploring themes such as the nature of men and women, love, marriage, and even incest and witchcraft. Issues such as the embedding of sexuality in the poetic language of Donne and Herbert, changing attitudes towards marriage in ‘taming plays’ such as Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Fletcher’s sequel to it, The Tamer Tamed (c.1611), the stage practice of having female characters acted by boys, and the frequently used ploy of cross-dressing, will provide us with enough tantalizing material for discussion. Finally, different aspects of (revisionist) theory with regard to Renaissance drama will be introduced: such as for instance the feminist and postcolonial rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Marina Warner’s novel Indigo (1992). The interplay with visual arts, such as Inigo Jones’s bare-breasted costume designs or the female letter writer in the paintings of Vermeer will also be explored. In short, the overall aim of this course is to give participants a sense of what ‘the state of the art’ is in Renaissance Studies.
Course objectives
By the end of the course, students will have learnt how:
to gain insight into the complex issues of literary canonization, and to explore the richness of male-authored as well as female-authored texts of the early modern period.
to explore gender issues in a broad variety of early modern texts (canonical as well as non-canonical).
to be able to discuss, reflect on, and write about these and related matters in a scholarly and authoritative manner.
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Timetable
The timetables are available through My Timetable.
Mode of instruction
Seminar
Research
Assessment method
Assessment
Mid term essay
Final essay
Weekly assignments
Weighing
The final mark is based on short but weekly reading reports based on secondary reading material to enhance discussion of a primary text on the reading list (20%), a mid term essay of 2,500 words (30%), and a final essay of 4,000 words (50%).
To complete the final mark, please take notice of the following:
The final mark for the course is established by determining the weighted average. To pass the course, the weighted average of the partial grades must be 5.5 or higher.
Resit
If the final mark is insufficient (below 5.5), the insufficient mid term essay and/or insufficient final essay can be retaken. The weekly assignments cannot be retaken.
Inspection and feedback
How and when an exam review will take place will be disclosed together with the publication of the exam results at the latest. If a student requests a review within 30 days after publication of the exam results, an exam review will have to be organized.
Reading list
The course schedule will be made available via Brightspace in due course.
Sylvia Bowerbank & Sara Mendelsohn eds, Paper Bodies; A Margaret Cavendish Reader.
Kirsten McDermott ed.,* Masques of Difference* (Revels Student ed.).
John Fletcher, *The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed *(any available edition).
John Ford, ‘*Tis Pity She’s a Whore *(Marion Lomax ed., Oxford World’s Classics).
Christopher Marlowe’s *Edward II *(New Mermaids).
William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (preferred edition: Ann Thompson ed., New Cambridge)
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (preferred edition: Stephen Orgel ed., Oxford World’s Classics).
Marina Warner, *Indigo, or, Mapping the Waters *(Vintage, 1992).
Texts from Norton Anthology English Literature vol. I & II (NAEL I & II – see course schedule).
Further material to be downloaded from Early English Books Online (EEBO –see course schedule), JSTOR, or State Papers Online.
Registration
Enrolment through MyStudyMap is mandatory.
General information about course and exam enrolment is available on the website.
Contact
For substantive questions, contact the lecturer listed in the right information bar.
For questions about enrolment, admission, etc, contact the Education Administration Office: Arsenaal.
Remarks
N.A.