Admission Requirements
None.
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
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 and write about these and related matters in a scholarly and authoritative manner.
Timetable
The timetable will be available from July 1 onwards on the Department website.
Mode of Instruction
Two-hour seminar per week.
Assessment
The final mark is based on active class participation, a presentation based on secondary reading material to enhance discussion of a primary text on the reading list (20%), a shorter essay of 2,500 words (30%), and a longer essay of 4,000 words (50%).
Blackboard
This course is supported by Blackboard.
Reading list
Sylvia Bowerbank & Sara Mendelsohn eds, Paper Bodies; A Margaret Cavendish Reader.
Kirsten McDermott ed., Masques of Difference (Revels Student Edition).
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) or JSTOR.
Registration
Students can register through uSis.
Contact information
English Department, P.N. van Eyckhof 4, room 103c. Phone: 071 527 2144, or mail: english@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Remarks
Course Schedule – Part I: Early Modern Women Writers and Female Performance
Week 1: Introduction Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (NAEL II)
Rehabilitating Eve: Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘Eve’s Apology in Defese of Women’ (NAEL I).
Week 2: Poetry – male and female perspectives.
Country house poems:
Aemilia Lanyer’s “Description of Cooke-ham” and Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” (NAEL I).
Week 3: “The Woman Controversy”:
Pamphlets by Jane Anger, Rachel Speght, Esther Sowernam, Constantia Munda and Joseph Swetnam (NAEL I & EEBO).
Week 4: Private becomes Public: Early Modern Letter Writers
-Alan Stewart, “The Early Modern Closet Discovered,” Representations 50 (1995): 76-100 (available via JSTOR).
-Extracts from Cavendish’s Sociable Letters (in Sylvia Bowerbank & Sara Mendelsohn eds, Paper Bodies; A Margaret Cavendish Reader)
-Copies from manuscript letters (to be provided)
Week 5: Closet Drama
Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure (in Paper bodies).
Week 6: The Court Masque
Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness & The Masque of Queens (in David Lindley ed., Court Masques Oxford World’s Classics or EEBO).
Course Schedule – Part II: Representations of Gender and Sexuality
Week 7: Sexuality in the language: John Donne and George Herbert.
“Sapho to Philaenis”; “To his Mistress going to bed”; “The Flea”; “[Batter my heart, three person’d God…]”; “[Show me deare Christ, thy spouse…]”; George Herbert, “Love” (NAEL I).
Week 8: Taming plays and changing attitudes towards marriage.
William Shakespeare’s The Taming of a Shrew (preferred edition: Ann Thompson (ed.), New Cambridge)
John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed (any available edition).
Week 9: Domestic tragedy
John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Marion Lomax ed., Oxford World’s Classics).
Week 10: Essay proposals
Week 11: The boy actor and cross-dressing.
John Lyly’s Gallathea (EEBO)
Week 12: ‘Queer studies’: Homosexuality and the Renaissance.
Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (New Mermaids).
Elizabeth Cary’s The History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II (EEBO).
Week 13: Modern Rewritings: Feminism/ postcolonialism.
William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (preferred edition: Stephen Orgel (ed.), Oxford)
Marina Warner’s Indigo, or, Mapping the Waters (Vintage 1992).