Module description
This module focuses on the afterlife of a selection of controversial tragedies, which shocked their original audiences in Elizabethan and Jacobean London as much as they continue to challenge and entertain us today, both on the contemporary stage and on screen. Equal attention is paid to the original context within which these tragedies were first written and performed and to recent cinematic adaptations spanning over the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. By the end of this module, students will have learned appropriate methodologies and terminologies to formulate informed views on the representation of recurrent motifs and concerns in selected Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies, ranging from identity politics, alternative sexualities and gendered violence, across time and different media. Special emphasis is placed on the relationship between cinematic adaptations of Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean drama, and between Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies on film and contemporary trends in period and costume films focusing on the English Renaissance more generally. Lectures and seminars will be complemented by the screening of the films studied on this module. Students will be encouraged to use traditional scholarly resources, such as books, essays, and articles about the plays, the films and the topics studied on this module, as well as reviews, interviews, or newspaper and magazine articles about the film directors studied on this module.
Assessment details
3,000 word final essay (100%)
Educational aims & objectives
This module aims to:
- introduce students to the recent proliferation of cinematic adaptations of early modern plays written by Shakespeare and some of his most prominent contemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, John Webster and John Ford.
- familiarize students with a wide range of critical and historical approaches to the plays as they first written and performed in early modern London · develop a critical understanding of the politics and poetics informing late twentieth- and early twenty-first cinematic re-appropriations of a selection of early modern plays
- develop the critical skills and the terminology that the different genres of theatre and film demand
- develop a good knowledge of the contexts of the early modern period and of the current circumstances under which their cinematic appropriations are produced and received by contemporary audiences
Learning outcomes
By the end of this module, students will be able to:
- demonstrate a critical understanding of a selection of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century cinematic adaptations of early modern plays written by Shakespeare and some of his most prominent contemporaries;
- carry out a critical analysis of play texts originally written for the commercial stage in early modern London from the early 1590s to the early 1630s;
- demonstrate a broad awareness of the cultural contexts within which these texts were originally written and performed and the cultural contexts within which these texts have been revived as films;
- demonstrate detailed knowledge of the major recent critical approaches to these texts and their cinematic adaptations;
- demonstrate the ability to use appropriate terminology and critical methodologies to discuss these texts in different media (theatre and film)
Teaching pattern
One-hour lecture; one-hour seminar; screenings every other week after the lecture. Because of reading week this results in screenings on weeks: 1, 3, 5, 8, 10.
Suggested reading list
Ideal preparation for this module would include reading Pascale Aebischer's most recent book on Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).