Module description
How was time conceptualised, experienced and performed on the Shakespearean stage and in early modern culture more broadly? For Hamlet, the time is famously ‘out of joint’, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ideas and ideologies (colonial, economic, medical, religious, political, technological etc.) indeed worked to shape a range of often conflicting ideas about time as both a philosophical concept and as a structuring principle of social and individual behaviour. These ideas, and the temporal frameworks for lived experience that grow from them, such as nostalgia, mourning, memory, patience, delay, and desire, proffered a variety of complex senses of the past, the present and the future. In turn, the early modern individual’s sense of self, and their place in the world, was structured temporally. Age, gender, nationality, religion, sexuality and social status were all configured in relation to social attitudes toward time’s passage; as Shakespeare’s Rosalind suggests, 'Time travels in divers paces with divers persons’. Through this module, we will examine the cultural construction of time and temporality in the early modern period, closely reading one of Shakespeare’s plays in each week of the course. In our two-hour seminars, we will at times take an historicist approach, working toward defining an early modern temporal consciousness. We will consider the temporal conditions and contexts of early modern performance - the temporal experience of the theatre for playwrights, actors and audience members - engaging with different critical approaches to Shakespeare’s plays that are themselves often reliant on specific constructions of time (e.g. Feminism, New Historicism, Performance Studies, Postcolonialism, Presentism, Queer Studies etc.).
Assessment details
1 x 4000 word essay (100%)
Educational aims & objectives
Through this module, students will develop a deep understanding of the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and the cultural construction of time and temporality in the early modern period. They will sharpen their skills of critical analysis by closely engaging with Shakespeare’s plays, including comedies, histories and tragedies from both the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, as well as with a range of non-dramatic early modern texts (e.g. extracts from conduct literature, medical and religious tracts, pamphlets and poems). This module will introduce students to the variety of ways that temporal thinking and temporal experience in the early modern period shaped how plays were written and performed, and it will ask them to think about how temporality continues to impact their own engagement with the plays today, as well as shaping our understanding of the early modern period in the twenty-first century.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this module, students will be able to demonstrate intellectual, transferable and practical skills appropriate to a Level 6 module, and in particular will:
- Have an understanding of temporality as a cultural construct.
- Be able to discuss the various ideological frameworks that contributed to the development of a historically specific ‘early modern temporal consciousness’.
- Understand the contrasting ways in which a range of discourses (colonialism, economics, emotion, gender politics, performance, religion, rhetoric etc.) construct different temporal experiences and identities.
- Be able to analyse with confidence a range of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as non-dramatic texts from the period.
- Be able to talk and write about the ways in which temporality shapes specific dramatic themes (e.g. delay, mourning, prophecy).
- Understand the temporal experience of early modern play-going.
- Recognise that some critical approaches rely on particular understandings of time.
- Be familiar with some of the key works of temporal theory that have shaped literary critical approaches to texts.
Teaching pattern
One 2-hour seminar, weekly