Courses

This course will investigate the comedy of the early modern English theater. Taking as a premise that the genre of comedy was ever-evolving and always in process on the stage, we will examine plays from the late-sixteenth century to the opening decades of the seventeenth, in order to ask how comedy both changed and reflected upon itself in this period. In focusing on the carnival, the pastoral, the romantic, and the grotesque, we will ask how these plays grappled with issues of gender, sexuality, and the body, as well as structures of economic and political power. We will also consider classical and Continental influences on English drama, with a focus on a wide array of playwrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker, Middleton, and Fletcher, among others.