Module Information

This module, taught to second-year students, furthers their study of Renaissance comedy and complements and extends the study of Renaissance theatre. It develops students' understanding of genre and of the complex and rapidly changing theatre of the period 1595-1615, and enables them to engage with recent theoretical debates about the relationship between theatre and society. It is designed to give students a solid grounding in the study of the early modern comic theatre on which they can build, if they so choose, in more specialised final-year project/dissertation work.

The module offers students a chance to extend their knowledge of Shakespearean comedy and to relate their reading of the three set Shakespeare plays to three probably less familiar works by his contemporaries Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson. Each Shakespeare play is studied in conjunction with a related play by another dramatist, the set texts being selected to build up a representative picture of the range of forms and meanings of comedy in the period 1595-1615. Important themes of the module will include: the relationship between the theatre and popular festive practice (carnival and carnivalesque); the theatre's role in mediating between courtly and popular culture; the ways in which the plays engage with the help to define contemporary urban experience; the regulation and meanings of laughter, mockery and burlesque.