ENGLISH 609.48/519.31 - Shakespeare and the Middle Ages
Instructor: Dr Michael Ullyot
Tuesday, 12:30 - 15:00
D E S C R I P T I O N
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the middle ages became a discrete, historicized, and irretrievable period of history. This course studies early modern dramatic and other depictions of the middle ages: its texts and authors; its religion and rebellions; its kings and princes. Each found a new guise in the dramas of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. We will read a number of their plays about medieval history and adaptations of fictional narratives, interleaving them with their sources to study how playwrights and readers imitated them. We will also read study critical theories of cultural memory and adaptation, and intellectual histories of early modern historical thought.
Among the questions we will ask: When did re-enactments of history become a nationalist project? How did Elizabethans rely on the mystery and morality plays? (Prof. Jacqueline Jenkins is offering a complementary course, Drama in the English Middle Ages, in 2008-09.) How did history plays affect the emerging genres of biographical writing? How did readers of Middle English, particularly romances, overcome its difficulty and imitate its heroes? And how, finally, did drama overcome the growing tendency to turn the past into a foreign country?
Contact Prof. Ullyot (ullyot [at] ucalgary [dot] ca) for details.
R E A D I N G L I S T
- Marlowe: Edward II
- Shakespeare: King John, Richard III, Macbeth, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Troilus and Cressida
- Beaumont: The Knight of the Burning Pestle
- Ford: Perkin Warbeck
