[litp] The Skull beneath the Skin: John Webster's Tragedies (Britische Literaturen und Kulturen) - Einzelansicht

Erste Sitzung: 19. April 2017

Die Anmeldung findet im Rahmen des allgemeinen Verfahrens der Fachrichtung Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Anglohphone Kulturen statt. Bitte beachten Sie die Mitteilungen auf der Website der Fachrichtung und die Aushänge.

“[Webster’s characters] kill, love, torture one another blindly and without ceasing. A play of Webster is full of the feverish and ghastly turmoil of a nest of maggots.”

[Rupert Brooke, John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama. 2^nd impr. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1917. 158.]

Set in the world of corrupt Italian courts, Webster’s two major tragedies The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1614) break open a world teeming with madness. The plays are full of violence and destructive passions which push the characters to gruesome acts of torture, into states of madness and often to their untimely deaths. In Webster’s tragedies, some of the most chilling villains have come alive on the English stage. At the same time, Webster has created two of the most interesting and most sympathetically drawn female characters of early modern drama.

This seminar will introduce you to the fascinating dramatic art of John Webster and to the historical and cultural contexts within which the plays were written and first performed. We will examine some of the literary traditions and dramatic conventions which Webster creatively adapted to his own dramatic ends. We will read and closely analyse the texts to explore how they negotiate questions of ambition and revenge, law and politics, madness, death and the afterlife. Moreover, we will examine how these issues are informed by early modern concepts of gender, sexuality, corporeality, class and ethnicity.

Texts (please buy no others than the editions below, since you will need ANNOTATED editions to join the discussions in class):

Webster, John. The White Devil. [1612]. Ed. Christina Luckyj. London: Methuen, 2008. New Mermaids. ISBN: 978-0713681376

---. The Duchess of Malfi. [1614]. Ed. Leah S. Marcus. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Arden Early Modern Drama. ISBN: 978-1904271512

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