Erste Sitzung: 11. April 2018
Die Anmeldung findet im Rahmen des allgemeinen Verfahrens der Fachrichtung 4.3 statt. Bitte beachten Sie die Mitteilungen auf der Website der Fachrichtung und die Aushänge.
We shall have time
To talk at large of all; but never yet
Incest and murder have so strangely met. ('Tis Pity She's a Whore, 5.6.152-154)
Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was one of the most prolific playwrights of the Jacobean period and is ranked as one of the major dramatists of the English Renaissance. John Ford (1586-1639?), almost unknown to modern audiences, was highly successful in his own time with plays steaming with desire and love, sex and death.
In this class, you will be introduced to Middleton's Women Beware Women (c. 1621) and Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (c. 1630). In these two tragedies, moral and social corruption, rape, adultery, incest, and excessive jealousy lead to acts of revenge that leave the stage drenched in blood. We will carefully explore the historical, cultural and social contexts from which these plays emerged. Next, we will closely analyse how the plays address early modern fears of the breakdown of family ties and the state, and how they negotiate questions of power and class, sexual and moral transgression, revenge, death and the afterlife. To round off our analyses, we will briefly look back to William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595) (which we will read in excerpts) to discuss how Middleton and Ford drew on well-known literary traditions and dramatic conventions to produce their plays.
Texts (please buy no others than the editions below, since you will need ANNOTATED editions to join the discussions in class):
Middleton, Thomas. Women Beware Women. [c. 1621]. Ed. William C. Carroll. London: A & C Black, 2002. ISBN: 978-0713666632
Ford, John. 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. [c. 1630]. Ed. Sonia Massai. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Arden Early Modern Drama. ISBN: 978-1904271505 |
