Erste Sitzung: 2. Juni 2016 [Bitte beachten: Dieses Seminar findet verdichtet im Juni und Juli statt.]
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 naturally think of comedy as theatrical, and indeed two of my three texts for study in this course will be dramas: Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Ben Jonson's Volpone, both of which are located in Venice. My third text however will be a sonnet sequence, Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, which is strongly indebted to Petrarch, and which launched the sonnet vogue in England at the beginning of the 1590s.
Sidney's sequence is rather special in that it contains a high degree of comedy, certainly far more than in Petrarch's Canzoniere, and more than just about every other English sonnet sequence that followed, with the possible exception of Michael Drayton. Petrarch's Italy is reshaped according to the terms of Sidney's Elizabethan England. We will study the effect of this through Sidney's poetry, and try to establish why Sidney took the often irreverent line that he did.
We will follow with Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, which is a comedy in the sense that it ends happily, but for much of the action it verges on being a tragedy; in the view of some commentators it doesn't altogether escape its tragic premises.
We end with another Venetian comedy, Jonson's Volpone, which may strictly be described as a satire (on greed in particular); but such is Jonson's inventiveness that the play soars beyond its formal limits and engages with the world of fantasy. We will look at the operations of the creative faculty of all three authors and try to compare their intentions and achievements. How far does the Italian theme or location bring out a special response in each English author?
Texts:
Sir Philip Sidney. The Major Works. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: OUP, 2008. Oxford World's Classics. ISBN: 978-0199538416
William Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice. Ed. M. M. Mahood. Updated edition. Cambridge: CUP, 2012. New Cambridge Shakespeare. ISBN: 978-0521532518
Ben Jonson. Volpone. Ed. R. B. Parker and David Bevington. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999. Revels Student Editions. ISBN: 978-0719051821 |
