Undergraduate Course: Political Shakespeare (ENLI10347)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course examines the political questions that matter most within a range of primarily historical and tragic dramas written across Shakespeare's career. Its first part will focus on a sequence of early plays and it will consider how these works address the political divisions and dilemmas that dominated late Elizabethan culture. Its second part will examine the shared concerns of three plays, all written in close proximity at the end of the sixteenth century, with questions of succession, resistance, and the rise of a new form of political sovereignty. To conclude, the course will consider the impact of the Jacobean succession on Shakespeare's political thought and dramatic composition. It will consider how James VI/I's mode of kingship affected Shakespeare's understanding of political life. |
| Course description |
What do Shakespeare¿s plays have to tell us about politics? In this course, we will consider how a range of works in different genres responded to the controversies that dominated their historical moment and their continuing significance for our world. These plays are deeply concerned with fundamental political questions: how is authority is achieved, exercised, challenged, and lost? What power-relations hold between different social classes, between men and women, between different generations and between different racial groups?
To explore these issues, the course will be organised around three key questions: firstly, what happens when authority exceeds its limits (or fails) and its legitimacy is called into question? How is active opposition enacted and what challenges does it confront? Second, what tensions and conflicts arise in urban life, especially those associated with uncivil behaviour? What impact does this have on the experience of women in patriarchal societies? Finally, how are racial and cultural differences experienced in colonial contexts? How do discourses of racial ¿otherness¿ affect those subjected to them?
The plays¿ exploration of these topics will be considered alongside some key examples of the political thought that was available to Shakespeare and the competing ways in which they have been interpreted in criticism and performance.
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Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- By the end of the course, students will have an overview of how Shakespeare's political thought developed across his career as a dramatist.
- In their work for this course, students will be able to demonstrate knowledge and critical engagement with the core political ideas and preoccupations of Shakespeare's plays in a variety of genres.
- IIn their work for this course, students will have learned how Shakespeare's plays intervened in the key political debates of their time.
- In their work for this course, students will be able to demonstrate an awareness of the key critical debates elicited by Shakespeare's political drama.
- By the end of the course, students will be able to demonstrate the ability to reflect constructively on the development of their own learning and research practice.
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Reading List
Syllabus
Power struggles
Richard II
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Civility and the City
Romeo and Juliet
Measure for Measure
Race and Empire
Othello
Antony and Cleopatra
The Tempest
Primary Text
A contemporary edition of the complete works of Shakespeare; either the Norton or RSC Shakespeare are good editions:
The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. 3rd edition. New York: Norton, 2015.
The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works, eds Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. Palgrave, 2008.
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Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Dermot Cavanagh
Tel: (0131 6)50 3618
Email: |
Course secretary | Ms Sheila Strathdee
Tel: (0131 6)50 3619
Email: |
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