Rob's stuff

Rob Maslen. Tel.: 330 5663; e-mail: r.maslen@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk; Room Number: G467; Office Hours: Monday 3.30-5.00 p.m.

Here are some essay titles from me. They’re intended to allow you to write on two or more texts from any period we’ve covered:

Compare two or more dramatic representations of death in the period.
‘Theatrical laughter in the period often has an element of the devilish about it.’ Discuss.
What traces of earlier drama have you found in drama of the late 16th century?
Consider some of the ways in which the drama of the period seeks to teach its audience.
What aspects of the drama of the period might be described as experimental?
‘Medieval and Renaissance theatre gives a powerful voice to members of society who are otherwise largely voiceless.’ Discuss.
‘Early English/Scottish drama is no less sophisticated than the more celebrated drama of the late sixteenth century; it simply uses different tools to make its impact.’ Discuss.

Suggested Reading

Life being short, I haven't italicised titles--but you should! Alaric.

Barish, Jonas A., The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and London, 1981).
Bartels, Emily C., Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia, 1993).
Beadle, Richard (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge, 1994).
Bevington, David, From Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass., 1962).
----------, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).
Billington, Sandra, Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama (Oxford, 1991).
----------, A Social History of the Fool (Brighton, 1984).
Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 1994).
Chambers, E.K., The Medieval Stage, 2 vols. (London, 1903).
Clemen, Wolfgang, English Tragedy before Shakespeare (London, 1961).
Cartwright, Kent, Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1999).
Dillon, Janette, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England (Cambridge, 1998).
Harris, John Wesley, Medieval Theatre in Context: An Introduction (London and New York, 1992).
Hattaway, Michael, Elizabethan Popular Theatre (London, Boston etc., 1982).
Kinney, Arthur F. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500-1600 (Cambridge, 2000) (especially chapter 7).
---------- (ed.), A Companion to English Renaissance Drama (Oxford, 1999).
Potter, Robert, The English Morality Play: Origins, History and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition (London and Boston, 1975).
Righter, Anne, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (Harmondsworth, 1967).
Southern, Richard, The Staging of Plays Before Shakespeare (London, 1973).
Spinrad, Phoebe S., The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage (Columbus, 1987).
White, Paul Whitfield, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge, 1992).
Wickham, Glynne, Early English Stages, 1300-1600, 3 vols. (London, 1959-81).
----------, Medieval Theatre, 3rd edition (Cambridge, 1987).

Week Three (27 Jan.): Tudor Interludes
Read: John Redford, Wit and Science, and Nicholas Udall, Respublica (handout provided).
Also read: You could try other morality plays / interludes so as to get a good feel for what was being written at the time. I’d recommend William Wager’s Enough is as Good as a Feast (c. 1560-70), Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience (c. 1581) (rather dull at the beginning but gets really good by the end – a precursor of Faustus), and The Three Ladies of London by Robert Wilson (early 1580s). The range of dramatic experiment in the earlier sixteenth century is truly astonishing. In the course of the term, try John Heywood, The Four PP or The Play of the Weather (1530s) – Heywood is the nearest thing we’ve got to a Chaucer for the stage; Nicholas Udall (?), Jack Juggler (c. 1554), a comedy about schoolboys based on classical models like his more famous Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1553); Richard Edwards, Damon and Pythias (1566), the first self-proclaimed tragicomedy; and John Pickering, Horestes (c, 1568), a musical tragedy(!). Jack Juggler and Horestes can be found in Marie Axton (ed.), Three Tudor Classical Interludes (Cambridge, 1982).

Week Five (10 Feb.): Devilish Drama
Read: Marlowe, Dr Faustus (c. 1590) – we will be concentrating on the ‘A text’.
Also read: Nathaniel Woodes, The Conflict of Conscience (c. 1581); George Peele, The Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1589) – a dramatized folk tale with ghosts and magicians; Robert Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1590) – a wonderful comedy only partly indebted to Faustus, and his The Scottish History of James IV (c. 1590) – another supernatural romance, nothing at all to do with history!; Thomas Dekker, Old Fortunatus (c. 1598) – another dramatized folk tale about a magic purse that brings bad luck to its possessors.

Week Six (17th Feb.): Celebrating the City
Read: Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599).
Also read: Thomas Deloney, Jack of Newbury (c. 1597), a brilliant little novel about a clothier in Henrician England by the man who provided Dekker with the source for The Shoemakers’ Holiday (available in Paul Salzman’s anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction); Thomas Dekker’s civic pageant for the entry of James VI into London, The Magnificent Entertainment (1603), in Kinney’s anthology; Dekker’s The Wonderful Year (1604), one of his plague pamphlets (edited by F. P. Wilson in the 20th century and A. B. Grosart in the 19th, and available in the library).

Week Nine (10th March): Political Tragedy
Read: Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1589).
Also read: John Pickering, Horestes (c. 1568); Thomas Preston, Cambyses (c.1569); Anon, The Misfortunes of Arthur (c. 1589); Marlowe, Edward II (c. 1592).