Theatre Arts 275
Shakespeare Performance History
Professor Mazer
Fall 2012
519 Annenberg Center, 3-2659;
cmazer@english.upenn.edu
Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:30-2:30, and by
appointment
All readings, except ones from James C.
Bulman, Shakespeare,Theory, and Performance, are downloadable from, or
linked to, the Blackboard site.
September 6: Introduction
September 11: What is a text, what is a performance, what
is a production, what is performance history?
Reading:
Zachary Lesser, “Playbooks”; Margaret Jane Kidnie, “Where is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation”; Michael
J. Warren, “Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany
and Edgar.”
September 13: Early Modern Scenic Conventions
Reading:
Alan C. Dessen, “Shakespeare and the Theatrical Conventions of his
Time,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986).
September 18: [NO CLASS]
September 20: Early Modern Acting
Reading:
Joseph R. Roach, “Changeling Proteus”; Anthony B. Dawson, “Performance
and Participation: Desdemona, Foucault,
and the Actor’s Body” (in Bulman, Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance);
Tiffany Stern, “Rehearsal, Performance, and Plays.”
September 25: Shakespeare “Improved”
Reading:
Nahum Tate, King Lear; Colly Cibber, Richard III (links on
Blackboard)
September 27: Eighteenth-Century Acting
Reading:
Henry Fielding, a chapter from Tom Jones; excerpt from Georg
Christoph Lichtenberg, excerpts from Visits to England; Joseph R. Roach,
“Garrick, the Ghost, and the Machine.”
October 2: Romanticism, Melodrama, and Spectacle
Reading:
William Henry Ireland, Vortigern (link on Blackboard)
October 4: Romanticism, Acting, and Character
Reading:
John Philip Kemble, “Macbeth Reconsidered”; H.C. Fleeming Jenkin, “Mrs.
Siddons as Lady Macbeth and as Queen Katharine”; Joseph W. Donohue, Jr.,
“Shakespearean Character on the Early Romantic Stage.”
[APPROXIMATE DUE DATE: FIRST TAKE-HOME ASSIGNMENT]
October 9: Nineteenth-Century Pictorialism
Reading:
Martin Meisel, “Preamble to the Picture Play” and “Irving and the
Artists”; Michael R. Booth, “Shakespeare,” and “Beerbohm Tree’s Henry VIII,
Her Majesty’s Theatre, 1910”; Richard W. Schoch, “Pictorial Shakespeare.”
October 11: Nineteenth-Century Pictorialism II
Reading:
Richard W. Schoch, “The Homestead of History’: Medievalism on the Mid-Victorian Stage”; Alan
Hughes, “The Merchant of Venice”; Michael R. Booth, “Pictorial Acting
and Ellen Terry”; Ralph Berry, “The Imperial Theme”;
October 16: Acting and Character
Reading:
Mary Cowden Clarke, “Katharina and Bianca: The Shrew and the Demure”; Helena Faucit,
“Juliet.”
October 18: Acting and Character
Reading:
George Henry Lewes, “Edmund Kean,” and “On Natural Acting,” from On
Actors and the Art of Acting; William Archer, “Introductory,” “Sunt Lacrymae
Rerum,” “‘Autosuggestion’ and ‘Innervation,’”
and “The Brownies of the Brain” from Masks or Faces?; G. Bernard Shaw,
two theatre reviews from The Saturday Review ; Edward Gordon Craig, “The
Actor—His Voice” and “The Actor—His Movement and His Face”; John Gillies.
“Stanislavski, Othello, and the Motives of Eloquence”
[FALL BREAK]
October 25: The Shakespeare “Revolution”
Reading:
Marion O’Connor, “Reconstructive Shakespeare: Reproducing Elizabethan and Jacobean Stages”;
Marion O’Connor, “‘Useful in the Year 1999’:
William Poel and Shakespeare’s ‘Build of Stage.’”
October 30: The Shakespeare “Revolution” II
Reading: J.L. Styan, “Barker at the Savoy”; essays by
H. Granville Barker; Laurence Senelick, “Moscow and Monodrama: The Meaning of the Craig-Stanislavsky Hamlet.”
November 1: [TO BE ANNOUNCED]
November 6: Director’s Theatre
Reading:
Ralph Berry, “Jonathan Miller,” “Robin Philips (I),” “Peter Brook,” and
“Robin Philips (II)”; Miller; John Russell Brown, “Directors and Scholars: The Intellectual Response” and
“Performance: Directors, Designers and
Actors”; W.B. Worthen, “Shakespeare’s
Auteurs: Directing Authority”
November 8: Rediscovering Shakespeare’s Stagecraft
Reading:
James C. Bulman, “Shakespeare and Performance Theory” in Bulman; Stanley
Wells, “John Barton’s Richard II, 1973-4; Cary M. Mazer, “Historicizing
Alan Dessen: Scholarship, Stagecraft,
and the ‘Shakespeare Revolution,” in Bulman.
[APPROXIMATE DUE DATE: SECOND TAKE-HOME ASSIGNMENT]
November 13: Against Character
Reading:
Catherine Belsey, “Unity”; Alan Sinfield, “When is a Character Not a
Character: Desdemona, Olivia, Lady
Macbeth, and Subjectivity”; Bridget Escolme, “Actors, Academics, Selves”;
Roberta Barker, “Inner Monologues:
Realist Acting and/as Shakespearian Performance Text.”
November 15: Politics and Performance
Reading:
W.B. Worthen, “Shakespeare’s Body:
Acting and the Designs of Authority”; Richard P. Knowles, “Shakespeare,
Voice, and Ideology: Interrogating the
Natural Voice” in Bulman; Denis Salter, Acting Shakespeare in Postcolonial
Space” in Bulman;
November 19: Politics and Performance II
Reading:
Barbara Hodgdon, “Looking for Mr. Shakespeare after ‘The
Revolution’: Robert Lepage’s
Intercultural Dream Machine” in Bulman.
Ric Knowles, “Theory: Towards a
Materialist Semiotics,” “The Stratford Festival,” and “The English Shakespeare
Company”; Alan Sinfield, “Royal Shakespeare:
Theatre and the Making of Ideology.”
[THANKSGIVING]
November 27: “Original Practices”
Reading:
Dennis Kennedy, “Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism”; W.B. Worthen,
“Reconstructing the Globe, Constructing Ourselves”; Don Weingust, “First Folio
Techniques to Performance: The Original
Shakespeare Company at the International Shakespeare’s Globe Center”; Cary M.
Mazer, “Historicizing Spontaneity: The
Illusion of the First Time of ‘The Illusion of the First Time’”; Tiffany Stern,
“(Re:)Historicizing Spontaneity: Original Practices, Stanislavski, and
Characterisation”; Cary M. Mazer, response to Stern’s “(Re:)Historicizing
Spontaneity.”
November 29: Playing with Gender
Reading:
James C. Bulman, “Bringing Cheek by Jowl’s As You Like It Out of
the Closet: The Politics of Queer
Theatre”; Cary M. Mazer, “Rosalind’s Breast”; Elizabeth Klett, “Redressing the
Balance: All-Female Shakespeare at the
Globe Theatre” .
December 4: Post Modernism
Reading:
W. B. Worthen, “Hamlet at Ground Zero: The Wooster Group and the Archive
of Performance”; W. B. “The Written Troubles of the Brain’: Sleep No More and the Space of
Character.”
December 6: Catch-up and conclusions.
There will be TWO take-home essay
assignments (approximately 5 pages), plus a final term paper (approximately
10-12 pages). The topic for the final
term paper must MUST BE APPROVED IN ADVANCE.
Attendance in class is crucial; CHRONIC
ABSENCE OR LATENESS WILL BE COUNTED AGAINST YOU.
Please familiarize yourself with the
rules of academic intergrity, at
http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/osl/acadint.html.
I will rigorously pursue violations of the code.
James C. Bulman’s Shakespeare,
Theory, and Performance can be purchased at the Penn Book Center, 34th and
Sansom Sts. There is a Blackboard web
site for this course, to which you are automatically subscribed, which includes
an electronic copy of the syllabus, and (under “Course Documents”) downloadable
.pdf files of all of the rest of the course readings.
The listserv for this course is
THAR275-401-12C@lists.upenn.edu. You
have been subscribed automatically. If
you do not seem to be on it, or if you drop the course and wish to be
unsubscribed, please send a note to cmazer@english.upenn.edu
The syllabus for this course is
available at http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mazer/275f12.htm.