ENGLISH 597:
MODERN SCHOLARSHIP, CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE,
EARLY-MODERN SCRIPTS
Professor Mazer
Fall 1999
Bennett Hall 305, x7382; cmazer@english.upenn.edu
Office Hours: Tu 1:00-3:00; Th 11:00-Noon, and by appointment
1. September 9: Introduction: Script, Performance, Text
2. September 16: Script, Performance, Text (continued)
Readings:
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
- W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance,
Chapter One ("Authority and Performance").
Reports:
- John Russell Brown, Shakespeare Plays in Performance
- J.L. Styan, Shakespeare's Stagecraft
- Michael Goldman, Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama
- Jean Howard, Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration
- Gary Taylor, To Analyze Delight (aka Moment by Moment by
Shakespeare
- H.R. Coursen, Shakespearean Performance as Interpretation
- Samuel Crowl, Shakespeare Observed
3. September 23: Conventions of Performance
- Readings:
- Alan C. Dessen, "Linking Analogues" (from Elizabethan Drama and
the Viewer's Eye); "Elizabethan Darkness and Modern Lighting," and
"Theatrical Metaphor: Seeing and Not-Seeing" (from Elizabethan Stage
Conventions and Modern Interpreters); "Much virtue in As," and
"The Vocabulary of 'Place,'" (from Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical
Vocabulary). (bulkpack)
4. September 30: Performance and Text
- Readings:
- Steven Urkowitz, "Five Women Eleven Ways: Changing Images of
Shakespearean Characters in the Earliest Texts" (bulkpack)
- Browse through the "Enfolded
Hamlet" website.
5. October 7: Acting and Character I: Writing About Character
- Readings:
- L.C. Knights, "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" (bulkpack)
- Bert O. States. "The Anatomy of Dramatic Character" (bulkpack)
- Harry Berger, Jr. "Text Against Performance: The Example of
Macbeth" (bulkpack)
- Random Cloud (Randall McLeod), "'The Very Names of the Persons':
Editing and the Invention of Dramatick Character" (bulkpack)
- Reports:
- A.C. Bradley, "Hamlet," from Shakespearean Tragedy
- Harley Granville-Barker, "Hamlet," from Prefaces to Shakespeare
- Lily B. Campbell, "Hamlet," in Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes
- John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet
- Michael Goldman, "Hamlet: Entering the Text," Theatre Journal
44 (1992) pp. 449-60
- Bert O. States, Hamlet and the Concept of Character
- Harold Bloom, chapters on Hamlet in Shakespeare and the
Invention of the Human
6. October 14: Acting and Character II: Historicizing Acting, Character,
and Gender
- Readings:
- John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
- Joseph R. Roach, "Changeling Proteus," from The Player's Passion:
Studies in the Science of Acting (bulkpack)
- Catherine Belsey, Chapters 2-4 ("Unity," "Knowledge," and "Autonomy")
from The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance
Drama (bulkpack)
- Phyllis Rackin, "Shakespeare's Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature,
and the Golden Age of Poetry" (bulkpack)
7. October 21: Acting and Character III: "Modern" Acting and Character
- Readings:
- William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
- Mary Cowden Clarke, "Katharina and Bianca: The Shrew and the Demure"
from The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines (bulkpack)
- Lady Martin (Helena Faucit), "Juliet," from On Some of
Shakespeare's Female Characters (bulkpack).
- George Henry Lewes, "Edmund Kean," and "On Natural Acting," from On
Actors and the Art of Acting (bulkpack)
- Henry Irving, Preface to the English edition of Denis Diderot, The
Paradox of Acting (bulkpack)
- William Archer, "Introductory" (pp. 75-82), "Sunt Lacrymae Rerum" (pp.
101-130), "'Autosuggestion' and 'Innervation'" (pp. 171-183), and "The
Brownies of the Brain," (pp. 184-200), from Masks or
Faces?(bulkpack)
- G. Bernard Shaw, two theatre reviews from The Saturday Review
(bulkpack)
8. October 28: Acting and Character IV: Character and Contemporary
Acting Practice
- Readings:
- Richard Paul Knowles, "Shakespeare Voice, and Ideology:
Interrogating the Natural Voice," in Bulman, Shakespeare, Theory and
Performance.
- Worthen, Shakespeare an the Authority of Performance, Chapter
Three ("Shakespeare's body: Acting and the Designs of Authority").
- Sarah Werner, "Performing Shakespeare: Voice Training and the
Feminist Actor," with responses from Cicely Berry, Patsy Rodenburg, and
Kristin Linklater, and follow up response from Sarah Werner (bulkpack)
- Reports:
- Selected essays in Players of Shakespeare, v. 1-4.
- Michael Pennington, Hamlet: A User's Guide
- Steven Berkoff, I Am Not Hamlet
- Antony Sher, The Year of the King
- Brian Cox, Lear Diaries
9. November 4: Acting and Character V: Post-Modern Criticism and
Practice
- Readings:
- Alan Sinfield, "When is a Character Not a Character: Desdemona,
Olivia, Lady Macbeth, and Subjectivity" (bulkpack)
- Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, latter
half of Chapter Two ("Shakespeare's Auteurs"), pp. 76-94.
- Anthony P. Dawson, "Performance and Participation: Desdemona,
Foucault, and the Actors' Body," in Bulman, Shakespeare, Theory, and
Performance.
[November 11: no class; extra class to be rescheduled]
10. November 18: Early-Modern Performance and Ideology
- Readings:
- Robert Weimann, "Bifold Authority in Shakespeare's Theatre"
(bulkpack)
- David Wiles, "William Kemp and Harry Hunks: Play as Game, Actor as
Sign--A Theoretical Conclusion," from Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and
Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (bulkpack)
- Jean Howard, "Power and Eros: Crossdressing in Dramatic
Representation and Theatrical Practice, from The Stage and Social
Struggle in Early Modern England (bulkpack)
[Thanksgiving]
11. November 30: Historical Performance and Ideology
- Readings:
- Richard W. Schoch, "'The Homestead of History': Medievalism on
the Mid-Victorian Stage" (bulkpack)
- Laurie Osborne, Rethinking the Performance Editions: Theatrical and
Textual Productions of Shakespeare," in Bulman, Shakespeare, Theory,
and Performance.
12. December 2: Contemporary Performance and Ideology
- Readings:
- Alan Sinfield, "Royal Shakespeare: Theatre and the Making of
Ideology" (bulkpack)
- Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the
Contemporary Past, Chapters One ("New Ways to Play Old Texts:
Discourses of the Past") and Two ("Production and Proliferation:
Seventeen Lears") (bulkpack)
- W.B. Worthen, "Reconstructing the Globe, Constructing Ourselves"
(bulkpack)
- Carol Rutter, "Kate: Interpreting the Silence," from Clamorous
Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today(bulkpack)
- Penny Gay, "The Taming of the Shrew: Avoiding the Feminist
Challenge," in As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women
(bulkpack)
- Barbara Hodgdon, "Katherina Bound: or, Play(K)ating the Strictures of
Everyday Life" (bulkpack)
13. December 9: Writing About Performance
- Readings:
- Barbara Hodgdon, "Looking for Mr. Shakespeare After 'The
Revolution': Robert Lepage's Intercultural Dream Machine," in
Bulman, Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance.
- Sarah Werner, "Confronting the Patriarchal Bed," from Act Like a
Feminist: Women and Performance at the Royal Shakespeare Company
(bulkpack)
- Sarah Werner, "Interpreting Shrew/Shrewing Interpretation" (bulkpack)
- SHORT PAPER on EITHER the Theatre Arts Program A Midsummer Night's
Dream or the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival Hamlet, to be
posted the listserv BY TUESDAY DECEMBER 7, with a hard copy to be
submitted in class on December 9.
14. postponed class from November 11, TO BE SCHEDULED: Creating
Performance
Books to be Purchased: The following books are available for
purchase at the Penn Book Center, 34th and Sansom Sts.
- James C. Bulman, Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance
- W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Cambridge Shakespeare in
Production edition)
- William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (Cambridge
School Shakespeare edition)
- John Webster, Plays
The bulkpack can be purchased at the Campus Copy Center, 3800 block of
Walnut St.
Reports and Papers: Depending on the final enrollment in the
class, you will be required to present, tentatively, TWO in-class reports:
ONE brief report on one of the essays in the Players of Shakespeare
or related texts on October 28; and ONE report on a scholarly book,
chapter, or essay, on EITHER September 16 or October 5. For your report,
you might be asked to give a brief presentation, and/or to distribute a
brief abstract or supporting materials. In addition to the short essay
(due, electronically, on December 7, with a hard copy due December 9),
there will be, at the end of the semester, a single seminar paper, due at
a date to be determined.
Recommended/Required Theatregoing: The Theatre Arts Program is
presenting a heavily-cut six-actor version of A Midsummer Night's
Dream, directed by Jim Schlatter, which runs for three performances
only at the Studio Theatre, Annenberg Center, September 16-18; it might be
useful for our later discussions if we see it. We will tentatively be
arranging for group-rate tickets to the Philadelphia Shakespeare
Festival's production of Hamlet, directed by Jim Christy, which
runs from October 15 to November 14. And we might consider organizing an
excursion to see Andrei Serban's production of Hamlet, with Leib
Schreiber, at the Joseph Papp/New York Public Theatre in
November/December.
The course listserv is mazer597@english.upenn.edu
An electronic version of this syllabus is available on line at http://www.english.upenn.edu/~cmazer/597f99.html.
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