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Modern Scholarship, Contemporary Performance, Early-Modern Scripts

ENGL 597.401
instructor(s):
R 12-3:00

This course examines the scholarly enterprise of "stage-centered analysis" by considering the ways that contemporary theatre artists make theatre events out of older, canonical scripts. What is the relation of script to performance? How do scholars understand and analyze contemporary performance? How does our scholarly understanding of historical performance affect contemporary performance and how we write about it? Using Shakespeare and his contemporaries as the test case, we will examine scholarship about playhouses and stage conventions, and theories of early-modern subjectivity, acting, and performativity, and consider these issues as they are manifest in late twentieth-century theatrical theory and practice.

fulfills requirements