Garrett.Epp@ualberta.ca
 

Issues of sexuality and theatrical cross-dressing have with good reason dominated much recent scholarship on early English drama: they dominated critical discussion of theatre at the time, as well. Long before Shakespeare’s As You Like It put a boy actor onstage playing a woman playing a boy playing a woman, antitheatricalists were railing about the social effects of such boundary-crossings, not just in regard to boy actors but also to the women in the audience. Although modern critical emphasis has been laid almost exclusively on homoeroticism and the male bodies under the women's clothing, it is seems mostly to have been heterosexual desire and women's bodies that antitheatricalists feared and playwrights exploited - even, or especially, in the absence of actual women's bodies on the stage.  This course will examine a wide variety of early English plays in relation to contemporary antitheatrical criticism and antifeminist satire, performance theory, and issues and theories of gender and sexuality, in order to explore various theatrical, sexual, political, and social meanings of “playing the woman's part,” on and off the stage. Material will range from the medieval allegory of Wisdom to a Jacobean court masque for female actors - Robert White's Cupid's Banishment - to the first original English tragedy written by a woman - Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Miriam. We will pay particular attention to plays of gender dissidence such as Shakespeare's As You Like It and The Taming of the Shrew, Jonson's Epicoene, and Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl, and to “fallen woman” plays such as the sprawling Digby Mary Magdalene, Wager's The Life and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene, and Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. Students should already have some familiarity with the work of Shakespeare in particular and with early English literature and culture more generally, as well as with contemporary theories of gender and sexuality. Online texts: Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse [+excerpts]; Playes Confuted [facsimile] Jonson, Epicoene Macropedius, Andrisca Middleton & Dekker, The Roaring Girl  Newgate Calendar: Mary Frith Shakespeare, Complete Works Shakespeare [old spelling texts:], The Taming of the Shrew; As You Like It Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses Webster, The Duchess of Malfi  Wisdom York Noah In bookstore: S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, ed. Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (Routledge, 1996) Still other texts - both primary and secondary - will be made available in the Salter Reading Room (3-95). Useful background readings currently available in the Salter include Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (see especially chapters 1, 4, and 8), and Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence (chapters 8-10, 15-19). More readings will be added as the course progresses.

Conduct:

The course will be conducted as a seminar, with frequent but brief (10 minute) presentations on issues raised by or relevant to particular texts under discussion. You will each  be responsible for two of these presentations, which may range in approach from formal position papers to improvised performance pieces. Since the point of these will be to raise issues and direct discussion, and to play more than to prove one's worth as a scholar, presentations will not be formally graded; experimentation and provocation are welcome. Presentations and general participation will nonetheless be taken into account in deciding your final grade for the course, which will otherwise be determined in regard to a single formal paper (appx. 3000 words in length), due in the final class of the term. Successful experimentation in presentations can and will mitigate the results of a less successful written experiment, to a maximum value of one grade point (within the University's 9-point system); an uninspired oral performance should similarly be balanced by a show of greater insight and eloquence in the formal paper. Anyone who fears carrying a single basket full of eggs, however, is welcome to submit an initial, shorter paper, either for formal grading - in which case the relative weight of the two papers will need to be negotiated - or for informal discussion and evaluation and general anxiety-allaying.
 

Order of Service [tentative]:

11 September     introductions
18 September     theatre and antitheatre; fashion and abuse
25 September     woman=boy: As You Like It
2 October           boy=woman: Epicoene
9 October           banishing Cupid, wedding Wisdom
16 October         the Digby Mary Magdalene: burning down the house
23 October         Wager’s Mary Magdalene: going down on Jesus
30 October         “I’ve fallen and can’t get up…” or “I am the Duchess of Malfi still.”
6 November        taming shrews: Noah’s wife, Andrisca, and Kate
13 November      [fall break: recreational cross-dressing permitted]
20 November      roaring girls and drag kings: the case of Mary Frith
27 November      history in the closet: Cary’s Miriam
4 December         exeunt omnes