Shakespeare’s Rivals: English Renaissance Drama

In this course we will read a selection of the best plays by Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights who helped define the “Golden Age” of English dramatic literature. Variously heroic and comic, eloquent and grandiloquent, witty and outrageous, dignified and obscene, and sometimes tragically bloody, these plays at their best are every bit as good as Shakespeare’s, and they give us a much better picture of the full theatrical and cultural contexts of Shakespeare’s plays than his alone can do. We will use all the tools of literary analysis to appreciate the problematics of these texts in terms of social politics, historical determinants, theatrical practice, and canon formation. Authors include Thomas Middleton, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Elizabeth Carey, John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont, Thomas Dekker, John Webster, and Thomas Kyd. (Pre-1800) 3 hrs. lect./disc (Formerly ENAM 0216)