EN3129: Shakespeare and the Comic Tradition
Special Subject: Semester 2 (Professor G Walker)

Module Aims

This course will study a representative selection of Shakespeare's comedies in the light of both previous and subsequent traditions of comic theatre and film. It will look at the sources of Shakespeare's comic plots, characters, and situations in Classical and late-medieval comic drama, and trace the conventions he deploys in later comic theatre, film and television drama. What seems to have made Shakespeare laugh? And how many of these characters, routines, and situations strike us as funny today? In seeking to answer such questions, the course will look more fundamentally at comedy itself. What is it? What makes us laugh? And are the two things necessarily related? We will look for clues in the plays themselves, in the conventions and traditions upon which Shakespeare drew, on comic theory, and the practice of contemporary comics and dramatists. The course will encourage students to 'read' plays not merely as written texts but as scripts for (and sometimes also records of) performance. The emphasis will be on gaining an understanding of how these plays and the comic motifs and devices they deploy would have been realised in production in the sixteenth century, and how they have been (or might be) imaginatively recreated by directors and companies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Content

The course will cover a range of Shakespearean and pre-Shakespearean comedies and excerpts from more modern material. We will explore the ways in which Shakespeare explored various comic traditions and situations, and what this suggests about his view of what was comedic and/or comic. We will also look at the ways in which Shakespearean comedy has been represented on the modern stage, viewing a number of videos of modern productions (and where possible also seeing a live production) and exploring the challenges of producing early modern comedy in the modern theatre. The core texts for the course are all contained in Wells and Taylor eds, The Complete Works of Shakespeare and Greg Walker, ed., Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Oxford, Blackwell, 2000), or will be provided by the tutor.

Learning and Teaching

Conventional seminars will alternate with shorter meetings to view recordings of selected modern productions. For the seminars students will collaborate to produce (non-assessed) discussion papers on topics associated with the week's set text and lead discussion in small groups on the issues they raise. Structured discussion around these general themes will follow, and students will be encouraged to explore the social and political contexts in which the plays were produced and the various cultural and practical factors that shaped them as well as central critical and theoretic accounts of the nature of comedy and laughter.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the module, students will be able to:

discuss critically the central features of Shakespeare's comic drama;
analyse dramatic texts as records of and/or scripts for performance;
show an awareness of the varying definitions and approaches to Comedy current in the medieval, early-modern, and modern periods;
view dramatic productions in a sophisticated and informed way, alive to both the similarities and differences between the early and modern stage.

Assessment

Assessment will be by means of a learning journal kept during the course (70%) and two reviews of productions of Shakespearean comedies chosen from three written during the course (30%).