PS 1: Early Modern Literary Couples [Di 10-12; PT
1.0.2] Zwierlein
A
significant number of early modern literary narrative poems, fiction and plays
are structured around a central couple (and sometimes a love triangle). Starting
with the absent presence of the poetic ‘love interest’ and its Petrarchan
antecedents, this seminar reinvestigates some of the relevant texts and
fictional couples, with a view to early modern political and cultural
developments, shifting gender relations and contested social hierarchies. We
will inquire into notions of male friendship, conventions of homosociality,
traditional wife-taming plots, functions of cross-dressing, and the mechanisms
of the marriage market, while not neglecting structural and stylistic devices
such as doubling and mirroring, intertextual referencing, and the uses of
rhetoric and staging techniques for the performance gendered identities. The
literary couple might seem the stuff of comedy, but we will also look at
examples in tragedy and epic. Our texts are: Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella (1582); Christopher
Marlowe, Hero and Leander (1598);
William Shakespeare, Sonnets (1609), Venus and Adonis (1592-93), The Taming of the Shrew (1593), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595/96), Much Ado about Nothing (1598/99), Romeo and Juliet (1597), Othello (1603/04); Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621); John
Milton, Paradise Lost (1667); Aphra
Behn, Oroonoko (1688). - Please
note: There is a substantial reading load for this course. It is imperative
that students start reading the set texts before the term starts.
Requirements: active
participation, an oral presentation, and a term paper (c. 10-12 pages; due date:
Monday, 9 September 2024).
Texts:
Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander
(1598), in Christopher Marlowe: The
Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel, rev. ed. (London:
Penguin, 2007). For the Shakespeare plays and poems, I recommend buying either
the Arden series editions, or a complete works edition such as William Shakespeare: The Complete Works,
ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford University Press). John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), ed. Alastair
Fowler, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1998); Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688), in Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd
(London: Penguin, 1992). Some additional materials will be provided via GRIPS.