Παρουσίαση/Προβολή

(ENL511) -  Βασιλική Μαρκίδου

Περιγραφή Μαθήματος

 

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

School of Philosophy

Faculty of English Language and Literature

 

MA Programme: The Greek Element in Anglophone Literature

Spring Semester 2020

 

 

Instructor: Dr. Vassiliki Markidou

Mondays, 9:00-12:00, Graduate Room (803)

Office hours: Mondays, 12:00-13:00 (Office Complex: 903)

e-mail address: vmarkidou@enl.uoa.gr

 

SHAKESPEARE AND GREECE

 

Course description

The course examines selected Shakespearean plays that include Greek characters and Greek topographies as well as borrow from ancient Greek mythology and ancient Greek writings, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Within this framework, the students will explore the Shakespearean representations of both classical and early modern Greece as a means of reinforcing as well as challenging the Renaissance English nation’s struggle to establish its cultural, linguistic and imperialistic identity. They will also analyze early modern perceptions of both ancient and contemporary Greece and assess the fact that Greece under Ottoman occupation is a fascinating case study for postcolonial analysis of early modern attitudes to Islam. Finally, they will unravel the ways in which the specific Shakespearean plays, through the aforementioned appropriations, rewritings and ambiguities, investigate issues of identity, otherness, authority, gender, social class, religion, the West and the East.

 

 

Primary Sources

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. Harold F. Brooks. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thompson Learning, 2003. Print.

 

Shakespeare, William. Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Ed. Suzanne Gossett. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Print.

 

Shakespeare, William. Timon of Athens. Ed. H. J. Oliver. The Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.

 

Shakespeare, William. Troilus and Cressida. Ed. David Bevington. Revised Edition. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Print.

 

Shakespeare, William and John Fletcher. Two Noble Kinsmen. Ed. Lois Potter. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thompson Learning, 2002. Print.

 

 

Secondary Sources 

Barbour, Richard. Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576-1626. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print.

 

Findlay, Alison and Vassiliki Markidou. Shakespeare and Greece. The Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Print.

 

Gillies, John. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

 

Gillies, John and Virginia Maon Vaughan, eds. Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998.

 

Hattaway, Michael, ed. A Companion to English Renaissance and Culture. Malden: Blackwell, 2003. Print.

 

Hakluyt, Richard. The Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation. London, 1598-1600. Print.

 

Kinney, Arthur, ed. A Companion to Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Print. Print.

 

Martindale, Charles and A. B. Taylor, eds. Shakespeare and the Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Print.

 

Martindale, Charles and Michelle Martindale, eds. Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.

 

McJannet, Linda. The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.

 

Mitsi, Efterpi. Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader. The Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. Print.

 

Purchas, Samuel. Purchas His Pilgrimage or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages and Places discouered, from the Creation unto this Present. London, 1614. Print.

 

Spencer, Terence. Fair Greece, Sad Relic: Literary Philhellenism from Shakespeare to Byron. London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1954.

 

Velz, John W. Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1968. Print.

 

Vitkus, Daniel. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

 

 

Useful electronic journals (indicative)

Shakespeare (https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rshk20)

Shakespeare Bulletin (https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/shakespeare-bulletin)

Shakespeare Quarterly (https://www.jstor.org/journal/shakquar)

Shakespeare Studies (http://sites.bu.edu/shakespearestudies/)

Early Modern Literary Studies (https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls)

English Literary Renaissance (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14756757)

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (https://read.dukeupress.edu/jmems)

Renaissance Quarterly

(https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renaissance-quarterly

 

Course requirements and evaluation

Student assessment will result from participation in class discussions, oral presentations, and a long research paper.

 

Each weekly session will be conducted in the form of lecture-cum-seminar. Students are expected to participate in class discussions, therefore to have read in advance both carefully and constructively the weekly assigned material. They are also required to deliver each a 15ˊ oral presentation (on a topic chosen by them and approved by the instructor). Last but not least, they are requested to submit a final research paper (approximately 5.000 words without counting notes and bibliography, which will also be chosen by them and approved by the instructor), according to the guidelines delineated in the graduate Student Guide.

 

All required work will be submitted both in electronic form and in the form of a hard copy to the instructor on the date due.

 

The three components of student assessment will count for the following percentages of your final grade:

 

• Class participation:   20%
• Presentation:  20% (10% presentation content; 5% the mechanics of presenting; 5% interaction with co-students following the presentation)
• Final research paper:  60% (10% thesis; 10% outline & bibliography; 40% final draft)

 

Learning Objectives

After having completed the course, students will be able:

• to become familiarized with the social, political, cultural and historical framework within which Shakespeare lived and penned his ‘Greek’ plays
• to assess in depth the crucial contribution of classical and early modern Greece in Shakespearean dramaturgy
• to trace the ways in which the Shakespearean ‘Greek’ plays both reflect and challenge the concerns, values and attitudes of the Elizabethan and Jacobean era
• to analyze in depth the Shakespearean ‘Greek’ plays and the allocated critical texts by means of close reading
• develop their critical thinking on both the oral and the written level through oral presentations and research essays
• develop advanced skills in reading, research and writing

 

Integrity

For students, a valuable and enriching academic experience entails personal integrity and the commitment to writing papers and carrying out all other required assignments based on independent thinking and without improper or unauthorized assistance. You need to bear in mind that plagiarism is a highly serious offence.

 

Week-by-week schedule

 

Week 1

Introduction: Shakespeare’s Greek; early modern perceptions of ancient Greece; Greece as an Ottoman other

 

 

Week 2

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: challenging the model of Greece as a site of origin; fragmentation and weaving; retelling the stories of Theseus

 

Further reading:

1. D’ Orsay W. Pearson, “Unkinde Theseus: A Study in Renaissance Mythography.” English Literary Renaissance 4.2 (1974): 276-98.

 

2. Douglas Freake, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a Comic Version of the Theseus Myth” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Critical Essays. Ed. Dorothea Kehler. London & New York: Routledge, [1998] 2001. 259-74.

 

Week 3

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: metamorphosis and gender politics

 

Further reading:

1. Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Contemporary Critical Essays. Ed. Richard Dutton. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. 101-38.

 

2. Shirley Nelson Garner, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘Jack shall have Jill / Nought shall go ill’” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Contemporary Critical Essays. Ed. Richard Dutton. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. 84-100.

 

Week 4 [Thesis due]

William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida: heroic masculinity, iconoclasm and ‘crisis of identity’

 

Further reading:

1. Susan Harlan, “Militant Prologues, Memory, and Models of Masculinity in Shakespeare’s Henry V and Troilus and Cressida” in Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture. Ed. Jennifer Feather and Catherine E. Thomas. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 23-46.

 

2. Miklós Péti, “New Directions: ‘What Art Thou Greek?’: Greeks and Greece in Troilus and Cressida” in Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader. Ed. Efterpi Mitsi. The Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. 129-46.

 

Week 5

William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida: epic narrative, anti-theatricalism and commodification; religion and sexuality

 

Further reading:

1. Efterpi Mitsi, “Greece ‘digested in a play’: Consuming Greek Heroism in The School of Abuse and Troilus and Cressida” in Shakespeare and Greece. Ed. Alison Findlay and Vassiliki Markidou. The Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 195-216.

 

2. Vassiliki Markidou, “New Directions: ‘[B]its and Greasy Relics’: The Politics of Relics in Troilus and Cressida” in Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader. Ed. Efterpi Mitsi. The Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. 147-64.

 

Week 6

William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens: Greek tragedy and Jacobean politics

 

Further reading:

1. Michael Silk, “Shakespeare and Greek Tragedy: Strange Relationship” in Shakespeare and the Classics. Ed. Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 241-57.

 

2. Chapter 5, “The Reality of Jacobean Politics,” in Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics. The Arden Critical Companions. Ed. Andrew Hadfield. London: Thompson Learning, 2004. 182-226.

 

Week 7 [Bibliography due]

William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens: the Athenian polis; republicanism; and the discontents of the Jacobean reign

 

Further reading:

1. R. S. Miola, “Timon in Shakespeare’s Athens.” Shakespeare Quarterly 31.1 (1980): 21-30.

 

2. John Drakakis, “Hospitality, Friendship and Republicanism in Timon of Athens” in Shakespeare and Greece. Ed. Alison Findlay and Vassiliki Markidou. The Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 139-68.

 

 

Week 8

William Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre: the romance tradition and Jacobean kingship

 

Further reading:

1. Stuart Gillespie, “Shakespeare and Greek Romance: ‘Like an old tale still” in Shakespeare and the Classics. Ed. Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 225-37.

 

2. Graham Parry, The Seventeenth Century: the Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1603-1700 [Chapter 1: “The Character of Jacobean Kingship, 1603-1625.” 9-28]. London: Longman, 1989.

 

 

Week 9 [Outline due]

William Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre: Greek topographies; the Hellenistic world; Greek lands under Ottoman occupation; Jacobean England

 

Further reading:

1. Amanda Piesse, “Space for the Self: Place, Persona and Self-projection in The Comedy of Errors and Pericles” in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580-1690. Ed. Gordon McMullan. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. 151-70.

 

2. Vassiliki Markidou, “‘To take our imagination / From bourn to bourn, region to region’: The Politics of Greek Topographies in Pericles, Prince of Tyre” in Shakespeare and Greece. Ed. Alison Findlay and Vassiliki Markidou. The Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 169-94.

 

Week 10

William Shakespeare, Two Noble Kinsmen: gender politics; the Athenian ideal and Ottoman tyranny

 

Further reading:

1. Nicole De Wall, “‘Like a shadow, / I’ll ever dwell”: The Jailer’s Daughter as Ariadne in The Two Noble Kinsmen.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 46.1 (2013): 15-26.

 

2. Maurice Charney and Hanna Charney, “The Language of Madwomen in Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists.” Signs 3.2 (1997): 451-60. 

 

 

Week 11

William Shakespeare, Two Noble Kinsmen: early and late Athenian settings; the rural and the courtly; native literary tradition and nation-building in Elizabethan England and Jacobean Britain

 

Further reading:

1. Peter C. Herman, “Is this Winning?”: Prince Henry’s Death and the Problem of Chivalry in The Two Noble Kinsmen.” South Atlantic Review 62.1 (1997): 1-31. 

 

2. Alison Findlay, “Reshaping Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Shakespeare and Greece. Eds. Alison Findlay and Vassiliki Markidou. The Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 195-216.

 

 

Week 12 [final paper due]

Conclusion: Greece as a fluid, multi-faceted mosaic; as a formative stratum of; and as a crucible for Shakespearean drama

 

 

 

 

Ημερομηνία δημιουργίας

Δευτέρα 24 Φεβρουαρίου 2020