English 323

Shakespeare's Poetry and Drama to 1603

Course Introduction

Course Overview

Welcome to English 323! I'm pleased you've chosen to take on the challenges—and reap the rewards—of a study of Shakespeare.

This course comprises seven lessons; each of the first six focuses on a single play (or the Sonnets, in the case of Lesson One), as follows:

• Lesson One: Sonnets
• Lesson Two: Richard II
• Lesson Three: Midsummer Night's Dream
• Lesson Four: Henry V
• Lesson Five: Twelfth Night
• Lesson Six: Hamlet

Each of these lessons includes a written assignment. The seventh lesson prepares you to take the final examination, and your seventh essay will be part of your final exam.

Each of the first six lessons also includes a reading assignment from Bevington, and a series of study questions intended to guide your reading of Shakespeare's work.

About the Online Environment

Your online course offers several advantages to the traditional classroom, including the comprehensive Online Student Handbook, the ability to communicate electronically with students and with your instructor, and links to a rich array of online resources.

Online Student Handbook

This handbook answers questions about your online learning course, such as how to purchase your text, schedule an exam, obtain a transcript, and get technical help if you need it. The handbook also provides additional resources, such as how to order books or journals from the library and how to study for an online course.

Communications with Your Instructor and Student Peers

• Online Discussion Forums, designed by the University of Washington award winning Catalyst team, allow you to communicate with other currently enrolled students and with your instructor.
• You can use e-mail to ask your instructor a question.

Online Resources

As an online student, you have access to a wealth of Web resources compiled to provide fast, easy access to information that supports your online learning experience. Organized by subjects, Online Resources link you to sites with help for writing and research, study skills, language learning, and library reference materials. All links have been assessed for credibility and reliability, and they are regularly monitored to ensure their usability.

Why Study Shakespeare?

A student once wrote to me about the aura that surrounds the work of Milton and Shakespeare. The student was curious to explore their work, but had feelings of trepidation about confronting the difficulties of Miltonic and Shakespearean language. I told the student I often encounter those same difficulties. So—given the tidal wave of information and images available to us in our contemporary vernacular—why bother?

It's true that Milton and Shakespeare are separated from us by centuries of innovations in English usage and—for many US university students—the likelihood that we grew up as speakers of American English, British English's scruffy sibling. Equally important, Milton and Shakespeare employ the English language with unparalleled fluency. Each uses masterfully its depths and precision of meaning, its reflection of social class and regional colors, its braiding together of Romance and Germanic word stock, its synthesis of Classical, Renaissance, and homespun literary forms, and the uncommon powers of expressive richness that result when written and spoken English are fused in the literary discourse of the long reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James.

Nonetheless, I find that when I slow down and read with uncommon care and patience, I encounter—not obscurity—but a wealth of meanings, folded and layered together in such a way that I experience uncommon insights, associations, and curiosities. The problem lies more in making room for all the reflections and insights these poets make available to me than in puzzling out the literal meaning of what they say (although there are times when that is the case). In the moment of reading I am not clueless about meaning; I am saturated with it.

At the same time I find that reading—even in the face of surface hesitations, errors, ambiguities, and doubts—is often possible and productive. The organization of events, strong narrative backbones, parallel plots and structural repetitions, and doublings of dramatic situation make rich tapestries of literary language cohere as resonant and deeply ordered dramatic worlds.

Rich forms of participation, (e.g., Shakespeare's plays within plays, Milton's cosmological spheres within spheres) become available. They involve me in works of artistic genius that constructed the terms and the vantage points by which their audiences came to know and understand their own their times, and to place them in the experience of humankind past. These works reinvent and broaden the domain of humanity and reflection so greatly that—even when we find Milton and Shakespeare dated, prejudiced, or limited—we often do so using standards of imaginative openness and fertility that we and our culture learned from their work.

In Shakespeare and Milton, we experience and are embroiled in making sense of universal human problems, that are less problems to be solved then cruxes: that is, unresolvable problems that define human nature and human existence. We experience the Fall, we rule, we assassinate, we rationalize and appease, and we live out their dramatic consequences in the worlds we imagine, contributing to the rottenness of the body politic or amputating its regrettably diseased limbs. We revitalize families and kingdoms grown old; our hubris is tempered by religious law; we cleanse ourselves in the penance of reflection on our acts and their consequences.

The famous literary scholar Harold Bloom has argued that Shakespeare in particular is the inventor of our humanity. I believe he means that Shakespeare's plays often allow us to examine the very foundations on which our view of ourselves stands, and that they provide us with the gift of renewal through dramatic re-examination rather than passive and dogmatic compliance. If this is Bloom's intention, he is close to what makes these texts indispensable to me and, I think, to our culture.

Why Study These Particular Works?

From Shakespeare's early poems and plays I have chosen works in which we see the foundations of this new humanity being constructed. The Sonnets are voiced by a brilliant commoner who dares interject his powers of invention into the social distance between himself and his object of desire. We see—in what proves an unhappy love triangle—the "new man", familiar with the high and the low in society, with court and commerce, with matters of government and matters of license in the vice districts of suburban London. In the Sonnets we see a poetic language and a poetry that resonates with competing and seemingly irresolvable world views and social stations.

The Emergence of a Dual Society

But sonnets are lyric poems; they focus on matters of heart and intellect and were at the time circulated privately; appropriately, the sequence—for all its echoes of its times—maps private space. In Richard II these tensions spill over into public space. We see the emerging dual society of aristocratic privilege and the burgeoning power and influence of the "new man"; we also encounter the contaminating nature of politics and intrigue that make no easy moral distinctions between the new and old order possible.

As I study these early works it becomes impossible not to envision the irony of Shakespeare's increasingly powerful language of social and political criticism being staged before an audience that includes this dual society, as well as the peasant and urban lower-class "groundlings", occupants of seats placed far below the contesting elites. It was not lost on Shakespeare that his plays became a kind of "mirror for magistrates", a place where the conscience of both elites and populace was captured and schooled.

Richard II reflects two powerful speech makers and two competing public rhetorics: one ancient, aristocratic, and absolutist, the other popular, common, and heroic. The plays of court that follow, however, depict the role of imagination, dreams, and irrationality in highlighting and trumping the strains of moral and political incongruity that run through Elizabethan public life and the private lives it informs.

Dramas of Self-Reinvention

Midsummer Night's Dream and Henry V explore a court and society where spectacular forms of upward mobility and reinvention of the self are possible. These reinventions play no small role in turning the tables on established forms of privilege, power, and identity. Social position, fortune—even the balance of power between the sexes—can be reversed by the skillful invention of new identities and new appropriations of legal and moral tradition, and with them newly imagined communities—precursors to the web of state and nation in modern European states.

Dramas of Movement from Self-interest to Responsibility

At the outer limit of this period, Shakespeare will see the drama of the individual as he or she passes through the temptations of power and self-interest to some authentic understanding of his or her responsibilities to truth and the health of the body politic. We will read Hamlet and Twelfth Night, not as dark expositions of the failure of action and conscience, but as a moral vision that sees theatre—the welding of beliefs and actions to consequences—as the impossibly exacting standard that all moral conceptions must meet. We will see Hamlet entertain no action without examining its likely consequence, harboring no certainty about the motive of others without critical scrutiny. In Twelfth Night we will see a moral universe that turns on the facility of the imagination and the irrational to turn the world of moral appearances. As we move from first works to Hamlet, a language for grasping and comprehending rapidly transforming times culminates in a modern recognition: human character is invented incrementally, piecemeal, in a way that only drama—with its rejoining of means to ends, of preconceptions to hindsight—can illuminate.

Lives Caught in Successive and Transient Transformations

The pace and innovation that define contemporary society often assure we will live unreflective lives, indistinguishable from shifts in the technological capacities that shape science, commerce, and ultimately society. This is old news; it is the waves of "fashion" that unmoor individuals and world views, only to be discarded by the successive and transient waves of change that were first glimpsed in Richard II. The unhappy coexistence of Machiavellian pragmatism and Tudor absolutism are further complicated in Richard II and Henry V by appeal to popular consent, and in Hamlet by the passionate recovery of disinterest in intrigue and of right in lust for power.

We also know from these plays that their protagonists negotiate these transformations in darkness, or in the light of faintest inklings clarified only by dramatic hindsight—a hindsight which, like the Fall of Adam and Eve, enters into the cautionary vocabulary of each of us who witness it. In the works of Shakespeare and Milton, new error, dramatically and poetically rehearsed, produces new knowledge, new selves.

Whether we think of this vocabulary as dramatic or poetic humanism, it became particularly productive, because in Shakespeare and Milton's time highly-developed and systematic world views that had endured with (by our standards) great stability were under threat. As new scientific, philosophical, and commercial orders came into being, they threatened and then made visible the restive, agonistic, open-ended nature of social and religious institutions once thought invariable and uncontestable.

At their best these writers show us the imaginative work-in-progress of their times: recovering and reinventing the human in the face of what was to become a enlightening onslaught on the forms and institutions of British and European life. These poets provide an incredibly inclusive account of the social, political, and commercial invention of modern humanity.

In Milton's texts, in Shakespeare's theatre, as we read and observe, we are in fact at home. We engage the reflective webs of language and moral participation that have made us, and our predecessors over the course of a 300-year history of modernist uprooting, still profoundly responsive to the idea of affirming our humanity in inhuman worlds.

Course Goals and Objectives

By the end of this course you will have examined:

• strategies for reading and interpreting Shakespeare's poetry and drama;
• the dramatic construction of psychological and moral depth of field in Shakespeare's characters;
• theatrical traditions and the Elizabethan theatre;
• the role of audience and reader responses in meaning and interpretation of Shakespeare; and
• Shakespeare's dialogue with the emerging national culture of Elizabethan England.

You will have practiced and developed your ability to

• closely read the poetic language, the imagery, and the themes of Shakespeare's major poetry and drama;
• reconstruct some of the cultural precedents of Shakespeare's work;
• think critically about the role dramatic structure plays in the interpretation and meaning of Shakespeare's plays, including their susceptibility to alternative interpretation and productions;
• use prewriting and study questions to develop your critical reading and writing skills; and
• write critically about individual works and the larger contours of Shakespeare's early career.

About the Textbook

My focus in this course is on the ways Shakespeare's plays further our understanding of how a crucial moment in European and world history was experienced by the people who contributed to its making. I believe there is great value in visualizing the world in which Shakespeare's plays were received. Our textbook, edited by David Bevington, represents current Shakespeare scholarship, and contains the kind of careful notation of difficult passages and background for each play that the modern reader requires.

The Social Milieu

My assignments and the final exam will not test you on the details of Bevington's introductory material, but will assume you have consulted them to gain a broad understanding of the social and dramatic context of Shakespeare's plays. The introductory material is invaluable in helping you to reconstruct how Shakespeare's audience would have likely experienced his plays. Who was in his audience? What was in the popular mind? In addition, Bevington reviews the crises and accomplishments of Elizabethan rule, military adventures and economic development.

He also reconstructs the social milieu of the Elizabethan playhouse—a heady vice world exiled beyond civil authority to the suburbs. It was a world of restaurants, gaming houses, pubs, theatres, and brothels, where (mostly male) members of all social classes escaped the stringent political, ecclesiastical, and civil policing of London's center (where the heads of dissidents and criminals were often displayed on pikes on London Bridge). It was also a place where the exploitation of women and children—as well as the poor—knew few bounds, and a rough-and-tumble lower class of apprentices, criminals, and drunkards roamed more freely than was possible in the center of London.

This was also a place where the wealth of the "new man" and the aristocracy might meet, not only on gaming tables, but also in more legitimate business ventures that linked middle class capital with aristocratic connections and prestige. As a successful playwright, actor, and part owner of a theatre company Shakespeare himself was among these new men, with access to new wealth and the old social elite, even as he rubbed elbows with the disreputable and working classes.

The Staging of the Plays

Bevington also reviews and includes a fine range of illustrations of the physical makeup of the theatres in which these works would have been staged. There is no question that, in part, Shakespeare's plays have become for his readers a theatre of the mind; but he penned them for quite specific players performing in theatrical spaces in which he had done his apprenticeship and for an audience he knew intimately. Bevington's guide can help us read the plays for the added meanings that come when we understand them as performances experienced in their distinct places and times.

Videotapes and Live Performances

Bevington mentions an additional important resource; there are abundant opportunities to view Shakespeare in local productions on stage, and in video. Bevington shows still photographs from some of the most famous and well-regarded productions. Seattle has seen local productions of MacBeth set in the Wild West and Twelfth Night placed in the Roaring 20s, and Haight Ashbury-tinged productions of Midsummer Night's Dream. There are numerous Hamlets, including recent ones by Mel Gibson and Kenneth Branagh; a famous, very patriotic Henry V with Sir Laurence Olivier, made during World War II, and a Kenneth Branagh remake-made in the post-Vietnam era—depicting a war-weary Henry appalled by the gore of conquest.

To view these productions is to be reminded that Shakespeare's plays, like musical scores, are guides to performance as well as literary "works." Consulting these sources (video or live performance) will enhance your ability to visualize and enact the texts you read and will surprise you by the breadth of interpretation that any one text is able to support.

Only for your exam preparation will I ask you to view a performance; but I would urge you to draw on additional sources, auditory and visual, to aid your learning in this course and to build on your own strengths and interests as a learner.

I've included in Lessons Two through Six a short list of "Suggesting Viewing"—videos of different interpretations of the play in question. These are available through the UW library, your local library system, or at video stores. These lists are by no means exhaustive; you may find other versions of these plays.

Preparing for the Assignments

You will be asked to write six essays—one in response to each of the six lessons; your final exam will include a seventh essay that asks you to project your reading of Shakespeare into new venues. See the "About Your Instructor" page on the course syllabus for information about submitting assignments.

In this course, I have modeled the skills I ask you to draw on in your written assignments, and I have given you opportunities to practice and develop them. You will see examples of my work as an engaged and active, a questioning and reflective, reader in my model reader's diaries. I also pose study questions (as in my description of Shakespeare's times and career, in this introduction) about the focus and point of view we might adopt in the study of his work. Throughout the course guide I conduct a sort of argument, which includes propositions about:

• the cultural and literary resources that Shakespeare drew on in developing his own dramatic vision and form;
• the dialogue between Shakespeare's dramatic and comic problem plays and the rapidly changing attitudes of the London populace, both elite and common; and
• the construction over the course of these plays of a powerful humanism: a world view where human frailty and power displace tradition and authority at the center of the moral and political universe.

Prewriting, Rough Drafts, and Revisions

The assignments in this course are demanding, and they require that you be analytical. Each poses a puzzle or a question about an important aspect of the poem or play, for which there can be more than one thoughtful, well-supported answer. The assignments ask that you demonstrate close knowledge of the text, but as a step toward the "answer" or position on the question that you will state explicitly in the thesis paragraph.

Prewriting, drafting to clarify what you know and what you think about it, is an essential step in preparing writing of this kind. Having said that, I think a range of prewriting can be useful at different times. Each assignment requires that you include a copy of the well-developed prewriting that you have done. I encourage you to choose a format that you feel is most productive for that assignment; you may show your thinking

• as responses to the study questions in the lesson, or
• as a reader's diary.

Reader's Diaries

The first two lessons include model reader's diaries.

• In my readings of Shakespeare's Sonnets, I share my efforts to understand particular sonnets; I trace the multiplication of the perspective and point of view voiced in any one sonnet as it takes its place in the whole like a "scene" in a larger dramatic sequence.
• In my reading of Richard II, I reconstruct how the structural organization of Shakespeare's play asked his original audience and us, his readers, to experience a mirror-like relationship between the trials faced by the two protagonists and between the grounds on which each claims Britain's throne.

In both cases, I model the active engagement and interpretation you will need to bring to the sonnets and plays: the process of puzzling out the text and formulating questions about it. Then I ask you to complete this process in each lesson, by writing an essay in which you produce a similar analysis of Shakespeare's shaping and development of reader and audience responses through poetic and dramatic structures.

Study Questions

Each lesson includes a series of study questions, which serve three purposes:

• They inform your reading by providing schemes for close critical examination of the text; they identify key passages, organizing principles, themes, and central problems or questions raised by the poems and plays. So consult them before you read and when rereading the plays as maps for reading. They will provide useful models as well for the issues you might write about when preparing reader's diaries.
• They provide occasions for prewriting—developing the responses which will provide a foundation for the larger essay assignments that cap each lesson. You will notice that the questions anticipate themes in the essay assignments. Prewriting is required for most essay assignments and written responses to study questions you see as particularly relevant to your essay is one of the forms you might use to meet this requirement
• They prepare you for the final exam, which is composed of written answers to a set of essay questions. In fact, your final exam questions will be drawn from these study questions, so close examination of them and written responses to them throughout the course and when studying for the exam should be very helpful.

Grading

Grading of your essays will reflect how well you complete each of three distinct functions served by the essays. I have designed assignments that ask you to demonstrate several kinds of skill and expertise—each fundamental to a command of Shakespeare's work and to literary study in general. Your essays should accomplish the following:

• Give evidence that you have read closely and understood both the texts of Shakespeare's poems and plays and the background material presented in The Complete Works of Shakespeare and this course.
• Demonstrate your experience as an engaged and critical reader—one who can actively organize and focus his or her experience of the text and comment on the significance of the patterns you identify in Shakespeare's work.
• Use your active experience of the text to engage and development an argument or position on the essay topic. In other words, does your essay address the problem or question posed by the assignment, develop a coherent point of view and support it well with reference to your close experience of the text?

The grading of the essays will reflect how effectively you have met each of these purposes, as shown in table i.1.

Table i.1—Criteria for Grading Essays
4.0	Your essay shows evidence that you have actively engaged the essay question, stated a position on it, and then used your experiences as a reader to support and develop your position.
3.0	Your essay shows a focused and well-elaborated emphasis on a particular pattern of imagery or expression, parallel plots or structural counterpoints, an intellectual theme, a problem or question related to your emerging understanding of Shakespeare. Your essay is focused and unified, although it does not yet conduct an explicit argument about the patterns you document.
2.0	Your essay reflects close familiarity and understanding of Shakespeare's text, but does not single out and develop any particular patterns of dramatic expression and structure, themes in the work, or particular topics in our larger understanding of Shakespeare and his world.

Other factors influence your grade as well; these have to do with your development over the sequence of assignments and throughout the course. Most, I hope, are in your favor. I will look for evidence that you have read, engaged, and deepened your understanding of Shakespeare's work covered in the lesson. Other criteria include whether you have used the essay assignment to frame your topic; and whether you have taken a position on that topic and been able to elaborate and support that position with close reading and understanding of Shakespeare's texts. In my responses to your essays I will identify areas for you to develop in future assignments. Effort and progress will factor into my consideration of how well you succeed in the assignments, but I will also take each essay seriously as a finished project on its own.

The best papers will have

• an argument;
• supporting evidence that both supports and extends the argument; and
• a conclusion that reflects a sense of why your answer matters, what it teaches, and what it clarifies.

Each of the major essays and the exam are weighted equally in computing your grade.

About the Final Exam

My goal for the final exam is to build on the reading and responding you have done in the essay assignments; the exam continues the development of your ability to actively trace the patterns of dialogue, of structured action, of development of dramatic and thematic conflict over the course of the work. I have selected all exam questions from this course. The exam includes two questions for each of our six lessons; you will choose and write on one question for each lesson, a total of six questions. You will also complete Assignment 7: "Your Approach to a Shakespeare Play" as a part of the exam.

You are welcome to use any prewriting you have done in preparation for the exam, and to consult Bevington as you write.

Reading Shakespeare

Reading Shakespeare is a challenging process; it asks us to follow the immediate action even as we work carefully through the figures of speech with which his characters interpret the action and justify their actions in it. At the same time, any character or explanation of the action is subject to radical reinterpretation when we see the character in other settings (which often test the character's stated beliefs against his or her subsequent actions) or when the beliefs of one character are compared with the beliefs and rationalizations offered by parallel characters. Initially convincing and eloquent "talk" is always juxtaposed to the character's ability to subsequently "walk the walk".

Drama as Adversarial Proceeding

It's useful as you read to keep in mind the idea of a verbal or a rhetorical contest, an adversarial proceeding like the arguing of a court case in front of an attentive jury. In the Sonnets the speaker anticipates objections, works through alternative explanations, and seeks confirmation of his beliefs about his beloved, even as he scrutinizes his own motives and the nature of their relationship in a complicated world of social and erotic double talk. In Richard II, both Richard and Bolingbroke carefully rationalize their conduct in anticipation of judgment before the court of posterity.

Like a jury, Shakespeare's audience (and we, his readers) must know the facts well, understand what the adversaries argue, and then put them in the larger context of patterns of contradiction and congruence that run through the behavior of the parties to the dispute. The parties place their conduct and their arguments in legal traditions and precedents. The heat of dispute reveals both virtues and vices, both the confirmation and the destruction of character: think of the usurper Claudius in Hamlet or the honorable Brutus in Julius Caesar, or Shylock in Merchant of Venice (which culminates in a kind of courtroom drama).

No character remains unaltered or uncomplicated by his or her trial by verbal and dramatic combat. Along the way pretenses are deflated and masks stripped away. Apparent opposites may moderate and gravitate towards a mean of human conduct. The grounds for judgment are clarified; the differences are tested between revenge and justice, between dogma and truth, between compassion and anarchy. Virtue in Shakespeare is often demonstrated—not by appearances or seeming merit—but by what is revealed of character under a rhetorical onslaught (such as Portia's exercise of wit and ingenuity when she encounters the cruel absurdities that slumber in the letter of the Venetian law in Merchant of Venice).

How Did Shakespeare's Contemporaries Respond?

We must also reconstruct some of the assumptions and associations Shakespeare's audience would have brought to these trials within trials and plays within plays. At the same time we must trace carefully the pressures the play evokes in us as readers who may agonize (like Hamlet) over how to deliver justice without giving in to blood lust and revenge, or how (like Portia in Merchant of Venice) to balance our understanding of human frailty against our healthy respect for evil in a world without order.

Note

All assignments are based on my assumption that you have read Bevington's introduction carefully and thoughtfully.

Shakespeare and his Times

Shakespeare's drama has a rich relationship to its times. As in all literature, Shakespeare's plays and poetry act as windows on their times (Bevington calls them Aristotelian "mirrors" on nature). David Bevington's introductory chapters and notes to the individual plays bear witness both to the social, political, economic and religious contexts in which Shakespeare wrote, but also the history and the role of theatre in Elizabethan society.

Shakespeare was also a master builder of dramatic structures; these often brought into relief contemporary issues that had seldom been given such sharp focus or explored as deeply. The following study questions ask you to reconstruct both Shakespeare's times and his perfection of a medium in which to express them. These questions highlight information about Shakespeare's era, and contribute to your understanding of how Shakespeare's work conducts a reflective and highly exploratory dialogue with the times as his contemporary audience was experiencing them.

Social and Economic Background

1. Shakespeare's England was a relatively small and isolated nation that had abdicated claims to most of its holdings on the European continent. It was still predominantly a rural and agrarian society and far from the commercial power it would become in the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, there were forces in motion that made Shakespeare's London seem a place of dynamic change, unparalleled prosperity, and contrasting squalor. What were some of these forces?
2. What did the social class structure of England look like during this period? What role did other ethnic and cultural groups, (e.g., Scots, Welsh, Irish) play in Elizabethan society?
3. During much of the feudal era in Europe wealth resided in property and agricultural surpluses supplemented by limited trade and manufacture. By the seventeenth century this had come to be supplanted by increased livestock production, wool production, and textile trade. London became an important port and a center for some textile production. What social changes were set in motion by a more commercial economy and the resulting increase in contacts with the European continent (particularly the Low Countries, Italy, and France)?
4. What controversies were stirred by the growing importation of continental luxury goods, intellectual trends, and political ideas?
5. How was England's national culture and perhaps national identity shaped by its rivalry with the expansionist and staunchly Roman Catholic Spain?
6. Theatres, gaming houses, and brothels were banned from the city proper and scorned by the court as sources of civil disorder, by reformers as places of disgraceful conduct, and by the old social order as places where a scandalous leveling of social position was inevitable. What did this interaction of old and "new men", of ancient dramatic traditions and popular taste contribute to the themes and staging of Shakespeare's plays?
7. The court itself was removed from the center of London and much of the population lived in the suburbs. What do these three very different social spaces—court, theatrical and leisure establishments, and commercial mercantile London, with their very different ideas about social and dramatic propriety—contribute to the social canvas of Shakespeare's plays and the convergence and interaction of the high and the low, the exalted and the common in his plays?

Political and Religious Background

8. In Shakespeare's plays issues of the rightful succession to the British throne and problems of political tyranny and political decadence are raised again and again in the history plays and the tragedies. What did you learn from Bevington about the century of political crisis and civil war (the 1500s) and the restoration of order under Tudor absolutism (the 1600s) that explains this preoccupation of Shakespeare's plays?
9. What was Tudor absolutism? How was it wielded in Elizabeth's reign? How was absolutism complicated by the fact that the English Parliament was a significantly powerful institution, and by the existence of powerful and influential commoner and aristocratic advisors to Elizabeth?
10. Elizabeth never married. She deferred the execution of her Roman Catholic sister and rival Mary for over a decade. Under Elizabeth the Crown and the Anglican Church maintained a "high church" ecclesiastical structure and liturgy while adopting latitude in questions of individual belief, reflecting some of the values of protestant reformers. If we call this behavior Elizabethan irresolution, or the Elizabethan compromise, how might it be reflected in Shakespeare's dramatization of the English body politic in his plays?
11. What was the "Doctrine of Passive Obedience"? What were the main assumptions of Machiavellian political theory? How did these two ideas of political legitimacy—one absolutist and the other pragmatic—enter into contemporary discussions of political authority?
12. Who were the "new men"? How did they enter into the political balance of power and social status in Elizabeth's court and in Elizabethan society generally?
13. Bevington describes a number of Elizabethan controversies, including Roman Catholicism versus reform Protestantism, absolutism versus Machiavellianism, continentalism versus indigenous intellectual and artistic fashions, the new man versus the old aristocracy. How did these controversies evolve over the course of Elizabethan's reign? What do we know about Shakespeare's position on any of these controversies? How are they reflected in his plays?

Renaissance Cosmology and Psychology

14. The Ptolemaic view placed Earth at the center of the universe. It also superimposed a religious and philosophical order on the physical universe: divinely ordained spheres within spheres that orchestrated the movements of the heavenly bodies. During Shakespeare's time, however, the Copernican theory of a heliocentric, or sun-centered system was becoming known. The contrast between these two models might also be seen in controversies between a science based on authority (Aristotle) and one based on observation (reflected in the reformist rhetoric of Peter Ramus). According to Bevington, what were some of the cultural consequences of these scientific controversies?
15. What role does the court and the royal family play in the English body politic and the English nation as a whole, according to the political cosmology of Shakespeare's plays?
16. A king or queen was, according to absolutism, the servant or handmaid of God on earth, His agent to whom all owed deference, and through whom Providence would be revealed in human history. In the courtly and genteel traditions about the self that devolve from absolutism, the external social position and social behavior of individuals reflected their true spiritual and moral makeup (although more suspicious ideologies about human nature, including those of Calvin and Montaigne, became known during this period). What is the relationship between the public and private self, between the spiritual and the physical nature of the individual, between the ideal self and the psychology of the self-reflective mind during this period, according to Bevington?
17. What are some of the ways Shakespeare's characterizations reflect these different beliefs about the nature of human identity?

Shakespeare's Dramatic Predecessors

Four of the historic contributions to the drama of Shakespeare's day were 1) the tradition of the medieval religious or morality play, 2) classical tragedy and comedy as studied in the classics-heavy curriculum of Shakespeare's schooling, 3) the early writers of early Tudor humanist drama, and 4) Shakespeare's actual contemporaries.

18. What elements of the medieval traditions of Corpus Christi plays and morality plays carry over into Shakespeare's work?
19. How are Shakespeare's plays influenced by the codification of dramatic genre in Aristotle, as applied by Elizabethan educators to the actual practice of the Roman writers of comedy and tragedy?

     Note

    The term "euphuism" comes from the title character in John Lyly's Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and his England. The word derives from Greek euphues, shapely.

20. John Lyly and other early Tudor writers borrowed heavily on Greek prose narratives and were innovators of an ornate, literary style of English called euphuism. How did these prose innovations influence Shakespeare's style, his story lines, and his plotting of dramatic action?
21. How did Thomas Kyd rework the staging of Senecan tragic violence in his play The Spanish Tragedy? What kind of influence might this have had on the way Shakespeare depicts tragic violence in Hamlet?
22. What does Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus add to Shakespeare's treatment of the tragic hero?
23. Bevington mentions what he calls a protean (many-formed, complexly hybrid) integration of very different dramatic devices and structures in Shakespeare. Drawing on some of what you have learned about Shakespeare's predecessors, discuss why his plays often can so successfully orchestrate multiple narrative elements, integrate both comic and tragic elements in the same play, and juxtapose low comedy and heroic tragedy in a single work.

About the Course Developer

My name is Norman Wacker. I completed my B.A. degree in English at Rockford College in 1973 and my Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington in 1987. Since 1989, I have been a lecturer in the U.W. English Department and the Interdisciplinary Writing Program, with time out to teach from 1988–1990 as a Fulbright scholar in the former Czechoslovakia. I also teach part of each year in the Comparative History of Ideas Prague program.

I have published articles on the uses of the epic tradition by modern writers to bring perspective and meaning to our sense of the present, and on postmodern writers who are not sure that making sense is a good idea. I teach courses in early modern literature, contemporary American literature, and the Central European novel. In general, I am interested in how writers and we, their readers, have often turned to literature to take the measure of historical and political transformation whether during the Renaissance, the Age of Revolution, or the Cold War.

My mother, a Neapolitan-speaking Roman Catholic, came of age in Hitler's Third Reich. My father grew up speaking German in a Russian-American neighborhood in Lincoln, Nebraska during the dustbowl. As I have tried to bring order to this family heritage of uprootings and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it has become second nature for me to think of studying literature as one of our ultimate and most humanizing locations, a place where we can examine together a richness of loss recovered in language.

---

©2005, University of Washington. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.