2016-2017
Love, Sex and Death: English Renaissance Tragedy
Code: IS252
Category: Humanities
Level: 5
Credits: 15
Teaching Pattern
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Seminar
2 x 3hrs
3 x 3hrs
3 x 3hrs
3 x 3hrs
Fieldwork
1 x 8hrs

*in addition to the above formal teaching sessions you will be expected to do approximately 109 hours of
independent study over the 4 weeks.
*Additional Field Trip fee of £70.00
Outline
The Elizabethan and Jacobean periods in English history were periods of enormous religious and
social upheaval. Written against this background of social unrest, the 'Renaissance Tragedies' are
some of the most astonishing and memorable dramatic works ever written. In their seemingly
persistent overturning and perversion of all social niceties, in their insistence upon violence, cruelty,
bloodletting and illicit sexual activity, they can still shock us today. You will study eight of the bestknown and most enduringly popular of these tragedies, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Thomas Kyd’s The
Spanish Tragedy, Middleton’s Women Beware Women, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and The
White Devil, Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling, Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy and
John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. We will be examining these plays from a range of critical
viewpoints, including psychological literary critical theory, feminist and gender theory, ideology and
religion, and politics and the relations of power, asking how the plays may reflect contemporary
early-modern anxieties and preoccupations. There will be a field trip to Shakespeare's Globe
Theatre in London, which is a reconstruction of the original 1599 Globe Theatre, and which will
allow you to experience what it meant to be a playgoer in Jacobean London.
Week One
Texts: The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, Hamlet, by William Shakespeare,
This week we will be looking at two foundational texts in the Renaissance Tragedy genre,
examining the seminal The Spanish Tragedy in conjunction with the slightly later (and perhaps
rather better known) Hamlet, and discussing the society and cultural climate of late Elizabethan
England that gave rise to these plays, a time of social, cultural and religious turbulence and
fundamental change.
Core reading:
Both play texts, plus ‘Hamlet and Humanism’ and ‘The Spanish Tragedy and Revenge’ in Garrett A.
Sullivan Jr., Patrick Cheney and Andrew Hadfield, Early Modern English Drama: A Critical
Companion.
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SUMMER Session 2
Recommended reading:
Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama, esp. Part
1, ‘Unity’, ‘Knowledge’, ‘Autonomy’ and Part 2, ‘Silence and speech’, and ‘Finding a place’; Janet
Clare, Revenge Tragedies of the Renaissance, esp. ‘Revenge and Justice: Elizabethan Revenge
Tragedies’; Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of
Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, esp. ‘Contexts’, and ‘The Disintegration of Providentialist
Belief’.
Week Two
Texts: The Revenger’s Tragedy and Women Beware Women, both by Thomas Middleton.
Good edited copies of these plays are available, and there is also a good website on Thomas
Middleton at www.tech.org/~cleary/middhome.html. We will be looking at the plays in connection
with various contemporary texts discussing the nature of power and monarchy, religious ideology,
and the emphasis upon social and personal discipline. In particular we will be discussing the
prevalence of the misogynistic treatment of women in the texts of the period, connecting this with
areas such as the performance of masculinity, and the anxieties about social, sexual and moral
decadence in early modern England.
Core reading:
Both play texts, and ‘”The Revenger’s Tragedy”: Providence, Parody and Black Camp’, in Jonathan
Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, ‘Bastardy, Counterfeiting and Misogyny in The Revenger’s Tragedy’, by
Michael Neill, in ELH, Vol. 21, No. 2, and ‘Middleton’s “Women Beware Women” as Anticourt
Drama’, by Albert H. Tricomi, in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 19, No 2 (Spring, 1989).
Recommended reading:
J. W. Lever, The Tragedy of State; A Study of Jacobean Drama, esp. ‘Tragedy of State’; ‘Revenge
Drama: Antonio’s Revenge, The Revenger’s Tragedy’; ‘Death and the Revenger’s Tragedy’ in
Garrett A Sullivan, Jr., Patrick Cheney and Andrew Hadfield, Early Modern English Drama: A Critical
Companion; and ‘Women Beware Women and the Economy of Rape’, by Anthony B. Dawson in
Studies in English Drama, 1500-1900, Vol. 27, No. 2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring
1984).
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SUMMER Session 2
Week Three
Texts: The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, both by John Webster.
Good edited versions of these plays are widely available, and there are also various online sites
with full copies of the texts, e.g. http://larryavisbrown.homestead.com/files/Malfi/malfi_home.htm.
We will be looking at the plays in conjunction with various contemporary texts concerned with the
nature of female power and sexuality. We will cover such areas as the conflicting and controversial
early modern ideas about women, thinking about the anxieties about patriarchal control of female
sexuality and about women’s power in a patriarchal society.
Core reading:
Both play texts, and ‘Webster: The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi’, in J. W. Lever, The Tragedy
of State; ‘Defining/Confining the Duchess: Negotiating the Female Body in John Webster’s “The
Duchess of Malfi”’, in Studies in Philology, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Spring, 1990), and ‘Webster’s The White
Devil and the Jacobean Tragic Perspective’, in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 16,
No 3 (Fall 1974).
Recommended reading:
Hereward T. Price, ‘The Function of Imagery in Webster’, PMLA, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Sep., 1955); Peter
Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The
Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen
Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers; ‘Incest and Ideology: The Duchess of Malfi’, in Staging the
Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, eds. David Scott Kastan and
Peter Stallybrass
.
Week Four:
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SUMMER Session 2
Texts: The Changeling, by Middleton and Rowley, and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, by John Ford.
Good edited texts of these plays are widely available, and there is a helpful website at
www.tech.org/~cleary/middhome.html. We will be examining the plays in connection with linked
contemporary pamphlets and other texts, in the context of the prevalent early modern preoccupation
with the socially damaging effects of promiscuous female sexuality and moral weakness as a
paradigm for social corruption, and the ways in which this corruption is manifested not only through
women’s bodies but through the prevalence of ambition, treachery and madness.
Core reading: Both play texts, and ‘”I’ll Want My Will Else”: The Changeling and Women’s
Complicity With Their Rapists’, ‘”As Tame as the Ladies”: Politics and Gender in The Changeling’,
both in Revenge Tragedy: New Casebooks, by Stevie Simkin; ‘’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Incest’,
in Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Patrick Cheney and Andrew Hadfield, Early Modern English Drama: A
Critical Companion.
Recommended reading:
Donald K. Anderson. Jr., ‘The Heart and the Banquet: Imagery in Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore
and the Broken Heart’, in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1700, Vol. 2, No. 2, Elizabethan and
Jacobean Drama (Spring, 1962); Judith Haber, ‘”I(t) could not choose but follow”: Erotic Logic in
The Changeling’, Representations, Vol. 81, No. 1 (Winter 2003); Larry S. Champion, ‘Ford’s ‘Tis
Pity She’s a Whore and the Jacobean Tragic Perspective’, PMLA, Vol. 90, No. 1 (Jan., 1975).
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Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module students will be able to:
Identify, analyse and summarise the main themes in the plays studied
Recognise, contrast and compare the different literary critical theories studied in
conjunction with the playtexts.
Apply this knowledge in the evaluation, appraisal and assessment of the language,
imagery and symbolism employed by the author.
Evaluate, discuss and debate their ideas in seminar group discussions.
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SUMMER Session 2
Demonstrate the knowledge gained in seminar presentations and the end-of-course
assessed essay.
Contacts
Catherine Parsons
Email: [email protected]
Indicative Reading List
Each week we will be studying two play texts in conjunction with a variety of secondary critical
reading, contextualising the plays within their time of writing and helping us to understand the
society in which the plays were written. Texts of all the plays are freely available online, but it would
be preferable to have good edited copies if possible, as editor’s footnotes will help in the process of
understanding the plays. All the secondary reading is available from the University of Sussex
Library, to which you will have access for the duration of the module, and all journal articles will be
available online via the course online study site, available once you have enrolled. It is
recommended that you read the primary texts before the course starts.
Students will receive a module reader containing excerpts of relevant contemporary early-modern
documents such as pamphlets, together with authoritative pieces of critical writing on the texts, and
appropriate literary critical theoretical articles from such viewpoints as feminist theory, gender and
queer theory, early-modern politics and the relations of power, and psychological literary critical
theory.
University Library
The Library,
University of Sussex,
Brighton
BN1 9QL
Phone: 01273 678163
[email protected]
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SUMMER Session 2