ENGL 81100. Actors, Bodies, and Performance in Early Modern England
Tanya Pollard
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Fall 2019
Thursdays 2:00PM - 4:00PM
This course will explore ways that actors, both individually and collectively, shaped the construction of plays in early modern England. How did the members and power dynamics of repertory companies inspire playwrights’ development of characters and plots? What can we learn from accounts of actors in plays and other documents, and how did recognizable bodies interact with prosthetics such as wigs, cosmetics, blackface, and physical deformities? How might factors such as height, build, beards, voices, previous acting parts, and reputations have affected roles, and how did authors and audiences play with conventional practices of crossing lines of gender, race, class, and age? Readings will plays that include Marlowe's Dido and Tamburlaine; Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Tempest; and Jonson's Alchemist; as well as theatrical documents and scholarship by theater historians, literary critics, and performance theorists.
