ENGL 20240 - Staging the Religious: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

How do we imagine religious experience? What happens when religion becomes an image, either visually, dramatically, or on the page? In this course, we will approach this question through the plays of William Shakespeare and a handful of his contemporaries, focusing on English Renaissance playwrights whose works stage the cultural tensions and competing religious claims of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and atheists, not to mention the supernatural (ghosts, witches, devils, etc.). While we will explore a handful of themes in relation to these works-faith and the will, religious outcasts, and violence and justice-we will spend most of our time asking how the presentation of these religious themes in dramatic form and on the stage affects their meaning. We will do so by way of comparison, both comparing Shakespeare's plays with the frequently under-read works of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, as well as setting their images of religious experience against the Bible, Renaissance painting (e.g., Bosch, Bruegel, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt), and contemporary film versions of the plays.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nd.edu

Phone Number:

(574) 631-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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