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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
Historical and critical study of the idea and practice of tragedy from Greek times to the present.
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4.00 Credits
Of the many gifts of the ancient Greeks to Western culture, one of the most celebrated and influential is the art of drama. This course covers, by way of the best available translations, the masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, including the place of the plays in the history of the drama and the continuing influence they have had on serious playwrights, including those of the 20th century.
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4.00 Credits
Study of early comedy, its form, content, and social and historical background. Covers the Old Comedy of fifth-century Athens through the Attic New Comedy and Roman comedy. Authors include Aristophanes (11 comedies are studied, and one is staged); Euripides, whose tragedies revolutionized the form of both comedy and tragedy; Menander, whose plays were only recently discovered; and Plautus and Terence, whose works profoundly influenced comedy in Western Europe.
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4.00 Credits
Introduction to the reading of Shakespeare. Examines about 10 plays each term, generally in chronological order. First term: the early comedies, tragedies, and histories up to Hamlet. Second term: the later tragedies, the problem plays, and the romances, concluding with The Tempest.
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4.00 Credits
Explores the richness and variety of Shakespearean drama through an emphasis on the mastery of selected major plays. Six to eight plays are read intensively and examined thoroughly in discussion.
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4.00 Credits
The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 brought an end to a 20-year period of civil war and military rule in England. As a postwar culture, Restoration England was a divided society, but also a Major/Minor in Dramatic Literature society ripe for social change and cultural innovation. The London public theatres in this period, reopened after twenty years of prohibition, can be variously characterized as progressive vanguard and conservative rearguard, both an open forum for new ideas and subversive critique of the dominant culture, and a bastion of aristocratic privilege and state hegemony. This course considers the cultural activity of the Restoration public theatres from both outlooks. Embracing the divided nature of the art and culture of this period, the readings are organized into a series of unlikely pairings: urban comedies and classical tragedies, closet dramas and box-office successes, propaganda pieces and broad satires, puritan reform and libertine excess. Playwrights include Dryden, Davenant, Cavendish, Etherege, Wycherley, Rochester, Milton, Centlivre, Shadwell, Otway, and Farquhar.
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4.00 Credits
A study of plays by female playwrights and feminist theatre from the perspective of contemporary feminist theory. Considerations include strategies for asserting new images of women on stage, the dramatic devices employed by female playwrights, lesbian aesthetics, race, class, and the rejection of realism. Possible plays and performance texts treated include those of Maria Irene Fornes, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Daniels, Wendy Wasserstein, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Susan Glaspell, Aphra Behn, Alice Childress, Tina Howe, Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, Darrah Cloud, and Suzan-Lori Parks.
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4.00 Credits
Studies in the modern drama of England and Ireland, always focusing on a specific period, a specific group of playwrights, a specific dramatic movement of theatre, or a specific topic. Among playwrights covered at different times are Shaw, Synge, O'Casey, Behan, Osborne, Pinter, Stoppard, Bond, Friel, Storey, Hare, Edgar, Brenton, Gems, Churchill, and Daniels.
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4.00 Credits
Study of the drama and theatre of America since 1900, including Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, the Group Theatre, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Maria Irene Fornes, and David Henry Hwang.
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4.00 Credits
This course (different each time) explores one or more distinctive theatrical genres, such as tragedy, comedy, melodrama, satire, or farce, or plays of distinctive theatrical types, such as theatre of the absurd, the documentary play, or theatre of witness. Since theatrical genres and theatrical types come into being because playwrights respond to historical necessity by visualizing specific worldviews, the course presents a study of the role and function of the theatre within societies, as a response to historical, psychological, and spiritual forces.
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