Course Description
Outstanding dramatists of the period: Dryden, Wycherley, Addison, Goldsmith, Sheridan, and others.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Graduate students will be responsible for a more extensive syllabus, for secondary reading, and for more ambitious, sophisticated writing.
Athena Title
Restoration 18th Century Drama
Prerequisite
Two 2000-level ENGL courses or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 3000-level ENGL course) or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 2000-level CMLT course)
Semester Course Offered
Offered every even-numbered year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
At the end of the course, students, having read a substantial body of literature, will be able to discuss the assigned works (orally and in writing) with a considerable degree of critical sophistication, to read and enjoy other works from the period, and to converse with fellow students about texts and issues related to the subject matter of the course. In particular, 1. The course will introduce students to British drama of the 1660-1800 period. 2. The course will moreover discuss the historical, social, political, and literary background and milieu of this period. 3. Students will learn the stage and performance history of the plays. 4. Students will learn the major critical controversies and will explore the traditional and more innovative mapping of the field in terms of texts and contexts. 5. Written work may take the form of research papers, critiques and reviews of staged performances (if the opportunity arises), biographical sketches of performers, theater managers, or playwrights, a review of the literature on a given play or problem, essay examinations, a reading journal, collaborative revision of a scene or an entire play with documenting rationale, or any number of other assignments deemed by the instructor to forward the aims of the course. The total number of pages written for the term will be between 20 and 25 typed pages.
Topical Outline
The selection of plays read and discussed will vary from instructor to instructor and semester to semester. However, major dramas of the period will be read and analyzed using critical skills of various kinds (e.g., historical, close reading, comparative, structural). In addition to being examined on the material, students will moreover write critically on one or more of the plays. Research projects (particularly in 6400) may also be assigned. An instructor who chooses to construct a syllabus with a broad chronological focus will likely begin with a Heroic Drama such as Dryden's CONQUEST OF GRANADA. There will be a number of Comedies of Manners(drawn from the work of Wycherley, Congreve, Dryden, Behn, and Etherege). The tragic repertoire will be represented by plays such as Dryden's ALL FOR LOVE, Lee's RIVAL QUEENS or LUCIUS JUNIUS BRUTUS, Otway's VENICE PRESERVED, Manley's ALMYNA, Addison's CATO, and Lillo's THE LONDON MERCHANT. The mid-century turn to sentimentalism will be treated in both its manifestation (in the works of Cibber, Steele, Centlivre, and others) and in the resistance to the fashion (in Vanbrugh and Farquhar in particular); Fielding's farces and John Gay's phenomenally successful BEGGAR'S OPERA will almost always be featured in such a course as will the late century "return" to "Laughing Comedy" by Goldsmith and Sheridan. There will be considerable time devoted to the Collier Controversy of the late seventeenth century and the Licensing Act of 1737 as well. Instructors will vary as to the number and variety of texts they assign, and the course allows for a narrower definition of the field than the sample syllabus described above. For example, it would be possible to focus heavily on tragedies from the Restoration to the late eighteenth century (mentioning the other genres, but studying the tragic repertoire most thoroughly), or one could approach the material by focusing on three theater companies at various stages of the long historical period, teaching the plays, players, and events through the lens of performance, audience, and playhouse. The course should provide, however, a broad overview of the field, and students should be aware of the major genres, people, writers, and events that characterize the drama of this period.