Shakespeare's Mediterranean

Catalog description

This course will explore the plays of Shakespeare and other early modern English dramatists in a broad Mediterranean context, including fictions from the Italian novellatradition, Renaissance Italian and Spanish comedy and tragicomedy, several plays by Plautus set in the northern and eastern Mediterranean, captivity narratives and materials on Ottoman and North African relations. The class will look at questions of race and racialization in relation to questions of religion and empire, and at the emergence of Shakespearean comedy and “romance” or “tragicomedy” in relation to Italian, classical and Spanish precursors and contemporaries. Readings will probably include non-Shakespearean English dramas such as The Battle of Alcazar (George Peele), A Christian Turned Turk (Daborne), The Renegado and The Bondsman (both by Massinger), The Deceived (by the Italian Sienese humanist academy The Intronati), and Cervantes’ “The Bagnios of Algiers” or “The Great Sultana.” A selection will be made from the following plays by Shakespeare: Comedy of Errors, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest. We will draw on recent scholarship on race, religion, and transnational theatrical intersections including Black Lives in the English Archives by Imtiaz Habib and Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion, eds Jonathan Burton and Ania Loomba, and work by Daniel Vitkus, Nabil Matar, Barbara Fuchs, Ayanna Thompson, Jonathan Burton, Ania Loomba and Dennis Britton, among others.