Court Theater from Shakespeare to Mozart

Catalog description

We will study four plays written for James I (including Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Macbeth, and The Tempest, and Massinger's The Roman Actor) in the broader context of European court theater from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Forms will include French ballet de cour, the Florentine intermedio, the Stuart court masques of Ben Jonson and Milton's country house masque, Comus, French classical tragedy (Corneille's Cinna), tragédie en musique (Rameau's Les Boreads), and Enlightenment opera (Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito). We will ask how these forms weigh the need to praise the ruling monarch with the imperative to counsel and critique him; how they balance the power of poetry, music, and spectacle; and how they, as forms, are transformed by the political developments that culminate in the American and French Revolutions.