English 9233
Friendships, Foreignness, and Refuge-Seeking in Early Modern Drama
Instructor: Professor James Purkis
Winter Half Course.
This course will cover a broad cross section of early modern drama, including well-known Shakespearean texts (including Othello); plays on the edge of the Shakespeare canon (the collaborative Two Noble Kinsmen and Sir Thomas More); mainstays of the non-Shakespearean dramatic canon (including Marlowe’s Edward II); and little-studied plays such as Fletcher, Massinger, and Field’s The Honest Man’s Fortune. Classes will attend to different forms of kinship and alliance explored in the plays as well as relations that, for some early moderns, challenged the possibility of association between people, such as nationality and race. Early modern concepts of friendship or amity, strangeness, and hospitality will be brought into critical contact with recent theories of sexuality, race, trans studies, and refugee studies. Many of these texts exist in two or more early versions, and their textual histories will be explored, especially when textual variants indicate alternative interpretative possibilities for understanding the plays’ treatment of the course’s core topics.
