ENGL 315 Fall 2021 Shakespeare the Maker Course essay (10 pages double-spaced, 3

ENGL 315 Fall 2021 Shakespeare the Maker
Course essay (10 pages double-spaced, 3,000 words approx.)
Please submit your essays as Word files by December 13
Please feel most welcome to consider the prompt that you choose in broad terms, but please
focus the discussion that you develop on one play only.
1. The Gendered Body: Disguised / Discovered in As You Like It or Cymbeline
In the narratives of Rosalind/Ganymede and Innogen/Fidele, Shakespeare uses a complex layering of gender performances in order to motivate his audience into thinking critically about the ways that gender may be performed and embodied both on and off-stage. In their respective plays, Rosalind and Innogen initially adopt male disguises as a means of achieving both self- preservation and mobility. These disguises, however, also allow each character to renegotiate their relationships and positions within the world of each play. How does Shakespeare approach questions of gender and embodiment in plays like As You Like It or Cymbeline? Are Rosalind and Innogen able to transcend the restrictions of gender codes, or are there limits to how far gender boundaries may be pushed? How does Shakespeare’s layering of gender roles potentially complicate our interpretations of these characters?
2. Reimagining Comedy Genre Conventions in Love’s Labor’s Lost or Measure for Measure
KING: Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day, And then ’twill end.
BEROWNE: That’s too long for a play. (5.2.861-862)
Berowne’s self-aware comment in the final scene of Love’s Labor’s Lost draws our attention to the ways that Shakespeare is subverting the traditional genre conventions of comedy: rather than resolve the plot of his play on stage through a series of marriages or engagements, Shakespeare instead defers resolution, having the men commit themselves to an off-stage “twelvemonth” plan of self-improvement. In plays like Love’s Labor’s Lost and Measure for Measure, the world of tragedy often seems to encroach upon the world of comedy. The news of the French King’s death at the end of Love’s Labor’s Lost serves as a reminder that the presence of mortality is never too far away from the seemingly lighthearted action of the play. In the final scene of Measure for Measure, Isabella’s silence prompts us to think about the coercive nature of the Duke’s final proposal of marriage. How does Shakespeare approach the conventions of the comic genre in his plays? What is the purpose of the uncomfortable or ambiguous endings of these comedies? How might these plays be commenting upon the formal conventions of comedy, or upon the genre more broadly?
3. Metatheatre and Stagecraft in As You Like It or Measure for Measure
Through his work as both player and playwright, Shakespeare brought to the stage a nuanced understanding of the labour entailed in assembling and coordinating a performance for a public audience. Forms of stagecraft appear throughout Shakespeare’s works, from the performance of the Nine Worthies in Love’s Labor’s Lost to the (often dysfunctional) royal pageantry of Richard II. We see characters such as Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure function as both actor and stage manager, operating both “behind-the-scenes” to orchestrate the action of the play and “on- stage” in a disguised role. Additionally, in the case of Rosalind’s sustained performance of masculinity as Ganymede, Shakespeare brings to our attention the ways in which performances are an integral part of our everyday lives (as, in fact, “All the world’s a stage…”). How do Shakespeare’s characters use the techniques of stagecraft to interact with or transform the world around them? How does Shakespeare approach the ideas of “theatre” and the “theatrical” in his plays? Is the theatre a space of creative agency or does it restrict characters into certain “roles”?
4. Love and Language in As You Like It or Love’s Labor’s Lost
For the characters in Shakespeare’s plays, falling in love is a transformative process, one that can often alter a character’s worldview, sense of self, and relationship to language. After meeting with the Princess and her attendants, the men of Love’s Labor’s Lost are transformed from austere scholars into aspiring poets. Similarly, Orlando, after first meeting Rosalind in As You Like It, begins to post his love poetry throughout the Forest of Arden. The women of these plays, however, challenge their prospective partners to think outside of their preconceived notions of language in order to communicate in more meaningful ways. How does Shakespeare address the conventional language of love poetry in his plays? How do we see characters adapt to different forms of language in order to express their love or desire? How does a character’s use of language shape our understanding of that character as a person?
5. Law and Politics in Richard II, Measure for Measure, or Henry VIII
“It is the law, not I, condemns your brother,” Angelo says in Measure for Measure. Indeed the law is, ideally, supposed to operate as the instrument of justice by enforcing agreed principles of right and wrong independent of the interests of any individual or group, including the judges and the governors. Yet in his plays, Shakespeare shows us how the law can be recruited not as an instrument of justice but rather as an instrument that serves to advance the will of the judges and the governors. In Richard II, the King depends upon the legal principle of divine rule (a principle that governs the conduct of John of Gaunt), while York and Bolingbroke bring forward the legal principle of lawful succession. In the event, is either side of the law victorious, or is it really all about who has the power, which means here, who has the most armed men? The centrepiece of Henry VIII is the annulment trial of Queen Katherine, the long-married wife of the King. Does the law in this play serve what the King and others call the demands of “conscience”? Or is it the same old story—how the powerful use the law to get what they want? Do Shakespeare’s plays
simply reveal that the law is a mere weapon dressed up in the costume of justice and used by the powerful against the weak? Or do the plays hold out some promise for the value of the law as a crafted system of principles, rules, and procedures that can advance individual and collective well-being?
6. The language of race and racism in Titus Andronicus, Love’s Labor’s Lost, or Othello
Shakespeare seems to have written about questions of race and racism from his very early plays Titus Andronicus and Love’s Labor’s Lost to his last single-authored play The Tempest. Plays like Merchant of Venice and Othello are replete with the language or race hatred, to the degree that modern productions of these two plays are always controversial and require careful and creative thinking on the part of the acting companies that put them on. Productions often cut particularly objectionable lines from the texts they perform. How might readers, scholars, actors, and audience members work with the language of race and racism in the three plays we have studied in this course—Titus Andronicus, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and Othello? Might we argue that they are simply products of the unenlightened past and therefore should be consigned to the dusty shelves of university libraries? Should we edit and emend the texts to bring them more in line with our ideas about how we should talk about the question of race? Or might we argue that they are not really racist at all but rather texts that subject racism to searching critical scrutiny? How can we, after all, read or perform these plays in the 21st century?
7. Jealousy and Proof in Othello or Cymbeline
By the world,
I think my wife be honest and think she is not; I think that thou art just and think thou art not. I’ll have some proof.
Othello, 3.3.385-8
‘Thy mistress, Pisanio, hath played the strumpet in my bed, the testimonies whereof lie bleeding in me. I speak not out of weak surmises but from proof as strong as my grief and as certain as I expect my revenge.
Cymbeline, 3.4.21-4
The protagonists in these two plays couple a terrible, violent sexual jealousy with a misconceived idea about the kinds of certain knowledge that might be gained from witness testimony and material evidence about the sexual conduct and indeed the inward emotions of the women they have wed. In these plays and in others (Much Ado about Nothing, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra for example), Shakespeare seems to be developing a socio- psychological critique of male insecurity and violence within the regime of patriarchal, heterosexual marriage. What do these men want? Why do they move so readily to a weird investment in what they choose to call proof? Do the plays bring forward altogether different ideas about how men can come to know and to trust women—a way not based on something called “proof”?