Text and Action: Renaissance Theatricality

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor: Gillian Woods
• Assessment: a 5000-word essay (100%)

This module on early modern theatre history will enhance your understanding of a variety of Renaissance plays through an exploration of the various early modern documents that made up a 'play'. We will look at prompt books, manuscript plays and early quartos, as well as full plays by Shakespeare, Middleton, Marlowe and Ford, among others.

You will learn how to assess the term 'stage direction' in the light of its historical context and also develop your close-reading skills, to enable you to connect the action signified by stage directions with the meanings created by dialogue. The module will foster your analytical skills, enabling you to assess stage directions as evidence of Renaissance theatrical space and performance practice. You will also develop a critical vocabulary for talking about early modern textual variants and modern editorial practice.

Indicative module syllabus

• Document of the stage: backstage plots; actors' parts; prompt books; manuscript plays; early quartos
• Revision and reconstruction
• Editing stage directions
• In and out
• Above and below
• Gesturing
• Special effects
• Noises
• Properties
• Dumb shows

TEXTS

• Anon, Arden of Faversham
• John Ford, Love's Sacrifice
• John Lyly, The Woman in the Moon
• Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
• Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women
• Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling
• William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
  
• William Shakespeare, The Tempest

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• interpret a range of plays in the light of the action indicated by stage directions
• understand the variant nature of stage directions in different early modern texts and modern editions of the same play
• assess the value of competing scholarly accounts of early modern stage practice
• recognise the possibilities and limitations of primary evidence.