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Spectacular Bodies: Shakespeare and Counter-cultural Performance

Module description

This module looks at plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Middleton and Webster, concentrating on the reception of these playwrights both in criticism and in modern performance (defined broadly to include online remediations, theatre broadcasts and a broad range of adaptations) and visual culture. You will be invited to think about the centrality of Shakespeare in present-day Western performance culture and to analyse the assumptions that lie behind the ‘mainstreaming’ of Shakespeare and the association of ‘Jacobean’ drama with counter-cultural forces. As you do so, you will learn to distinguish between performances in different media and explore how the affordances of specific media affect how audiences encounter early modern drama today. We will look at Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean bodies both as dramatic metaphors and as literal presences on stages, screens, in images and installations, focusing on the ways in which early modern plays (in particular, tragedies) repeatedly represent bodies in traumatic situations: raped, dismembered, defiled, tortured, dead, decomposing.

Module aims - intentions of the module

This module aims to sharpen your awareness of the ideological and political purposes served by twentieth- and twenty-first-century interpretations of early modern drama. You will be taught to analyse a wide range of performances, on film, theatre broadcast, and online video-streaming sites. Through individual research and seminar discussions, you will learn to reflect critically on the political work carried out by such performances. In particular, we will reflect on questions such as:

• When filmmakers, theatre practitioners, artists and critics make us look once more at these early modern bodies in their work, what are they telling us about the power and purchase of early modern drama and/or Shakespeare in Western culture and the global cultural marketplace?
• What is achieved by the traumatic portrayal of early modern bodies in the plays and in their modern and intermedial interpretations?
• How can the theoretical frameworks of performance studies, gender and queer studies, race studies and trauma studies help us assess the ‘work’ these bodies do in present-day performances?
• To what extent is it important that we consider the technologies involved in the mediation and remediation of early modern plays when talking about present-day performances? What ‘invisible’ impact on presentation and reception of early modern drama do technologies such as film, theatre broadcast and social media have?

You will also learn to work with a range of performance-related materials. In the process, you will gain experience in archival research and improve your IT skills. Since much of the teaching and preparation for seminars in this module involves group work, you will develop your team-working skills and learn to provide constructive feedback to the work of your peers. The emphasis, in seminars, on bringing into the sessions material prepared beforehand will strengthen your presentation skills and confidence, while the assessment component consisting of review-writing is designed to prepare you for the workplace, where writing style and word counts have to match very specific requirements which differ, in crucial ways, from essay-writing. You will learn how to write a review in the course of two workshops dedicated to review-writing skills and will get the chance to improve your writing throughout the module. The assessment component consisting of a traditional essay, meanwhile, will enable you to build on your essay-writing skills. The division of this assessment into an abstract and an essay models professional scholarly research and writing practices.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Demonstrate the ability to make use of Renaissance contextual material and modern criticism in your assessment of the representation of bodies in early modern plays
• 2. Engage critically with, and apply appropriate analytical frameworks to the representation of bodies in modern stage and screen productions of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster and Middleton and write reviews of such productions
• 3. Establish connections between a range of playtexts, performance texts and artefacts and show an understanding of their cultural impact

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 4. Demonstrate an advanced ability to analyse dramatic literature and to relate its concerns and its modes of expression to its historical context
• 5. Demonstrate an advanced ability to interrelate texts and discourses specific to your own discipline with issues in the wider context of cultural and intellectual history
• 6. Demonstrate an advanced ability to understand and analyse relevant theoretical ideas, and to apply these ideas to literary and film texts as well as online materials.

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 7. Through seminar work and presentations, demonstrate advanced communication skills, and an ability to work both individually and in groups
• 8. Through essay-writing, demonstrate appropriate research and bibliographic skills, an advanced capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and a capacity to write clear and correct prose
• 9. Through research for seminars, essays, and presentations, demonstrate advanced proficiency in information retrieval and analysis.
• 10. Through review-writing, demonstrate an advanced capacity to adapt individual writing styles to the requirements of a specific genre and type of publication

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

The syllabus combines key plays by Shakespeare, classic film adaptations and theatre broadcasts of those plays with film adaptations and broadcasts of some of the most powerful and influential plays by his fellow-playwrights Marlowe, Webster and Middleton. Working across a range of media, periods and performance cultures will enable us throughout the module to think about the role of Shakespeare as a British export product in a globalised cultural marketplace. 

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE: https://vle.exeter.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=674

Indicative learning resources - Other resources

• Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (CUP, 2004) and Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare (CUP, 2013).
• Pascale Aebischer, Susanne Greenhalgh and Laurie Osborne, eds. Shakespeare and the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience (Bloomsbury, 2018).
• Roberta Barker, Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984-2000. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
• James C. Bulman, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. (Oxford UP, 2017).
• Mark Thornton Burnett, Shakespeare and World Cinema (Cambridge UP, 2013)
• Mark Thornton Burnett, Courtney Lehmann, Marguerite H. Rippy and Ramona Wray, Kurosawa, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli (Bloomsbury, 2015).
• Marvin Carlson. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. (U of Michigan P, 2001).
• Thomas Cartelli, Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
• Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Shakespeare, Cinema, Counter-Culture (Routledge, 2013)
• Barbara Hodgdon and William B. Worthen, eds. A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (Blackwell, 2005).
• Jyotsna Sing, Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory (Bloomsbury, 2019)
• Kim Solga. Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: In/Visible Acts. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Key words search

Shakespeare, early modern drama, Renaissance, performance, performance studies, visual culture, violence, rape, trauma, queer, counter-culture, Webster, Middleton, Marlowe, film, stage, gender, race, digital