Macbeth. So foul and fair a day I have not seen. (1.3.35)
Macbeth. This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill, cannot be good. (1.3.129-30)
Lady Macduff. I am in this earthly world where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly. (4.2.71-74)
Macduff. Such welcome and unwelcome things at once,
'Tis hard to reconcile. (4.3.138-39)
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Macbeth in Perfomance
Ian McKellen (Macbeth) and Judi Dench (Lady Macbeth)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe5uRWnzUig
Ian McKellen, The Dagger Soliloquy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA0NyeFpCY8
Ian McKellen, "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LDdyafsR7g
Ian McKellen discusses Macbeth's last soliloquy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGbZCgHQ9m8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe5uRWnzUig
Ian McKellen, The Dagger Soliloquy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA0NyeFpCY8
Ian McKellen, "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LDdyafsR7g
Ian McKellen discusses Macbeth's last soliloquy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGbZCgHQ9m8
Macbeth: Historical Context
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Shakespeare and Selfhood: Select Bibliography
Some of the books and articles below deal with selfhood quite explicitly. Others explore related concepts such as performance, political subjectivity, conscience, emotion, and sensation. I offer these sources as potential starting points as you begin to brainstorm ideas for your paper. As always, let me know if you have questions!
Altman, Joel B. The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry
and the Development of Elizabethan Drama. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1978.
------. The Improbability of Othello:
Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010.
Archer, John Michael. Technically Alive: Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Bailey, Amanda. Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood
in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2013.
Beckwith, Sarah. Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.
Braun, Harald and Edward Vallance, eds. Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Curran,
Kevin. “Feeling Criminal in Macbeth.” Criticism 54.3 (2012):
391-401, Special Issue on "Shakespeare and Phenomenology," ed. Kevin
Curran and James Kearney.
------. “Hospitable Justice:
Law and Selfhood in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Law,
Culture, and the Humanities 9 (2013):
295-310.
De Grazia, Margreta, Maureen
Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, eds., Subject
and Object in Renaissance Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996.
------. Hamlet without Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007.
Ferry, Anne. The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of
Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986.
Floyd-Wilson, Mary. English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern
England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
------ and Garrett A.
Sullivan, Jr., eds., Environment and
Embodiment in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Fudge, Erica. Brutal Reasoning:
Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2006.
Garber, Marjorie. Daemonic Figures: Shakespeare and the
Question of Conscience. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Hanson, Elizabeth. Discovering the Subject in Renaissance
England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Harris, Jonathan Gil. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
Hartley, Andrew James. “Page and Stage Again: Rethinking Renaissance
Character Phenomenologically,” in New
Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies, ed. Sarah Werner, 77-91.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Harvey, Elizabeth D., ed. Sensible
Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Holbrook, Peter. Shakespeare’s Individualism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Hutson, Lorna. The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis
in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007.
Kinney, Arthur. Lies Like Truth: Shakespeare, Macbeth, and the Cultural Moment. Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 2001.
Kottman, Paul. A Politics of the Scene. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2008.
Kuzner, James. Open Subjects: English Renaissance
Republicans, Modern Selfhoods, and the Virtue of Vulnerability. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
Lee, John. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of Self. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2000.
Lupton, Julia Reinhard. Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political
Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
------. Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011.
Maus, Katharine Eisaman. Inwardness and Theater in the English
Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
------.
Being and Having in Shakespeare. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013.
Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the
Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
------, Katherine Rowe, and
Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the
Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Reiss, Timothy J. Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood
in Ancient and Early Modern Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2003.
Schoenfeldt, Michael C. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology
and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
Seigel, Jerrold. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience
in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
Selleck, Nancy. The Interpersonal Idiom in Shakespeare,
Donne, and Early Modern Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Smith,
Bruce R. Phenomenal Shakespeare. Malden,
MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Sullivan, Jr., Garrett A. Sleep, Romance, and Human Embodiment:
Vitality from Spenser to Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the
Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Turner, Henry S. “The Problem
of the More-than-One: Friendship, Calculation, and Political Association in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 57 (2006): 413-42.
Watson, Robert. Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in
the Late Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Werner, Sarah, ed. New Directions in Renaissance Drama and
Performance Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Wilson, Luke. Theaters of Intention: Drama and the Law in
Early Modern England. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Yates, Julian. Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from
the English Renaissance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002
Monday, November 9, 2015
Research Paper
Due: Friday, December 11 (before midnight)
Length: 3,000 words
Format: Word, double-spaced, standard margins, standard font (Times New Roman or Cambria). Your paper should have a title and your name on it.
How to submit: by email (kevin.curran@unil.ch). Write "Research Paper" in the subject line. Use your last name as the file name (i.e. Johnson.doc).
The major assignment of the course, the Research Paper should tackle a significant question and demonstrate:
(1) that you have read the relevant plays/sonnets very closely.
(2) that you know how to advance a compelling argument and support it with evidence.
(3) that you know how to position that argument in relation to the ideas of other critics.
(4) that you know how to analyze literary texts in a way that is responsive to cultural, historical, and/or philosophical context.
You may work on any topic relevant to our course theme, "Shakespeare and Selfhood," and any play or plays we've dealt with. The sonnets are fair game, too. I don't offer ready-made essay prompts of the sort you'd find on an exam. At Masters level, I think it's crucial that you learn how to develop your own research topics--topics that are significant but still manageable. This is an important intellectual and critical skill. That said, I'm happy to list a few broad areas of investigation that might help you focus your thinking a bit. Most of this stuff grows out of discussions we've had in class.
Selfhood and science
Selfhood and the Reformation
Selfhood and Renaissance education
Selfhood and performance
Philosophical contexts of selfhood
(Aristotle, phenomneology; agency, intention; the mind-body problem; etc.)
Selfhood and economics
Selfhood and political theory
Selfhood and gender and/or sexuality
Humans and animals
Humans and things
Colonial contexts
And much, much more!
Remember that scholarship, like theater, benefits from collaboration and discussion. Talk to each other as you develop your paper topics. And feel free to come talk to me, too! I'm more than happy to offer guidance.
Length: 3,000 words
Format: Word, double-spaced, standard margins, standard font (Times New Roman or Cambria). Your paper should have a title and your name on it.
How to submit: by email (kevin.curran@unil.ch). Write "Research Paper" in the subject line. Use your last name as the file name (i.e. Johnson.doc).
The major assignment of the course, the Research Paper should tackle a significant question and demonstrate:
(1) that you have read the relevant plays/sonnets very closely.
(2) that you know how to advance a compelling argument and support it with evidence.
(3) that you know how to position that argument in relation to the ideas of other critics.
(4) that you know how to analyze literary texts in a way that is responsive to cultural, historical, and/or philosophical context.
You may work on any topic relevant to our course theme, "Shakespeare and Selfhood," and any play or plays we've dealt with. The sonnets are fair game, too. I don't offer ready-made essay prompts of the sort you'd find on an exam. At Masters level, I think it's crucial that you learn how to develop your own research topics--topics that are significant but still manageable. This is an important intellectual and critical skill. That said, I'm happy to list a few broad areas of investigation that might help you focus your thinking a bit. Most of this stuff grows out of discussions we've had in class.
Selfhood and science
Selfhood and the Reformation
Selfhood and Renaissance education
Selfhood and performance
Philosophical contexts of selfhood
(Aristotle, phenomneology; agency, intention; the mind-body problem; etc.)
Selfhood and economics
Selfhood and political theory
Selfhood and gender and/or sexuality
Humans and animals
Humans and things
Colonial contexts
And much, much more!
Remember that scholarship, like theater, benefits from collaboration and discussion. Talk to each other as you develop your paper topics. And feel free to come talk to me, too! I'm more than happy to offer guidance.
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