- Teacher: Georgia Fulton
32E0348 - Seminar - Tudor Comedy (Autumn) - G. Fulton
This seminar focuses on three sixteenth-century plays (“Gammer Gurton’s Needle”, by William Stevenson, “Damon and Pytheas”, by Richard Edwards and “Endymion” by John Lyly) to study pre-Shakespearean comedy in England during the Tudor period. These plays are particularly useful for investigating the adaptation of Plautian and Terentian comedy into a distinct genre. We will assess how stock characters and stock elements of plot are re-worked for a Tudor audience, looking also at medieval comedic tropes which persist in these three plays. The seminar also hopes to explore stylistic features of comedy in Tudor England, focusing particularly on the way the genre balances the serious with the unserious. By the end of the seminar, students should have a good awareness of the workings of pre-Shakespearean Tudor comedy and knowledge of the development of its chief features in the second half of the sixteenth century.
Course book: “The Oxford Anthology of Tudor Drama”, Oxford University Press, ed. by Greg Walker, ISBN:
9780198728139.
Extracts from other relevant literature and critical material will be provided on Moodle.
This seminar takes place on Tuesday, 14h-16h, in IFAGE 408.