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Module Title
LM Shakespeare's Bodies of Knowledge
School
Eng, Drama, & Creative Studies
Department
Shakespeare Institute
Module Code
09 32527
Module Lead
Chris Laoutaris
Level
Masters Level
Credits
20
Semester
Semester 1
Pre-requisites
Co-requisites
Restrictions
None
Exclusions
Description
.This module will appeal to you if you are passionate about Shakespeare but also have a restless desire to explore the rich and strange panoply of early modern systems of knowledge through interdisciplinary study.
Shakespeare’s plays often present the body as the site of competing structures of thought, knowledge and belief. This module will investigate the ways in which such ‘bodies of knowledge’ are dramatized corporeally through a range of disciplines, including anatomy and dissection; theories of gender; teratology (the study of ‘monstrosity’); natural history; witchcraft and demonology; heraldry and commemoration; post-humanism and early robotics; colonial discourse; and others. Through these disciplines Shakespeare’s bodies stage their own liminality, and are shown to inhabit the spaces between life and death; remembering and forgetting; the natural and the supernatural; the human and the monstrous; the corporeal and the technological; the masculine and the feminine; and old worlds and new.
Using a range of historical, contextual and illustrative material – from spectacular funerary monuments to anatomical manuals; from the archaeological remains of magic to the wonder literature of early modern monstrosity; from communal rituals of bodily humiliation to early modern automata and robotics – we’ll plunge into the hidden recesses of the Renaissance body to reveal how Shakespeare’s art was influenced by advances in the study of dissection, changes in the understanding of natural and cosmological histories, developments in early theories of birth and gender formation, prevailing anxieties surrounding witchcraft, trends in the rituals of burial and commemoration, the politics of the tortured body, beliefs and misconceptions attached to race, the impact of new-world exploration, and much more!
Our aim will be to gain new and compelling insights into Shakespeare’s bodies as they perform the systems of knowledge which generate their meanings at the very nexus of material, textual and performative cultures.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module students should be able to:
Demonstrate wide-ranging knowledge and comprehension of the ways in which the Renaissance body was constructed and interpreted across a range of early modern disciplines, media, and cultural contexts;
Develop sophisticated analyses which contextualise and historicise the representation of the body in Shakespeare’s plays in relation to significant social, intellectual, literary, visual and proto-scientific trends in the early modern period;
Demonstrate advanced skills in close reading of Shakespeare’s plays, both as textual and performative artefacts, in a manner which facilitates erudite and persuasive comparative analysis across dramatic genres;
Demonstrate advanced research skills necessary to identify and locate relevant primary and secondary sources across differing media, and to apply these to nuanced analyses of the module’s set readings in meaningful and convincing ways.
