Spiru sinteza ist lit engleze an1 sem 1.pdf

7/29/2019 Spiru sinteza ist lit engleze an1 sem 1.pdf

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ISTORIA LITERATURII ENGLEZE

THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH DRAMA

FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO 1642

Conf. univ. dr.GEORGE VOLCEANOV

Specialitatea A i BSemestrul I

INTRODUCEREThe course addresses the first year full-time and distance education undergraduates majoring in English

during the first semester.The course covers the first centuries of English drama. It starts with the Middle Ages and the

religious drama that first flourished under the patronage of the Catholic Church and it goes down tothe post-Renaissance age of the civil war that led to the closing down of the London theatres in 1642.The course is not necessarily history-oriented, which means that the students will not be stifled withhistorical data. On the contrary, the course, as the students will come to learn in due time, is basically

text-oriented. This means that the undergraduates are supposed to read a corpus of works belonging tothe dramatic genres as well as some critical works and to get familiar with the specific, distinctivefeatures of drama as a genre so different from, say, the epic and the lyricalgenre.

The discussion of early English theatre cannot circumvent, or neglect, the historical sources ofdrama, the Greek and Latin dramatic theories and types of spectacle. Students in drama should notignore Aristotles definition of tragedy, the main features of the classical Greek tragedy, the definitionof catharsis, hybris, hamartia, protagonist, antagonist, and chorus, as well as the main features ofGreek and Latin comedy. Speaking about comedy as a dramatic subgenre, terms like qui pro quo,imbroglio, cross-dressing are instrumental in describing and analyzing a text.

The students should hence bear in mind that they are supposed to get acquainted with aminimum of literary terminology. Chris Baldicks Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms may turn outto be a useful reference work in the undergraduates effort to acquire such terms, but any other

dictionary of literary terms (whether Romanian or English) is well-worth visiting.

OBIECTIVELE CURSULUIDrama, unlike fiction (prose) or poetry, is an essentially dual art. It addresses its receivers both

as readers and spectators. Drama is more than literature. It is also a complex visual art that combineslanguage, body language, choreography, light effects, aural effects, music, dance, pantomime (ordumb-show), painting, specially designed settings, costumes, architecture, etc. A play viewed on stagetriggers a different response from the one experienced by a reader in his room at home or in a publicreading room. A reader will enjoy the plot, view it in his minds eyes, and construct the setting and theappearance of his characters. A reader will further analyze a play in literary terms, discussing itsplot, themes, motifs, imagery, characterization, sources, influences, topical allusions, language, style,etc. He will also accept situations otherwise incredible due to his/her awareness that a play is based ontheatrical conventions. These are superbly treated in Muriel Bradbrooks Themes and Conventions of

Elizabethan Tragedy. Some of them are discussed in my bookMethinks Youre Better Spoken (thesoliloquy, the aside, the play-within the play, etc.). Conventions make possible the very idea of dramaas spectacle, as performance.

Before discussing, say, the poetry of Marlowes or Shakespeares plays, we should first have inmind that at the time when the two playwrights wrote their masterpieces, drama was considered asubliterary genre, something not suitable for being preserved in libraries. At the time, drama wasconsidered quite a vulgar sort of showbiz that offended common sense and was often subjected tocensorship and vehement attacks.

Drama has been defined in textbooks of literary criticism as that genre of imaginative literature inwhich characters act out their roles, conventionally on a stage, although some dramas are meantprimarily to be read. In the Middle Ages, the religious plays performed at Christian festivals wereoriginally acted in churches. The movement from the religious to the secular drama, in the second half of

the sixteenth century, led to the building of outdoor theatres like the famous The Globe, whereShakespeares fellow-actors played his famous tragedies and comedies. The typical Elizabethan theatrewas hexagonal in shape. It had three roofed galleries encircling an open courtyard. The plain, high stage


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projected into the yard, where it was surrounded by the audience of standing groundlings. Two doorswere at the back for the actors entrances and exits. Above these doors was a balcony used for themusicians who sometimes provided instrumental interludes, or for acting the above scenes. Over thestage was a thatched roof, supported on two pillars. It seems to have been painted with the sun, moon,and stars for the heavens. A curtain concealed a space underneath. It was used by actors who couldascend or descend through a trap-door in the stage. Costumes and properties (or props) were kept

backstage, in the so-called tiring house. The Elizabethan stage did not use rich settings familiar tomodern theatregoers. That is why the actors words often explained the location and the time of the daywhere and when the action took place.

Acting on the Elizabethan stage was quite different from acting in modern times. The Elizabethanactors had to express emotion in a flamboyant style, mimicking various states of mind with theappropriate rhetoric, with the brows gathered in a menacing frown, teeth clenched, the right fist shaken,the feet stamped to reinforce the violence of emotion (Bertram Joseph). On the other hand, the actor hadto enable his listeners to experience the literary quality of what was pronounced. The voice was carefullytrained by means of exercises similar to those used by modern opera singers. Voice and gesture wereequally important in performance in the process of turning rhetoric, style and figures, intocharacterisation.

The course pays special attention to the works of William Shakespeare, the author who is

considered the greatest writer of all times not just in English literature but in the entire world literature,too. The bibliography contains a number of plays by Shakespeare (both comedies and tragedies) thatmust be read.

For a better understanding of Shakespeares art and of Shakespeares fictional world, the studentsshould read George Volceanovs books, Methinks Youre Better Spoken: A Study in the Language ofShakespeares Characters issued by Institutul European Publishing House in 2004, and The ShakespeareCanon Revisited, issued by Niculescu Publishers in 2005. The main goals to be pursued by theundergraduates are the following: they should be able to express their own original, personal viewpoint about various aspects of a

play by Shakespeare; such an aspect is the discussion of the theme or themes detectable in a play by Shakespeare (the

theme of a literary work is what the work is about); the theme should not be misinterpreted as thesummary of a work; the theme can be expressed in just one word (or one phrase), and this wordshould be something abstract or general, it should not denote a particular feature or event; forinstance, the themes ofMacbeth by William Shakespeare are, say, life and death, regicide,betrayal, the struggle for power, ambition, the assertion of individual merit, justice and tyranny,the absurdity of life, fear, desire, revenge, etc.;

the undergraduates are also supposed to prove that they have read the works mentioned in themandatory (obligatory) bibliography by writing essays on various aspects such as the tragic and thecomic elements in Shakespeares plays, Shakespeares types of masculine and feminine characters,the time and the place when/where the action in the plays occur, the social hierarchy illustrated bythe characters cast in a play, the permanent oscillation between reality and illusion, role-playing, thatis how various Shakespearean characters behave as if they were actors, the role of disguise and ofthe plays-within-the-plays, etc;

one of the best ways of assessing a students competence is to have him/her write an essay titledImagine you are character X in the play Y; what would you do if you were in his/her place?

TEMATICA CURSULUIThe course is structured in thirteenth lectures, each of which will be briefly outlined.Lecture I is about the object and methods of literary history. Like history, in general, literary

history is a construct, the produce of human minds. As such, it is something more subjective than thestudents generally tend to believe. Hence, my philosophy of this course is that all students should beas subjective as possible, and the more subjective they are, the better their grades will be!!! Thislecture will also provide undergraduates with a list of reference works worth consulting.

Lecture II will discuss the dual status of drama as literary genre and visual art, with the dualapproach, from a literary and a performance perspective. It will familiarize students with somefundamental notions and concepts needed in a critical approach to any play.

Lecture III will discuss the major conventions that represent structuring elements of drama and makedrama possible as a visual art of spectacle or performance.


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Lecture IV is dedicated to medieval drama represented by the so-called miracles, mysteries,moralities and interludes religious plays performed on festive occasions under the supervision andsponsorship of the Catholic Church. These types of plays emerged and evolved almost simultaneouslythroughout the entire Western Europe, so they are not a local, national cultural phenomenon.

Lecture V is dedicated to some of the most important Elizabethan playwrights that wereShakespeares contemporaries. Most of them started their literary careers a few years earlier than

Shakespeare did and died before him. That is why I have conventionally labelled them as Shakespearespredecessors. This chapter is very important insofar as it shows that Shakespeare was not a solitarygenius but one of the many great talents participating in a flourishing art and trade. Shakespearesextraordinary work cannot be understood properly unless we place it in a wider cultural context. Nameslike those of Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Nashe, and Christopher Marlowe are essentiallyrelated to the development of the Elizabethan drama. Without their contribution, Shakespeare would nothave been the great Shakespeare we are celebrating today. The greatest of these precursors is doubtlessChristopher Marlowe. His premature death is considered the greatest loss in the whole history of Englishliterature. He exerted a strong influence on Shakespeares art throughout the latters career.

The chapter on Shakespeares predecessors also contains a sketchy presentation of the Elizabethanworld picture, the Elizabethans ontological views concerning mans place in the Universe. This can helpthe undergraduates to better grasp the philosophy of Shakespeares characters and, hence, Shakespeares

own philosophy.Lectures I, IV and V in this course outline correspond to the chapters in my bookA Survey ofEnglish Literaturefrom Beowulf to Jane Austen, (Fundaia Romnia de Mine, Publishers, 2000,pages 9-51).

Lecture VI cannot be found in the printed handbook; therefore, I shall tackle it right here. It isabout the double literary status of Elizabethan drama, in general, and of Shakespeares plays, inparticular. These plays can be interpreted both as poetry and as narratives, two distinct genres, withdistinct sets of rules to be applied in the course of interpretation.

The plays are written in verse. So, they can be discussed from the viewpoint of prosodicelements (rhythm, rhyme, line-endings) or stylistics (figures of speech). If we regard these plays assome vast poems, a suitable approach to be used is the holistic one. Holistic is derived fromwhole: the holistic approach is the attempt to define a play as a whole. When we speak about a playas a whole the first question that instantly comes to our mind is what is the play about? So, the

holistic approach aims at identifying the main theme of a play. We have already seen from the earlierexample ofMacbeth that the ideational world of a play is not made up of a single theme. A play is acomplex texture in which several themes (and often sub-themes, as well) are interwoven. The best wayto identify the themes of a play is to read it and to write down a list of personal opinions andconclusions. Lazy-minded undergraduates, who would sooner copy the ready-made ideas of literarycritics or of Internet data, are liable to fail the examination. Any philology student should be able andshould have the courage to work out a personal opinion about a work, without massive external help.

The plays can also be dealt with as narratives. A narrative is a story or an account of events (TheBBC English Dictionary, Harper Collins Publishers, London, 1993, p. 734). The architectonic dimensionof any narrative is itsplot. The plot has content and the content is the change on a cause-effect axis. Thismeans that we are supposed to recognize causes for effects. While reading a play by Shakespeare, werealize that more or less expected events keep occurring. So, we must incessantly connect one event to

another and we must keep asking questions like, for instance, Why does Macbeth kill Duncan? or Whydoes Macbeth kill Banquo (in Macbeth), Why does Viola get disguised as a boy? (in Twelfth Night),Why does Ophelia die? or Why does Hamlet not kill Claudius when he sees him kneeling in prayerbefore the altar? Such questions, despite their apparent simplicity, can help us a lot in understanding theunfolding of events in a play. Theorists of the novel have defined the plotof a novel as a temporalsynthesis among three factors: action, characterand thought. The same definition can be applied to theinterpretation of a play by Shakespeare. You cannot disengage and oppose character and plot. A plot ismeaningless without an agent. A character is not relevant unless something occurs to him. A plot shouldtake the character in action. These aspects were acknowledged by the great Shakespeare critic A.C.Bradley a century ago. He famously wrote that in Shakespeares plays the action ensues from characterand the character issues in action. Thought is also important in the plot. Various characters upholddifferent, contradictory, opposed ideas. Which are right and which are wrong in their choices? Reading a

play by Shakespeare, the students will realize that no single character in Shakespeare is one hundredpercent good or one hundred percent bad. Shakespeares characters are not personifications of virtuesand/or vices, they are representations of human beings, of human identities, and when we come to speak


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about real life, we must admit that nobody is perfectly virtuous or completely wicked. Shakespeare hasbeen considered by many great thinkers the inventor of modern identity. This idea has been recentlyendorsed by the great American critic Harold Bloom in a book with a telling title, Shakespeare: The

Invention of the Human. Says Bloom: Shakespeare invented us all. That is why it is easy for a modernreader to identify himself/herself with so many of Shakespeares characters.And that is why my studentsare required to relate their Shakespearean readings to their own life experience, not to critics that they

may hardly understand, after all.Before moving on to the next lectures, I shall briefly say a few words about the dramatic species or

genres cultivated by Shakespeare. There are several types of plays: tragedies, comedies, tragicomedies,historical plays, melodramas, romances, etc. The student ought to know at least a minimum definition ofthese species. Dictionaries of literary terms are useful in this respect. My own handbook, A Survey of

English Literature, provides useful information about comedy (pp. 64-5). For tragedy, Aristotles Poetics(available in libraries in Romanian translation) remains the most authoritative source; we can add to itFriedrich Nietzsches The Birth of the Greek Tragedy, which is also available in Romanian. It isimportant to have a few ideas about the theory of genres and I shall explain why. The concept ofgenreimplies a certain set of expectations to be fulfilled by the writer. To read generically means to read withexpectations partly confirmed and partly contradicted. The writer as a creator cannot ignore what othersdid before him. There is a tradition he has to take into account. He has to stay within a tradition and to

depart from tradition, to invent previously unemployed elements, in order not to be just an epigone.Writing within the confines of a genre displays the dialectics of tradition and innovation. As for thereaders viewpoint, it is obvious that the genre of a work in itself sets up our expectations. When we goto the theatre to watch a performance ofHamlet, or when we stay at home and read the play, we knowthat the play is about the fall and death of a noble character. Conversely, when we read or watch, say,AsYou Like It, we know that there is laughter in store for us as readers or spectators, as the play presents astory full of comic events and comic characters, with a happy ending.

The feminist critic Marilyn French is the author of a gender-inflected taxonomy (classification),according to which tragedy is focused on the masculine principle represented by the pole of power,while comedy concentrates on the feminine principle represented by the pole of sex and pleasure.Tragedy is focused on the struggle for poweramong men. It leads to the death of a hero, one whobecomes the scapegoat of an entire community in his attempt to do away with chaos and restore orderand harmony. Tragedies deal with particular cases, with the fate of individuals. Comedy presents a

generalized, universal picture of society. The societies depicted in various comedies are not essentiallydifferent from one another. Moreover, comedy does not focus on a single protagonist; it presents theconflicting interests of several groups of characters. Woman holds a privileged position in comedy as sheguarantees the consolidation of a new order through marriage and procreation.

The following five lectures are something unexpected for most of my graduates: they represent theINTERACTIVE SIDE of this course. These chapters focus on the study of some of Shakespeares mostimportant plays. The plays are to be studied individually, by each and every student. In my opinion, abetter understanding of these plays can be attained if we read and study them in pairs. Lecture VII isconceived as the first step towards familiarization with Shakespeares romantic or high comedy. Theselected texts are As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Read the plays carefully. Then, write down thethemes and sub-themes of the two place and the dramatis personae (that is, draw up the list ofcharacters). Think of the place, the location where the action takes place. Think of the characters

names and of other funny details (like, for instance, the presence of a lioness in the European woodnamed Arden Forest). Try to decide whether Shakespeare sticks to realistic geographical details orinvents a fictional world in which several cultures and traditions are freely mingled. Next, draw a list ofsimilarities and differences between the two texts. There are, indeed, striking similarities between them.(I will let you enjoy discovering them yourselves). Then, starting from the similarities, draw a list ofdifferences between the two stories, characters, place of action, comic events, etc. I am sure you willenjoy sorting out these details. If you want to go deeper with your analysis, think of the opposing groupsof characters in the two plays. How many groups have we got? Do they live in the same place? Find theconflicts that build the plot in its cause-effect relation. Give a thought to the characters identity.Identityis an essential concept in discussing literary characters. It means who you are. Are the characters inShakespeares plays always who they are? Do they have to pretend, to dissemble, to put on variousmasks (personae) and be something different from what they are? Think of Viola and Rosalind. Next,

think of the way in which these characters use language as a means of communicating/concealing theirtrue intentions. What are the uses of language in Shakespeares plays? Try to find the answer to these


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latter questions by reading my book, Methinks Youre Better Spoken: A Study in the Language ofShakespeares Characters.

Lecture VIII is conceived as a parallel study of another pair of plays that have many things incommon. Go through exactly the same stages of research as in the case of the aforementioned playsand identify the themes as well as the similarities and differences between A Midsummer Nights

Dream and The Tempest. Think of the two plays in terms of reality and illusion/imagination, think

again of Shakespeares unique way of constructing the geography of his plays, think of the socialpyramid present in the plays, of the relationships between the representatives of the various socialgroups. Think of the novelty added by the author to these plays, something that did not appear in theother two comedies. Give a thought to the importance of the festive and spectacular elements presentin the two plays, of the plays-within-the plays or the spectacles performed by various characters. Tryto decide which pair of plays is more realistic and which more fairy-tale-like? Then, think of the wayin which love is depicted by the author: is it a spontaneous feeling, is it volatile, or is it everlasting?How do lovers manifest their erotic feelings?

Lecture IX is aimed at introducing students to the atmosphere of the medieval world depicted byShakespeare in his historical plays. I have selected a text with the theme of war, war with France, tobe more precise Henry V. The play deals with the heroic deeds of a hero-king on the battlefields ofFrance during the One Hundred Year War. The play poses a series of interesting questions that the

undergraduates are expected to answer: the monarch as public/private that the person; thelegitimacy/illegitimacy of rulers claims to crowns and territories, the struggle for power and itsconsequences; the fate of the lower classes in times of war; the cyclic patterns discernible in history;the blending of comedy, tragedy and grotesque; the authors attitude towards monarchy (was he asupporter or a dissenter?), etc. Think of the various ethnic groups present in the play and of theirattitude towards one another. Was Shakespeare a nationalist? If so, can we find any excuse in thisrespect? The last chapter of my aforementioned bookMethinks Youre Better Spoken, which is aboutHenry V as one of Shakespeares most fascinating characters, may provide students with helpfulsuggestions.

Lectures X and XI deal with Shakespeares great tragedies. Hamletand King Learare groupedtogether because they share a slight similarity: the parent-child relationship is the central theme ofboth plays. There are similarities at a different level, that of theatrical devices: both Hamlet and Edgarresort to disguise in order to deceive and ambush their enemies. Both my Survey of English Literature

and my studyMethinks Youre Better Spoken contain plenty of information about these plays, but whatI really expect my students to do is to read these masterpieces of world literature and work out apersonal interpretation, using some of the clues I have already listed speaking about the comedies inChapter VII.

Lecture XII is reserved for a parallel approach to Macbeth and Othello. These tragedies featuretwo great warriors, two great military men that end up as murderers, as human failures. Macbeth is oneof those characters whose depth psychology is revealed with unique art. His tragic flaw consists not inhis aspirations toward a higher position but in his lack of will. He is unable to resist all the temptationsarising from the Witches insinuations and his wifes unbridled ambition. Othello, the Moor, the blackbarbarian turned into the champion of Christianity ends up as an ignominious murderer because ofanother tragic flaw, namely his lack of wit. Shakespeares tragedy anticipates the twentieth centurytragedy of a famous American football star, O.J. Simpson, who, in a terrible fit of jealousy, murdered

his wife and her alleged lover. A hero turned into a murderer, Othello lets himself be manipulated byIago, the most perfect villain of all Shakespearean characters. Iago is an excellent example standingfor the power of language in the process of manipulation. Manipulation is a key word in theinterpretation of many of Shakespeares plays, so I expect my students to give it a thought and to try tosee who manipulates whom whenever they read a play. Again, there is plenty of information aboutthese two tragedies in my two books. However, do not forget to discuss these plays in pairs, writingdown your own comments and opinions on the similarities and differences between them. You canfind more details about various critical interpretations ofOthello in my Survey and in my monographThe Shakespeare Canon Revisited.

Lecture XIII is dedicated to some of Shakespeares contemporaries that started their artisticcareer some years later and continued it after Shakespeares death. The interesting fact about the playsof Thomas Heywood and John Webster is that they show the strong influence exerted by Shakespeare

on the younger authors of his age but also the possibility that Shakespeare, too, was indebted to theirart. Thomas Heywood is the author of the most important domestic tragedy of the EnglishRenaissance. Domestic suggests that the action deals with family matters, somewhere in rural


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England, in the household of a middle-class family. The characters do not belong to the aristocracy, asin Shakespeares high comedies. John Webster, who is presented in the film Shakespeare in Love asa teenager obsessed with horrible things and as Shakespeares great admirer, is the author of two great

tragedies considered by critics to be as good as any Shakespearean tragedy: The White Devil and TheDuchess of Malfi. The former was translated into Romanian by Dan Duescu in the 1960s, while thelatter has been published in Romanian by Institutul European Publishing House of Iai. Heywoods

domestic tragedy has also been issued by the same publishing house. The two authors are discussed inmy A Survey of English Literature, pp. 84-87. However, the undergraduates have to prove in theirwritten tests that they have read these plays as they are part of the mandatory bibliography.

I hope that my indications and directions have been clear enough. Do not waste your timereading literary criticism that is hard to understand. Just try to step in the critics shoes and be yourown critics and judges. But, above all, read Shakespeare first. One cannot obtain a philology degree

(diploma) in any civilized country without reading at least ten plays by the worlds greatest writer. Goback to Lectures VII-XI, read the ten plays and write down your comments according to mydirections. Then, try to find similarities and differences not just between the pairs suggested by me,

but also between each and every play. You will come to realize that each Shakespearean play hassomething similar with another play, and all of his plays participate in a dialogue with one another.Try to imagine yourselves as one Shakespearean character or another, use your imagination and try to

remove a character from one play to another. What would Ophelia do if she were King Learsdaughter? What would Cordelia do if she were Hamlets fiance? What would Hamlet do if Iago triedto persuade him that his wife Desdemona is cheating on him? If you succeed in using your

imagination and writing down your thoughts in a clear, coherent English, you will also be able to getan excellent grade in a seemingly easy multiple-choice test.

SUBIECTE PENTRU EXAMEN

The written test usually consists of two subjects. The first subject aims at verifying whether theundergraduates have read the mandatory bibliography. It is either a synthesis of historical informationprovided in my books or a commentary on one or two plays by Shakespeare. The second subject is atext analysis. For those who fail in their first examination, the second subject will probably be nolonger a text analysis but a free composition that takes a Shakespearean character, situation, or play as

its starting point. Both subjects are graded with 4.50 points, plus 1 point given ex officio. The accuratehandling of the English language will provide undergraduates with a bonus.

Here is a list ofpossible examination subjects, which does not mean that they will necessarily bethe ones included in the written test:

Woman in English drama up to 1600;Classify and discuss the types of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy;

Character portrayal in the works of Chaucer, Marlowe, and Nashe;Erotic triangles in Elizabethan drama;History in Marlowe and Shakespeare;Treatment of love in the Elizabethan drama;

Heroes and heroism in Macbeth and Othello;Identify the themes of a Shakespearean play;

The fusion of comic and tragic elements in Shakespeares plays;Role-playing in Shakespeares plays: or, the uses of disguise in Shakespeares plays;

Similarities and differences between two Shakespearean plays;What would character X do if he/she were in the position of character Y from another play?;What would you do if you were in a Shakespearean characters place, in a similar situation?;Compare two characters from two different plays by Shakespeare.

Manipulation in Shakespeares plays: the manipulators and the manipulated;Shakespeares heroines between submission and self-assertion (emancipation);

Reality and illusion in Shakespeares plays;The world as stage and the stage as world in Shakespeares plays;

Social hierarchies and social tensions in Shakespeares plays;The struggle for power and its consequences in Shakespeares plays;

Gender anxieties in Shakespeares plays: Shakespeares women in a mans world;Shakespeares geography;


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The source of comic (comic devices) in Shakespeares plays;The source of tragic (identify tragic flaws) in Marlowe, Shakespeare, Heywood, and Webster;

The parent-child relation in Shakespeares plays;Shakespeares love games: loves at first sight, arbitrariness of love, mature love, love as a battle

of sexes, love as a source of comic/tragic events;Sex/sexuality in Webster and Heywood;

Hamlet and the Duchess of Malfi as founders of modern identity;Recurrent images, types of characters, dramatic situations in Shakespeare, Heywood and

Webster;The function of the double plot (main plot and subplot) in Shakespeares and Heywoods plays;Shakespeares characters as human apes (mimickers of their fellows manner of speech).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Obligatory

George Volceanov,A Survey of English Literature, Editura FundaieiRomnia de Mine, 2000.

George Volceanov, Methinks Youre Better Spoken: A Study in the Language of Shakespeares

Characters, Editura Institutul European, 2004.

George Volceanov, The Shakespeare Canon Reconsidered, Niculescu, 2005.William Shakespeare,Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Henry V, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The

Tempest, A Midsummer Nights Dream.

John Webster,Ducesa de Amalfi / The Duchess of Malfi, Institutul European, 2004.

Thomas Heywood,A Woman Killed with Kindness, Institutul European, 2004.

Optional

Andrew Sanders, Scurt istorie Oxford a literaturii engleze, Editura Univers, Bucureti, 1997.

Leon Levichi,Istoria literaturii engleze i americane, Editura ALL, Bucureti, 1999.

Harold Bloom, Canonul occidental, Editura Univers, Bucureti, 2000.

Antony Burgess,English Literature, Longman, London, 1993.

John Drakakis, ed.,Alternative Shakespeares,Routledge, London and New York, 1991.

Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990.

M.C. Bradbrook, The Living Monument: Shakespeare and the Theatre of His Time, Cambridge University

Press, Cambridge, 1977.

M.C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979.

Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare, Picador, London, 1998.

E.A.J. Honigmann,Myriad-minded Shakespeare, Macmillan, London, 1998.

Gary Taylor,Reinventing Shakespeare, The Hogarth Press, London, 1990.

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Spiru sinteza ist lit engleze an1 sem 1.pdf