Studying English with Life Long Learning at St Andrews

Evening Degree Virtual Open Day

Dr Harriet Archer

School of English

harh@st-andrews.ac.uk

Hello, and welcome!

• Overview of Evening Degree modules in English literature

• Format of modules

• How English is assessed

• What you will read

• A taste of “Crime and Passion in Romeo and Juliet”

• Further study

• c.10 minutes for questions

Format of Modules

• Weekly lecture (50 minutes) with topic specialist

• Weekly tutorial (1h30) with module tutor

• Optional weekly office hour with lecturer/tutor/module coordinator

• 3 essays per module

• One text per week (usually)

• EN1901 includes 3 skills sessions:

• How to do close reading

• Using historical context

• Engaging with secondary sources

www.st-andrews.ac.uk/english/people/

Assessment

Coursework essays (no exams)

3 essays per module, c. 2100 words each

Final grade = the average of your best 2 marks

Detailed guidance and feedback from module tutor

Access to the St Andrews Writing Lab sessions

Skills gained

• Reading and writing with precision

• Presenting ideas to a high standard, out loud and on paper

• Accessing and managing key resources

• Sifting large quantities of information for relevant detail

• Adjudicating between and building on a variety of viewpoints

• Developing logical, persuasive arguments

• Paying close attention to the nuances of expression and the construction of meaning

• Understanding the significance of literary and historical contexts

What you will study

Everyone takes EN1901: Reading English (Candlemas Semester)

This module (re)introduces you to:

• Victorian poetry and prose

• Modernism

• Contemporary writing

Skills sessions:

• Close reading

• Historical context

• Using secondary sources

2000-level: Comedy in English

How does Comedy work?

In drama, verse and prose, from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries

• Shakespeare; Wilde; Beckett

• Pope; Burns

• Austen; Woolf; Mitford

3000-level: Crime and Passion in Popular Culture(Parts 1 and 2)

• Part 1: crime and passion in premodern texts

• Part 2: modern and contemporary literature and film

EN3904: Romeo and Juliet lecture

• “Shakespeare uses kitsch to satirize sentimental self-deception in Romeo and Juliet”, Robin Headlam Wells, Modern Language Review, 93:4 (1998), 913-33.

image: “Romeo + Juliet”, 1996, dir. Baz Luhrmann

Crime and Passion in Romeo and Juliet

We’re familiar with the idea that R&J is a play about passion, but what is passion’s relationship to crime?

• In this lecture we consider how romantic passion is often portrayed inthe play through the language of crime/sin, and strategies of concealment: innuendo, impatience and deferral.

• We look at the origins of Shakespeare’s play, in Arthur Brooke’s poem printed c. 30 years earlier, which presents the story as a result of youthful transgression in a foreign, heretical country: Catholic Italy...

Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet (1562)

“So, to like effect, by sundry means, the good man’s example biddeth men to be good, and the evil man’s mischief; warneth men not to be evil. To...this end (good Reader) is this tragical matter written, to describe unto thee a couple of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire, neglecting the authority and advice of parents and friends, conferring their principal counsels with drunken gossips, and superstitious friars (the naturally fit instruments of unchastity) attempting all adventures of peril, for th’attainingof their wished lust, using auricular confession (the key of whoredom, and treason) for furtherance of their purpose, abusing the honourable name of lawful marriage, to cloak the shame of stolen contracts, finally, by all means of unhonest life, hasting to most unhappy death.”

Shakespeare’s crimes of passion

Shakespeare also presents the story using the language of criminality, but here it is primarily metaphorical:

• JULIET: “To prison, eyes, ne’er look on liberty”

• FRIAR: “their stolen marriage day”

• PRINCE: “hear the sentence” / “all are punished”

• Like Brooke, Shakespeare makes a link between passion and crime, through his dramatization of emotion as illicit

• Less censorious, more interested in the risks of concealed or suppressed feeling, the implications of tensions between internal and external realities

Literal disguise at the masked ball:

MERCUTIO: Here are the beetle brows shall blush for me (1.4.32)

Metaphorical concealment:

JULIET: Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face,

Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek (2.2.85-86)

Crime Passion

• If passion is something which can be hidden or disguised, how do we interpret our own or other people’s emotions?

• Lady Capulet claims to be able to read people like books• Juliet says her own love has been “overheard” by others before she herself was aware of it

• By troubling the connection between outer displays of emotion and inner feeling, Romeo and Juliet thinks through crucial Renaissance questions:

• Where are the emotions located in the body? (Not in the heart but in the...eyes, according to Friar Lawrence)

• Do we perform our feelings, or do they control our actions?• Do we generate our emotional responses, or are we “moved” by external forces?• Should we try to control our passions, or would that be a dishonest pretence?

BALTHASAR: Your looks are pale and wild, and do import

Some misadventure.

ROMEO: Tush, thou art deceived. (5.1.28-29)

Passion Crime

• When flipped back in the other direction, this relationship demands that we ask quite radical questions:

• Is criminality inherent or a product of external forces?

• Is sin and transgression a matter of perspective?

• Can you discern someone’s guilt just by looking at them? What kinds of secrecy and pretence are we all guilty of? How/should we judge others?

“Wherefore [why] art thou “Romeo”?...What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”

• What happens when we separate the sign or name of a thing from its qualities?

Further study• Evening Degree students regularly go on to

use their credits to take the full undergraduate degree in English literature with us

• There, you will start off with historical survey modules, such as:

• EN2003: Medieval and Renaissance Texts

• EN1004: Explorers and Revolutionaries

• Before choosing from the full range of Honours options, for example:

• EN3141: Tragedy in the Age of Shakespeare

• EN3219: Reading Popular Music

Thanks for listening!

• Please feel free to contact me at harh@st-andrews.ac.uk if you would like to ask follow-up questions/discuss anything mentioned here further