English 9222
More and More Shakespeare
Instructor: Professor James Purkis.
Fall Half Course.
The Shakespeare canon is in a moment of change. Computer-assisted attribution studies are making increasingly persuasive cases for the identification of Shakespearean writing in drama beyond the traditional Shakespearean canon, while historical and theoretical critiques of authorship have (belatedly) come to bear on the Shakespearean. Plays that have for a long time loitered at the threshold of Shakespeare’s works, because suspected to include writing by Shakespeare, are now gaining admittance in various forms. This course will study some of these plays and the intellectual and cultural consequences of this broadening of the canon.
The first half of the course will focus on Sir Thomas More. A three-page addition to this manuscript play was first attributed to Shakespeare in the nineteenth century. Yet the play’s collaborative status, and the tendency of critics to isolate the Shakespearean material, make the play a continuing canonical embarrassment and its place within or alongside Shakespeare’s established works remains contested. Classes on More will explore how the messily collaborative playtext disturbs the ideology of Shakespearean ‘singularity’; study the playhouse manuscript as a witness of theatrical practice and revision; and explore recent readings and performances of the play’s interest in refugeeism, migration, and hospitality, and how these readings (perhaps erroneously, probably bardolatrously) isolate the Shakespearean material from the rest of the play to find in the three pages a personal plea for tolerance and compassion.
The second half of the course will focus on other plays either making new entries into the canon – such as Arden of Faversham and Thomas Kyd’s [with additions by Shakespeare] The Spanish Tragedy – or those that have a more established place among Shakespeare’s works that have nevertheless proven to be unsettling through their collaborative composition – such as Pericles and Timon of Athens. Throughout, classes will keep an eye on questions that collaboration poses to the Shakespeare canon and, in particular, classes will trace how a confusing notion of Shakespeare’s ‘work’ or ‘works’ is emerging, especially through companion volumes and print/electronic editions that may be said to produce a deuterocanonical Shakespeare. This emphasis will be further studied through consideration of the untidy canons of Shakespeare’s successors at the King’s Men, Fletcher and Massinger. Beyond the canonical interest, these plays are also fascinating dramas in themselves, and classes will find time to enjoy reading and interpreting plays that do not attract as much attention as most Shakespearean works.
