ENG Lit I Introduction

2025

English Literature I

What is English Literature?

Q & A

Reflexion time

Historical background

The beginnings of drama

Summarizing ideas

Contemporary theatre

overview Unit 1

• Literature is an art which exploits the English language
• It's not just an English art, it's international

What is English Literature?

Q & A

Literature and English

Introduction

• What was the art that was at the heart of the Elizabethan period?
• What was Queen Elizabeth's ethos?
• What were morality plays and what were miracle plays?
• Why were other plays banned?
• What were the main genres that independent playwrights wrote?
• What was the social treatment that actors endured?
• Who acted in the plays? Who else was involved?
• What was the audience's response to the plays?

Summarizing ideas

Elizabethan Theatre

The identifiable acting and staging conventions common to Elizabethan theatre include soliloquy, aside, boys performing female roles, masque, eavesdropping, presentational acting style, dialogue and play within a play. Stagecraft is characterised by elaborate costumes and minimal scenery.

Historically, Elizabethan theatre refers to plays performed in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603); these include works by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, such as Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Heywood and Robert Greene.

ELIZABETHAN THEATRE

Conventions of Contemporary performance include intertextuality, hypertextuality, hybridity and openness of form, fragmentation, appropriation, and integration of live, site-specific and mediatised performance.

Contemporary performance is hybrid work that integrates text, physical theatre / dance, visual theatre, non-linear form, objects, music, costumes, lighting, image, sound, sets, and vocal expression into complex interactive systems.

Contemporary Performance is a body of work that builds on an aesthetic history beginning in the 1880s with Alfred Jarry and early Dada experiments. It has developed through the avant-garde and performance art of the 1980s and continues into our post-modern contemporary condition.
 
 Contemporary performance is often non-narrative, technically rigorous and characterised by openness of form. Performances unsettle perception, demand critical engagement from audiences, address conceptual debates within aesthetics and draw on a diverse range of cultural interests.

CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE

Consider characters, themes, thecniques, form and structure and think about a Shakespearean theatre play. How do you think it was written? When do you think it was performed? How did the audience know when there was a show? What was the political use of plays? How do these compare to contemporary theatre?

How can drama be used to reframe purpose, context and meaning through contemporising texts? Think of examples. How can drama reshape and transform meaning of inherited texts through skills of drama, including devising, directing and acting? Do you think that a play is only to be seen on stage? Why? How does a script written so long ago speak to a contemporary audience?

Reflexion Time

The Globe today

Aristotle's Poetics

Summary

3. To what extent is it important for an audience to "identify" with the characters in a literary work? Can you imagine an aesthetic approach that does not rely on this kind of identification? 4. How have ideas about performance changed over time? What makes a good actor?

1. Can you think of contemporary works that meet most or all of Aristotle's requirements for a successful tragedy? 2. How have the "modes" of presentation changed with the introduction of new technologies? Are there forms of "spectacle," for example, that are characteristic of the late twentieth century?

Discussion Questions

William Shakespeare

1. “To be, or not to be: that is the question.” Hamlet, Act III, Scene I 2. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII 3. “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” Richard III, Act V, Scene IV 4. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” The Tempest, Act IV, Scene I 5. “The course of true love never did run smooth.” A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act I, Scene I

Monty Python

Laughter Thomas Hobbes: “The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly (Hobbes 1840, 46). We laugh, according to this argument, out of a sense of superiority - the sudden glory or conception of eminency in relation to the stupidity or weakness of others, or ourselves at some point in the past. The second theory is what we could call the “nothing theory” or the “no theory’s theory”. “Laughter is an affection arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing” (Kant). When we laugh according to this argument, we are laughing in a sort of “absurd” vacuum: “merely” laughing, with nothing to support us. “There is no theory of laughter, only an experience” (Jacobsen) Laughter can be dependent on the visual - and literature is full of instances of visual comedy. But laughter, at least in literature, is perhaps more fundamentally a matter of language. How do we spot amusing scenes in Shakespearean theatre plays? There are a number of literary devices such as puns or quibbles (p.98)

Humour in Shakespeare

Laughter How do we spot amusing scenes in Shakespearean theatre plays? There are a number of literary devices such as puns or quibbles (p.98), errors in plot, confussion, disguises, misunderstanding, ambiguity, exageration, twists in plots, unexpected behaviour in characters. Freud argues that jokes tend to be sexist, dirty, violent, racist: they transgress social taboo and “life” repression. But literature, conversely, might be defined as the space in which the seriousness of Freud’s or anyone else’s claims are ironized, satirised, parodied and otherwise put into question. For Literature is the discourse that is, perhaps is more than any other, concerned with questioning and unsettling assumptions about what is serious and what is not serious. Laughter can both liberate and mystify. It can be diabolical. It can be at once offensive (laughing at sexist or racist jokes, for instance) and inoffensive (it was only a joke). It can be cruel, a means of exclusion or exerting power over people (the she just laughed in my face). But it can also be joyous, a means of sharing and confirming one’s sense of “social community”.

Cultural awareness and puns

Cultural awareness and puns

• What two definitions of theorys of laughter does the author give?
• How is laughter represented in literature?
• What cultural awareness elements do we need to be aware of in order not to miss the joke?
• How is humour being deconstructed nowadays? Why?

Summarizing ideas

In search of Shakespeare