1
School of English (QUB)
MA English Literary Studies – Renaissance and
Shakespeare Studies
QUB students should choose ONE module in semester ONE and TWO modules in semester
TWO.
Semester One Modules
ENG 7237 Time, Theatre and Identity, 1588-1670 (starts week beginning 6
Oct at QUB, Thursdays 2-4)
Denise Kelly
The course will explore the relationship between time, the theatre, and identity in early
modern England through an interrogation of the complex cultural texture of England’s
shifting conceptions of time, and an examination of the theatre as an active agent within,
and of, these shifts. Topics for exploration will include (but are not limited to): the history of
mechanical and cultural time-keeping in England and Europe; the theatre as a temporal
counter-economy; the relationship between time and memory; the female body as a
temporal object; the complex interactions between religious doctrine and secular temporal
philosophies; apocalyptic ideologies; the market and the commodification of time; the
politics of time and space; the war on time and the closing of the theatres during the
Interregnum; the radical temporal revisions of the Restoration. The course will focus on
works by the following playwrights and writers: Aristotle, Augustine, Calvin, Montaigne,
Stubbes, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Dekker, Jonson, Cary, Webster, Massinger, Davenant, and
Dryden.
Advance Reading: Landes, David S. ‘Preface’, Introduction’, and Parts 1 and 2 in Revolution
in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1983 and Le Goff, Jacques. ‘Preface’ and Chapters 1-3 in Time, Work, and Culture in
the Middle Ages, tr. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1980.
ENG7038 Shakespeare and World Cinema (starts week beginning 6 Oct at
QUB, Wednesday 10-12)
Mark Thornton Burnett
This module examines recent translations of Shakespeare’s plays into the filmic medium yet
it does so from the premise that criticism, for too long, has concentrated on a narrow,
English-language based sample. By contrast, the films investigated in ‘Shakespeare and
World Cinema’ are exclusively non-Anglophone and run the gamut of global languages and
cultures. The module will introduce students to dominant concepts in film theory (such as
the use of filmic language and terminology) as well as current theorizations in ‘world
cinema’ (what the term means, how it is deployed and how the concept is linked to
questions of market, distribution and the economy). In our discussions of the films
themselves, we will be confronting issues of translation and translatability, representation
2
and location, political context and cultural tradition. Further discussion will focus on the
status of Shakespeare as an icon and signifier of cultural capital. DVD versions of the films
will be available for viewing in the McClay library.
Advance Reading: Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, eds, Remapping World Cinema:
Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London: Wallflower, 2006) and Shohini Chaudhuri,
Contemporary World Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).
Semester Two Modules
ENGXXXX New Worlds, Old Worlds (starts ? at UCD, day and time to be
arranged)
Jane Grogan
The literary, political and diplomatic constructions of East and West in the early modern
period cast a long shadow even today. This module examines the texts and intertexts of
such constructions, and the store of moralised and classicised motifs and paradigms in
which so-called 'new' worlds as well as the 'old worlds' of the Atlantic archipelago were
conceived in the period. This project was intimately related to the questions and instabilities
of national identity much closer to home, particularly after the accession of King James VI of
Scotland to the English throne in 1603. We will therefore explore the making and re-making
of English and British national identity, the investment in ideas of ethnic difference, and the
literary provenance and performance of empire in genres as varied as travelogue, prose
romance, colonial propaganda, drama and masque. In sum, this module investigates the
purposes and means by which early modern English writers mapped themselves and others
by connecting ideas of old and new worlds, all the way from Anglo-Saxon Britain, 'Scythian'
Ireland and classical Rome to colonial America, Catholic Ireland and as far East as the Islamic
Ottoman empire.
Advance Reading: Jyotsna Singh (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to the Global Renaissance
and Thomas More, Utopia (Norton edition).
ENG7024 Shakespearean Childhoods (starts week beginning 2 Feb at QUB,
Wednesday 11-1)
Edel Lamb
Children and childhood are important thematic concerns of Shakespeare’s plays, and these
plays have been adapted for children in diverse ways throughout history. This module will
explore these longstanding connections between Shakespeare and childhood. It will begin
by reading plays such as Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, Richard III, The Winter’s Tale, A
Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet in the context of Renaissance attitudes to
childhood to consider the roles occupied by children and the ways in which childhood
operates thematically. It will then investigate a range of appropriations of Shakespeare for
and by children from the nineteenth century to the present day, including graphic novels,
young adult fiction and film.
3
Advance Reading: Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy, eds,
Shakespeare and Childhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, repr. 2011);
Carol Chillington Rutter, Shakespeare and Child’s Play: Performing Lost Boys on Stage and
Screen (London: Routledge, 2007); Joseph Campana, ‘Shakespeare’s Children’, Literature
Compass, 8 (2011), 1-14 [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.17414113.2010.00768.x/abstract].
ENG40820 Poetry, Piety, Patronage (begins ? at UCD, day and time to be
arranged)
Danielle Clarke
By approaching the work of many of the key poets of the Renaissance, this module seeks to
read and interpret the poetry of the period by concentrating on relationships between
poetic practice (print/manuscript, miscellanies, reception and circulation, poetic
apprenticeship, imitation, ornament, rhetorical training) and cultural meaning (political
intervention, gender ideologies, sexuality, religious ideologies, the court). By exploring a
variety of sub-genres (sonnet sequences, pastoral, elegy) we will examine how these forms
were inaugurated (imitation), how they were produced, and how they signified in the
complex interpretive systems of the early modern period. In addition to detailed readings of
primary texts, students will be expected to develop their own interests, researching a poet
and/or form not covered directly in the module. It is hoped that the module will include a
library visit and a gallery visit.
Advance Reading: ‘Introduction’ in Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, ed. David Norbrook
and Henry Woudhuysen (Penguin) and Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion,
ed. Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield and Garrett A Sullivan (Oxford University Press).
ENG7136
Reading Elizabeth Cary: Writing, Gender, Renaissance (begins
week of 2 Feb at QUB, Thursday 2-4)
Ramona Wray
The first original play to be authored by a woman, Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam
occupies a unique place in the canon of early modern English drama. It is a work of
considerable significance, its very existence introducing key questions about circulation,
print and the relationship between women writers and the literary marketplace. Yet little is
known about Cary’s other works – her very substantial oeuvre, including a history of Edward
II, several important translations and a clutch of letters. This module reads across Cary’s
oeuvre, positioning her outputs in the context of Renaissance writing and culture and in the
context of Cary’s extraordinary life in England, Ireland and France. Contemporary materials
around Cary’s conversion to Catholicism, marriage and estrangement, wealth and poverty
will be used to think biographically about the ways in which it is possible to reconstruct a
seventeenth-century life today.
Advance Reading: Ramona Wray, ed, The Tragedy of Mariam (Arden, Early Modern Drama,
2012)
4
ENG40690 Writing Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (begins ? at UCD, day and
time to be arranged)
Naomi McAreavey
This module will examine a fascinating range of verse, dramatic, and prose texts produced in
Ireland during the conflicts of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Considering the
work of writers who in different ways had an investment in the country, the module will
explore how Ireland is re-conceptualized in the varied writings of men and women from a
range of national, religious, social and political backgrounds. Focusing on texts produced
during periods of crisis, and paying particular attention to the writing of the Irish rising of
1641, this module will explore the impact of violence and conflict on the re-constitution of
Irish identities during this period of remarkable social and political change. In doing so, the
module will assess the usefulness of postcolonial theory and the New British History in the
analysis of a range of discourses on early modern Ireland.
Advance Reading: Andrew Carpenter, ed., Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland
(Cork: Cork University Press, 2003) and Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of
Ireland (Variorum or Maley and Hadfield edition).