Aidan Selmer

Whose voices matter in Shakespeare’s plays? In this class, we will draw upon diverse perspectives in the fields of voice and sound studies to explore questions of identity and agency, performance and play, in the works of Shakespeare. We will read and watch stagings of Hamlet, Henry VIII, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and Macbeth—texts that insist upon understanding voices as powerful, though unpredictable, modes of expression. As we do so, we will learn about the history of early modern dramatic performance. What did voices sound like in the acoustic spaces of 16th/17th-century London’s indoor and outdoor theatres, and how are modern writers and artists responding to the “voice” of Shakespeare today? How did psychology, religion, and stories about witches combine to shape Shakespeare’s theatre music? How might familiar characters and plots become unfamiliar when we approach them through the context of children’s performance? We will also consider the ways that Shakespearean voices challenge our expectations about the performance of gender, race, class, and neurotypicality. “Mad” songs, hyper-drag theatrics, curses, jokes, and choked-up confessions: the variety of speech acts in Shakespeare’s works underscores the wide scope of perspectives that his plays offer. Readings from modern voice theorists like Nina Sun Eidsheim, Amanda Weidman, and Patricia Akhimie will help guide our discussion of the resonant social problems and possibilities that Shakespeare’s voices continue to speak, sing, and shout about.

When the iconoclastic poet John Milton published his masterpiece, Paradise Lost (1667), he had already lost the fight he had spent most of his adult life waging: A king had returned to the throne of England, and the radical energy of the English Civil War seemed to have consumed itself. Why write Paradise Lost—an epic poem about the biblical Creation, the Fall of Man, and the dignity of human freedom—at all? Among other things, Milton’s epic is an act of faith: faith in religious and political imagination; faith in the revolutionary potential of love; and, ultimately, faith in poetry as a means to express his passionate “great argument.” In this course, we will take our time reading all of Paradise Lost, considering its revisionary relationship with the Bible, its complex gender politics, its experimental poetic form, and its bold engagement with scientific advances and philosophical problems. Along the way, we will consider a range of theoretical approaches that literary scholars have taken to comprehend a text that one early reader described as a book that “contains all things.” Finally, we will explore the influence of Paradise Lost on later works, such as William Blake’s mystic poetry, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise.

Masques are the “forgotten genre” of English Renaissance drama, rarely appearing on syllabi or studied with the same frequency as works for the popular stage. Yet, during the first half of the 17th century, they exerted a political and artistic influence that arguably exceeds that of the plays that Shakespeare and company were staging at the Globe Theatre. Masques were bombastic entertainments performed for and by the Stuart court. They were studies in excess, with lavish sums spent upon well-documented costumes and scenery. They were commentaries on the state of things in England, where playwrights like Ben Jonson could speak directly (and critically) to the royalty themselves. They were avant-garde experiments, where creatives like the architect Inigo Jones could reinvent the visual style of theatre for centuries to come and where women—at least aristocratic women—could break ground by performing in dramatic roles at a time when male actors alone occupied the popular stage. In this course, we will dive into the hidden world of the early modern English masque. We will read and discuss Ben Jonson’s pioneering works that established many masque conventions, including The Masque of Blackness, The Masque of Queens, and Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. We will discuss how masques offered a vehicle for dramatists to comment on current political affairs, colonial projects, and even salacious “true crimes” while reading George Chapman’s The Memorable Masque and John Milton’s innovative masque about chastity and liberation, Comus. Finally, we will encounter texts that reveal just how far these entertainments influenced literary culture more broadly. This will include Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which shows him trying to “keep up” with masque innovations, as well as Margaret Cavendish’s “The Contract,” a romance that details the complex traditions of attending masques—and the thrilling possibility that audience members might become spectacles themselves.

When we consider some of the “great” works of early modern English poetry—Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example—we are often tempted to treat them as the product of unique inspiration and individual craft when they are, in fact, heavily invested in creating and sustaining collaborative relationships. The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost were published with dedicatory poems by Sir Walter Ralegh and Andrew Marvell, respectively, that stand as some of the best interpretive readings of each work to date; Shakespeare’s Sonnets reflect the intimacies of patron-client relationships, which forcefully shaped the early modern literary marketplace. Indeed, framing poetic authorship in the early modern period as the work of aloof geniuses can obscure the poetic forms that honored creative communities: verse letters, epitaphs, country house poems, song settings, and unfinished works “completed” after a poet’s death, to name a few. In this course, we will explore collaborative authorship in early modern English poetry. Besides reading selections from The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Paradise Lost, we will survey poetry that illuminates the community ethics of these major texts: Spenser’s friendly verse epistles to his friends and desperate dedications to his patrons; works circulated through the poetic circles fostered by Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke; and the poems written by royalists and revolutionaries to promote new kinds of community during the English Civil War. Along the way, we will also encounter poems that show the unique characteristics of early modern English literary collaboration: Ben Jonson’s verses for his adopted poetic “sons,” Mary Sidney’s heartbreaking completion of her late brother’s psalm translations, and George Herbert’s partnership with the experimental bookbinders Anna and Mary Collett. Course work will include a collaborative “journal” project that will help us explore what it means to read and write in relationship with one another.