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1. Music (T/ A. Knight, W/ N. Wanless)
Practically, what instruments are used on Shakespeare’s stage?
What is the (cultural) function of music?
Philosophically, how do the Elizabethans understand music?
Think about harmony, the music of the spheres, cacophony, arithmetic
How is music scored, remembered?
Who are the big composers?
Where is music ‘set’ in the plays? What theatrical work does it perform?
Singing? Favourite tunes?
Dancing? Steps? Forms? Function?
What about ‘signature’ sounds? How do you know Antony is approaching?
And noise: how big a sound is possible? Where does Shakespeare use noise?
How does a language of music feature poetically/imagistically in theatre speech?
2. Fashion: Clothes/Costumes (T/ G. Edewor-Thorley, W/ F. Burke)
What can you derive about the stage business of costume from Philip
Henslowe’s theatre accounts for the Admiral’s Men?
What are the sumptuary laws and how do they, theoretically at least,
code Elizabethan/Jacobean dress?
How do the players transfer this ‘code’ to the stage? What is ‘royal’ dress?
Yeoman/artisan dress? ‘Phantasicke’ dress? How does a scholar dress?
A merchant? A virgin? A wife? How does colour work in clothing?
How does a man dress for war?
How is ‘otherness’ coded in dress – fairies? Venetians? The Egyptian
queen?
What are the elements of dress? (what’s a doublet, hose, codpiece,
farthingale, bodice, sleeves, hats, weapons, laces, points etc?)
How does the stage ‘do’ nudity? Insanity? Invisibility?
How is fashion changing across Shakespeare’s theatrical career? New
styles? New fabrics/colours?
What theatrical statements does Shakespeare make with costumes?
How does a language of clothing feature poetically/imagistically in
theatre speech?
3. Medicine: Science/The Body (T/ S. Pournori, W/ P. Pollard-Davey)
How do the Elizabethans/Jacobeans theorise the human body, the ‘little
world of man’? How do they understand the difference between the body
and the soul, and what difference to human physiology did the Fall of
Man make?
Who is Galen and why is he important?
What are the ‘humours’ and how do they operate?
Where do feeling and thought reside (cf. liver, heart, reins, gall)?
What advances are being made in: anatomy; gynaecology; surgery; homeopathy?
How do early moderns understand disease – where does it come from?
What cures, what remedies are available? Drugs? Poison?
How do they understand sexuality and the gendered ‘appetite’?
How do these function in Shakespeare’s plays (and culture) and what are
their physical signs: the plague; the pox (syphilis, ‘the French
disease’); lunacy; hysterica passio; gout; tisick; the wound.
What are the expectations of pregnancy, birth, and post-natal care?
What scientific instruments are being developed for the physician?
What happens to bodies post-mortem?
Where does Shakespeare put disease (and cure) on stage?
How does a language of medicine feature poetically/imagistically in theatre speech
– including a language of diagnosis and cure?
4. Cosmography (T/ R. Marks, W/ O. Turner)
How do the Elizabethans/Jacobeans understand the relationship between
the microcosm and the macrocosm, the world of man and the universe,
the sub-lunar creation and the heavens?
What is the ‘Great Chain of Being’ and how does it work to establish
degree, priority and place?
What physical models exist for the universe? What are the ‘spheres’
And how do they affect human life?
What role do the stars have in human life? Astronomy? Astrology? The
zodiac? The elements?
Who is Ptolemy and what is the Ptolemaic system?
How does Christianity map on to classical schemes of understanding
(or not)? How does the Elizabethan/Jacobean square Humanism with the medieval
inheritance of religious knowledge?
Who is Galileo? How does he change how we look at the universe, and
why does ‘the new philosophy’ cast ‘all in doubt’?
What do the following mean: fate; destiny; fortune; eternity; the heavens?
Where is hell?
What scientific instruments are being developed to help the
cosmographer – optics? Perspectives? Burning glass? Telescope?
Where does Shakespeare put cosmology directly in play on stage?
How does a language of the cosmos feature poetically/imagistically in theatre
speech?
5.
Religion: The Bible, The Book of Common Prayer (T/ D. Dean W/)
Where, and when, do these books appear and in response to what pressures? How do
these texts impact on everyday early modern life?
Who is Tyndale?
Who is Cranmer?
What is original sin?
What is ‘election’ or ‘predestination’?
What is justification by faith vs. justification by works? What is the function of
Confession? ‘Taking the sacrament’? Redemption? Grace?
What is the Reformation and what are the changes that we need to be aware of (for
Shakespeare’s plays) post- Reformation?
How, briefly, is religion connected to Tudor politics? To Stuart politics?
What is a ‘Puritan’? An Anglican? A Catholic? A recusant? A heretic?
Blasphemy?
What is the Oath of Supremacy and how does it impact on ordinary Englishmen?
How does the theatre deal with the performance of religious ideas, practices and rites,
i.e., prayer, sacraments (cf. baptism, marriage, funeral), purgatory?
What Biblical stories/histories circulate in Shakespeare (i.e., Eden and the fall of man;
Jacob and the Sheep; the Prodigal Son; the Nativity and Crucifixion)?
What religious ‘others’ appear in Shakespeare and to what effect (the Jew, the Turk)?
How does Christianity accommodate Humanism (the recovery of the ancient classical
past: God vs. Apollo; Genesis vs. Ovid; Hell vs. Elysium)?
From the point of view of re-formed Anglicansim, ‘what a piece of work is a man’?
how are ‘body’ and ‘soul’ connected, and what happens to a person after death?
How does Shakespeare stage the religious – including challenges to orthodoxy?
How does a language of religion feature poetically/imagistically in theatre speech?
6. Poetry (T/ A. Bogdonova W/ R Abderabbani)
What is poetry, the ‘poetical’? What cultural function does it perform? What is the
status of poetry vs playwriting? Who are the culture’s poets?
What are the poems / poets feeding in to Shakespeare?
Sidney? Spenser? Marlowe? Jonson?
What genres are available?
What do the Elizabethan poets learn from their Latin classical models?
Technically: what tools does the poet have in his bag and how does he use them (i.e.,
antithesis, anadiplosis, chiasmus, synecdoche, alliteration, trope, metaphor, etc.)?
What poetry is Shakespeare publishing?
What is the role of the patron (so how is poetry culturally produced and how does it
circulate)?
How does Shakespeare stage poetry – that is, where does poetry as poetry ‘perform’
in the plays?
How does theatre poetry work? What is the relationship between the ‘I’ of the sonnets
and the voice of the speaker?
How does a language of poetry feature poetically/imagistically in theatre speech?
7. Maps Geography, the New World, the East (T/ V. Truslow W/ Joanna Woods)
For the early modern, what kind of object is a map? What is its function? What kind
of information does it contain? Is a map a document of geography or of history?
That is the Mappa Mundi? What are its features? How does it understand the known
world? Is it possible to map a spiritual geography as well as a temporal one?
What effect do the voyages of trade and discovery have on the early modern
imagination? Where are ‘the Indies’, the ‘Orient’, ‘the East’ and what sites do they
occupy in the English imaginary? What about the new world?
And the classical world: Rome, Alexandria, Athens, Damascus, Troy, Carthage,
Ephesus. What do these places ‘mean’? What is ‘a wonder’?
Closer to home: how do Shakespeare’s plays stage Europe? Venice, Paris, Elsinore,
London, Verona, Vienna?
What, theatrically, is the usefulness of the foreign stereotype and how does he/she get
staged?
What about other global types: the stranger, the merchant, the moor, the cannibal, the
vagabond, the world conqueror?
How does Shakespeare use the voyage as a theatrical trope? How does he stage the
voyage? What is the ‘wilderness’? What spaces can’t be mapped?
Where do maps appear in his plays and to what effect?
For the average Elizabethan, how big is the world? How long does it take to get from
Stratford – or Warwick – to London? How do people travel?
What is the relationship between space and time: how do people count time in early
modern England? What calendar do they use?
How does Shakespeare stage time?
How does a language of space and time feature poetically/imagistically in theatre
speech?
8. Books (T/ E. Turney W/ N. Hodgson)
How new a technology is printing?
How is printing connected to Humanism and the scientific revolution?
How many people in early modern England are literate? Who are they? Men?
Women? Children?
What is the relationship between reading and writing?
What sort of writing gets into print?
What formats are there for books?
Who administers printing? What is the Stationers’ Register and how does it work?
What do books cost? Paper? Who sells books?
Who owns copyright?
What do title pages tell us?
How does Shakespeare’s writing get into print?
Where do books appear on Shakespeare’s (and Marlowe’s stage)? What cultural /
theatrical work do they do?
What is the movement from playbook (the manuscript of the play) from scribal copy
to actors’ parts to plot (all of these, the ‘book’ inside the playhouse) to printed quarto?
How does a language of the book (printing, imprinting, copy, line, edition, ‘bastard’,
‘bear’) feature poetically/imagistically in theatre speech?
9. Government (T/ C. Brown, W/ S.Chapman)
What are the ‘degrees’ of men inside the Elizabethan commonwealth? How is social
hierarchy arranged? Who is the ‘servant’? What does ‘duty’ mean?
How is the government structured? Who does what? Where is the government
located?
How many nobles are there in England? How many commoners?
What is an absolutist monarchy? What is a ‘commonwealth’?
What is the ideology of the ‘king’s two bodies’ and how does it appear in
Shakespeare’s plays?
What is the political theory of the ‘divine right of kings’? how does it operate? How
does the kingdom deal with the ‘bad king’ conundrum?
What political theories are available for thinking through government (Machiavelli,
Buchanan)?
What alternatives are there to monarchy (cf. models offered by Rome and in Greek
political philosophy, Aristotle, Plato).
What acts are treasonable? What language attaches to treason? How is treason
punished?
How do governments talk to each other: Denmark to England; England to France;
Wales to Northunberland? What is the role of the ambassador? The Messenger? The
letter? The cipher?
How does the prince talk to the people? How do the people talk to the prince? What
do the speeches of Elizabeth I and James I tell us about the monarch’s selfrepresentation?
How is macro-government reflected in micro-government: the household?
What metaphors are available to image government (the body politic; the hive)?
How does government, the king, the commons play on Shakespeare’s stage? What is
visibly recognised? What is interrogated, contested? What is the apparatus of
monarchy? How does Shakespeare stage power?
How does a language of government and rule feature poetically/imagistically in
theatre speech?
10. Plays and Players (T/ E. Reid W/ L. King)
What do we know about the size, shape, layout, construction and physical apparatus
of the early modern playhouse; the stage; the auditorium; backstage (the Rose; the
Globe)?
Where were the playhouses located in London – geographically; culturally;
politically? What is the connection of playing to the queen?
Who were the players? How was the Elizabethan playing company organised? How
many players? Company structure? Sharers? Hired Men? Boys? Literary manager?
‘Director’? What other jobs need to be done in a playing company and who does
them?
What is ‘patronage’ and how does it work for the players?
What does Henslowe’s Diary tell us about the daily working life of the London
playhouse? About repertoire? About the economics of playing?
How does a play get written – and how does it pass into and through the playhouse?
What are the stages of theatre writing: how does a manuscript move into
performance? How do the players learn the play? What happens to the playbook
subsequently?
Who is the audience? How many? Popular? Elite? Other audiences?
Who in London is pro-theatre? Who is anti-theatre? What defence can be made of
the theatre? What do the anti-theatricalists allege?
Who are the playwrights? What is their relationship to the playing company? How do
they manage their work? What are they writing about? Who are they writing for?
Where do plays, players, and audiences appear in Shakespeare’s plays? How does he
write meta-theatrically?
How does a language of playing feature poetically/imagistically in theatre speech?
11. Ovid (T/ Z. Juma W/ E. Walpole)
Who was Ovid?
When did he live?
Who translated Ovid, and when?
Where did Shakespeare encounter Ovid?
What did Ovid write that fuelled Shakespeare’s imagination? Where do Ovid’s stories
appear in the plays? Where do Ovidian references appear?
What is ‘metamorphosis’ and how does it function as a constituting trope, fiction, idea
in Shakespeare?
How are the following significant: Hecuba, Dido, Thisbe, Philomela, Daphne, Icarus,
Ariadne, Achilles, Theseus, Morpheus, Diana, Ajax, Ulysses?
What account does Ovid offer for the beginning of the world? How does it contest the
account given in, for example, Genesis?
What account does Ovid offer of the Trojan War?
What models of human relationship are on offer in Ovid? Parent/child;
husbands/wives; ruler/ruled; lover/warrior; rapist/raped; seducer/seduced;
poet/administrator?
What other big source materials does Shakespeare draw upon – classical and English /
European?
How does a language of Ovid feature poetically/imagistically in theatre speech?
12. Rhetoric/Schools (T/ S. Denison W/
When were the grammar schools founded, where and why? Who attended?
What do we know about the grammar school curriculum? What exercises does the
child perform? Reading? Writing? Speaking? Remembering? How do these exercises
equip the child for life?
What is the role of role play in education (see Erasmus, for example)?
What do we know about pedagogic philosophy as it was expressed by the humanists
(Erasmus, More, Elyot) and the protestant reformers (Bishop Latimer, Cranmer)?
What is the point of study? Where are ‘graduates’ going?
How do we understand rhetoric? How does rhetoric fashion a ‘formal’ man?
How does rhetoric fashion social dialogue?
Where do we see rhetoric in Shakespeare’s writing? Oration? Lament? Plotting?
Persuasion? Soliloquy?
What constitutes ‘conversation’, ‘informal’ dialogue, ‘chat’?
What happens when rhetorical structures fail?
Meanwhile, what are girls doing? How are they educated? What is the ‘woman’s
part’?
Who is permitted to talk in Elizabethan/Jacobean culture – and on Shakespeare’s
stage?
What is the function of silence?
Where do schools, schoolboys, scholars, orators feature on Shakespeare’s stage?
How does a language of the rhetorical feature poetically/imagistically in theatre
speech?