ENG745/001

Seminar in Shakespeare Rogues, Pirates, and Boys: Trans*/Queer Theories and Early Modern Culture

Instructor: Dr. Derrick Higginbotham

Time: Fridays, 3.15 – 5.45pm

Location: SAKIMAKI B211

Office Hours: TBD

Location: KUY 416

Course Description:

This course focuses on three categories—rogues, boys, and pirates—that were socially marginal in early modern England but symbolically central, to resurrect Jonathan Dollimore’s formulation from his 1991 book, Sexual Dissidence. Each category serves as an anchor point for socio-political conflicts regarding class, race, sexuality, gender, and colonialism, in the early modern period and beyond. The first part of this course will analyze representations of rogues, around which a literature emerged detailing their criminal underworld; rogues even had its own language called ‘cant’. We will read Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s city comedy, The Roaring Girl (1607-10), which portrays Mary Frith, a cross-dressing figure in London who participated in the world of rogues as the swaggering Moll Cutpurse. Then, we will read a short biography of Frith, “The Life and Death of Mrs. Frith” (1662). This later piece of life writing thinks through this cross-dressed/cross-gendered figure by following Frith overseas, and thus this account gives us a chance to think about the English’s presence within a wider global and early colonial context.

In the second part of the course, we focus on Shakespeare in order to consider the cultural and historical problem of boys, specifically boy actors. As scholars like Stephen Orgel, Phyllis Rackin, and Simone Chess argue, the category of the ‘boy’ in early modern English culture exists somewhere between masculine and feminine, generating complex gender and erotic effects on and off stage. We will read Twelfth Night and focus on its depiction of Violas as Cesario, which precipitates epistemological and categorical crises that shape this comedy. To tease out the meanings of ‘boy’, we also will read Antony and Cleopatra, which plays with cross-gender identifications in terms of both content and staging, especially in the final scenes when Cleopatra anxiously fears a ‘squeaking’ boy will perform her on a future stage. What is the role of the ‘boy’ in this tragedy’s vision of empire building? What effect does racial difference have in the portrayal of cross-gender identifications?

The final part of this course moves to depictions of pirates, who like rogues are criminalized figures that index economic innovation, especially the rapacious violence of early capitalism. We will read Robert Dabourne’s 1612 play A Christian Turned Turk, which depicts the historical pirate John Ward and his adventures in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia; we also will consider some of the poems and images of Ward that circulated in the period to reflect on how piracy sets religious, sexual, and gender categories into confusion. Then, we will read Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Parts I and II (1631), which dramatize the bartender Bess, and her rise to power as a pirate in the Mediterranean, one who woos the Moroccan Sultan, Mullisheg. In reading these texts, we will analyze the similarities and differences in the representations of rogues, boys, and pirates.

By focusing on these three figures, we will consider a host of questions, including: how does the emergence of capitalism impact conceptualizations of gender and sexuality? How does the early modern era represent sexual and gender dissidents, and what do those depictions reveal about the production of sexual and gender ideals? How do the insights of trans*/queer theories help us to interpret these texts? How do these texts and this eras help us enrich contemporary trans*/queer theories?

Student Learning Outcomes:

In this course, students will:

Gain a rich understanding of early modern English culture via a focus on the works of Shakespeare and his peers
Grasp the distinctive socio-cultural impact of early modern theater as an institution
Improve one’s knowledge of different methods for interpreting texts such as feminist theory, queer theory, trans* theory, and critical race theory
Strengthen one’s skills in historicizing texts and objects
Better one’s capacity in crafting a paper, especially in handling an array of primary and secondary sources to make an argument
Conduct oral presentations that effectively convey arguments to an

Required Texts:

Shakespeare, W., Antony and Cleopatra. John Wilders, ed. Arden Shakespeare: 1995.

Shakespeare, W., Twelfth Night. Kier Elam, ed. Arden Shakespeare, 2008.

“The Life and Death of Mrs. Frith” [I will provide a PFD copy]

Dekker, T. and Thomas Middleton. The Roaring Girl: A Norton Critical Edition. Jennifer Panneck, ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

Dabourne, Robert. A Christian Turned Turk. Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England. Daniel Vitkus, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. [I will provide PDF copy]

Heywood, Thomas. The Fair Maid of the West, Parts I and II. Robert K. Turner, Jr., ed. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1967.

I will provide PDFs of all secondary readings.

Assignments:

Participation 10%

Theater and History Presentation (8-10 Minutes) 15%

Respondent to Theater and History Presentation (2 minutes) 5%

Presentation Write-up/Reflection (1,500 words) 25%

Final Project (Research) (4,500 words) 45%