Special Programs
Shakespeare (Area I)
Prof. Douglas Bruster
‘The play’s the thing . . . ’
-Hamlet
This course will introduce students to the delights of Shakespeare’s plays through direct experience of their performance in the theaters of modern-day England. What happens to Elizabethan plays as they go from page to stage? How should what happens on stage affect our understanding of their meaning? These are a few of the questions we will ask as we view performances of Shakespeare’s plays in Stratford-upon-Avon and London (where we will take in at least one show at the recently reconstructed Globe Playhouse). Following certain performances, we will have the opportunity to discuss Shakespeare’s plays with actors from the performances themselves. By combining the experience of these performances with our own interpretations of his texts, we will strive toward a richer understanding of Shakespeare’s achievement.
Jane Austen on Location (Area I)
Prof. Janine Barchas
This class reads four novels by Jane Austen in the context of the real-world locations that served as settings for Austen's stories and her life. We will read Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Persuasion (1818), and Northanger Abbey (1818) and visit many of the country estates and towns featured in these fictions. Like the heroine Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, we will tour rich country estates and extant eighteenth-century gardens, particularly those of Blenheim, West Wycombe, and Prior Park. In the century prior to the publication of Austen’s works, British landscape architecture had changed dramatically – as the manicured French-inspired symmetrical garden, with its clipped hedges, fountains, and mazes, gave way to the sweeping sheep-dotted vistas of Capability Brown. Austen’s novels comment on how these aesthetic alterations to the landscape reflect moral, religious, and political changes in British culture. Persuasion prominently features the city of Bath, where Austen and her family lived for some years, and the town of Lyme Regis, where she once holidayed. Our visits to these locales will also link place and characterization, just as it famously did for Tennyson on his visit to Lyme in 1867: “Now take me to the Cobb, and show me the steps from which Louisa Musgrove fell.” We will also travel through the Hampshire countryside, where Austen lived much of her life, in order to visit the village of Chawton, where her former home is now a museum, and Winchester Cathedral, where Austen lies buried. We will end the term with Northanger Abbey, a novel that not only provides us with an alternative judgment of the city of Bath but offers a marvelous overview of how Classical sensibilities give way to (and compete with) the Romantic and the Gothic in Austen’s time. With many Regency gardens and period architecture still extant in Oxford’s own environs, we will spend as much time as possible outdoors -- reconstructing both Austen’s real world and her imagined one.
Romantic Legends (Area II)
Prof. Samuel Baker
Robin Hood; Joan of Arc; Lancelot, Guinevere, and King Arthur: we imagine that these have been important literary characters ever since their exploits were chronicled by the monks, bards, and balladeers of their own times. Yet in truth these characters are mainly legendary. They really only assumed their now-familiar forms in the nineteenth century--the same century that bequeathed to us our popular idea of the poets of olden days. In this course we will read some of the works of British Romantic literature, broadly construed, that did the most to invent such cherished traditions. These Romantic works, it turns out, are strangely modern. They present us with a multimedia experience that transports us into antique historical settings while engaging with concerns of the nineteenth century and of our own day. The name these works give to this experience is "poetry," and this course will serve the uninitiated as an excellent introduction to poetry's unique qualities. We will read the early ballads and sonnets that set the tone for the Romance revival; Samuel Taylor Coleridge's tale of Gothic horror "Christabel" and Sir Walter Scott's chivalric romance "The Lay of the Last Minstrel"; philosophical blank verse poems by the Lake Poets, including William Wordsworth's epochal "Tintern Abbey"; and later poetic visions from John Keats, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti. We will also read two novels: Jane Austen's witty tale of a girl obsessed with Gothic crime, Northanger Abbey, and Scott's Ivanhoe, the nineteenth century's favorite story and the crucial modern account of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Students will write four short papers, and will go on several field trips to Medieval locales: to Tintern Abbey and Chepstow Castle, and perhaps also to Newstead Abbey, which both the Sheriff of Nottingham and the Romantic poet Lord Byron made their abode.