Drama 576 Seminar in Theatre History

Theatre of the Transnational English Renaissance
Traditionally English theatre studies are marked by the long Medieval period of liturgical drama, carnival and cycle plays, ruptured by the Reformation, the closing down of the long Medieval and the creation of the public, commercial theatre of Shakespeare’s day, that was itself ruptured by the civil war and the English inter-regnum, after which a more continental model was introduced. In Spain, where there was no Reformation movement, the long medieval continued, alongside the development of the public and commercial theatre.
If we break the national narratives, we begin to see something closer to an exchange of cultures, a free marketplace of ideas, stereotypes, aesthetics, like the developing international trade, colonial grids of empire, border-cross notions of representation, identity, immigration and imitation in which, through which the Italian, the Spaniard, the Jew, the Moor, become both immigrants and types in a larger formation of nationalism. ‘Trans-national’ may be thought of as the movement of cultural influence equivalent to the free flow of capital in an international market in which ideas flow like goods, between borders, carrying national ideologies with them. Performance (plays) becomes sites of dense inter-actions in the formation of national identities and those ‘others’.
This seminar considers the English Renaissance in exchange with the world around it, particularly Spain, at once both its nearest and most distant neighbor.