ENGL 508 - History of Drama in English

Credit(s): 3
This course will study selected dramatic works from the vantage of the cultures of the historical epochs they are embedded in. It will use a chronological approach, beginning with the drama in England: the medieval mystery cycles and morality plays, the emergence of secular drama in the 16th century and earlier 17th century, focusing on the precursors and contemporaries of Shakespeare, Restoration drama, the development of sentimentalism and the adaptation of drama to an increasingly middle class audience in the 18th Century, the closet drama of the Romantic era, 19th-century melodrama in Britain and America, and the emergence of the modern theater in the United Kingdom and the United States.