L5ANM536 - Littérature et Civilisation de la Renaissance - LCottegnies

  • Love and lust in Shakespeare and his contemporaries 
Option d'approfondissement sur la littérature (ici poésie et théâtre) et la culture de la période élisabéthaine et du XVIIe siècle.

This class offers an introduction to seventeenth-century English literature and culture, with a special focus on representations of love, sex and passion. We will be reading literary texts together with other documents (sermons, medical texts, legal documents, essays…) as a way of contextualizing these representations and the language commonly used to talk about love -- which will help us navigate the discourse of idealization encountered in poetry in the context of social realities that were often less glamorous. Could one marry for love in the seventeenth century? What agency were women allowed? The course will in particular study the social and theological status of woman and attitudes towards marriage before discussing a selection of literary works of the time that reflect the complexities of the relationships between men and women.  

After an introduction about the contexts of love and marriage in Elizabethan times, the course will start with an examination of the conventions of love in poetry, especially the sonnet form which, taking up the Petrarchan tradition, idealizes women and describes love in formulaic terms. The tradition interestingly finds a political outlet in the cult of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, often couched in terms of love and courtship. Then we will turn to a selection of sonnets and poems, by the poet John Donne, in particular, which break away from the Petrarchan tradition and celebrate different kinds of love. A couple of Sonnets by Shakespeare will offer a striking counterpoint to the mainstream tradition, not only because they revamp the Petrarchan sonnet completely, but also because they celebrate homoerotic love (2 classes). In the second half of the semester we shall study two plays which revolutionized the literary representations of passion and love, and offered ground-breaking, striking forms the new contemporary sensibilities: first, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (3 classes) and then Webster’s Duchess of Malfi.

The class is in English.