While sonnet 116 with its essentialist “loue is not loue / Which alters
when it alteration findes” suggests that Shakespeare subscribed to a
notion that love is a human attribute that may be culturally overwritten
but is fundamentally an Archimedean point in the realm of emotions and
affects, Shakespeare’s plays and poems certainly suggest otherwise. With
Charney’s Shakespeare on Love and Lust (2001), Nordlund’s Shakespeare and the Nature of Love (2007), Well’s Shakespeare, Sex, and Love (2010), and Schalkwyk's Shakespeare, Love and Language
(2018) as cornerstones in a growing field of scholarship on early
modern emotions and the performative nature of passion and affect,
Shakespeare’s texts have served as a quarry to construct erudite and
critical edifices in which ideas about love can be displayed, dissected
and reconfigured. We will explore notions of love in the Roman play Antony and Cleopatra
(1607), according to Schalkwyk "Shakespeare's most sustained
representation of the navigation of feeling through the interactive
speech acts of passionate utterance and modes of behaviour" (15), and
square our understanding of love with early modern conceptions.
While the concept 'love' is at the centre, we will also explore ideas
foregrounded in the play, in particular the idea of empire, elements of
Orientalism, and the relatiosnship between politics and warfare.
Methodically this seminar is grounded in practices of close reading. So
make sure that you
a) have read the play before coming to the first session so that we can
re-read passages in the seminar without having to discuss plot and
setting.
b) take notes prior to every session with your questions regarding the text.
You need to purchase a paper copy of the following edition (no e-texts
or other editions will do; paper copies are also available second-hand):
William Shakespeare. Antony and Cleopatra. Arden Third Series. London: Bloomsbury, 1995 [and later reprints].
ISBN: 9781904271017
- Dozent/in: Felix Sprang