Hanna Scolnicov, Tel Aviv University

The plays we will study in this course were written around the year 1600, by English playwrights, but take place in Venice, Verona and Padua. Clearly, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were fascinated by what they knew of Venice and its environs, and also wanted to use Italian story-material for their plays. The focus will be on the cultural, social and political meanings invested in the Venetian setting by the plays. We will trace the references to the unique Venetian city-scapes and try to understand their role in the shaping of the plots.

As no scenery was used in the Elizabethan playhouse, Shakespeare had to rely on the power of his poetry on the one hand, and on the singular spatial properties of his theatre building on the other, to convey the visual image of a city on which he himself had never set eyes. In this course, we shall discuss some famous theatrical and cinematic productions. The image of Venice in Ben Jonson's Volpone will provide a useful point of reference.

We will read the following plays: 1. Romeo and Juliet , 2. The Merchant of Venice , 3. The Taming of the Shrew , 4. Othello , 5. Volpone . The first four are by Shakespeare and the last by his contemporary, Ben Jonson. No previous university-level course in Shakespeare is required, although I will assume a general acquaintance with Shakespeare and at least one or two of his plays. See note below about the use of translated texts.

We will view and analyze videos or DVDs of all these plays, emphasizing the depiction of locale. Notable among them will be historical productions by Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, Michel Tourneur, Franco Zeffirelli, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Ian McKellan, and Kenneth Branagh.

Prospective students are asked to read the above plays over the summer vacation, so that they can easily refresh their reading in preparation for the classes. For those who find the English daunting, I strongly recommend reading the plays in translation, but, from time to time, comparing the translation to the English text. From my experience with students in Israel, I know that you soon overcome the initial difficulty, and sometimes even discover that the original is easier to read than the translations, which become quickly outdated. Try it out for yourself and see! But, by all means, do bring along the translations if you feel more confident with them!

In any case, our work will be text-oriented, which means we will, among other things, read and interpret in class. You will get up to 10 bonus points added to your grade for performing in class short scenes from the plays. You do not have to memorize the texts and can perform with book in hand. Also, if there are enough of you from any one country, you can perform using a translation into your own language – but you must be prepared to explain (in English!) the special flavour endowed by your language to the dialogue and acting! A similar bonus will be given for painting a scenic design for a possible production – and explaining your conception to the class.

Evaluation:
30% mid-term short paper (up to 3 printed pages, double-spaced, font Times New Roman, point 12). This assignment will be given on Monday, the 24 th of October, to be handed in on Monday, 31 st of October.
70% end of course exam, during the examination week.

Course outline:
The first week will be devoted to two introductory classes, and the last week for revision, in preparation for the final exam. As there are 12 weeks of classes, this leaves us with 10 weeks for the 5 plays listed, so two weeks, i.e. four classes, per play.

Week 1: General introduction to the Elizabethan theatre and to its ties with Venice
Week 2: Romeo and Juliet
Week 3: Romeo and Juliet
Week 4: Othello
Week 5: Othello
Week 6: The Taming of the Shrew
Week 7: The Taming of the Shrew
Week 8: The Merchant of Venice
Week 9: The Merchant of Venice
Week 10: Volpone
Week 11: Volpone
Week 12: Summary and revision

Texts:
I strongly recommend using the Cambridge, Oxford or Arden editions of Shakespeare's plays and the New Mermaid edition of Jonson's Volpone , although you are free to use other printed editions. These editions contain helpful explanatory footnotes as well as comprehensive introductions.

Suggested bibliography:
The scholarly introductions to the Cambridge, Oxford and Arden editions of Shakespeare's plays and the New Mermaid edition of Jonson's Volpone provide excellent summaries of approaches and ideas put forth by leading scholars.

Books of general interest for the course:
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Maurice Hussey, The World of Shakespeare and his ContemporariesI (London: Heinemann, 1971)
François Laroque, Shakespeare: Court, crowd and playhouse (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993; repr. 1997)
David C. McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice ( Newark: University of Delaware press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990).
Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1985).

Shakespeare
Murray Levith, Shakespeare's Italian Settings and Plays (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).
Stanley Wells, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Lynda Boose and Richard Burt, Shakespeare: The movie (London: Routledge, 1997)
Anthony Davies, Filming Shakespeare's Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells, eds., The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A visual history of twentieth-century performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Ben Jonson
Jonas Barish, ed., Ben Jonson: A collection of critical essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963)
Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
Harold Bloom, ed., Ben Jonson (Northborough, MA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003)
Richard Dutton, Ben Jonson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
Matthew R. Martin, Between Theater and Philosophy: Skepticism in the major city comedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2001)

Hanna Scolnicov B.A. in English Literature and Philosophy, M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature (The Hebrew University ). Associate Professor in Theatre Studies and former Head of the School of Graduate Studies of the Faculty of Arts at Tel-Aviv University, and life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She is the author of Experiments in Stage Satire (Peter Lang, 1987), on Ben Jonson's Comical Satires, and of a study of the theatrical space from a feminist perspective, Woman's Theatrical Space (Cambridge University Press, 1994). She has edited, with Peter Holland, The Play Out of Context (CUP, 1989) and Reading Plays (CUP, 1991). In Hebrew, she has published a study of, and co-translated Adam de la Halle 's Le Jeu de la feuillée (Jerusalem, Carmel, 1999). She has published over fifty essays on Elizabethan theatre, intertextuality, Shakespeare, Stoppard, Pinter and others, and is currently preparing a book on Harold Pinter. She has taught as Visiting Professor at universities in North Carolina, Rome and Beijing. She has organized several international conferences on theatre and was a fellow at Salzburg Seminar in the session on “Shakespeare Around the Globe”, in the year 2000.