Interrogates drama of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton, and other playwrights from only the second time in world history when the genre conducts a culture's dominant intellectual currents. Umbrella questions: ethnicity, proto-feminism, sexual orientation, secularism, aesthetic-commercial rivalry, mercuriality, Shakespearean exceptionalism. In addition to edited play-texts we will also use major new electronic resources. Grade based equally on class discussion and a twenty-page essay.
