17414 Hauptseminar

Manfred Pfister

Elizabethan Others

Anthropology has taught us that projecting and constructing an 'Other' is an important way of fashioning ones 'Self'. What, or who, were crucial Others for the Elizabethan English?

I would suggest, in widening circles, the Welsh, Scots and Irish, the Jews, the Continental Catholics, and the 'barbaric' or 'savage' peoples to be colonised. To each of these groups we shall dedicate a case study:

• Shakespeares Henry V and the margins of Britain and the French
• Spenser and the Irish
• Thomas Nashes Unfortunate Traveller, Marlowes Jew of Malta and Shakespeares Merchant of Venice and the Jews, the Italians and the margins of Europe
• Shakespeares Othello and the Moors
• Marlowes Tamburlaine and the Oriental Scythians
• Shakespeares Tempest and the West Indians

This (highly selective) list of key texts demonstrates in itself how preoccupied Elizabethan culture was with what it had to reject or eject or subdue in order to fashion its own cultural identity. The field is, of course, almost too large to be mapped in one Hauptseminar, but we shall try.

Each participant is expected to have read at least half the texts before term begins and to contribute a paper introducing us to the various discourses of Elizabethan otherness or presenting one of the texts. A detailed programme, a bibliography and a list of topics for Hauptseminar-Arbeiten will be circulated in the first week.

As a first introduction to the problematics at stake I would suggest Leslie Fiedlers 'classic', The Stranger in Shakespeare.