17411 Hauptseminar

Manfred Pfister

Dialogue and Drama in the English Renaissance

Dialogue is at the core of all forms of drama; the highly articulate and rhetorical drama of the English Renaissance and Shakespeare's plays in particular bear this out most impressively.

In our seminar, we shall put this close relationship between dialogue and drama into a historical perspective: beginning with the literary dialogues written by Humanists such as Thomas Morus or Erasmus of Rotterdam, and intended to be read and not staged, we move to theatrical interludes by Henry Medwall or John Heywood, who stage debates (or débats) in the context of rather rudimentary plots, and from there to the forms and functions of thematically focussed dialogues in Shakespeare's plays.

Our questions will be: what happens to dialogue when it is transferred from the page to the stage and when the conflicting positions are fleshed out in fully-fledged characters? To what extent and in which direction does that change the dialogical negotiations of crucial questions such as the legitimacy of political authority and social hierarchy, the gender order or truth in religion?

The working hypothesis to be tested in our readings is an increase in 'dialogicity', i.e. an increasing readiness to withhold foregone answers and conclusions, an increasing openness to paradoxes and irresolvable contradictions or apori as, an increasing awareness of the subjectivity of solutions and resolutions to problems, and an increasing appeal to the audience to make up its own mind.

As this seminar is about Shakespeare in relationship to earlier forms of literary and theatrical dialogue, a familiarity with plays of his in all genres is a necessary prerequisite. We will decide at our first meeting which plays to focus upon, and then I shall provide a READER of pre-Shakespearean texts to match them.

A first series of texts to be read before term begins will negotiate questions of love, marriage and the gender order: Erasmus' dialogue "A Modest Mean to Marriage" between a girl and her suitor from the Colloquia, two interludes by Medwall (Fulgens and Lucrece) and Heywood (The Play of Love) and the love and marriage debates in Shakespeare' s Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and All' s Well that Ends Well.