123221 SE Literary Seminar / BA Paper / MA British/Irish/New English (2022W)

NB:
This course is scheduled to take place on site, as long as the public health situation permits. All scholarly articles will be made available on Moodle.

Two events of the 17th century exerted great influence on theatrical practice in Britain during the 18th. First: When the displaced Stuart came back from exile in France in 1660 to ascend the throne as King Charles II., he brought with him the continental custom of allowing women to play roles on public stages. His Royal decree meant that English patent and unlicensed theatres alike, after the hiatus of Puritan reign, discontinued the tradition of boy actors. All of a sudden, professional actresses were needed, and by the early 18th century their daughters and granddaughters, having grown up in a society used to women on stage, reigned supreme. Second: Aphra Behn, the first professional female playwright of any standing in Britain, built her remarkable career in the late 17th century, acting as a trailblazer. Once the glass ceiling of 'writing for the stage while female' had been shattered in the late Restoration period, quite a few women followed her, despite the hostile backlash-conditions and potentially rioting spectators that characterised the accelerating "democratization of theatre" (Davis). In this seminar, we are going to look at four plays by four female playwrights who are largely (and wrongfully, I think) forgotten today: Mary Pix, Susanne Centlivre, Elizabeth Griffith and Hannah Cowley. If you have never heard these names - despite the fact that Centlivre and Cowley were stars in their own time - don't fret, you are not alone. Even research is sparse. All the more reason to delve right in, and help close this gap together. Since times are bleak enough as is, I've picked four comedies, the first of which helps bridge over from the Restoration period to the 18th century: The Innocent Mistress (1697), The Busybody (1709), The Times (1779) and The Belle's Stratagem (1780), which all circle around the marriage-plot, the questions of (gendered) power and property it raises and the answers a resourceful protagonist is able to deliver. I hope that by the end of term you will agree that these underdiscussed plays full of "wish-fulfilment structures […] witty trickster heroines and fifth-act reformations" (Anderson) are well worth studying on top of being fun.

Specialist model:
Most importantly, this course should allow you to delve into a world that is both 'chronologically other' (for instance in its rigid class structure and its legal framework that does not give subject statues to women), and oddly familiar (as far as human motivations and weaknesses are concerned and how they are being mocked, but also in terms of celebrity culture and an obsession with public opinion). As regards methodology: There will be no monological student presentations in this class. Instead, you are expected to act as a specialist for one lesson of the term, either alone or as a member of a team, depending on the number of participants. How exactly this works in terms of timing, what will be expected of you and what a 'prep mail', 'the double-feedback-loop' and a 'golden nugget' is, in all of which you are going to participate, I shall explain in detail in the first lesson. You'll be expected to provide a powerpoint presentation as an accompaniment to your specialist task.

Quizzes:
There will be a text knowledge quiz for each of the four set plays, due before the lesson when we first discuss it. You will be able to fill in each quiz at home. Please send each filled-in quiz as a pdf-file or a doc-file attachment via email to sylvia.mieszkowski@univie.ac.at. NB: Any quiz sent in after the relevant class has started, will remain unmarked, which means you won't be able to collect points on it.