Renaissance Drama: Tragedy: Theory and Practice, 1500-1700

In this course, we trace and analyze the ways in which tragic drama was theorized and written in the 16th and 17th centuries. Our focal points are i) the recovery of Artistotle's theory of tragedy and its integration with broader notions of the tragic; ii) the ways in which different tragic writers lent on, appropriated, ignored, and creatively subverted these theoretical developments. Other than reminding ourselves that the relationship between theory and practice is a two-way street, we think hard about the connections between tragic drama and questions of history, human agency, religion, modernity, and secularization.