Teaching, Curriculum and Learning

Teaching, Curriculum, and Learning Julie Sutherland Chapter Overview Core Topics and Sample Writers: Texts and Contexts 2 Books and Articles on Teaching Seventeenth-Century Literature 6 The Internet 7 Films 9 Final Words 10 Even though a vast majority of university students have reached higher edu- cation with at least some exposure to Shakespeare, instructors often find it a challenge to encourage their students to connect with what they deem his archaic language and equally antiquated themes. Instructors may also find that students have less exposure than they had anticipated and that in fact what they had thought would be familiar, possibly even child’s play, turns out to be very new and very daunting. When students encounter seventeenth- century literature by writers other than Shakespeare, instructors will find undergraduates are one further step removed from any level of familiarity, interest, or enthusiasm. However, once students begin to understand the context of the pieces, including the glittering court-culture, blood-soaked vio- lence, and disease-ridden cities this literature often describes, and once they find themselves relating to the original spectators’ and readers’ frequent lust for vice, spectacle, and titillation (as well as to the equally frequent sense of sin and desire for redemption and elevation), twenty-first century minds begin to appreciate the literature’s recurring themes and puzzling language. Fortunately, a wealth of tools can help instructors of seventeenth-century literature build and sustain student interest. These include numerous digital resources, dozens of films, and myriad paper publications. A sampling of all 1 these resources will be provided below. First, however, I should like to address some core topics that might help teachers structure their courses. Core Topics and Sample Writers: Texts and Contexts While students often have impressive insight into whatever text is in front of them, they often lack the larger picture, failing to understand how the text fits into the period at hand. The students are intelligent, but without someone providing a context for them, they often do not have a greater sense of, and appreciation for, what is being studied. To divide seventeenth-century literature into a series of genres and themes is in some ways reductive, but to give students a sense of some recurring themes and recent critical trends can nevertheless be a good place for instructors to begin. Recent topics of discussion, of course, reflect recent theoretical approaches, but for that very reason they can help make seventeenth-century literature seem more relevant to today’s students. Of course, depending on where a college or university is situated, these divisions become more or less immedi- ately relevant in the student’s mind. Studying, for example, Aphra Behn’s Oronooko from such perspectives as colonialism, expansion, and race may be a more moving experience for students in Africa or South America than for North American or Western European students. However, when students in any place are given some background concerning Western European expansionism, then the text becomes alive in a way it may not have otherwise. Instructors often find that their students are very divided on questions of race in seventeenth-century literature, and studying expansionist texts offers delightful opportunity for debate. Teachers may wish to provide students with the opportunity to formally debate issues such as: did Behn (or any writer on the subject of exploration and colonialism, such as John Fletcher and Philip Massinger in The Sea Voyage, 1622, or Richard Brome in The Antipodes, 1638) underscore racist/imperialist stereotypes of the time, or did she challenge them? This sort of debate can be usefully extended to issues of gender: were men who wrote about women asserting sexist stereotypes or affording women opportunities to be equally multi-faceted as men? It is helpful to provide students with a wide range of literature to demonstrate how differently women were presented by individual writers. What we think of as John Donne’s early poetry (e.g., ‘The Indifferent’) presents a vastly different view of women than, for example, what we suspect is his later poetry (e.g., ‘A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning’), or Thomas Heywood’s prose pieces, extolling the virtues of women, including Gunaikeion (1624) and The Exemplary Lives of Nine the Most Worthy Women of the World (1640). If these lectures and student debates exclude women writers from the 2 discussion, then they will only be partially useful. Why discuss women without including their own writings about themselves and about the world around them in that discussion? Behn’s work is again a wonderful resource, as is the closet drama of Elizabeth Cary (see The Tragedy of Mariam, 1613) and the poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Katharine Phillips. These exceptional women each challenge restrictions on their sex in pieces that had, for centuries, been excluded from the canon. Aphra Behn is particularly remarkable for considering sexuality in the period (‘The Disappoint- ment’ is refreshing in its overt sexuality), and recent approaches to teaching the literature of the period have heavily stressed the importance of including women writers. Human sexuality in general is another wonderful theme to address in seventeenth-century literature classes because of its perpetual relevance. Looking at the explicit nature of Behn’s work – and introducing writers such as William Rochester to this discussion – can enliven a flagging group of students enormously. Consider the obscenity of Rochester and the witty seduction poems of his predecessors (Donne’s ‘The Flea’, for example). Instructors may wish to include plays of the period as well, such as the hilari- ously sexual A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613) by Thomas Middleton or William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675). It is interesting to show students how the Restoration offered unprecedented sexual license – Middleton’s sexual language only seems implicit, for example, when compared with Wycherley’s scintillating text. One tool that helps ensure that students are understanding the texts at hand is to give them an opportunity to paraphrase the work. Have them put the texts into intentionally colloquial jargon drawn from a twenty-first century lexicon. While this assignment works well for any text, it may be particularly effective when studying pieces about human sexuality, because it will high- light the double entendres and coarse humour of that period, bringing to life otherwise dusty-seeming poetry, drama, and prose. Two more themes that often intrigue students are power and revenge, both of which receive considerable attention in seventeenth-century literature. Both motifs recur in twenty-first century politics and entertainment, and students easily recognize the power-struggles and consequent corruption they encounter in seventeenth-century texts. For instance, teachers may wish to show how some literature highlights the intersection between power and exploitation. This connection can be found in such plays as Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece (c. 1607) or Fletcher’s The Tragedy of Valentinian (c. 1614). Both address powerful men’s abuse of women, and the latter has a particularly poignant and timeless roar: ‘Justice shall never hear ye: I am justice’ (3.1). Instructors may want to encourage students to discuss the theme of corrupt power in movies of today (Chinatown, All the President’s Men, The Last King of 3 Scotland, The Lives of Others, to name a few) to help them to appreciate its timelessness. Equally engaging is literature that treats the subject of revenge. Plays of the period are particularly useful. Teachers might try prompting the students to read aloud in class some of the great revenge speeches in such plays as The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606) or The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1609). An interesting area to consider is the realm of female revengers, such as those found in Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1629) or Shirley’s The Cardinal (1641). Students will likely see from these pieces that female revengers seem never to be entirely successful. In part, the representation of failed female revenge may have to do with the fact that vengeance was viewed as a masculine preroga- tive, and a female desire for the same must be suppressed because it presents a challenge to male authority. Rosaura’s revenge, in The Cardinal, is subsumed by Hernando’s own act of revenge. Hippolita, in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, is somewhat more successful. But even Hippolita’s action is not fully successful, in that Ford does not permit her to know she has attempted to appropriate a masculine privilege: her vengeance was not an act committed in conscious defiance of her gender. Further, she dies before she learns that the enemy, Soranzo, has died. Despite such less-than-successful female revenge stories, some of the students may offer some interesting insight into how these roles could be interpreted more generously towards women as active agents of their own revenge. An engaging and useful tool for teaching these plays (or any plays) is to have students act out pertinent scenes. Doing so gives them an opportunity to become familiar with the language of the plays, and it also offers teachers a chance to speak about dramatic literature in terms of performance and to discuss the culture of play-going in seventeenth-century England. Take, for example, Hippolita’s vengeful appearance in Tis Pity She’s a Whore (2.2). Her desire for revenge is ignited by the wrong Soranzo has done her, for whom she believed she had indirectly terminated her husband’s life and with whom she conducted an affair. Despite this, Hippolita has done a service to women—not necessarily because women should follow her example and per- form violent acts of unsuccessful revenge, but rather because she has further blurred this distinction between the clear roles society designed for women and men.

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