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 immediately 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. By becoming a self-acclaimed revenger, she has allied herself with the male characters in the play and with a whole history of men who have conducted vengeful acts in the name of their own hurt pride or honour. She has celebrated what can now be recognised as the levelling nature of vengeful desire. Students of any gender and all persuasions are likely to be fascinated by such a character. Teachers may wish to have volunteers come to the front of the classroom and work through the scene with them, interrupting to question their staging

4 choices and to challenge them to try different approaches to how the characters relate with one another (for example: who enters from where, why, and in what order? How would the male characters have responded to this female revenger? With fear? Disdain? How do the levels and various entrances/exits of a seventeenth-century playhouse offer opportunities for suggestions of power relations and/or subservience?) Teachers may also wish to introduce students to some non-fiction pieces about power and revenge, such as Francis Bacon’s Religious Meditations, Of Heresies (1597) or his compositions ‘Of revenge’ and ‘Of Great Place’ (Essays, 1597). While these slightly pre-date the period at hand, their lessons resonated throughout the seventeenth century and beyond. Montaigne’s Essaies (first translated into English in 1603) are also a useful tool, particularly his piece on ‘the Incommodity of Greatness’ (3.7), in which he challenges his readers not to aspire to greatness, stating that a life of power is ‘an enemy to all manner of pleasure’. All of seventeenth-century literature is written against a backdrop of a still intensely religious culture, conflicted by a century of reform, counter-reform, hypocrisy, and doubt. Students may find it interesting to compare the earlier religious pieces of Herrick or Herbert (for instance) with the later work of Milton (such as Paradise Lost [1667]) or Bunyan (such as Pilgrim’s Progress [1678]). While full of conflicts, Herbert’s religious poetry seems more personal and less didactic than Bunyan’s later prose, and less argumentative and more emotive than Milton’s verse. Herrick’s deceptively simplistic poems seem nearly childish, failing to rival the more weighty material of Donne or Vaughan, but behind them lies brilliant craft. By comparing and contrasting the different styles and techniques of such works, teachers can help their students appreciate the uniqueness of any text they study. None of these social contexts or cultural experiences is free, of course, from the subtle and ruthless hands of mockery and criticism, and students who are effectively instructed are likely to be especially interested in the latter. Later seventeenth-century literature, in particular, is rife with satire. Rochester comes into play again here, with ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’ (1679) and Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681) or ‘The Medal’ (1682). Stu- dents seem often to struggle with the utility of satire, often forgetting that the pieces exist to attack particular subjects. This may be in part because they feel so removed from the zones of combat into which the satirists are marching. For this reason, in order to ensure that students have a decent grasp of the period at hand, teachers may consider saving the study of satirical pieces for the latter half of the course. Students should be reminded that authors often felt the need to write with some subtlety in satirical texts, particularly when the writer was attacking something sacred to a cross-section of society, or to society as a whole. Comparisons and contrasts with recent satirists can help.

5 Discussing, for example, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show or showing clips from Stephen Colbert’s Colbert Report may get students into the right frame of mind to discuss the satire of four centuries past. If these recent programs begin to feel dated, teachers and their students may want to take a look at ‘old faith- fuls’ that have endured the test of some time. For example, The Simpsons has been satirizing big business and the American dream for over two decades. Teachers might also look at written satire at The Onion (www.theonion.com) or the now defunct but still mercilessly funny SatireWire, whose archives can be found at www.satirewire.com.

Books and Articles on Teaching Seventeenth-Century Literature The Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, sponsored by the Modern Language Association’s Publications Committee, offers several titles relevant to courses in seventeenth-century literature. For instructors of non- Shakespearean Renaissance Drama, the importance of Karen Bamford and Alexander Legatt’s edition of Approaches to Teaching English Renaissance Drama (2002) cannot be overstated. The contributors to this volume provide a series of reading, performance, and research strategies, offering new perspectives on the texts and techniques of this period. Another helpful book speciﬁc to Renaissance Drama is Teaching Shakespeare and Early Modern Dramatists, edited by Andrew Hiscock and Lisa Hopkins (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Placing non-Shakespearean dramatists in the context of the bard may help teachers approach a Renaissance drama course with less trepidation. This volume also has an intriguing chapter on the increasingly popular subject of early modern women dramatists. Other important and helpful titles in the Approaches to Teaching series are: Metaphysical Poets (ed. Sidney Gottlieb, 1990); Milton’s Paradise Lost (ed. Gal- braith M. Crump, 1989); and Milton’s Shorter Poetry and Prose (ed. Peter C. Herman, 2007). Gottlieb’s volume not only cross-examines the dubious term ‘metaphysical’ but also refreshes dusty criticism of this genre of poetry, moving it squarely into the late-twentieth century. Contributors to Crump’s edition helpfully summarize critical opinions on course materials and offer a wide range of suggestions on how to make Milton both enjoyable and accessible. Essays found in Herman’s volume will help teachers provide students with the tools not only to understand but also to appreciate Milton’s demand- ing style and complicated syntax. Another essential series is the Longman Annotated English Poets, including individual volumes on Donne (ed. Robbins, 2009), Marvell (ed. Nigel Smith, 2007), Milton (multiple volumes, with revised editions by Alastair Fowler in 2007 and John Carey in 2008), and Dryden (eds. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 2007). Each of these anthologies is extensively introduced

6 and annotated, providing readers with information on dating, sources, histori- cal contexts, and critical reception. Teachers who have included Dryden on their syllabus should also look at Teaching Satire: Dryden to Pope (1992), edited by Hermann Josef Real. For instructors of Early Modern Women Writers courses, perhaps the definitive book on pedagogy is Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (eds. Susanne Woods and Margaret P. Hannay, MLA, 2000). This book summarizes the latest scholarship on British women writers (c. 1500 to 1700) and advances invaluable approaches for presenting their works to students. Another useful printed work that addresses women writers is a special edition of Shakespeare Quarterly (47.4, 1996), which takes up ‘Teaching Shakespeare with Women Writers’. In this volume readers will find such articles as Kim F. Hall’s ‘Beauty and the Beast of Whiteness: Teaching Race and Gender’; Leah S. Marcus’s ‘Renaissance/Early Modern Studies’; and Megan Matchinske’s ‘Credible Consorts: What Happens When Shakespeare’s Sister Enters the Syllabus?’ Readers will also encounter Jane Donawerth’s ‘Teaching Shakespeare in the Context of Renaissance Women’s Culture’ and Theresa D. Kemp’s ‘The Family is a Little Commonwealth: Teaching Mariam and Othello in a Special- Topics Course on Domestic England’. Despite much of this volume’s emphasis on Shakespearean texts, teachers will also find many ideas for teaching non-Shakespearean compositions. Annotated anthologies and books about teaching and annotated anthologies are, of course, essential. Less immediately practical, but perhaps also more imperative, are books contextualizing the period at hand, in clearly structured and concise formats. There are countless books of this nature. Three, however, are perhaps worth listing here because of their widespread popularity amongst instructors of the period. Isabel Rivers’ Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry (2nd edition, Routledge, 1992) is an invaluable source for instructors not only of seventeenth-century poetry but also across all genres. The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon (eds. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky, U. of Mass. Press, 1990) is a slightly dated but very thorough consideration of women as writers or as objects of representation in the Early Modern period, to 1640. A very helpful book for instructors of non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama is This Stage-Play World: Texts and Contexts, 1580–1625 by Julia Briggs (2nd edition, Oxford University Press, 1997), which has become an authoritative introduction to Renaissance culture for teachers and students alike.

The Internet It is difﬁcult to believe that teachers ever planned lectures or courses without the Internet. The new challenge is navigating oneself through this now

7 perilous landscape, determining the utility of the plethora of sites. There are numerous legitimate and authoritative sites that provide seventeenth-century texts and a whole history of commentary. So popular as to need no introduction is Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature, found at www.luminarium.org. A very useful website is ERIC (English Renaissance in Context) at http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/ furness/eric/index.cfm. One of its greatest assets is its tutorial section on, among other things, Early Modern book production. Designed for students, these tutorials also provide invaluable ideas for teachers. Other helpful online literature sites are Early English Books Online (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/ home), and Renaissance Women Online (a special subset of Women Writers Online, found at http://www.wwp.brown.edu/), both of which require sub- scriptions. See also Voice of the Shuttle, a website for humanities research and a gateway to online literature and academic websites. Its subsection on the Renaissance and 17th Century Literature can be found at http://vos. ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2749. Another helpful gateway link is CEReS (Cam- bridge English Renaissance Electronic Service) at http://www.english. cam.ac.uk/ceres/. Finally, instructors may also wish to look at What Good Teachers Say About Teaching, available online at http://teaching.berkeley.edu/goodteachers/. First published in book form in 1994, this online site offers words of advice from teachers at Berkeley who have at some point in their careers achieved the Distinguished Teaching Award. Most relevant to the Seventeenth Century are the entries written by Janet Adelman, Stephen Booth, Stephen Greenblatt, and Hugh Macrae Richmond. These teachers may or may not give concrete teaching tips, but their musings serve as inspiration to any teacher of the period. It is also a good idea to see what other teachers actually include on their syllabi. Excellent course descriptions can be found on university English department websites. Course descriptions abound; here I shall list a few that seemed particularly thorough: Durham University English Department’s website offers course descriptions of RENAISSANCE LITERATURE LEVEL 2 at http://www.dur.ac.uk/faculty.handbook/module_description/?year= 2008&module_code=ENGL2041 and RENAISSANCE LITERATURE LEVEL 3 at http://www.dur.ac.uk/faculty.handbook/module_description/?year= 2008&module_code=ENGL3041. Also see their course descriptions of FORMS OF ENGLISH DRAMA, 1625–1737 (http://www.dur.ac.uk/faculty. handbook/module_description/?year=2008&module_code=ENGL2511) and RENAISSANCE TRAGEDY (http://www.dur.ac.uk/faculty.handbook/ module_description/?year=2008&module_code=ENGL2261). Warwick University also has exhaustive explanations of their modules on its website. See, for example, Warwick’s description of its Seventeenth-

8 Century Literature and Culture course: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/ arts/english/undergraduate/current/modules/fulllist/second/en228/.

Films Teachers should never underestimate the power of film to attract students and to provide variety in the classroom. The company known as Films for the Humanities and Sciences provides a prodigious offering of visual media that pertains to the Renaissance. Some helpful titles include: ‘The Renaissance Theatre’; ‘John Donne’; ‘The Metaphysical Poets’; ‘Paradise Lost’; ‘’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: The First Women on the London Stage’; and ‘Early English Aloud and Alive: The Language of Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare’; and The Changeling by Thomas Middleton. Further information about all these titles, along with sample clips, can be found at http://ffh.films.com/. Each of the offerings available from Films for the Humanities blends scholarship with visual appeal. Many are fairly short (less than sixty minutes), which permits teachers to facilitate conversation following the film. Teachers may wish to provide students with a list of things to watch for during these films in order to ensure a better conversation. Students might be asked, for instance, what seemed significant or interesting to them, and why, and they might be asked to discuss these observations in groups before they present their ideas to the class. Some recent feature films may also help to pique a student’s interest in the seventeenth century. By appropriating Renaissance characters, figures, and events, modern filmmakers have successfully reignited an interest in a period long past. Considering V for Vendetta, for example, might help students link terrorist fears of today with those of the past. This 2006 action-thriller directed by James McTeigue exploits the Guy Fawkes story at the same time as it makes it accessible to generations now fixated on the moving image. The same generation will appreciate the continuity between the discontent and social upheaval found both in the literature of Jacobean England and in the 1970s anarchist punk revolution. These associations are explicitly celebrated in Julien Temple’s rockumentary, The Filth and the Fury (2000), which traces the brief but significant life of the Sex Pistols. The dispossessed counter- culture spotlighted in this twenty-first century film can be likened to a num- ber of brooding or violent malcontents in early modern drama, and the film is in fact directly connected with Shakespeare’s Richard III. Non-Shakespearean plays are full of such characters as well, including Amintor or Aspatia in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (1613) or Satan in Milton’s Para- dise Lost. Another useful approach to film is to consider the artistic challenges filmmakers encounter in reproducing seventeenth-century drama. Twentieth- and

9 twenty-first century film as a medium stands in stark visual contrast to seventeenth-century drama. Classes might watch portions or whole films and then discuss the evolution of visual media. A wonderful film for such an endeavour is Alex Cox’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (2002), which is based on the play of the same name commonly attributed to Cyril Tourner or Thomas Middleton. Alex Cox calls this an ‘angry, almost-demented play, and a black comedy’ and he saw it his role to make it accessible to modern audiences while still remaining true to the piece. Watching a film such as this provides wonderful opportunity to explore with students the relevance of Jacobean drama to today. A superb interview of Alex Cox, which addresses some of the recurring themes he deems relevant to both the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, can be found at http://www.alexcox.com/dir_ revengerstragedy.htm. A less loosely interpreted film, but still an excellent vehicle for considering the colliding of Renaissance and twentieth-century media, is the BBC 1993 production of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, directed by Simon Curtis. It might be interesting to compare this made-for-TV production starring Bob Hoskins with the modernized production in 1998, directed by Marcus Thompson. Despite some of the latter’s artistic failures, the film provides an opportunity for class discussion on the modernization of early modern plays.

Final Words The dissociation students often feel from seventeenth-century work seems to be result largely from a lack of familiarity with the culture and the language. Once students shed their fear of the language and begin to appreciate the timelessness of many of the era’s themes, and once they understand the socio- political contexts of less-timeless themes, a whole world of creative imagin- ation opens up to them: texts take on skin and clothing and breathe, and life comes to the seventeenth-century classroom.