Studies in Renaissance Literature

Beginning with Walter Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama, and Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology, this course explores the theory and practice of tragedy in seventeenth-century England and France.  Texts include: Shakespeare, Hamlet; Descartes, Passions de l’ âme, Corneille, Le Cid; Hobbes, De Cive and Letter to Davenant; Milton, Samson Agonistes; and Dryden. Topics to be discussed include the relationship of early modern tragedy to a crisis in notions of political sovereignty; revenge tragedy and the martyr drama; the relevance of Cartesian physiology and Hobbesian psychology to the development of tragedy. Secondary readings in early modern theories of tragedy.