106-210 Romance and Melancholia

Students who have completed 106-210 Elizabethan Texts are not eligible to enrol in this subject.

Usually 12.5 points of first-year English.

This subject focuses on two contrasting representations of human experience in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English literature. Traditionally described as 'Elizabethan romance' and 'Jacobean melancholy', each developed a set of distinctive characteristics that can be studied most engagingly in its symptomatic masterpieces: idealism in Spenser's epic romance The Faerie Queene (1590-96), and melancholia in Shakespeare's tragedy, Hamlet (1599-1601). Where romance offered an sympathetic expression of the court structures and cultural achievements of Elizabeth's reign, melancholia became the key note of the political, economic and cosmic pessimism of the fin de siécle. Both 'romance' and 'melancholia' will be studied as literary forms, social discourses and somatic formations. These are the contexts in which we will reconsider some famous literary texts by Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and the encyclopaedist of the syndrome of melancholia, Robert Burton. Students who successfully complete this subject will be familiar with the central philosophical, political and literary forms of romance and melancholia and will understand contemporary critical and cultural paradigms for the reading of Elizabethan and Jacobean texts.

• be able to apply new research skills and critical methods to a field of inquiry;

• develop critical self-awareness and shape and strengthen persuasive arguments;

• be able to communicate arguments and ideas effectively and articulately, both in writing and to others.

Written work totalling 4000 words, comprising one 1500 word essay worth 40% (due mid-semester), and one final essay of 2500 words worth 60% (due in the examination period).

A subject reader containing contextual and critical material will be available from the University Bookshop.

• W Shakespeare, Hamlet. Oxford Worlds Classics.
• E Spenser, The Faerie Queene. Penguin.