This course will focus on an important genre in the period 1590-1633: drama. Reading work by key dramatists, students will engage with a form that addressed both a highly literate and a popular audience, and is thus a particularly interesting place to trace key and debated ways of thinking in the period. In the selection of plays studied you will read tragedies and comedies. Alongside these you will also be asked to think about the moral and theological debates that were taking place at the time these works were produced and consumed. Thus, for example, plays by Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton will be read alongside writing by Robert Burton, Sir Francis Bacon and Niccolo Machiavelli and extracts from the Book of Common Prayer. As such you will be exploring some of the most important literary texts of the period, but will also be engaging with crucial ideas of that time – about selfhood, violence, revenge, patriarchy, gender, sexuality, and the nature of the theatre itself. Lectures will provide context for tutorials, which will be organised around worksheets that will be circulated in advance, and so will give you the chance to prepare for each class, and will allow everyone the chance to contribute to discussions.