CULTURAL STUDIES

The Course intends to introduce prospective students to the methodological approach of Cultural Studies, a framework for inquiry established in Anglophone countries in the second half of the twentieth century, and to present its most innovative features, namely the deconstruction of traditional distinctions between “high” and “low” culture on which academic epistemologies and university curricula are generally based. In particular, the Course will provide the methodological tools for students to develop independent critical skills in interpreting Anglophone cultural artefacts across the ages, belonging to both literary and popular culture, theatre and cinema, musical and visual culture.

Specifically, Cultural Studies will be the analytical framework to foreground the contemporaneity of the Elizabethan theatre. As a cultural institution in itself controversial and ideologically volatile, it did not simply contribute to the age’s profound social transformations but created a unique performing aesthetics through which representation could be effectively politicized, then as now. Cultural Studies will allow students to contextualize the literary as well as the political and cultural impact of Shakespeare’s theatrical innovations on contemporary performed representations; students will discover alternative domains of cultural intelligibility beyond the rigidly exclusionary codes of high cultural practices, and will get acquainted with unexpected venues and forms of engagement with Shakespeare across different media and cultural contexts.

Teaching and group discussions in the classroom.

Module 1. Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood (prof. S. Arcara)

This module will examine an instance of transnational and transcultural re-writing for the screen of a “classic” Elizabethan text: William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, by Australian director Baz Luhrmann, produced by Miramax and filmed in Mexico. After a survey of some of the earlier films (between the 1930s and ‘60s), and through a comparative analysis of the source-text, we will focus on the way in which “the most famous romantic tragedy in the world” is transposed into a new medium with a formal postmodern aesthetics (a hybrid of several film genres and the languages of comics and pop music), resulting in a commercial product aimed (especially, but not exclusively) at a teen audience. In its attempt to make Shakespeare “our contemporary”, which tensions does the film create between homage and pastiche, celebration and parody, and between a “dissident” reading and a conventional tribute to the authority of “the Book”? In order to answer this and other questions about the contemporaneity of the Shakespearean myth and its use in pop culture, we will discuss collectively in the classroom about Elizabethan and postmodern culture, theatre and cinema, texts and images.

Module 2. “Nothing that is so, is so”: Cross-dressing and role-playing in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (prof.ssa M. G. Nicolosi)

While Queen Elizabeth I’s public representations both shaped and were shaped by changing constructions of gender, on the all-male Elizabethan stage, gender difference was represented as the unstable ‘prosthetics’ of role-playing and costume. In plays where cross-dressing was also the plot engine, such double androgyny came closest to exhibiting the “denaturalization of gender” familiar to today’s sensibilities. Like the drag queen Judith Butler discusses in Gender Trouble, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night delights in the ambiguities of cross-dressing: his heroine demonstrates an almost contemporary self-consciousness about the erratic inconsistence of her triple corporeality as a boy actor playing a woman disguised as a male page. Eros itself operates as a mechanism that destabilizes the hegemony of compulsory heterosexuality and class boundaries through the performance of multiple same-sex erotic fantasies.

The methodology of Cultural Studies will be employed to: 1) unpack the gendered ‘grammar’ of Elizabeth I’s iconography and its impact on the politics of spectacle; 2) examine how cross-dressing works as a potentially subversive performative practice in both Twelfth Night and in contemporary re-inscriptions across media; 3) apply postmodern notions of “performativity” to Renaissance discourses about masculinity and femininity in order to read the semiotics of male and female homoerotic desire in Twelfth Night as a de-essentializing strategy against gender binarism and social hierarchies.

• Shakespeare: the Essential Guide to the Life and Works, Encyclopedia Britannica, Wiley & Sons, 2007 (ebook), voci:
  The Globe; Social and Intellectual Context; A Chronology of the Plays.
• Shakespeare’s Globe Mini-Doc, dir. J. Cogan, Gro Digital production (20 min.):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9uDK3xsLYk

Module 1. Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood (prof. S. Arcara)

Primary Texts:

- W. Shakespeare, Romeo e Giulietta, English and Italian text, trans. S. Sabbadini, Garzanti, 2018.

- William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet (USA 1996), dir. B. Luhrmann; L. DiCaprio (Romeo), C. Danes (Juliet).

- 4 video extracts from Romeo and Juliet (Italy/UK 1968), 
dir. F. Zeffirelli; 
L. Whiting (Romeo), O. Hussey (Juliet), on the YouTube channel The Paramount Vault. Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd0LhgZxFkVIWo3koLxNcvJjNF61yivJi

- video trailer of Romeo and Juliet (UK/Italia 1954), 
dir. R. Castellani, 
L. Harvey (Romeo), S. Shentall (Juliet), on the YouTube channel HD Retro Trailers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7P80iRgCqU&pbjreload=101

- video trailer and 2 video extracts from Romeo and Juliet (USA 1936), dir. G. Cukor; 
L. Howard (Romeo), N. Shearer (Juliet), on the YouTube LeslieHowardSteiner. Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC26Q16bNdA&list=PL5A051749EE537420&index=42&t=0s

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMJ-xtxBiPY&list=PL5A051749EE537420&index=39

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWDQMtc2-ZU&list=PL5A051749EE537420&index=40

Criticism:

- Anderegg, M., “James Dean Meets the Pirate’s Daughter. Passion and Parody in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and Shakespeare in Love”, in R. Burt, L. Boose, eds., Shakespeare The Movie II, Routledge, 2003, pp. 56-64 e pp. 69-71.

- Buhler, S., “Shakespeare the Filmmaker”, in Shakespeare in the Cinema, SUNY Press, 2002, pp. 89-94.

- French, E., Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood, University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006, pp. 107-116.

- Garber, M., Shakespeare and Modern Culture, Pantheon, 2008,
Chapter 2, “Romeo and Juliet: The Untimeliness of Youth” (pp. 124-184).

- Modenessi, A.M., “(Un)Doing the Book ‘without Verona walls’: A View from the Receiving End of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet”, in C. Lehmann, ed., Spectacular Shakespeare, Associated University Presses, 2002, pp. 62-85.

- Tatspaugh, T., “The Tragedies of Love on Film”, in R. Jackson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, CUP, 2007, pp. 142-149.

Module 2. “Nothing that is so, is so”: Cross-dressing and role-playing in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (prof. M. G. Nicolosi)

Primary Text (either edition):

- W. Shakespeare, La dodicesima notte, testo inglese a fronte, trad. e cura A. Lombardo, Feltrinelli, 7^a ed. 2015.

- W. Shakespeare, La dodicesima notte, testo inglese a fronte, trad. e cura C. A. Corsi, Garzanti 5^a ed. 2008 (available as ebook).

- 3 video extracts from Twelfth Night (The National Theatre, UK, 2017), dir. S. Godwin, on the YouTube channel The National Theatre:

- video trailer of Act 2 Scene 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2aMKzV6MGo&list=RDCMUCUDq1XzCY0NIOYVJvEMQjqw&index=1

- video trailer of Act 2 Scene 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CiDGr40WLk&list=PLJgBmjHpqgs7QvWMmiIcswmSd6PAE_NJG&index=5

- video trailer of Sonnet 135: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfMKDB8h-qE&list=PLJgBmjHpqgs7QvWMmiIcswmSd6PAE_NJG&index=6

- 3 video extracts from Twelfth Night (Royal Shakespeare Company, UK, 2017), dir. C. Luscombe, on the YouTube channel The Royal Shakespeare Company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THdv42isHaw

- video trailer of Act 1 Scene 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THdv42isHaw

- video trailer of Act 2 Scene 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pQu06_6Ows

- video trailer of Act 3 Scene 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF97NGDN6H8

- video extract from Orlando (UK/France/Italy/Netherlands/Russia 1992), dir. S. Potter; T. Swinton (Orlando) and Q. Crisp (Queen Elizabeth I): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hz15QOlkBM

- 2 video extracts from The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (USA 1939), dir. M. Curtiz; B. Davis (Elizabeth I) and E. Flynn (Earl of Essex):

- video extract from Elizabeth and Essex (scene: Better King) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncrewpJEJfg

- video extract from Elizabeth and Essex (scene: Power play) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ0hraU1Tb0

Criticism:

- Belsey, C., “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies”, in J. Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares, Methuen 1985, pp. 170-94.

- Berry, P., “Three-personed queen: the courtly cult of Elizabeth I and its subjects”, in Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen, Routledge, 1995, pp. 61-82.

- Casey, C., “Gender Trouble in Twelfth Night,” Theatre Journal 49.2 (1997), pp. 121-141.

- Greenblatt, S., “Fiction and Friction”, in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, U of California P, 1988, pp. 66-93.

- Jordan, C., “Representing Political Androgyny: More on the Siena Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I”, in A. M: Haselkorn and B. S. Travitsky, eds, The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, The U of Massachusetts P, 1990, pp. 157-176.

- Traub, V., “The homoerotics of Shakespearean comedy (As You Like It, Twelfth Night)”, in K. Chedgzoy, ed., Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender, Palgrave, 2001, pp. 135-160.

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