In this course, we will study western European theatre history by closely reading some of the richest and most suggestive texts this art form has produced. We will rigorously analyze the plays' structures, themes, and language; discuss how these texts were originally staged and received; and finally consider what part they have played in theater history. Though the assigned dramas' literary and structural qualities will always be addressed, the primary subject of the course will be plays-in-the-theatre-specifically, the ways in which performances have unfolded in time, in a place, before an audience, in the physical world. A major focus throughout will be on how two forces-the history of theatre and the theatre of history-have put pressure on and changed one another, in theory and in performance. Secondary themes will also be traced through the plays, among them: the performance of gender; the role of the outsider; the political uses of theatrical spectacle; the anti-theatrical prejudice; and the relations between social order, theater architecture, performance style, and dramatic form.

Selective as any broad survey must be, BC 3150 will gravitate towards historical moments when the theatre was perhaps the most vital means western Europeans had of expressing themselves. The ephemerality of theatrical performance and its involvement in so many other theoretical questions and historical forces make its history difficult to study, but these difficulties are also the theater's perpetual strengths. In the theater, history is not only often thematized in plays, it is also made in performance: in the dynamic between performers and audiences; between the theater and its patrons and censors; between any given recapitulation or reinterpretation of a play or performance technique and the original source. Anybody who works in the art form knows that theaters are often said to be haunted by ghosts-that is, by spirits determined to make history and memory vitally present in the physical world, often through repeated appearances before the living. Eerily but significantly, these are also the fundamental actions of the theater.