Love/Marriage Age Shakespeare (IHENG-220)

This course will survey writings by Englishmen and Englishwomen who lived in the English Renaissance. We will look at how love and marriage were conceived of, experienced, and written about at that time. This necessarily overlaps with questions of gender identity and gender relations. We will ask: how was the Renaissance experiences of masculinity and femininity different from our own, and where can we identify overlaps? How did literature contributed to further defining and consolidating love, marriage, and gender? Are love and sexuality purely "individual" and "personal" matters or are they linked to "larger" socio-political issues ranging from religious conflicts to voyages of exploration to distant lands? These are some of the questions we will ask ourselves as we read texts (plays, poetry and non-fiction) by Shakespeare and some of his best-known contemporaries.