Comedy and its Cities in Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance

(4 Credits)

This course will explore the origins and development of the apparently symbiotic relationship between comedy and the city in the dramatic traditions of antiquity and the Renaissance, focusing on plays written, performed, and set in Classical Athens, Republican Rome, the city states of Renaissance Italy, and Elizabethan and Jacobean London. From Aristophanes to Shakespeare, and, arguably, into the modern era, comedy has often seemed especially at home in the city: urban life is a perennial subject of the genre, and city-dwellers among its most loyal audiences. Throughout the semester, we will think about the ways in which comedy has functioned as a form of political engagement; investigate its roles as a repository of local knowledge and a laboratory for spatial experimentation at moments of rapid urban transformation; and attend closely to the ways in which it has represented (or failed to represent) the issues of gender, class, race, and ethnicity that have always afflicted – and energized – life in the metropolis. Readings will include plays by Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, Terence, Bibbiena, Machiavelli, Aretino, Shakespeare, and Jonson.