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Early modern love discourses offer insights into how early modern writers imagined gender relations, desire and sexuality as well as the workings of body and psyche. In the poetry and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these aspects are explored in both tragic and comic terms. On the London stages, love provides ample opportunities to engage with some of the broader questions of social life, ranging from marriage and household economy to social transactions, from subjection to passion to the freedom of choice, from eroticism and desire to cool calculation and dissimulation. In this seminar we will take a closer look at Petrarchism and Anti-Petrarchan strategies, at medical discourse of love-melancholy and hedonistic love discourses. We will focus on plays and poems by Shakespeare but will also discuss classical and other influences as well as some works by his contemporaries. |
