VS-Literatures of Medieval Britain: Dark-Age Britain
Wolfram Keller
Comments
This seminar focuses on beginnings – more specifically on the question of the beginnings of Britain. One of the key ‘historical’ texts for the history of Britain in the late Middle Ages and the ‘Renaissance' is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, in which Geoffrey recounts how Britain was first founded by the Trojan Brutus. The Trojan origins of Britain are not the only (invented and inventive) episode within the Historia that inspired English authors to reflect about the history of Britain, the story of the legendary King Leir, re-staged, as it were, in William Shakespeare’s King Lear being another. The latter is one of several Shakespeare plays which is set in what one could refer to as dark-age Britain. In the course of the semester, we shall read theses plays – King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet – with a view to how they construct ‘medieval’ ‘English' history and the ways in which these constructions become poetologically productive.
close14 Class schedule
Regular appointments