ENG395Z

Searching the past 500 years of British stage comedy, do the roots of bigotry and prejudice, as identified in contemporary comic performance, announce themselves? Is there a line from Shakespeare’s, Jonson’s, Behn’s comedies; eighteenth-century comedy of manners; Victorian philosophical satire; Wilde’s exaggerated speech; Beckett’s flatness; Orton’s outrageousness to the contemporary snarky comedy of Fawlty Towers, Key and Peele, and Curb Your Enthusiasm? Is religious imposturing, a complaint of seventeenth-century writers such as Spinoza against the clergy's case for belief in miracles, a probable source for the highly theatrical practice of feigning? Early modern theater, no less than subsequent theater, has seized on religious hypocrisy to provide material for comedy. To understand the social processes - the mechanism of action - of such migration, the seminar explores and contextualizes theatrical practices of mockery, irritability, and satire.