Performing Gender and Power in the British 18th Century and Its Cinematic Legacy

From sex comedies to epic poems, from ballad operas to courtship novels, the Restoration and 18^th century helped to define the modern conventions of both high art and popular entertainment. Beginning with the reign of a king who loved the theatre and all-too-public extramarital sex (Charles II), the era also thought in new and troubling ways about the nature and potential of performance—not only as an aspect of artistic practice but also as an element of all social and political life. What if all our identities (king and subject, husband and wife) were not God-given and prescriptive but, instead, factitious and changeable—mere roles that we can assume or dispose of at will? This course considers how authors from the 1660s to the 1800s imagined the potential of performance to transform—or sometimes to reinforce—the status quo, with a look ahead to the Hollywood films that have inherited and adapted their legacy. The emphasis is on drama—with a survey of major comedies, burlesques, parodies, heroic tragedies, and gothic melodramas from the period—by playwrights such as William Wycherley, George Etherege, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, Henry Fielding, and Horace Walpole. We will intersperse this dramatic reading with viewings of films that show its influence from directors such as Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, and Hal Ashby. Some attention will also be paid to poetry, including excerpts from Milton’s Paradise Lost and verse satires by Behn, John Wilmot (the second Earl of Rochester), Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. We will also consider some prose fiction from a self-proclaimed “masquerade novel” by Eliza Haywood to Jane Austen’s study of the subversive consequences of an amateur theatrical production, Mansfield Park.