Time Schedule:
David Odai Johnson
DRAMA 494
Seattle Campus
Topics in drama, history, and criticism. See Time Schedule for specific topic. Prerequisite: DRAMA 302.
Class description
**SPRING 2011** One city, two millennia. Roma Eterna. Using 2,000 years of performance traditions, literature, painting, and architecture, this broad humanities course considers how Rome created, maintained, and circulated its own image of imperial and cultural power first as the heart of the Roman Empire, then as the capital of Catholic Christiandom, later as a city of Papal Princes, the epicenter of high culture on any European tour, until the restoration of the Empire under Mussolini. How Rome occupied its unique charismatic position in European history is largely a product of its own self-promotion. Rome the city invented and re-invented Rome the ideal, fashioned and re-fashioned itself across the centuries, and those acts of invention can be read as a powerful performance of civic identity. Combining the architecture of the city with plays, art, pageants, spectacles, gladiatorial games and opera, all staged to promote the values of Rome, we consider how the city fashioned its own identity as the center of power and culture from Classical Empire under the Caesars to the return of empire under Mussolini: Roma Eterna, remained eternal by re-staging itself.
**SUMMER 2011** Shakespeare Intensive Four weeks, four genres: the histories, tragedies, comedies, and romances of William Shakespeare, their context, their quarrels, their legacies. The course is designed to expose readers of Shakespeare to the traditions of staging Shakespeare, to explore how productions have historically embraced, promoted, and challenged this supreme writer, to introduce this complex writer to artists of the theatre and to make these texts accessible for the daunted.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
