Drama and Performance

Drama works differently from poetry or the novel because the text is only half the artifact—the rest happens on a stage, and this course is built around that gap between page and performance. You'll move chronologically through five plays (Shakespeare, Webster, Sheridan, Shaw, Pinter), reading each alongside a screen or stage adaptation, and your work is assessed through participation, an open-book midterm, a take-home midterm, and a final term paper. It sits alongside the other genre surveys in the ELIT core, giving you the historical and analytical vocabulary you'll lean on later in period courses and theory electives, where treating performance itself as an act of interpretation becomes a useful habit.