This module will introduce you to the cultural politics of the Jacobean court and Elizabethan England by addressing relationships between body and text, colonialism and commerce, gender and power in Early Modern Britain. You will have the opportunity to examine historical constructions and stagings of ‘self’ and ‘other’ to consider how Renaissance drama employs, and shapes, racial and sexual difference on the stage. The module will introduce you to a range of voices and literary modes from the period including prose, poetry, pageants, masques and plays including works by Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Christopher Marlowe, Mary Wroth, Aphra Behn and William Shakespeare. Building on an initial focus on historicist readings of race and gender, the second half of the module will open out to consider Shakespeare in a global context. Using a range of digital archives, interactive websites and film screenings, this part of the module will encourage you to engage with both text and performance in order to consider how Shakespeare’s works might be positioned as a tool of (de)colonial theatre-making. By engaging with a range of contemporary international stagings and intercultural adaptations of Shakespeare’s works you will be encouraged to analyse the extent to which his plays have become a universalising force through which the values of Western localities are imposed on other theatrical cultures, or whether his works provide a medium for creative and radical crosscultural exchange.