The Family is a Little Commonwealth: Teaching Mariam and Othello in a Special-Topics Course on Domestic England

Abstract

S CHOLARS IN FAVOR OF REWRITING THE CANON of early modern literature include (once again) the women who wrote alongside their fathers, brothers, and sons often assert that the insight provided by such reinclusion enables us talk about the past in new and interesting ways. Indeed, this is certainly true in the classroom. By placing women's voices with those of men, we can configure courses in new ways that actively involve students in discussions of the literatures and cultures of the early modern period. My purpose in this essay is recount my experience teaching a special-topics course in the spring quarter of 1995 at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The goal of the course, as stated in my catalogue description and on the syllabus, was to examine the ways that the idea of the 'domestic' functions in terms of literary and cultural production in the Tudor and Stuart periods. Students wrote weekly, two-page critical/interpretive responses the readings, one five-page paper on an assigned topic, and one longer research essay. After covering a broad range of texts and genres, the course ended with the paired reading of Elizabeth Cary's Mariam and Shakespeare's Othello, two works in which I hoped the various trajectories of thinking set up throughout the course would converge: how the seemingly private and domestic are inextricably caught up in the public and the political, issues of gender and agency, the role of culture in the production of gender, and the role of gender in the production of culture. These readings of the two plays could not have developed without the cultural and literary discussions in which the class engaged during the first two thirds of the quarter. My students were a diverse group consisting of twelve upper-level undergraduates and four master's students. The University of Alabama at Birmingham has a population of 17,000 students, deriving predominantly from the local metropolitan area. Like students at many universities across the nation, they sometimes mistrust their own ability read carefully and