This course examines how the body is imagined in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theater. In plays by Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and others, bodies perform sexual acts; undergo torture, rape, and other forms of violence; experience selfhood; and suffer through the humiliations of old age. Reading these plays alongside current work by philosophers, legal experts, and anthropologists, we’ll ask how literature shapes the ways in which we think about our physical selves and the society in which we live. For instance, what does King Lear tell us about the bodily theme of aging, both in Shakespeare’s time and our own? Key topics to be investigated include the creation of sexual and gendered identities, the production of embodied political subjects, and the cultivation of urbanity.