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Barbato, Guido. "Mannerism in Elizabethan literature and drama." Thesis, University of Ulster, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.274107.
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Oram, Yvonne. "Older women in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2002. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/1778/.
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This thesis explores the presentation of older women on stage from 1558-1625, establishing that the character is predominantly pictured within the domestic sphere, as wife, mother, stepmother or widow. Specific dramatic stereotypes for these roles are identified, and compared and contrasted with historical material relating to older women. The few plays in which these stereotypes are subverted are fully examined. Stage nurse and bawd characters are also older women and this study reveals them to be imaged exclusively as matching stereotypes. Only four plays, Peele’s The Old Wives Tale, Fletcher’s Bonduca, and Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale, by Shakespeare, reject stereotyping of the central older women. The Introduction sets out the methodology of this research, and Chapter 1 compares stage stereotyping of the older woman with evidence from contemporary sources. This research pattern is repeated in Chapters 2-4 on the older wife, mother and stepmother, and widow, and subversion of these stereotypes on stage is also considered. Chapter 5 reveals stereotypical stage presentation as our principal source of knowledge about the older nurse and bawd. Chapter 6 examines the subtle, yet comprehensive, rejection of the stereotypes. The Conclusion summarises the academic and ongoing cultural relevance of this thesis.
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Jarrett, Joseph Christopher. "Mathematics and Late Elizabethan drama, 1587-1603." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2017. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/270195.
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This dissertation considers the influence that sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century mathematical thinking exerted on popular drama in the final sixteen years of Elizabeth I’s reign. It concentrates upon six plays by five dramatists, and attempts to analyse how the terms, concepts, and implications of contemporary mathematics impacted upon their vocabularies, forms, and aesthetic and dramaturgical effects and affects. Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter, which sets out the scope of the whole project. It locates the dissertation in its critical and scholarly context, and provides a history of the technical and conceptual overlap between the mathematical and literary arts, before traversing the body of intellectual-historical information necessary to situate contextually the ensuing five chapters. This includes a survey of mathematical practice and pedagogy in Elizabethan England. Chapter 2, ‘Algebra and the Art of War’, considers the role of algebra in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays. It explores the function of algebraic concepts in early modern military theory, and argues that Marlowe utilised the overlap he found between the two disciplines to create a unique theatrical spectacle. Marlowe’s ‘algebraic stage’, I suggest, enabled its audiences to perceive the enormous scope and aesthetic beauty of warfare within the practical and spatial limitations of the Elizabethan playhouse. Chapter 3, ‘Magic, and the Mathematic Rules’, explores the distinction between magic and mathematics presented in Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. It considers early modern debates surrounding what magic is, and how it was often confused and/or conflated with mathematical skill. It argues that Greene utilised the set of difficult, ambiguous distinctions that arose from such debates for their dramatic potential, because they lay also at the heart of similar anxieties surrounding theatrical spectacles. Chapter 4, ‘Circular Geometries’, considers the circular poetics effected in Dekker’s Old Fortunatus. It contends that Dekker found an epistemological role for drama by having Old Fortunatus acknowledge a set of geometrical affiliations which it proceeds to inscribe itself into. The circular entities which permeate its form and content are as disparate as geometric points, the Ptolemaic cosmos, and the architecture of the Elizabethan playhouses, and yet, Old Fortunatus unifies these entities to praise God and the monarchy. Chapter 5, ‘Infinities and Infinitesimals’, considers how the infinitely large and infinitely small permeate the language and structure of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It argues that the play is embroiled with the mathematical implications of Copernican cosmography and its Brunian atomistic extension, and offers a linkage between the social circles of Shakespeare and Thomas Harriot. Hamlet, it suggests, courts such ideas at the cutting-edge of contemporary science in order to complicate the ontological context within which Hamlet’s revenge act must take place. Chapter 6, ‘Quantifying Death, Calculating Revenge’, proposes that the quantification of death, and the concomitant calculation of an appropriate revenge, are made an explicit component of Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman. It suggests that Chettle enters two distinctly mathematical models of revenge into productive counterpoint in the play in order to interrogate the ethics of revenge, and to dramatise attempts at quantifying the parameters of equality and excess, parity and profit.
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Allen, Gerard Peter. "'This is my mind, I will have it so' : the developing imperative of sixteenth-century individualism and its dramatization in the plays of Christoper Marlowe." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.262559.
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Elaskary, Mohamed. "The image of Moors in the writings of four Elizabethan dramatists : Peele, Dekker, Heywood and Shakespeare." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10036/48033.
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The word ‘Moor’ is a loose term that was used in Medieval and Renaissance England to refer to the ‘Moors’, ‘blackmoors’, ‘Negroes’, ‘Indians’, ‘Mahometans’ or ‘Muslims’. All these terms were more often than not used interchangeably. This study is concerned with the Moor from North Africa. This study is divided chronologically into two phases. The first part deals with the plays that were written during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I while the second part examines the plays that were written during (and after) the rule of King James I. Queen Elizabeth I and King James I had opposite points of view when it came to the relationship between England and the Muslim world. Thus, while Queen Elizabeth was in closer alliance with the Moors and the Turks than the Spaniards and the French, King James I chose, only after a few months of being enthroned as the King of the English monarchy, to befriend the Spaniards rather than the Moors and the Turks. The plays discussed in this thesis will be viewed against the opposite policies adopted by Elizabeth I and James I concerning the relationship between England and the Muslim world. The idea of poetic verisimilitude will be given due importance throughout this study. In other words, I propose to answer the question: did the authors discussed in this thesis manage to represent their Moorish characters in an efficient and objective way or not? Warner G. Rice, Mohammed Fuad Sha’ban, Thoraya Obaid, Anthony Gerald Barthelemy and Gerry Brotton had written PhD dissertations on the image of Moors, Turks, or Persians, in English drama. This study, however, will focus on the image of North African Moors in Elizabethan drama. What I intend to do in this thesis is to relate each of the plays discussed to a context (political, historical, or religious) of its time. My argument here is that the tone and the motive behind writing all these plays was always political. For example, George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar will be related to the historical and political givens of the 1580s, i.e., the familial strife for the throne of Marrakesh in Morocco, the Portuguese intervention in this Moorish-Moorish conflict and the friendly Moroccan-English relations. Thomas Dekker’s Lust’s Dominion will be viewed in the light of the Reconquista wars and the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula. Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West will be seen in relation to the theme of conversion and Moorish piracy that were so vigorous in the 16th and 17th century. William Shakespeare’s Othello is unique and it represents what may be ranked as the earliest insights regarding the idea of tolerating the Moors and foreigners into Europe. The contribution this study aims to offer to the western reader is that it involves scrutinizing Arabic texts and contexts whenever available. Thus, Arabic sources concerning the historical accounts of the battle al-Kasr el-Kebir (the battle of Alcazar); the expulsion of Moors from Spain or Moorish and Turkish piracy are to be invoked. In the same vein, the reception of these plays in the Arab world is to be reviewed at the end of each chapter.
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Johnson, Toria Anne. "The cultivation of pity on the Elizabethan stage." Pullman, Wash. : Washington State University, 2009. http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Thesis/Spring2009/t_johnson_042209.pdf.
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McCarthy, Jeanne Helen. "The children's companies Elizabethan aesthetics and Jacobean reactions /." Digital version accessible at:, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p9983291.
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Di, Ponio Amanda. "The Elizabethan Theatre of Cruelty and its double /." St Andrews, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/836.
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Di, Ponio Amanda Nina. "The Elizabethan Theatre of cruelty and its double." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/836.
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This thesis is an examination of the theoretical concepts of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and their relation to the Elizabethan theatre. I propose that the dramas of the age of Shakespeare and the environment in which they were produced should be seen as an integral part of the Theatre of Cruelty and essential to its very understanding. The development of the English Renaissance public theatre was at the mercy of periods of outbreaks and abatements of plague, a powerful force that Artaud considers to be the double of the theatre. The claim for regeneration as an outcome of the plague, a phenomenon causing intense destruction, is very specific to Artaud. The cruel and violent images associated with the plague also feature in the theatre, as do its destructive and regenerative powers. The plague and its surrounding atmosphere contain both the grotesque and sublime elements of life Artaud wished to capture in his theatre. His theory of cruelty is part of a larger investigation into the connection between spectacle, violence, and sacrifice explored by Mikhail Bakhtin, René Girard, and Georges Bataille.
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Rigali, Amanda. "The plays of Fulke Greville in context." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.325814.
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Bhattacharjea, Roma. "Anthony Munday and the representation of religious resistance in late Elizabethan drama." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.390276.
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Neu, Elizabeth. "Tieck's marginalia on the Elizabethan drama : the holdings in the British Library." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1988. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/250918.
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Fung, Kai Chun. "The reception of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in the Romantic period the case of John Ford /." University of Sydney, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1866.
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Hanabusa, Chiaki. "John Danter's play-quartos : a bibliographical and textual analysis." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.366119.
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Rowland, Richard. "Materials towards an edition of '1 Edward IV'." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.365610.
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Banks, Carol Ann. "'Mother-England' : this teeming wombe of royall kings' - finding the female in Shakespeare's histories." Thesis, University of Hertfordshire, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.263026.
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Binongo, Jose Nilo G. "Stylometry and its implementation by principal component analysis." Thesis, University of Ulster, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.311585.
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Dunworth, Felicity Elizabeth. "Motherhood and meaning : the transformation of tradition and convention in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama." Thesis, University of Kent, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.408426.
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Benitez, Michael Anthony. "The discursive limits of "carnal knowledge"| Re-reading rape in Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Restoration drama." Thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1598621.
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This thesis, by analyzing how rape is treated in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1592-3), Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling (1622), and Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677), details how the early modern English theater frequently dramatizes the period’s problematic understanding of rape. These texts reveal the social and legal illegibility of rape, illuminating just how deeply ambivalent and inconsistent patriarchy is toward female sexuality. Both using and departing from a feminist critical tradition that emphasized rape as patriarchy’s sexual entrapment of women, my readings of the period’s legal treatises and other documents call attention to the ambiguity of how rape is defined in early modern England. As represented in these three plays, male rapists exploit the period’s paradoxical views of female sexual consent, thus complicating how raped women negotiate their social and legal status. The process of disclosing her violation ultimately places a raped woman in an untenable position.
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Schwartzman, Beth. "Rereading festive drama : an investigation of theory, theme and politics in five late Elizabethan plays." Thesis, University of York, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.416216.
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Calore, Michela. "Elizabethan stage conventions and their textual verbalization in the drama of the 1580s and 1590s." Thesis, University of Reading, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.391266.
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Di, Miceli Caroline. "Paragon of animals, quintessence of dust : images of the body in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama." Montpellier 3, 1993. http://www.theses.fr/1993MON30037.
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Suivre le corps de l'apogee de sa force a la decheance finale : tel est le but de cette etude, qui s'inspire d'une des images cles de l'epoque, celle de la roue de la fortune. Les hommes avaient a l'egard du corps une attitude extremement complexe, nee du conflit entre idees nouvelles et doctrines anciennes. L'image d'un corps beau, jeune, vigoureux, bati a l'echelle de l'univers - le corps 'cosmique' - s'oppose a celle du corps malade, corrompu, voire monstrueux, voue au tombeau. Leur juxtaposition ou leur antagonisme cree la tension dramatique qui est caracteristique des pieces, et surtout des tragedies. L'esprit de l'homme estcontraint de passer sa vie dans un corps qui traversera ineluctablement les quatre "ages" qui le meneront au tombeau. L'ame est retenue prisonniere dans l'enveloppe charnelle, mais elle donne au corps et a l'esprit ce mouvement incessant, cette ambition demesuree qui font de l'homme le rival de dieu. Chaque dramaturge etudie utilise les theories philosophiques, religieuses, medicales du corps a sa maniere pour creer un univers dramatique qui lui est propre. Finalement, corps et ame seront reconcilies. Les forces conjuguees du temps et de l'imagination arriveront a harmoniser les contraires, et, transcendant les elements ephemeres et corruptibles, a construire un corps eternel, refuge de l'esprit immortelTHE WHEEL OF FORTUNE BRINGS MAN'S BODY FROM THE HEIGHT OF ITS strength AND INTELLECTUAL POWER TO ITS FINAL DECAY. THIS STUDY, WHOSE STRUCTURE WAS INSPIRED BY THIS IMAGE AND THAT OF THE SEVEN AGES OF MAN, WILL ATTEMPT TO FOLLOW THE BODY ON ITS DWNWARD PATH TO THE TOMB. THE ELIZABETHANS AND JACOBEANS HAD AN EXTREMELY COMPLEX ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE BODY THAT AROSE PARTLY FROM THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE PHILOSOPHIES AND IDEAS OF THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE NEW DOCTRINES OF THE RENAISSANCE AND PARTLY FROM THE JUXTAPOSITION OF TWO CONTRADICTORY IMAGES AND THEIR ANTAGONISM : THE HEROIC BODY, BUILT IN THEIMAGE OF THE UNIVERSE, AND THE CORRUPTED, EVEN MONSTROUS BODY OF WHOSE WEIGHT THE SOUL DESIRED TO BE FREE. THIS ANTAGONISM CREATES THE DRAMATIC TENSION THAT IS CHARACTERISTIC OF THE PLAYS OF THE PERIOD AND PARTICULARLY THE TRAGEDIES. EACH PLAYWRIGHT USES THE PHILOSOPHICAL, RELIGIOUS AND MEDICAL THEORIES OF THE TIME TO CONSTRUCT HIS OWN IMAGE PF THE BODY. THE SOUL IS IMPRISONED IN ITS ENVELOPE OF FLESH, BUT THE ECHO OF THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES GIVES THE BODY AND SPIRIT THEIR HEROIC strength AND LIMITLESS AMBITION. FINALLY, BODY AND SOUL WILL BE RECONCILED AS THE ALLIED FORCES OF TIME AND IMAGINATION, FROM THE EPHEMERAL, CORRUPTIBLE ELEMENTS. CREATE THE BODY ETERNAL THAT HOUSES THE IMMORTAL SPIRIT
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Margalit, Yael. "Creaturely pleasures : the representation of animals in early modern drama." Thesis, McGill University, 2008. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=115607.
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This dissertation addresses the profound influence that the shared experience of humans and animals had on the poetics of early modern drama. With reference to a selection of early modern comedies and a range of non-literary texts that includes natural history encyclopedias and animal husbandry manuals, I argue that the vernacular knowledge of animals shaped the early modern imagination generally and the early modern playwright's imagination particularly. I propose an original approach to early modern literature, one which urges integrating a consideration of the real-world referent for animal representation, the collective life lived by humans and animals, and the poetics of early modern drama.In my introduction, I take up the dissertation's general claims about the ethical and historiographical dimension of interpreting early modern animal representation. I continue to work at this theoretical level in Chapter One, where I consider how the animal-focused disciplines of sociobiology and ecology can help and hinder readers interpret early modern drama. In the following chapters, I work closely with a selection of early modern plays, contexts, and literary and theatrical devices. Chapter Two focuses on a web of comic plays that feature instantiations of animals in stage properties and actor's gestures. The web of plays in Chapter Two includes the anonymous Mucedorus; Lording Barry's Ram Alley; John Fletcher's Women Pleased; Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament ; William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford's The Witch of Edmonton; Shakespeare's Love's Labor Lost; and Shakespeare and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen. Chapter Three is devoted to the anthropomorphism of the allegorical representations of animals in Ben Jonson's plays Volpone and The Alchemist. In my reading of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in Chapter Four, I move on to consider animals whose representation is removed from reality not merely by anthropomorphism, but also by magic. All of these instances of representation draw animals into a sphere of existence that is commonly understood as the exclusive domain of humans at the same time that they draw humans in the other direction, which is to say into the muck and mire that is the origin of all life.
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Harper, Lana Marie. "The development of early English playhouses, 1560-1670." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2018. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/76206/.
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This thesis presents a study of playhouse spaces and the theatre industry in early modern England, and how they developed from 1560-1670. The period considered spans the English civil wars and Commonwealth to complicate the notion of a cessation of theatrical activity in 1642, and argues against the division of theatre history into distinct Renaissance and Restoration periods. The study builds on recent scholarly trends which have productively read early modern playing companies as consistent cultural entities with individual identities, by extending and applying this methodology to playhouse spaces. As such, this thesis proposes that all early modern playhouses had unique identities, and suggests that the frequent division into amphitheatre and indoor playhouses can produce an oversimplified binary with homogenising consequences. Moreover, it argues that a problematic, undertheorized hierarchy of playhouses exists; a key factor being the strength of the playhouse's connection to Shakespeare, which has led to the prioritisation of the Globe in particular. This thesis problematises the metrics which have been used to assess the importance of playhouses; it offers alternative factors but also suggests it is more important to ascertain unique aspects of playhouse identities than to create a hierarchy between them. Case studies of the Curtain (c.1577-c.1625), Salisbury Court (1629-1666) and Gibbons' Tennis Court (1653-c.1669) demonstrate how distinct aspects of playhouses' identities can be established by proposing dimensions of their unique reputations based on their known repertories. Collectively, these studies also demonstrate how playhouse space developed over time. This study concludes that each of these playhouses have been undervalued in scholarly narratives. By producing substantial accounts of these neglected spaces this thesis contributes towards a rebalancing of emphasis in early modern scholarship, and it also demonstrates that a wider reappraisal of early modern playhouse space is necessary in the future.
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Macrae, Mitchell. "Between Us We Can Kill a Fly: Intersubjectivity and Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/23131.
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Using recent scholarship on intersubjectivity and cultural cognitive narratology, this project explores the disruption and reformation of early modern identity in Elizabethan revenge tragedies. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate how revenge tragedies contribute to the prevalence of a dialogical rather than monological self in early modern culture.
My chapter on Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy synthesizes Debora Shuger’s work on the cultural significance of early modern mirrors--which posits early modern self-recognition as a typological process--with recent scholarship on the early modern dialogical self. The chapter reveals how audiences and mirrors function in the play as cognitive artifacts that enable complex experiences of intersubjectivity.
In my chapter on Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, I trace how characters construct new identities in relation to their shared suffering while also exploring intersubjectivity’s potential violence. When characters in Titus imagine the inward experience of others, they project a plausible narrative of interiority derived from inwardness’s external signifiers (such as tears, pleas, or gestures). These projections and receptions between characters can lead to reciprocated sympathy or violent aggression.
My reading of John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge explores revenge as a mode of competition. Marston suggests a similarity between the market conditions of dramatic performance (competition between playwrights, acting companies, and rival theaters) and the convention of one-upmanship in revenge tragedy, i.e. the need to surpass preceding acts of violence. While other Elizabethan revenge tragedies represent reciprocity and collusion between characters as important aspects of intersubjective self-reintegration, Marston’s play emphasizes competition and rivalry as the dominant force that shapes his characters.
My final chapter provides an analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet. I argue that recent scholarship on intersubjectivity and cognitive cultural studies can help us re-historicize the nature of Hamlet’s “that within which passes show.” Hamlet’s desire for the eradication of his consciousness explores the consequences of feeling disconnected from others in a culture wherein identity, consciousness, and even memory itself depend on interpersonal relations.
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Hill, Alexandra. "BLOUDY TYGRISSES": MURDEROUS WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DRAMA AND POPULAR LITERATURE." Master's thesis, University of Central Florida, 2009. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/2281.
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This thesis examines artistic and literary images of murderous women in popular print published in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. The construction of murderous women in criminal narratives, published between 1558 and 1625 in pamphlet, ballad, and play form, is examined in the context of contemporary historical records and cultural discourse. Chapter One features a literature review of the topic in recent scholarship. Chapter Two, comprised of two subsections, discusses representations of early modern women in contemporary literature and criminal archives. The subsections in Chapter Two examine early modern treatises, sermons, and essays concerning the nature of women, the roles and responsibilities of wives and mothers, and debates about marriage, as well as a review of women tried for murder in the Middlesex assize courts between 1558 and 1625. Chapter Three, comprised of four subsections, engages in critical readings of approximately 52 pamphlets, ballads, and plays published in the same period. Individual subsections discuss how traitorous wives, murderous mothers, women who murder in their communities, and punishment and redemption are represented in the narratives. Woodcut illustrations printed in these texts are also examined, and their iconographic contributions to the construction of bad women is discussed. Women who murder in these texts are represented as consummately evil creatures capable of inflicting terrible harm to their families and communities, and are consistently discovered, captured, and executed by their communities for their heinous crimes. Murderous women in early modern popular literature also provided a means for contemporary men and women to explore, confront, and share in the depths of sin, while anticipating their own spiritual salvation. Pamphlets, plays, and broadsides related bawdy, graphic, and violent stories that allow modern readers a glimpse of the popular culture and mental world of Renaissance England.M.A.
Department of Liberal and Interdisciplinary Studies
Graduate Studies;
Interdisciplinary Studies MA
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Yardy, Danielle. "Stake and stage : judicial burning and Elizabethan theatre, 1587-1592." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c90c5635-2258-4213-a445-4bfaf67d24d7.
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This thesis is the first sustained analysis of the relationship between Elizabethan theatre and the judicial practice of burning at the stake. Focusing on a five-year window of theatrical output (1587-1592), it argues that polemical literary presentations of burning are the key to understanding the stage's negotiation of this most particular form of judicial violence. Unlike other forms of penal violence, burning at the stake was not staged, and only fourteen incidences of the punishment are recorded in Elizabethan England. Its strong literary presence in Protestant historiography is therefore central to this study. Part I explores the tragic and overtly theatrical rhetoric that the widely available Acts and Monuments built around the burning of heretics in the reformation, and argues that the narrative of this drama of injustice intervened in the development of judicial semiotics over the late-sixteenth century. By the time that Tamburlaine was first performed, burning at the stake was a pressing polemical issue, and it haunts early commercial theatre. Elizabethan historiography of the stake was deeply influential in Elizabethan theatre. In Part II, I argue that Marlovian fire spectacles evoke tableaux from the Acts and Monuments to encourage partisan spectatorship, informed by the rhetoric of martyrdom. Dido's self-immolation courts this rhetoric by dismissing the sword from her death, while Tamburlaine's book burning is condemned through its emphatically papist undertones. These plays court the stake through spectacles utilizing its rhetoric. In Part III, I show that characters historically destined to face the stake required thorough criminalization to justify their sentence. Alice Arden is distinguished from female martyrs celebrated for their domestic defiance, while Jeanne d'Arc's historical heresy is forcefully rewritten as witchcraft and whoredom to condemn 1 Henry VI's Joan la Pucelle. Both women are punished offstage, and the plays focus instead on the necessary task of justifying the sentence of burning. Though rare in practice, burning at the stake was a polemical issue in Elizabethan England. Despite the stake's lack of imitation in the theatre, I argue that widely available Protestant historiography - propaganda at the heart of debates about burning and religious violence - affected both how plays were written, and how they could be viewed.
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Mukherjee, Manisha. "The representation of transgressive love and marriage in English Renaissance drama /." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=42103.
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This study explores the presentation of transgressive, effective and erotic relationships in a selected group of early modern plays as those relationships relate to the English Renaissance ideal of marriage and sexuality expressed in religious and secular tracts. The depictions of illicit love and sexuality in these plays reveal problematic social and moral issues inherent in the construction of the English Renaissance ideal of love and marriage. Not only do the dramatists reveal the tension between transgressive and normative love and sexuality, but they do so through the use of aesthetic forms that transgress conventional dramatic structure. This dissertation contends that the unconventional dramatic representation of transgression functions as a cognitive mode for the audience in their understanding of the practical social reality associated with the abstract ideality of love and marriage. Focussing on a selected plays of English Renaissance dramatists William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Thomas Heywood, John Ford, and two anonymous playwrights, I suggest that the dramatists refuse to condemn or condone the transgression. Rather, they endow it with meaning, and while not rescinding the ideal love and sexuality, offer possible ways of accommodating it.
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Streete, Adrian George Thomas. "Calvinism, subjectivity and early modern drama." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/12800.
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This thesis examines the connections between Calvinism and early modern subjectivity as expressed in the drama produced during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. By looking at a range of theological, medical, popular, legal and polemical writings, the thesis aims to provide a new historical and theoretical reading of Calvinist subjectivity that both develops and departs from previous scholarship in the field. Chapter one examines the critical question of 'authority' in early modern Europe. I trace the various classical and medieval antecedents that reinscribed Christ with political authority during the period, and show how the Reformers' conception of conscience arises out of this movement. In chapter two, I offer a parallel reading of Reformed semiotics in relation to the individual's response to two specific loci of power, the Church and the stage. Chapter three brings the first two chapters together by outlining the development of Calvinist doctrine in early modem England. Chapter four offers a theoretical reading of the early modern 'unconscious' in relation to the construction of England as a Protestant nation state against the threat of Catholicism. In the next four chapters, I show how the stage provided the arena for the exploration of Calvinist subjectivities through readings of four early modern plays. Chapter five deals with Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and in particular the Calvinist conception of Christ interrogated throughout the play. Chapter six looks at The Revenger's Tragedy in relation to the question of masculine lineage and the Name-of-the-(Calvinist)-Father. Finally, in chapters seven and eight, I examine two of William Shakespeare's plays, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. In the first, I demonstrate how the play's concern with witchcraft brings about a parody of providential discourse that is crucial to an understanding of Macbeth's subjectivity. And in the second, I excavate the use of the biblical book of Revelation in Antony and Cleopatra in order to show how an understanding of the text's 'religious' concerns problematises more mainstream readings of the drama.
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Anderson, Haley D. "Female Agency in Restoration and Nineteenth-Century Drama." Scholar Commons, 2010. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/1560.
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This thesis examines issues of female agency in the plays The Rover and The Widow Ranter by Aphra Behn, Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw, and Votes for Women! by Elizabeth Robins. The heroines of each of these plays work toward gaining agency for themselves, and in order to achieve this goal, they often stray from cultural norms of femininity and encroach on the masculine world. This thesis postulates that agency for women becomes a fluid notion, not statically defined. These plays show a fluctuating and evolving sense of feminine agency.
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Moran, Caitlin. "Social Class, Literacy, and Elizabeth Cary: The Participation of Servants in Early Modern Private Drama." University of Dayton / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=dayton1398612946.
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Slowe, Martha. "In defense of her sex : women apologists in early Stuart letters." Thesis, McGill University, 1992. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=39756.
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This study explores the problem of female defense in relation to the constitution of women as disempowered speaking subjects within the dominant rhetorical structures of early Stuart literature. The discourse of male rhetoricians defines a subordinate place for women in the order of language. The English formal controversy arguments over the nature of women in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries similarly deploy tropes of male precedence and female subordination to restrain women in the symbolic order and to inhibit any form of female discourse. In order to construct an effective defense a female apologist must reconstitute herself by working within and subverting these constraints. Early Stuart drama provides numerous instances in which women confront and contest the pre-established limits for female speech in their efforts to defend themselves and/or their sex. However, in the dramas selected for this scrutiny, despite the forceful defense strategies that female characters use in their attempts to negotiate their negative positions in language, they are ultimately marginalized. My final chapter therefore examines the rhetorical strategies whereby in her life and writing one woman author, Elizabeth Cary, successfully appropriated and transformed the gendered tropes into compelling female defenses.
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Hill, Leslie Anne. "Theatres and friendships : the spheres and strategies of Elizabeth Robins." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/17879.
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Victorian women used strategies that allowed them to not only work as actresses but also as directors, producers, translators, and playwrights, thus transforming theatre at the cusp of the New Drama. Female friendships were particularly integral to these strategies as women employed secretiveness and anonymity, charm and shrewdness, networking and collaborating in small and large groups to meet their creative and professional goals. Through these means of sociability women enlarged their spheres of influence beyond the stage. Elizabeth Robins is a superb example of these strategies, particularly when theatrical realism was her primary focus. Though she also collaborated well with men, William Archer and Henry James among them, it was Robins’s female friends who helped her to establish a London career. This project shows how Robins and her women friends contributed to the New Drama in dynamic, critical, and often-secret ways. Marion Lea and Robins finagled the rights to Hedda Gabler in 1891. Lea and Florence Bell helped Robins to translate plays for production and to develop new acting techniques suited to realism. After Lea left England, Robins and Bell joined Grein’s Independent Theatre Society to present their anonymously written protest play Alan’s Wife. These efforts illustrate the adaptive functions of female friendships. Through closer examination of their relationships, particularly the one Robins and Bell called a sisterhood, we see the nurturing functions of female friendships. This project explains some of the reasons why, despite being famous in their day, these women disappeared from history. It was not just because of male control of the theatre, but was also a product of their own desires to protect themselves. Secrecy had served them well in the 1890s, but their fame faded as even friends forgot them. Yet, since female socialization taught them to be group-focused, these women’s stories are highly pertinent to the history of the theatre, an art form that is collaborative by its nature. Through study of their work and their relationships, we can fill some gaps in theatre history, women’s history, and nineteenth-century history, adding resonance to their voices that may carry to coming generations.
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Fraser, Robert Duncan. "Ram alley, or Merry tricks (Lording Barry, 1611) : a critical edition." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2013. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/47147/.
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The object of this thesis is to produce a critical edition of Lording Barry's play Ram Alley (first published in 1611 by Robert Wilson and printed by George Eld). This edition will consist of (a) an annotated, modernised spelling version of the text, that text being based on a bibliographic study of the first quarto, and (b) an introduction which will cover: the printing of the first quarto, the life of Lording Barry and his critical reception, the play's place in and contribution to early Jacobean city comedy (particularly in relation to the use of wit and bawdy in masculine self-definition), and the problems of annotating a text which is so reliant for its humour on bawdy innuendo. The annotation will be very much fuller than is normal for an edition of an early modern play text, aiming to provide not just explanation but also commentary on and contextualisation of the language, contemporary and cultural references, characterisation, and action. This play is something of a by-way in the early Jacobean drama, and, like its author, is little known. It is, however, a competent example of the type of comedy produced for the private theatres and reflects, therefore, on the work of other, better known dramatists, in particular Thomas Middleton. In terms of original contribution to the field of study, this thesis will, it is hoped, add to our knowledge and understanding of: 1. the text of Ram Alley 2. the production of the first quarto of Ram Alley 3. the working practices of the printer, George Eld (who was also responsible for the first quarto of Troilus and Cressida and of Shakespeare's Sonnets) 4. the nature and hermeneutics of wit in Ram Alley 5. approaches to editing early modern dramatic comedy 6. Jacobean city comedy as a genre.
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Rose, Caroline. "Closure and the short story: with readings oftexts by Elizabeth Gaskell and Angela Carter." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1996. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31213571.
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Chow, Po-fun Wendy, and 周寶芬. "Carnivalization and subversion of order in comic plays, with referenceto Shakespeare's Twelfth night and Herry IV." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1987. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31948996.
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Masood, Hafiz Abid. "From Cyrus to Abbas : staging Persia in Early Modern England." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2012. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/39657/.
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This thesis considers the different ways Persia was perceived in early modern England. Persia, understudied in recent scholarship, played an important role in the early modern English imagination, both as a classical civilization and as a counterweight to the Ottoman threat to Christendom. This classical heritage and anti-Ottomanism, when intersected with a Persian Muslim identity, resulted in a complex phenomenon. This thesis is an attempt to understand the various cross currents that constructed this complex image. Chapter One discusses English interest in classical Persian themes in the wake of Renaissance humanism. It focuses on three classical ‘Persian' plays featuring Achaemenid Kings; Cambyses, Darius and Cyrus, and investigates how classical Persia became a focus of interest for Elizabethan playwrights. Chapter Two moves to the wars between the Ottomans and Safavids and how they fascinated many English writers of the time. Paying specific attention to Usumcasane in Marlowe's Tambulaine plays, the chapter suggests the significance of Persian references in the play and offers a new interpretation of the notorious Qur'an burning scene. Chapter Three analyses John Thomas Minadoi's Historie of Warres betweene the Turkes and the Persians and shows the significance of Christian knowledge of schism in Islam for Catholic-Protestant debates. Chapter Four concentrates on the representation of Persia in Romance texts from late Elizabethan England and shows that despite being hailed as an anti-Ottoman power, Persia's anti-Christian Islamic identity, which was also suggested by Minadoi, becomes manifest in the alliance of ‘Sultan' and ‘Sophy' against the Crusaders. Chapter Five combines two crucial moments in Anglo-Persian encounters: Jenkinson's trading mission and the ‘travailes” of the Sherley brothers. Through an analysis of the play The Travailes of the Three English Brothers, the argument of the chapter is that it represents the cumulative experience of Englishmen in Persia in the early modern period.
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Mentzer, Julianne. "The textuality of friendship : homosocial hermeneutic exchanges in early modern English drama." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/16009.
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My thesis argues that textually embedded intimacy and exclusivity between men opens up ethical problems concerning the use of education and persuasive powers—the ability to reconfigure vice as virtue, to argue a case for transgressions, and to navigate political, economic, and social spheres for personal self-advancement. My argument is based first on the proposition that masculine elite friendship in the early modern period is situated in specific pedagogical practices, engagement with particular rhetorical manuals and classical texts, and manipulation of texts which determine the affectionate, ‘textual', nature of these relationships. From this, I propose, second, that a hermeneutic process of rhetorical and poetic composition and exclusionary understanding is embedded within these textual relationships. From these two propositions, I analyse the textual surface of homosocial relationships in order to ask questions about ethical dilemmas concerning the forms of power they represent. How can an enclosed system of affection be useful for political, social, or financial advancement by making a vice (self-interest) of a virtue (fidelity), a dubious idea in the early modern period? How are homosocial networks developed and depicted through an engagement with their own textuality? Are they shown as transgressive and dangerous in further marginalizing those who are not privy to the system of textual exchange between men? The creation of homosocial male friendships is predicated on the idea that there are shared texts and methodologies for internalizing ideas from classical sources (imitatio) and for using these as starting points for the creation of arguments (inventio) to suit social, political, and even domestic situations. I focus on fictitious relationships developed in early modern English drama—as playwrights represent masculine discourse, textual knowledge, and rhetorical techniques. The friendships and fellowships in these dramatic productions contain questions about the use of masculine networks in socio-political and economic navigation.
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Rose, Caroline. "Closure and the short story : with readings of texts by Elizabeth Gaskell and Angela Carter /." Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1996. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B17506207.
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Montanari, Anna Maria. "'A heart in Egypt' : Cleopatra on the Renaissance stage in Italy and England." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709112.
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Roberts, David. "The ladies : female patronage of Restoration drama 1660-1700." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.670377.
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Steffes, Annmarie. "Between page and stage: Victorian and Edwardian women playwrights and the literary drama, 1860-1910." Diss., University of Iowa, 2017. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/5642.
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This study focuses on a series of late-century works by women writers that incorporate facets of theatrical performance into the printed book. Literary drama was a common genre of the Victorian and Edwardian period, used by writers such as Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold to elevate drama to the status of literature, a term synonymous with the printed page and the experience of reading. However, this project examines a series of women writers who, in contrast, used this hybrid form to challenge the assumed superiority of text. The values ascribed to the printed page—that it was a disembodied enterprise unattached to the whims of its audience or the particularities of its author—were antithetical to the experiences of women writers, whose work was often read in the context of their gendered bodies.
My study proceeds chronologically, reading the literary dramas of five writers—George Eliot, Augusta Webster, Katharine Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper (writing under the pseudonym “Michael Field”), and Elizabeth Robins—alongside changes in print practice and theatrical staging as well as evolving discourses about “literariness.” I argue that these women allude to theatrical performance in the text to show that the page always bears the physical traces of its authors and its audience. Each chapter blends book studies with performance studies, showing the way the form of a work invites particular responses from its readers. Overall, this project has two goals: one, to recover marginalized texts by women writers and revise narratives about the period to incorporate these pieces; and two, to span the scholarly chasm between Victorian poetry and drama and demonstrate, instead, the mutually constitutive relationship of these two art forms.
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Jayawickrama, Sarojini. "Carnival, carnivalisation and the subversion of order, with reference to Shakespeare's Henry IV and Henry VI." Thesis, [Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong], 1991. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B13115601.
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Israël, Natacha. "Mélancolie, scepticisme et écriture du pouvoir à l’âge baroque." Thesis, Rennes 1, 2014. http://www.theses.fr/2014REN1S011/document.
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Nous examinons d’abord les aspects de la souveraineté politique sur la scène shakespearienne. À la lumière des analyses consacrées par Walter Benjamin au drame baroque, en 1928, et de la réaction de Carl Schmitt dans Hamlet ou Hécube (1956), nous montrons que Shakespeare met en scène la mortalité des corps politiques et la souveraineté nouvelle de l’intrigant dans le temps terrestre. Sommé de maîtriser l’art et le tempo de l’intrigue, le Prince est néanmoins impuissant à empêcher la décomposition de l’État. En prenant appui sur le drame élisabéthain, notamment sur le vertige mélancolique et sceptique d’Hamlet, nous interrogeons alors l’effort contemporain en vue de l’ordre et de la synchronisation dans la cité. La théorie hobbesienne de la représentation politique et juridique moderne rompt avec la conception mystique de l’unité politique et toute écriture inspirée des lois, tandis que la scène civile y est dédiée à la paix du commerce entre les individus afin de garantir les conditions d’une autonomie réelle dans la sphère privée. Réciproquement, cette autonomie doit pérenniser les solutions à la mélancolie et au scepticisme conceptualisées dans Léviathan. Tout en entérinant la tragédie de l’existence humaine et de tout savoir déjà mise en scène par Shakespeare, Léviathan évite d’emblée l’exaltation schmittienne ainsi que la violence « pure » logée, selon Benjamin, dans l’état d’exception de la subjectivité. À travers les spectres qui, chez Hobbes, n’ont plus droit de cité, la scène shakespearienne défait cependant les mécanismes de l’ordre et de la synchronisation continus, cela sans congédier le droit ni le projet de l’autonomieFirst, we examine the aspects of the political sovereignty on the Shakespearean stage. In the light of Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German baroque drama (1928) and of Carl Schmitt’s answer to Benjamin in Hamlet or Hecuba (1956), we show that Shakespeare stages the mortality of the political bodies and the new sovereignty of the plotter. Urged to master the art and the tempo of the plot, the prince is nonetheless unable to prevent the decomposition of the state. Then, drawing on the Elizabethan drama, and especially on Hamlet, we question the contemporary effort towards order and synchronization within the city. Hobbes’s theory of political and juridical representation breaks with the mystical conception of political unity and with any inspired legislation, whereas the civil scene is dedicated to the peace between individuals in order to ensure the possibility of a real autonomy in the private sphere. Reciprocally, this autonomy must consolidate the solutions to the problems of melancholy and skepticism conceptualized in Leviathan. While endorsing the tragedy of human condition and of knowledge already put on stage by Shakespeare, Leviathan prevents Schmitt’s exaltation as well as the « pure » violence which, according to Benjamin, lies in the subject’s state of exception. Yet, through the ghosts that Leviathan cannot tolerate within the public sphere, the Shakespearean stage unravels the mechanisms of perpetual order and synchronization without rejecting the law and the project of autonomy
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Tanner, Jane Hinkle. "Sharing the Light: Feminine Power in Tudor and Stuart Comedy." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278551/.
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Studies of the English Renaissance reveal a patriarchal structure that informed its politics and its literature; and the drama especially demonstrates a patriarchal response to what society perceived to be the problem of women's efforts to grow beyond the traditional medieval view of "good" women as chaste, silent, and obedient. Thirteen comedies, whose creation spans roughly the same time frame as the pamphlet wars of the so-called "woman controversy," from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, feature women who have no public power, but who find opportunities for varying degrees of power in the private or domestic setting.
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Weber, Minon. "Rediscovering Beatrice and Bianca: A Study of Oscar Wilde’s Tragedies The Duchess of Padua (1883) and A Florentine Tragedy (1894)." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen, 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-184574.
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Towards the end of the 19th century Oscar Wilde wrote the four society plays that would become his most famous dramatical works: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The plays combined characteristic Wildean witticisms with cunning social criticism of Victorian society, using stereotypical characters such as the dandy, the fallen woman and the “ideal” woman to mock the double moral and strict social expectations of Victorian society. These plays, and to an extent also Wilde’s symbolist drama Salomé (1891), have been the object of a great deal of scholarly interest, with countless studies conducted on them from various angles and theoretical perspectives. Widely under-discussed, however, are Wilde’s two Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedies, The Duchess of Padua (1883) and A Florentine Tragedy (1894). This thesis therefore sets out to explore The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy in order to gain a broader understanding of Wilde’s forgotten dramatical works, while also rediscovering two of Wilde’s most transgressive female characters—Beatrice and Bianca. Challenging traditional ideas of gender and female sexuality, Beatrice and Bianca can be read as proto-feminist figures who continually act transgressively, using their voice and agency to stand up against patriarchy and asserting their rights to experience their lives on their own terms. Through an in-depth study of these plays, this thesis will demonstrate that Wilde’s Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedies, with their strong, modern female characters Beatrice and Bianca deserve greater critical attention on a par with the extensive scholarship on Wilde’s well-known dramatical works.
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Doyle, Anne-Marie. "Shakespeare and the genre of comedy." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/177.
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Traditionally in the field of aesthetics the genres of tragedy and comedy have been depicted in antithetical opposition to one another. Setting out from the hypothesis that antitheses are aspects of a deeper unity where one informs the construction of the other’s image this thesis questions the hierarchy of genre through a form of ludic postmodernism that interrogates aesthetics in the same way as comedy interrogates ethics and the law of genre. Tracing the chain of signification as laid out by Derrida between theatre as pharmakon and the thaumaturgical influence of the pharmakeus or dramatist, early modern comedy can be identified as re-enacting Renaissance versions of the rite of the pharmakos, where a scapegoat for the ills attendant upon society is chosen and exorcised. Recognisable pharmakoi are scapegoat figures such as Shakespeare’s Shylock, Malvolio, Falstaff and Parolles but the city comedies of this period also depict prostitutes and the unmarried as necessary comic sacrifices for the reordering of society. Throughout this thesis an attempt has been made to position Shakespeare’s comic drama in the specific historical location of early modern London by not only placing his plays in the company of his contemporaries but by forging a strong theoretical engagement with questions of law in relation to issues of genre. The connection Shakespearean comedy makes with the laws of early modern England is highly visible in The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure and The Taming of the Shrew and the laws which they scrutinise are peculiar to the regulation of gendered interaction, namely marital union and the power and authority imposed upon both men and women in patriarchal society. Thus, a pivotal section on marriage is required to pinion the argument that the libidinized economy of the early modern stage perpetuates the principle of an excluded middle, comic u-topia, or Derridean ‘non-place’, where implicit contradictions are made explicit. The conclusion that comic denouements are disappointing in their resolution of seemingly insurmountable dilemmas can therefore be reappraised as the outcome of a dialectical movement, where the possibility of alternatives is presented and assessed. Advancing Hegel’s theory that the whole of history is dialectic comedy can therefore be identified as the way in which a society sees itself, dramatically representing the hopes and fears of an entire community.
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Coleman, Alex. "Foul Witches and Feminine Power: Gendered Representations of Witchcraft in the Works of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries." Ohio Dominican University / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=odu1562624942402741.
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Hirsch, Brett Daniel. "Werewolves and women with whiskers : figures of estrangement in early modern English drama and culture." University of Western Australia. English and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2009. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2009.0175.
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Each chapter of Werewolves and Women with Whiskers: Figures of Estrangement in Early Modern English Drama and Culture explores a particular figure of fascination and fear in the early modern English imagination: in one it is owls, in another bearded women, in a third werewolves, and in yet another Jews. Drawing on instances from drama and other cultural forms, this thesis seeks to examine each of these phenomena in terms of their estrangement. There is a symbolic appositeness in each of these figures, whether in estranged and estranging minority groups, such as Catholics, Jesuits, Jews, Puritans, Italians, the Irish, and the Scots; or in transgressive behaviours, such as cross-dressing and gender trouble, infidelity and apostasy, intemperate passion and unnatural desire. Essentially unfixed and unstable, these emblematic figures are indicative of cultural uncertainty and therefore are easily adapted to suit changing political, religious, and social climates. However, adaptability and fluidity come at a price, since figures of difference have an uncomfortable way of transforming themselves into figures of resemblance. Thus, this thesis argues, each of these figuresowls, bearded women, werewolves, Jewsoccupies an undefined and undefinable space on the precarious boundary between the usual and the unusual, between the strange and the strangely familiar, and, most strangely and paradoxically of all, between us and them.
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Kenny, Amy. "Domestic relations in Shakespeare." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2012. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/42121/.
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This thesis investigates how the size, structure and function of the family presented in Shakespeare's plays relates to an early modern understanding of the importance and function of the family. By examining domestic manuals, pamphlets, treatises and diaries from the early modern period, I establish what was considered normative domestic behaviour at the time and analyse Shakespeare's plays through these contemporary attitudes, specifically their treatment of privacy, household structure and medical beliefs surrounding reproduction and gynaecology. This thesis seeks to focus on the way in which people's positions in the family change over time, from infancy to adulthood, and how these relationships are represented in Shakespeare's plays. Beginning with marriage, where the family is first formed; I examine Othello and Macbeth, and show how the marriages in these plays, while tragic, are cherished and valued. Succession was integral to the legacy and sustainability of a family, which is the topic of the next chapter, in which I explore the notions of how children are conceived and raised in Richard III and The Winter's Tale. The transition from childhood into adulthood was fraught with change in both housing and legal circumstances, and this struggle in adolescence is clearly depicted in Romeo and Juliet, which comprises the third chapter. Aside from the familial relationships of husband and wife and parent and child, the most influential relationships were those of siblings, which I investigate in a number of plays in the fourth chapter. Finally, I focus on the traditional and complicated nuclear families in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet and Coriolanus, and analyse how the family is highlighted and valued in each of these plays. The thesis concludes that throughout Shakespeare's work, the family is privileged over war, nobility and absolute patriarchal control, emphasising that it is vital to understanding and analysing Shakespeare's plays.