To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: English drama Early modern and Elizabethan.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'English drama Early modern and Elizabethan'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'English drama Early modern and Elizabethan.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Streete, Adrian George Thomas. "Calvinism, subjectivity and early modern drama." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/12800.
Full textAbstract:
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.
2
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.
Full textAbstract:
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.
3
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.
Full textAbstract:
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
4
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.
Full textAbstract:
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.
5
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.
Full textAbstract:
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.
6
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.
Full textAbstract:
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.
7
Di, Ponio Amanda Nina. "The Elizabethan Theatre of cruelty and its double." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/836.
Full textAbstract:
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.
8
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.
Full textAbstract:
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.
9
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.
Full text
10
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.
Full textAbstract:
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.
11
Doyle, Anne-Marie. "Shakespeare and the genre of comedy." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/177.
Full textAbstract:
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.
12
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.
Full text
13
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.
Full text
14
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/.
Full textAbstract:
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.
15
Johanson, Kristine. "A rhetoric of nostalgia on the English stage, 1587-1605." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1001.
Full textAbstract:
In locating the idea of nostalgia in early modern English drama, ‘A Rhetoric of Nostalgia on the English Stage, 1587-1605’ recovers an influential and under-examined political discourse in Elizabethan drama. Recognizing how deeply Renaissance culture was invested in conceptualizing the past as past and in privileging the cultural practices and processes of memory, this thesis asserts nostalgia’s embeddedness within that culture and its consequently powerful rhetorical role on the English Renaissance stage. The introduction situates Elizabethan nostalgia alongside nostalgia’s postmodern conceptualizations. It identifies how my definition of early modern nostalgia both depends on and diverges from contemporary arguments about nostalgia, as it questions nostalgia’s perceived conservatism and asserts its radicalizing potential. I define a rhetoric of nostalgia with regard to classical and Renaissance ideas of rhetoric and locate it within a body of sixteenth-century political discourses. In the ensuing chapters, my analyses of Shakespeare’s drama formulate case studies reached, in each instance, through an exploration of the plays’ socio-political context. Chapter Two’s analysis of The First Part of the Contention contextualizes Shakespeare’s development of a rhetoric of nostalgia and investigates connections between rhetorical form and nostalgia. I demonstrate the cultural currency of the play’s nostalgic proverbial discourse through a discussion of Protestant writers interested in mocking the idea of a preferable Catholic past. Chapter Three argues that Richard II’s nostalgic discourse of lost hospitality functions as a political rhetoric evocative of the socio-economic problems of the mid-1590s and of the changing landscape of English tradition instigated by the Reformation. In Chapter Four, Julius Caesar and Ben Jonson’s Sejanus constitute a final analysis of the relationship between a rhetoric of nostalgia and politics by examining the rise of Tacitism. The plays’ nostalgic language stimulates an awareness to the myriad ways in which rhetoric questions politics in both dramas.
16
Rumbold, Kate Louise. "All the men and women merely players : quoting Shakespeare in the mid-eighteenth-century novel." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.670136.
Full text
17
Pettegree, Jane K. "Foreign and native on the English stage, 1588-1611 : metaphor and national identity." Thesis, St Andrews, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/786.
Full text
18
Pearson, Meg Forbes. "Spectacle in early modern English drama." College Park, Md. : University of Maryland, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/3780.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2006.Thesis research directed by: English Language and Literature. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
19
Jarrett, Joseph Christopher. "Mathematics and Late Elizabethan drama, 1587-1603." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2017. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/270195.
Full textAbstract:
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.
20
Loeb, Andrew. "Subjectivity and Music in Early Modern English Drama." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/32129.
Full textAbstract:
Music in the early modern world was an art form fraught with tensions. Writers from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines engaged in a vibrant debate about the value of hearing and playing music, which could be seen as a useful tool for the refinement of the individual or a dangerous liability, capable of compelling inappropriate thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.
This study analyzes music on the early modern stage and its relation to emerging ideas about subjectivity. Early modern philosophies of music, I demonstrate, are concerned with the stability of the body, the soul, and the humours and spirits that unite them, along with the individual’s capacity for autonomy and agency. In the theatre, I argue, music is frequently deployed as a strategy for experimenting with ways of imagining and performing selfhood. On one hand, it can facilitate self-fashioning, acting as a marker for such characteristics as class and spiritual condition; on the other, it can be disruptive to identity and the capacity for agency and autonomy, since music was understood as both penetrative and transformative, facilitating the disruption of one self by an other.
Chapter 1, “Meanings of Music in Early Modern England,” surveys a range of early modern texts on music to demonstrate their concerns with both the performance of the self and the threat of its dissolution. Chapter 2, “Many Sorts of Music in Twelfth Night and The Roaring Girl,” examines music’s role as an imaginative strategy for improvising an unstable, hybrid gender identity, an alternative subject-position from which to speak and act in ways ordinarily denied to women. Chapter 3, “Music, Magic, and Community in Early Modern Witchcraft Plays,” explores witches’ uses of music to establish a sense of communal identity and to magically disrupt the communities from which they have been excluded. Finally, Chapter 4, “Noise, the City, and the Subject in Epicoene” makes a case for understanding Morose’s fear of noise in terms of early modern ideas about music, reading noise as a radical instability representative of new ways of fashioning selves in a rapidly expanding urban environment.
21
Jung, Jessica. "Truth and honesty in early modern English drama." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.493076.
Full textAbstract:
'Truth' and 'honesty' were two terms that were distinctly gendered in Renaissance England. For women, 'honesty' had developed a meaning synonymous with chastity. Male 'honesty', alternately, suggested honourable and befitting words and actions. Women were also perceived as less likely than men to be telling the truth. My focus in this thesis is on a point of convergence for these two complex terms: when female characters in contemporary drama are falsely accused of dishonesty.
22
Harper, Lana Marie. "The development of early English playhouses, 1560-1670." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2018. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/76206/.
Full textAbstract:
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.
23
Alfar, Cristina León. ""Evil" women : patrilineal fantasies in early modern tragedy /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9455.
Full text
24
Wright, Myra. "Whores and their metaphors in early modern English drama." Thesis, McGill University, 2010. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=86819.
Full textAbstract:
Several clusters of metaphors were routinely used to represent the sex trade onstage in early modern England. Close philological study of these figures reveals that even the most conventional metaphors for whores and their work were capable of meaning many things at once, especially in the discursive context of the drama. This project follows a practice of reading that admits multiple significations for the words used by characters on the early modern stage. I argue that metaphors are social phenomena with consequences as varied and complex as the human interactions they're meant to describe. Each chapter treats a different set of images: commodities and commercial transactions, buildings and thoroughfares, food and drink, and rhetorical and theatrical ingenuity. Using methods based on the study of conceptual metaphor in the field of cognitive linguistics, I trace the deployment of conventional figures for prostitution in plays by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, and John Marston. I also introduce occurrences of these metaphors in other genres (news pamphlets, prose narratives, homilies, medical manuals, and so on) to show that they were part of pervasive cultural patterns. The readings below dwell on the figurative associations that were most available to early modern writers as they fashioned prostitute characters for the stage—metaphors commonly taken for granted as literal descriptions of sex work. An understanding of the social force of metaphor begins with the realization that words convey more than any writer, printer, or actor intends. The language of prostitution in the early modern theatre is therefore both common and complex, much like the characters it conjures.Pendant la Renaissance, divers grappes de métaphores étaient utilisées couramment dans les représentations théâtrale de la prostitution en Angleterre. Des études minutieuses philologiques des métaphores pour les putains et leur travail révéler que même les plus conventionnelles pouvaient signifier plusieurs choses à la fois, particulièrement dans le contexte discursif du théâtre. Le projet suit un procédé de lecture qui admet plusieurs significations pour les mots utilisés par des personnages de la Renaissance. Je soutiens que les métaphores sont des phénomènes sociaux qui ont des conséquences aussi variées et complexes que les interactions humaines qu'elles sont censées décrire. Chaque chapitre met en évidence une différente série d'images: les marchandises et transactions commerciales, les bâtiments et les voies urbaines, la nourriture et les boissons, l'ingénuité rhétorique et théâtrale. En utilisant des méthodes basées sur l'étude des métaphores conceptuelles dans le domaine de la linguistique cognitive, je retrace le cortège des figures conventionnelles de prostitution dans les pièces de théâtre de William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, et John Marston. Je signale aussi l'existence de ces métaphores dans d'autres genres littéraires (pamphlets de nouvelles, narratives en prose, homélies, manuels médicaux, etc.) pour démontrer qu'elles faisaient partie des tendances culturelles omniprésentes. Les explications ci-dessous s'entendent sur les associations figurées qui étaiaent les plus à la disposition des écrivains de la Renaissance en façonnant les personnages des prostituées—les métaphores qui étaient souvent considerées comme constituant les descriptions littérales du travail sexuel. Pour bien comprendre la force sociale de la métaphore, il faut realiser d'abord que les mots communiquent beaucoup plus qu'un écrivain, un imprimeur, ou un acteur les destine. La la
25
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.
Full textAbstract:
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.
26
Griffiths, Huw Daniel. "Renaissance geographies : space, text and history in early modern England." Thesis, University of Strathclyde, 1998. http://oleg.lib.strath.ac.uk:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=21403.
Full textAbstract:
In examining the relationships between space, text and history in the early modern period, this thesis reads sixteenth and seventeenth century texts in the context of the new geographies and the shifts in spatial awareness that accompany the arrival of the early modern period. In doing so, it also employs a 'spatialised' mode of criticism that, rather than privilege any one kind of text, seeks to view all texts alongside one another, within what Foucault calls the 'space of a dispersion'. This situates the thesis within a developing interest, in renaissance studies, both in early modern spatialities, as exemplified by the work of Richard Helgerson, John Gillies and others, and in postmodern approaches to the renaissance. It is the starting point of this thesis that space is produced, rather than a vacuum waiting to be filled by the actions and actors of history. It is also a contention of this thesis that this production of space takes place on a variety of fronts. It is neither limited to the visual or plastic arts, nor the result, solely, of changing economic and political situations. The texts covered include, therefore, plays as well as political pamphlets, poetry as well as maps, scientific treatises as well as portraits. It is organised around three successive 'moments' in sixteenth and seventeenth century England - Elizabethan imperialism reign following the defeat of the Armada, the union project of James VI and I, and the immediate aftermath of the English civil wars. Rather than being seen in a chronological narrative of cause and effect, these moments 'haunt' each other, living on beyond themselves, structuring the representation of space in new contexts. Understood as anachronism, this kind of effect is one result of using 'space' alongside 'history' as the horizon against which textual analysis is performed.
27
Deiter, Kristen. "The Tower of London icon of early modern English drama /." Diss., Online access via UMI:, 2005.
Find full text
28
Albano, Caterina. "Representations of food and starvation in early modern English drama." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.314188.
Full text
29
Reynolds, Paige Martin. "Reforming Ritual: Protestantism, Women, and Ritual on the Renaissance Stage." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2006. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5439/.
Full textAbstract:
My dissertation focuses on representations of women and ritual on the Renaissance stage, situating such examples within the context of the Protestant Reformation. The renegotiation of the value, place, and power of ritual is a central characteristic of the Protestant Reformation in early modern England. The effort to eliminate or redirect ritual was a crucial point of interest for reformers, for most of whom the corruption of religion seemed bound to its ostentatious and idolatrous outer trappings. Despite the opinions of theologians, however, receptivity toward the structure, routine, and familiarity of traditional Catholicism did not disappear with the advent of Protestantism. Reformers worked to modify those rituals that were especially difficult to eradicate, maintaining some sense of meaning without portraying confidence in ceremony itself. I am interested in how early Protestantism dealt with the presence of elements (in worship, daily practice, literary or dramatic representation) that it derogatorily dubbed popish, and how women had a particular place of importance in this dialogue. Through the drama of Shakespeare, Webster, and Middleton, along with contemporary religious and popular sources, I explore how theatrical representations of ritual involving women create specific sites of cultural and theological negotiation. These representations both reflect and resist emerging attitudes toward women and ritual fashioned by Reformation thought, granting women a particular authority in the spiritual realm.
30
Stephen, Scott. "The question that subverts : equitable drama on the early modern English stage, 1591-1621." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2010. http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=159216.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines drama and ideas of equity, judgement, and legality in early modern England. Drama of this age is a product of a society of disputation – and the debate surrounding the marginalised female is investigated here. Taking the lead from Ina Habermann, I argue that ‘equitable drama’ offered playgoers spaces of re-interpretive potential. Focusing initially on Arden of Faversham (1592) and A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) I argue that these domestic tragedies focus on problematic homes during an ‘age of anxiety’. The Arden playwright engages in a re-interpretation of the murder of Thomas Arden – highlighting flaws in the legal resolution to this scandal to show how drama can probe injustice. Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness illustrates an alternative domestic site of dramatic debate. Focusing on Heywood’s interrogation of acts of ‘kindness’ towards females, I suggest that Heywood demonstrates the workings of equitable drama removed from necessary correspondence to a specific real-life case. I then consider how three Jacobean dramas subject female witchcraft to in-depth equitable analysis. Contextualising Macbeth, Sophonisba, and The Witch within contemporary witchcraft debates, I suggest that these plays use witchcraft to interrogate a patriarchal society that reviled witchcraft whilst also demonstrating uncertainties about its reality. I conclude with The Witch of Edmonton (1621) – which is part witchcraft drama and part domestic tragedy. Within the depiction of the real-life ‘witch’ Sawyer, the audience is asked to question the iniquities of communal mob justice and the common law. Tracing new links between these works provides a sense of how early modern drama represented contentious issues surrounding gender, deviancy, and judgement. Ultimately, I argue that equitable drama is rooted in an early modern theatre informed by legal and social debate, which utilised interpretive difference to invigorate performance.
31
Grant, T. J. "The uses of animals in English early modern drama, 1558-1642." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.599617.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation is about the use of animals in early modern English drama between 1558-1642. There are two main aims of this investigation: to determine the dramaturigcal effects of animals on the stage and to historicise the plays by setting them in their epistemological context. My work compares the plays' different treatments of animals in order to ascertain whether there can be said to be a coherent early modern 'dramaturgy of animals'; how it differs from the employment of animals in Medieval and Classical drama; and how genre is affected by their use. The introductory Chapter 1 recapitulates the critical contexts into which may work fits and sketches out the early modern literary and natural-historical background to the plays. Chapter 2: In the drama of the period, apes heighten awareness of man's humanity: some writers consider that dressing up as an animal threatens man's soul because it denies his 'godlike' image. Specifically with apes, of course, this 'denial' is parodic, but this makes it more, rather than less, dangerous to the divine order. Travel literature as well as drama (including The Tempest), is used to interrogate the usefulness of metaphorical monkeys. Mr Moore's Revels and other masques draw attention to parallels between apes and Africans, and women and apes. Chapter 3: Reading the real dogs in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Every Man Out of His Humour, and The Staple of News as light entertainment, as previous critics have, constitutes a misinterpretation of the drama in its historical context. This involvement in the plots and imagery demonstrates that the playwright's intention was to elucidate the relationship between man and animal. A dog on the stage interrogates the 'realness' of stage business with a more direct, and more problematical method, than pleas from Prologues for the audience to suspend its disbelief. The 'dogginess', and the dramatic effect, of the costume devil-dog in The Witch of Edmonton is discussed.
32
Darvill, Mills Janis Jane. "Early modern legal poetics and morality 1560-1625." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2011. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/6966/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the reciprocity of literary and legal cultures, and seeks to enhance understanding of cultural and socio-legal constructions of morality in early modern England. Identifying the tensions in an institutional legality in which both secular pragmatism and moral idealism act as formulating principals, it interrogates the sense of disjuncture that arises between imaginative concepts of moral justice and their translation into the formal structures of law. Chapter 1 investigates representations of rape in light of the legislative changes of the 1570s, and addresses the question of how literature shapes the legal imaginary of immorality. Literary models, notably Shakespeare's The Rape Of Lucrece (1594), and George Peele's Tale of Troy (1589), are examined together with the texts of Edward Coke and Thomas Edgar to argue that lawyers' mythopoeic interpretative strategies produce a form of legal fiction in relation to sexual crime. These strategies are contextualised in Chapter 2 in relation to the education and literary-legal culture at the Inns of Court, and the thesis progresses to an examination of the inns' literary and dramatic output – notably that of Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorbuduc, and Arthur Broke's contemporaneous revels' masque, Desire and Lady Bewty (1561-2) – to establish how the legal fraternity wielded significant authority over Tudor sexual politics, moral signification, and interpretative practices. Chapters 3 and 4 explore legal and ethical challenges heralded by the Jacobean accession, particularly those posed by the Somerset scandal. Analysis of histories, letters, and court satire, together with Thomas Campion's The Lord Hay's Masque (1607), and George Chapman's Andromeda Liberata (1614) and The Tragedy of Chabot (1639), illuminates the period's textual negotiations of legal, political, and personal ethics, and offers a revealing picture of the moral paradoxes produced by the opacity of the parameters between the personal and political lives of the ruling elite.
33
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/.
Full textAbstract:
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.
34
Hill, Alexandra Nicole. ""Bloudy tygrisses" murderous women in early modern English drama and popular literature /." Orlando, Fla. : University of Central Florida, 2009. http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0002727.
Full text
35
Adachi, Mami. "Nuns and nunneries in the cultural memory of early modern English drama." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2016. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/6745/.
Full textAbstract:
The Reformation had exposed ideas of female religiosity, ridiculing the contested site of the gendered bodies of nuns. Nevertheless, memories of pre-Reformation religion could not be easily destroyed. Nuns and nunneries are memorialised in a range of early modern English texts, among which this thesis identifies a number of tropes featuring nuns in historiography and drama. The first two chapters examine works by authors with differing agendas, John Foxe and Raphael Holinshed (Chapter 1), and John Stow and William Dugdale (Chapter 2), which can be regarded as memory banks of nun tropes. The next three chapters focus on tropes featuring nuns in drama from the mid 1580s to circa 1640. Chapter 3 examines references or allusions to dramatic nuns, which are generally stereotypical, suggesting the onset of cultural forgetting. Chapter 4 explores plays featuring nuns as characters, where nuns assume various roles, sometimes demonstrating a mix of tropical and innovative in a single play. Shakespeare’s utilisation of nun tropes while accommodating the symbolic value of female religious life to artistic needs is treated separately in Chapter 5. These dramatic tropes are seen to draw from and in turn feed into the tropes circulating in the culture of early modern England.
36
Nielson, James. "Elizabethan realisms : reading prose from the end of the century." Thesis, McGill University, 1990. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=74597.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis basically has a twofold aim: on the one hand, to make a somewhat neglected body of Renaissance prose more readable, by adding, in a punctual and miscellaneous manner, to our historical, philological and thematic understanding of it and by examining it in the light of some of our current theoretical preoccupations; and, on the other hand, to problematize the "realistic" rubric assigned to these works and to do so by cultivating a more thoroughgoing textual realism on the part of readers.These works, traditionally grouped together because of the interaction of their authors at the end of the 16th century, include Robert Greene's "cony-catching" and "confessional" pamphlets, the texts of the controversy between Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, and Harvey's manuscript drafts, as well as more familiar works such as Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller.
The theoretical issue of "the real" as a textual effect has been divided up according to the three nominal categories of persons, places and things, but the thesis falls methodologically into two halves. The opening chapters aim at reintroducing the figures of Greene, Nashe and Harvey, and exploring the quasi-genres of confession, invective and rough draft as exemplary models of the textual construction of a realistic person. They also attempt an alternative form of reading which is an amalgam of cento, summary, close reading, theoretical aside, and running commentary. In the second half, microreadings of the Marprelate Tracts, the cony-catching pamphlets, and texts by Nashe are used to shed light on theoretical issues of textual "place" such as the rhetorical construction of "presence" and metaphorical "movement." Once the relationship between premodern and postmodern textuality has been sketched, the final chapter offers a critique of the unreflexive academic practice of doing "readings," and argues for a new literalism and the self-subversion of the figurative in an "extrarhetorical" reading of Nashe's Lenten Stuffe.
37
Gutmann, Sara. "Borders maritime in early modern drama and the English geopolitical imagination, 1575-1625." Thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3725922.
Full textAbstract:
“Borders Maritime” explores how the English imagined maritime geography, politics, and culture from 1575 to 1625. As a zone that is neither land nor sea, the maritime needed to be developed, demarcated, navigated, and policed in order for England to take her place on the international stage as the Empire by the end of the seventeenth century. To do so, traditional forms of sovereignty founded on the land needed to be reimagined from a different elemental perspective, that of the sea. The model of sovereignty inherited from political theology—anthropocentric, legalistic, and religious—is here transformed into a maritime political ecology—nonhuman, imaginative, and elemental. Recent criticism of the development of modern sovereignty out of the middle ages has found ways to displace the biological basis for the definition of life and reach further into the networked world. This includes forms of life such as pirates and power lines, territories and tidal zones. The move to define the maritime likewise requires including unfamiliar forms of life and active natures. It requires acting on the water, thinking like a whirlpool, imagining waves, and navigating islands.
The fifty years under consideration here mark this turn from the land to the sea in the English geopolitical imagination. Since the maritime is a border, an especially destructive and deconstructive one, drama provides an especially suitable vehicle in its own borderline nature—fiction performed in real space with real elements. This dissertation analyzes how the Elizabethan estate entertainments at Kenilworth and Elvetham, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Jacobean court masques by Ben Jonson, Samuel Daniels, and Francis Beaumont, and John Fletcher’s tragicomedies The Island Princess and The Sea Voyage perform elemental sovereignty and stage the political ecologies of early modern England.
38
Passe, Alison. "The figure of Cleopatra in early modern English and French drama (1553-1635)." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2017. http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=236420.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores the figure of Cleopatra in Early Modern English and French tragedy from 1553 to 1635 in the plays of Jodelle, Garnier, Montreux, Sidney, Daniel, Shakespeare, May, Mairet, and Benserade. There has been a dearth of full length studies investigating the figure of Cleopatra, to date only Mathilde Lamy's 2012 thesis has tackled the topic in depth. This thesis considers dramatic tradition, poetics, and contemporary events in order to trace the influences on the development of the figure of Cleopatra. The thesis examines, the authors, their plays, and performance as well as Early Modern English and French poetics before engaging more deeply with the figure of Cleopatra. The characterisation of the figure of Cleopatra is considered together with the notion of exemplarity. Her representation is framed through a discussion of the 'other' in Early Modern thought. Finally a consideration of the politics of speech in the Cleopatra plays links the plays firmly to the external circumstances surrounding their writing. The examination of all of these areas allows for the conclusion that the figure of Cleopatra while influenced by the nationality of the author and the attendant socio-political events, is more strongly effected by differences in poetics and dramatic tradition. The application of this mode of study, considering the changes in a single literary figure across multiple texts, through the lens of poetics, genre, and contemporary events allows not only for the detailed study of a single figure but also allows for some conclusions to be suggested about the changes taking place in literature as a whole throughout the period under consideration.
39
Headley, Cynthia Marie. "The Temporary Nature of Health: The Humoral Body in Early Modern Drama." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/222851.
Full textAbstract:
The Temporary Nature of Health: The Humoral Body in Early Modern Drama explores the ways in which drama, political theory, and travel accounts deploy metaphors and practices generated by the humoral body to provide an account for living in a postlapsarian world. This project's interdisciplinary approach builds on the work of Gail Paster and Valerie Traub and analyzes the ways in which understandings of the body both inflect and are inflected by culture. Chapter one, "'Letting' Blood: The Impossibility of Social Health and Stability in Shakespeare and Cary," focuses on metonyms and metaphors of blood, using both Richard II and Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam. Both plays challenge the notion that blood as bloodline metonymically means character fitness and the ability to rule. Chapter two, "The Failure of Authority: Medical Practitioners and Heads of State in The Winter's Tale, All's Well that Ends Well, and Measure for Measure," argues that these plays' central characters fail as healers in their attempts to find balance and stability for others, usually through the comedic conventional ending of marriage. Chapter three, "Pastoral's Temporary Healing: Elizabethan-Jacobean Comedies, Tragicomedies, and Travel Accounts," uses pastoral dramas such as Mary Wroth's Love's Victorie, John Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess, and Shakespeare's As You Like It, as well as travel accounts such as Walter Ralegh's A Discourse Concerning Western Planting. This chapter examines the relationship among pastoral drama, humoral understanding of the body, and travel accounts.
40
Kwong, Jessica Mun-Ling. "Playing the whore : representations of whoredom in early modern English comedy." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.707984.
Full text
41
Valley, Leslie Ann. "Replacing the Priest: Tradition, Politics, and Religion in Early Modern Irish Drama." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2009. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/1856.
Full textAbstract:
By the beginning of the twentieth century, Ireland's identity was continually pulled between its loyalties to Catholicism and British imperialism. In response to this conflict of identity, W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory argued the need for an Irish theatre that was demonstrative of the Irish people, returning to the literary traditions to the Celtic heritage. What resulted was a questioning of religion and politics in Ireland, specifically the Catholic Church and its priests. Yeat's own drama removed the priests from the stage and replaced them with characters demonstrative of those literary traditions, establishing what he called a "new priesthood". In response to this removal, Yeat's contemporaries such as J. M. Synge and Bernard Shaw evolved his vision, creating a criticism and, ultimately, a rejection of Irish priests. In doing so, these playwrights created depictions of absent, ineffectual, and pagan priests that have endured throughout the twentieth century.
42
Pilhuj, Katherine. "A Mirror for the World: Gender, Geography, and Identity in Early Modern English Drama." Scholarly Repository, 2008. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_dissertations/90.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation focuses on the particular ways in which early modern English playwrights connect geographical territory depicted in charts, travel, and colonial literature to the female body. By examining the rhetorical methods that both male and female writers employ, I demonstrate how the emerging imperial discourse relies upon the idea that through marriage, women represent and convey territory for their male relatives. But as physical embodiments of family wealth and property that serve as crucial links between males, these women can subvert this use of their bodies in order to formulate a site of resistance to masculine modes of mapping that penetrate, explore, and chart both territory and bodies. Beginning with depictions of Queen Elizabeth and English geography, I investigate plays from the 1570s to the 1670s that reflect and reshape Elizabeth's cartography of her virgin body. In my consideration of Christopher Marlowe's Tragedie of Dido, Queene of Carthage, and Tamburlaine, I argue that although Dido and Zenocrate serve to represent their homelands and legitimize its conquest by their men, the two queens upset this rhetoric when they delineate their own geographic re-imaginings. Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedie of Mariam and The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II reveal how both Mariam and Isabel are inscribed by the same colonial rhetoric that imagines the women to be fertile land that can only be properly civilized by men. The next chapter reveals how Thomas Heywood's works reflect and legitimize the growing importance of trade rather than outright conquest in English overseas expansion. In If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie and The Fair Maid of the West, Heywood's Queen Elizabeth and her counterpart Bess Bridges demonstrate how any woman's virginity becomes a commodity to be used and traded as a representation of English virtue. The final chapter examines how Margaret Cavendish in Loves Adventures and Bell in Campo reclaims the body as a site of potential resistance by redeploying the rhetoric of virginity and cartography. The coda calls for continued investigation into the uses of geographic rhetoric through the example of Queen Anne.
43
Abu-Baker, Mohamed Hassan. "Representations of Islam and Muslims in early modern English drama from Marlowe to Massinger." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.322283.
Full text
44
Redmond, Michael John. "The Scence lyes in Italy : representations of Italian culture in early modern English drama." Thesis, University of Sussex, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.321486.
Full text
45
Row-Heyveld, Lindsey Dawn. "Dissembling Disability: Performances of the Non-Standard Body in Early Modern England." Diss., University of Iowa, 2011. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4906.
Full textAbstract:
The fear of able-bodied people pretending to be disabled was rampant in early modern England. Thieves were reputed to feign impairment in order to con charity out of well-meaning Christians. People told stories about these deceptive rogues in widely circulated prose pamphlets, sung about them in popular ballads, and even recorded their purported actions in laws passed to curb their counterfeiting. Feigned disability was especially prevalent--and potent--on the stage. Over thirty plays feature one or more able-bodied characters performing physical impairment. This dissertation examines the theatrical tradition of dissembling disability and argues that it played a central role in the cultural creation of disability as a category of identity. On the stage, playwrights teased out stereotypes about the non-standard body, specifically the popular notion that disability was always both deeply pitiful and, simultaneously, dangerously criminal and counterfeit. Fears of false disability, which surged during the English Reformation, demanded a policing of boundaries between able-bodied and disabled persons and inspired the first legal definition of disability in England. Rather than resolving the issue of physical difference, as the legal and religious authorities attempted to do, the theater revealed and reveled in the myriad complications of the non-standard body. The many plays that feature performances of dissembling disability use the trope to interrogate issues of epistemological proof, ask theological questions about charity and virtue, and, especially, explore the relationship between the body and identity. Fraudulent disability also had important literary uses as well; playwrights employed this handy theatrical instrument to construct character, to solve narrative problems, to draw attention to the manufactured theatricality of their dramas, and, often, to critique the practices of the commercial theater. Expanding beyond the medical perspectives offered by the few studies that have considered early modern disability, I argue that these performances emerge out of a complex network of literary, religious, and social concerns. For all that fraudulent disability may have been itself a type of fraud, trumped up by the state, the church, and the theater for their own diverse ends, it still wielded enormous influence in shaping notions of the non-standard body that are still current.
46
Seahorn, Christal R. "Fighting Words| The Discourse of War in Early Modern Drama and Military Handbooks." Thesis, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3687704.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation analyzes war discourse in sixteenth-century military handbooks and history plays with a focus on formal performances of martial rhetoric and the informal language used to rally audiences and justify war. Chapter One uses Rhetorical Genre Studies to classify the pre-battle oration as a social genre with common structures and themes, familiar not only to exhorting commanders and their soldiers but also to the general Renaissance populace. Establishing the pre-battle speech as a highly-conventionalized, even ritualized form of oratory, Chapter Two argues that performances of the genre are social actions in which audience familiarity elevates the speech act. This heightened valuation raises anticipation for the rhetorical moment and helps transform events like Elizabeth's Tilbury Speech and Henry V's Agincourt address into transcendent hero narratives. Chapter Three dissects formal justifications of war in William Shakespeare's Henry V and George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar. The chapter demonstrates a playwright's ability either to persuade an audience of legitimate cause, even in the face of possible war crimes, by systematically leading viewers through the rules of Just Cause Theory or to complicate legitimacy assumptions by disrupting the expected framework and destabilizing the systematic narrative.
The final two chapters examine informal motives in the trope of martial masculinity and in figurative language descriptions of war. Conducting a character analysis of official and surrogate martial commanders in Shakespeare's 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI, Chapter Four evaluates recurrent themes of effeminacy in the manuals. It connects anxieties about masculinity to questions of patriarchal power and uncertainties about sociocultural transitions occuring within an English society that at once idealized peace and vilified it as emasculating. Using Cognitive Metaphor Theory, Chapter Five uncovers similar anxieties embedded in the figurative expressions used to describe war in which warfare is conceptualized as natural and unpredictable, but England's men lack the knowledge and training to keep the country ordered and war-ready. This study advocates for an increased literary-historical awareness of war discourse and gives explicit evidence for connecting the treatises to early modern literature, an assumption that remains as-yet unproven by prevailing scholarship.
47
Trevor, Wendy Ellen. "Less than ideal? : the intellectual history of male friendship and its articulation in early modern drama." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2010. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/614/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the intellectual history of male friendship through its articulation in non-Shakespearean early modern drama; and considers how dramatic texts engage with the classical ideals of male friendship. Cicero’s \(De amicitia\) provided the theoretical model for perfect friendship for the early modern period; and this thesis argues for the further relevance of early modern translations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and in particular, Seneca’s De beneficiis, both of which open up meanings of different formulations and practices of friendship. This thesis, then, analyses how dramatists contributed to the discourse of male friendship through representations that expanded the bounds of amity beyond the paradigmatic ‘one soul in two bodies’, into different conceptions of friendship both ideal and otherwise. Through a consideration of selected dramatic works in their early modern cultural contexts, this thesis adds to our understanding of how amicable relations between men were arranged, performed, read and understood in the early modern period.
48
Cull, Marisa R. "Staging Cambria: Shakespeare, the Welsh, and the Early Modern English Theater, 1590-1615." The Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1211545621.
Full text
49
Sheldon, Dania S. K. "'Unregarded age' : texts and contexts for elderly characters in English Renaissance drama, c.1480-1625." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:20f5d513-2121-4cb6-afcb-de9846ab9a8e.
Full textAbstract:
This study seeks to provide historical and literary contexts for elderly characters from English play-texts c.1580 to 1625. Its primary aim, from a literary perspective, is to draw attention to the ways that a better understanding of elderly characterisation can enrich the appreciation of much-studied play-texts, and to indicate some interesting features of more obscure ones. Its secondary aim is to suggest the value, for social historians of old age in early modern England, of play-texts as social evidence. I have examined most of the published extant play-texts of the period, and have found approximately 150 of these to be relevant (the most important of these are listed in the Appendix). Because of the problems of handling all aspects of such a large amount of material, I have chosen to consider the plays chiefly as texts to be read, with little reference to their performative aspects. However, I analyse the dramas as literary as well as social documents. Specific plays provide illustrations for observations and support for various hypotheses about dramatic representations of the elderly. In some instances, I address plays which have received little critical attention. The thesis falls into two parts. In the first three chapters, I discuss the socio-historical, cultural and non-dramatic literary contexts for representations of elderly men and women in play-texts. In chapters four through seven, I examine elderly characters in specific role or relationship categories: as sovereigns and magistrates, in sexual and marital relationships, and as parents. In the final chapter, I offer a detailed analysis of The Old Law by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley.
50
Hennessey, James Todd. "An examination of human anatomy in the drama of the early modern period." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2016. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/7075/.
Full textAbstract:
An examination of the science of human anatomy and dissection as it occurs in plays of the early modern period. Starting with a survey of available literature on the subject, the thesis then moves on to examine the state of human anatomy in England at the time as well as an overview medical training, textbooks and information that may have been available to the public at large. This leads to an examination of a group of plays that refer explicitly to the practice of anatomy, references that are found to be either literal or metaphorical in nature. In this, the theatrical representation of anatomy is examined with an eye toward investigating the nature of these representations.