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1
Hattori, Natsu. "Performing cures : practice and interplay in theatre and medicine of the English Renaissance." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.284234.
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Orman, S. "Nathan Field's theatre of excess : youth culture and bodily excess on the early modern stage." Thesis, Canterbury Christ Church University, 2014. http://create.canterbury.ac.uk/13427/.
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This dissertation argues for the reappraisal of Jacobean boy actors by acknowledging their status as youths. Focussing on the repertory of The Children of the Queen’s Revels and using the acting and playwriting career of Nathan Field as an extensive case-study, it argues, via an investigation into cultural and theatrical bodily excess, that the theatre was a profoundly significant space in which youth culture was shaped and problematised. In defining youth culture as a space for the assertion of an identity that is inherently performative, the theatre stages young men’s social lives to reflect the performativity of masculinity in early modern culture. Chapters One to Three focus on the body of Nathan Field by investigating the roles that he performed in the theatre to claim that the staging of bodily excess amounted to an effort to inculcate correct paths of masculinity. Chapters Four and Five offer detailed analysis of the plays written by Nathan Field, finding that Field was keen to champion positive aspects of youth culture and identity by reforming bodily excess on stage. Chapter One asserts that George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (1603) identifies the protagonist’s excessive violence as a failure to adhere to humanist teachings; a sign that youth culture is dependent upon the lessons learnt in school, whereas Chapter Two finds that Eastward Ho (1605) condemns the monstrous youthful drunken body before encouraging the audience to value apprenticeship as a positive site of youth identity. Chapter Three argues that John Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess (1607) reveals a range of polluted young bodies to demonstrate the importance of moderating the humoral fluctuations of youth before Chapter Four finds Field to be a conservative dramatist who ridicules excess with explicit didactic intentions in his Woman is a Weathercock (1610) and Amends for Ladies (1611). Finally Chapter Five locates aspects of excessive service in Field and Fletcher’s The Honest Man’s Fortune (1613) to problematise aspects of youth culture, friendship and eroticism. The dissertation concludes with a retrospective appraisal of Field’s multifarious identities that championed youth culture, morality and celebrity.
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Reed, Delanna Kay. "Readers Theatre in Performance: The Analysis and Compilation of Period Literature for a Modern Renaissance Faire." Thesis, North Texas State University, 1986. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500784/.
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The thrust of this study was twofold: to research and compile a script of English Medieval and Renaissance literature and to direct a group performance of the script in the oral interpretation mode at Scarborough Faire in Waxahachie, Texas. The study sought to show that a Readers Theatre script compiled of literature from the oral tradition of England was a suitable art form for a twentieth-century audience and that Readers Theatre benefited participants in the Scarborough Faire workshop program. This study concluded that the performed script appealed to a modern audience and that workshop training was enhanced by Readers Theatre in rehearsal and performance.
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Gambill, Christin N. "" A Poor Player That Struts and Frets His Hour Upon the Stage..." The English Theatre in Transition." University of Akron / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=akron1458984846.
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Loeb, Andrew. "Subjectivity and Music in Early Modern English Drama." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/32129.
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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.
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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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Holmes, Rachel E. "Casos de honra : honouring clandestine contracts and Italian novelle in early modern English and Spanish drama." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6318.
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This thesis argues that the popularity of the clandestine marriage plot in English and Spanish drama following the Reformation corresponds closely to developments and emerging conflicts in European matrimonial law. My title, ‘casos de honra,' or ‘honour cases', unites law and drama in a way that captures this argument. Taken from the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega's El arte nuevo (1609), a treatise on his dramatic practice, the phrase has been understood as a description of the honour plots so common in Spanish Golden Age drama, but ‘casos' [cases] has a further, and related, legal meaning. Casos de honra are cases touching honour, whether portrayed on stage or at law, a European rather than a strictly Spanish phenomenon, and clandestine marriages are one such example. I trace the genealogy of three casos de honra from their recognisable origins in Italian novelle, through Italian, French, Spanish, and English adaptations, until their final early modern manifestations on the English and Spanish stage. Their seeming differences, and often radical divergences in plot can be explained with reference to their distinct, but related, legal concerns.
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Lublin, Robert I. "Costuming the Shakespearean stage visual codes of representation in early modern theatre and culture /." Connect to this title online, 2004. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1060614385.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004.Document formatted into pages; contains x, 256 p. Includes bibliographical references. Abstract available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2005 Aug. 11.
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Coffey, Alexandra. "Höllischer Ehrgeiz und himmlische Macht : Herrschafts- und Magiediskurse im Theater der englischen Renaissance /." München : Utz, 2009. http://d-nb.info/988230267/04.
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Keller, Michelle Margo 1954. "A study of pathological narcissism in Renaissance English tragic drama." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/289178.
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The central conviction of this dissertation is that the tenets of the psychiatric medical category, pathological narcissism, explain, in a way other psychological interpretations have not adequately addressed, why the main characters in several important English Renaissance tragic dramas become enmeshed in difficulty and come to ruin. Evidence in the plays themselves invites the use of this particular interpretive category. William Shakespeare's Coriolanus in Coriolanus, Vindice in Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy, Edward in Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, and John Frankford in Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness are representative of tragic characters who suffer from a lack of a psychologically integrated self--the least common denominator of narcissistic disturbance. Pathological narcissism is not a hedonistic orientation toward self-gratification, nor is it self-love, but rather, it refers to an impoverished state of being that is self-misconstrued in a special way. Lacking a stable self-configuration--a mental state that is experienced painfully and fearfully, narcissists engage in patterns of defensive, compensatory behaviors which include grandiose acting out, masochistic and sadistic functioning, aggressive and vengeful conduct, mental splitting, and inappropriate psychological mirroring. The terrible irony of these defensive strategies is that, because they are so offensive and alienating to others, they isolate the narcissist from relational contact and impel him back toward the sense of self-incohesion that he seeks to avoid. In each chapter, I examine how pathological narcissism manifests itself in the four tragic protagonists under consideration. Coriolanus's exaggerated focus on himself renders him a completely unsuitable candidate for the office of consul. Vindice revives himself from mental paralysis through narcissistic defensive activities which cause him self-destructively to collapse back onto himself. Edward II possesses a self that is so narrowly conceived that it cannot survive the rigors of monarchical office. John Frankford lives in the narcissistic psychological prison of perfectionism that will be his undoing. Also in each chapter, I suggest how Ovid's treatment of Narcissus in the Metamorphoses, for whom the psychological condition of pathological narcissism is named, provides a gloss on the disastrous course each protagonist's life takes.
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Sharrett, Elizabeth. "Beds as stage properties in English Renaissance drama : materializing the lifecycle." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2014. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/5153/.
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This thesis examines beds as stage properties in English Renaissance drama. It argues that their indissoluble associations with the major rites of passage in the early modern lifecycle – birth, marriage, and death – created particular dramatic effects in performance not immediately obvious to audiences today. Chapter one identifies the theoretical and methodological frameworks informing the thesis, and addresses assumptions about the physical structure of beds from the period and their appearance as props. The succeeding chapters each explore different rites of passage. Chapter two considers childbirth rituals in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and other plays depicting the lying-in ritual, and the bed’s function in these plays as a mockery of the religious and cultural ideals it was intended to represent. Chapter three focuses on marriage, exploring how the bed becomes a subversive emblem of female marital control through a comparison of the manuscript and Folio editions of The Woman’s Prize. Chapter four analyzes the death ritual in relation to Humphrey’s murder in Henry VI Part II, comparing the uses of the bed in the Quarto and Folio versions in order to consider the extent to which Humphrey ‘dies well’. Chapter five explores the inherent interconnectedness of all three rites in A Woman Killed With Kindness, and establishes the ways in which they converge upon the bed. As these case studies demonstrate, the use of the bed by playwrights as a prop in performance on the Renaissance stage was a not an incidental inclusion, but a considered choice intended to exploit the dramatic potential of the object’s multivalency to affect the scene in which it appeared, due to its rich symbolic association with the three major rites of passage.
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Lucas, Georgina Mary. "The meaning of massacre in English Renaissance drama, 1572-1642." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2016. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/6993/.
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The PhD examines the web of meanings elicited by and constructed around the act and concept of massacre in English Renaissance drama. The study is underpinned by two contentions. The first is that the enactment of massacre, both on and off-stage, is often predicated upon the same kinds of fictive and imaginative processes inherent to dramatic practice. The second is that the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris was instrumental to conceptualisations of Renaissance massacre. Bartholomew, along with its most flagrant dramatic depiction, Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (1593), anchors every part of the study. The thesis is split thematically into three sections, each of which contains two chapters. The first part explores the language of massacre. Chapter 1 examines the denotations and connotations of the word massacre in French and English. Chapter 2 looks at the means through which the rhetoric of massacre reports prompt emotional responses in readers and spectators. Part two investigates the relationship between massacre and the state. Chapter 3 explores massacres committed from ‘above’ by ruling or de facto powers. Chapter 4 considers inverse phenomena – massacres committed from ‘below’ – by usurpers, lesser magistrates, and private individuals. The final part examines the relationship between massacre and warfare. Chapter 5 explores massacres committed by external forces – from ‘without’ – and explores the contribution of massacre to wars of conquest, sieges, and sacks. Chapter 6 addresses massacres committed ‘within’, examining inter-state conflicts and the internal logic of battle. The thesis concludes by gesturing to the continuation of key theorisations of massacres after the closure of the theatres in 1642.
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Gourlay, Jennifer Eowyn. "Negotiating spaces : women and agency in English Renaissance society, plays and masques." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2003. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3465/.
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This thesis provides new and alternative readings of women’s opportunities for agency in sixteenth and early seventeenth century society, and of the ways in which this was represented in plays and masques of the time. The relationship between history and theatre is a two-way process. In light of this, the depiction of proactive female characters in public plays is examined alongside the appearance of proactive women in society and on stage in Jacobean court masques, through the different but complementary lenses of marriage and female alliances. After the Introduction (Chapter One), Part One (Chapters Two and Three) looks at female agency in marriage and the ways in which this was depicted in drama, from the perspective of two neglected social practices, spousals and wife sales. The spousal law offered women as well as men an opportunity to regulate their marriage without recourse to the church or parents and is a common, but under-studied, plot in Renaissance drama. Three of the most interesting and complex uses appear in George Chapman’s The Gentlemen Usher (1602-4), John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1612-14) and Thomas Middleton’s The Widow (c. 1616). The spousal plot provides an alternative angle for the playwrights to explore and endorse female characters’ decision to rebel against male family members and marry men of their choice. Part Two (Chapters Four, Five and Six) analyses the opportunities for female agency at the Jacobean court from the perspective of female homosocial bonding, looking at Anna of Denmark (Queen consort of James I), her court women, and the masques in which they danced. Anna’s women were, like the Queen, trying to control their lives. Chapter Four shows that the Queen’s retinue provided a separate space for these women to gather, interact and create alliances and further, that this mutual support facilitated their agency at the Jacobean court, agency which often involved opposing the king.
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Coffey, Alexandra. "Höllischer Ehrgeiz und himmlische Macht Herrschafts- und Magiediskurse im Theater der englischen Renaissance." München Utz, 2007. http://d-nb.info/988230267/04.
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Gilmore, Nicola Anne. "The whole play of parts : a study of cued parts in English Renaissance drama, 1590-1620." Thesis, University of Gloucestershire, 2012. http://eprints.glos.ac.uk/1249/.
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The chief objective of this doctoral thesis is to identify the feasibility of interpreting non-Shakespearean plays written during the English Renaissance period in terms of their integral actors’ cued parts. The cued part is defined herein as the prevalent type of theatrical script received by an early modern professional actor. Unlike the familiarly linear, holistic guide to a play typically received by a twenty-first century actor, such a unique text consisted solely of the lines to be spoken by the player on behalf of the individual character he was to represent. Each moment of speech was prefaced by a short cue to facilitate effective timing on the stage. An actor’s cues, visually indicated on the part by ‘cue-tails’, the long horizontal lines which preceded them, would themselves be crucially distinguished from the speaking part, thus forming a detached peripheral ‘cue-text’ of their own (Palfrey and Stern, 2005). This thesis is situated in the context of seminal work by Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern (2005, 2007). Although the authors’ ground-breaking publications currently saturate the newly-emerging discipline, their content is almost exclusively confined to the plays of Shakespeare despite the non-Shakespearean provenance of extant early modern cued parts. Originality is demonstrated herein through extension of the field’s existing sphere of influence. The current study thus seeks to resolve whether the practice of performing from cued parts was unique to Shakespeare or common to a cross-section of Renaissance playwrights, united for analysis within the following chapters by one of two factors: the theatrical association of the dramatists’ plays with the Lord Admiral’s Men, the playing company for whom the known part-conversant actor Edward Alleyn performed and/or the existence of their plays in bibliographically inferior yet dramatically enlightening ‘bad’ quarto (Pollard, 1909) or ‘minimal text’ (Gurr, 1999) form. Whilst it has been largely critically overlooked, the cued part is hypothesised within this study to be an all-encompassing complete unit of text, performance and meta-performance. Although the original rationale for its production was firmly rooted in the practical, the revised agenda set by this thesis is predominantly interpretative. Adopting an actor-centred methodology, the present investigation represents an active contribution to understanding within the field, its most innovative inputs centring upon selected key areas. In terms of the dramatic, the study proposes an archetypal technical composition for the early modern professional actor’s customised text, venturing to assert a series of original classifications of cue type with far-reaching semantic repercussions, reinforced by supporting literary and cultural analysis. Establishing new terminology for the analysis of cued parts, the vast editorial potential inherent in the form begins to emerge. The comparative relationship between cued parts and ‘minimal text’ editions of plays written and performed during the period 1590 to 1620 is elucidated, the latter bibliographic grouping critically neglected on account of its compromised literary value. The surprising influence of the actor in shaping the composition, performance and direction of Renaissance plays is subsequently promoted. Finally, in the realm of the meta-dramatic, the thesis recommends the multi-dimensional self-reflexive potential of the cued part form. New evidence is provided for the existence of alternative texts within both play and part, tendering shifting perspectives on the whole play and simultaneously boasting immeasurable creative potential to contemporary directors, actors and scholars alike. Orienteering far beyond the accepted segmentation of the whole play into parts, the cued part itself is dissolved into interior and exterior meta-parts. The reader is ultimately presented with a selection of avant-garde reflections upon the broad interpretative facility of the small and quirky Renaissance theatrical text.
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Knott, Sue Marilyn. "Competing discourses of love and sexuality in the relationships between men and women in Renaissance drama." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 1998. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/3629/.
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This thesis is an examination of the ways in which competing discourses of love and sexuality, ranging from the literary and philosophical to the religious, have influenced the portrayal of men and women in the drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The structure of the thesis is in two parts: the first concerns what might be termed normative relationships, underlying which is the ideal of mutual affection in marriage, and the second, relationships which undermine, or challenge that ideal. My central proposition is that the conflict between the demands of the body and the spirit, rooted in the ascetic heritage of the Middle Ages, lies at the heart of all discourse on love and sexuality. This is demonstrated in the tension between the Petrarchan idealisation of love and women, and their denigration; between sublimation and sexual fulfilment. Underlying the idealism associated with love is the fear of disillusionment and betrayal, arising out of a deep-rooted association of sexuality with sin, which finds expression in anxiety about female sexuality. The playwrights dramatise these tensions, placing them in a context of changing values in which traditional views of morality come into conflict with a cynical acceptance of human frailty.
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Jacobs, Angela F. "Prelude to a Saturday Nighter." University of Dayton / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=dayton1281357729.
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"Clothes make the wo/man: cross-dressing and gender on the English renaissance stage and in the late Imperial Chinese theatre." 2004. http://library.cuhk.edu.hk/record=b6073650.
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Liao Weichun."August 2004."
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-268).
Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
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Jakacki, Diane. ""Covetous to parley with so sweet a frontis-peece": Illustration in Early Modern English Play-Texts." Thesis, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10012/5518.
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This dissertation studies visual artifacts associated with early modern theatre and book culture, and through them examines acts of communication in the marketplace. These artifacts, illustrated play-text title pages from the period 1600 to 1660, provide scholars with an opportunity to better understand the discursive power of theatre and subjects associated with drama in seventeenth-century London. This work offers a set of case studies that demonstrate how title page imagery and its circulation can contribute to our understanding of contemporary theatre culture, and addresses questions of intention, production and distribution. As well, it offers insights into early modern modes of constructing visualization. These artifacts served not only as visual reminders or interpretations of the dramatic works they represented, but were also used as powerful marketing tools that enhanced the cultural capital of the plays throughout London. The title pages were used as posters, tacked to the walls of the booksellers’ shops; the woodcuts were also repurposed, and incorporated into other popular publications such as broadside ballads, which retold the plots of the plays in musical form and were sold on city street corners. These connections raise questions about early modern forms of marketing used by publishers, and challenge the widely accepted belief that images held little value in the society and in the culture of print of the period. In addition, the distribution of these illustrations challenges the widespread conviction that early modern English culture was iconophobic, and suggests that seventeenth-century English society embraced rather than spurned visual media.
Methodologically, this study is built on the foundations laid by scholars of English theatre and print culture. Within those fields, however, it has been customary to view these title page illustrations as inferior forms of representation, especially in comparison to their continental counterparts. By using tools from visual rhetoric to expand on how and what these images communicate, I am able to show the important functions they performed, and the distinct and playful way they represent complex relationships between stage and page, audience and performance, reading and spectating. These readings, in turn, enrich our historical understanding of the cultures of print and theatre, and build upon our knowledge of the interactions between these rich and important fields.
Each chapter explores theoretical and contextual questions that pertain to some aspect of each illustration, as well as examining whether individual illustrations can inform us further about early modern theatrical performance practices. The introduction surveys the relevant field and introduces the theoretical resources that will be used in the subsequent chapters. Chapter Two examines the 1633 edition of Arden of Faversham and the question of whether the action in the illustration pertains to the play or to a broadside ballad that appeared in the same year. The third chapter provides a theoretical analysis of the performance of violence in the woodcut for The Spanish Tragedy, and how emphatic elements in the image may demonstrate the influence of theatrical performance upon the artist. Chapter Four explores the relationship between the title page of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and the concept of celebrity in relation to the Tarltonesque clown character who dominates the action of the image. Chapter Five considers the problematic relationship between theatre, politics and satire in the competing engraved title pages for A Game at Chess. The conclusion draws together the findings, and points to other aspects of early modern print and theatre cultures to which they pertain.
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Maxwell, Ashley-Marie. "Japanese Macbeth : Shakespeare's role on the international stage." Thèse, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/21985.
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(8774834), Cody W. Krumrie. "Dressing for the Part(s): Costume Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage." Thesis, 2020.
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This dissertation brings together studies of early modern subjectivity, material culture, and dramatic performance in ways that address the myriad ways in which material objects—in this case, clothing and costumes—can act as catalysts for change in a work of the dramatic literature of the period. Literary studies of the twenty-first century has done little to examine the ways in which costumes on the early modern English stage functioned to convey relationships between outward expression and inner self. Despite critical agreement that staged objects in early modern England were significant for creating meaning in theatrical performances, the presentation of material objects in early modern English drama with respect to a performed selfhood continues to be underappreciated or misunderstood, if not entirely neglected.
In response to this problem, I argue that an examination of the history of costumes on the early modern English stage is necessary to discover how costumes functioned over time to indicate both complete and incomplete transformations in performance. On-stage clothing, particularly when it is removed from or placed upon an actor’s body, effectively added to the performed narrative. Within any given work of drama, of course, the act of changing costumes often coincides with the potential for a change of one’s character. Examining elements of identity including political alignment, social status, religion, gender, and sexuality as features that can be defined and redefined through costuming, it is possible to trace the ways in which costumes have the power to transform.
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Totaro, Rebecca Carol Noel. "Bubonic plague in English Renaissance utopian literature." 2000. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9960795.
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The fear of plague was inherent in Renaissance English society. On average, at least two periods of extensive mortality occurred within each reign of a monarch from 1500–1700. All kings and queens knew that plague might in any year visit and force them to abandon their thrones in flight. A court page or cook breaking out in a fever was enough to shake the national foundation, as John Davies of Hereford records in his poem, “The Picture of the Plague According to the Life as it was in Anno Domini 1603”: The King himself (O wretched Times the while!) From place to place, to save himselfe did flie, Which from himselfe himselfe did seeke t'exile, Who (as amaz'd) know not where safe to lie. Its hard with Subjects when the Soveraigne Hath no place free from plagues, his head to hide; And hardly can we say the King doth raigne, That no where, for just feare, can well abide. For, no where comes He but Death followes him Hard at the Heeles, and reacheth at his head. (1.45) This was no way to keep a monarchy intact or a society stable. In their new worlds, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and Margaret Cavendish each constructed a “no-place” for the king “his head to hide”; however, containing the plague was not simply a matter of dreaming up a panacea. Rather than easily eliminate plague from their worlds, they grappled with the very presence of plague, both releasing and controlling it within their borders. This dissertation examines the specific religious, scientific, and literary regimens each writer utilized and depicted. The last chapter analyzes the less optimistic response to plague and utopia, assessing the failed utopian world presented by Shakespeare in Timon of Athens and by Jonson in The Alchemist.
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Yu, Jeffrey J. "Renaissance Caesars and the poetics of ambiguity: Dramatic representations of Julius Caesar in the English Renaissance." 1995. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9541171.
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The conceptions of Julius Caesar in the English Renaissance were complex and contradictory, and the four surviving plays about Caesar from the period--the anonymous Caesar's Revenge (c. 1595), Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599), George Chapman's Caesar and Pompey (c. 1604), and Sir William Alexander's The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1607)--negotiate these conceptions in distinct ways. The views of Caesar current in the Renaissance were diverse in both their sources and content. The medieval tradition glorified Caesar, but classical sources were mixed in their assessments. Caesar was lauded for his virtues and the authoritarian stability he brought to Rome, but was also condemned for his vices and his subversion of the Republic. In the Renaissance, therefore, Caesar was an ambiguous figure who was regarded as both an ambitious usurper and as a legitimate monarch. Renaissance drama imposed didactic lessons on historical subject matter, and, thus, Caesar's Revenge illustrates how ambition and revenge cause civil discord. Caesar and Pompey espouses Stoic independence, and The Tragedy of Julius Caesar both condemns ambition and counsels Stoic transcendence of the vagaries of Fortune. The three plays, however, cannot simplify Caesar and the events of his life to fully complement their didactic aims because of two primary factors. First, the plays were composed within disciplinary paradigms that promote ambiguity. These paradigms--historiographical in Caesar's Revenge, philosophical in Caesar and Pompey, and rhetorical in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar--resist reductive, didactic appropriations of Caesar by acknowledging opposing viewpoints and perspectives. Secondly, the multiple and conflicting conceptions of Caesar in the Renaissance defied simplification. The number of accounts of Caesar and their contradictory nature produced an intertextual web of references and interpretations that undermined unequivocal portrayals of Caesar. Shakespeare avoided these difficulties by focusing Julius Caesar on ambiguity itself. His play demonstrates the manner in which assessments and judgments of character are the product of the perceiver's perspective and how identity is thus shaped to appeal to the perceived judgments of those perceivers. These insights are applicable to the operations, specific to the Renaissance, of the other three plays, and to the means of interpretation today.
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Lee, Huey-ling. "Eat, drink, man, woman: Food, eating, and social formations in Renaissance culture and drama." Thesis, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1911/18550.
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Food and eating have attracted the attention of scholars in different disciplines, but no one has yet attempted a systematic study of their social and cultural significance in early modern England. This dissertation undertakes such a study of a period in which the traditional social hierarchy was loosening and economic resources were changing hands in an unprecedented pace. Analyzing contemporary drama along with medical treatises, self-help manuals, and popular literatures, I demonstrate the way in which cultural beliefs and practices accompanying preparation and consumption of food contribute to the process of social formation and, more specifically, to the making of a class and gendered body. I argue that, though women's involvement in food service and provision is indispensable in the maintenance of the social order, they are usually identified with the unruly forces from below, threatening to become not just the medium but the agent of pollution and destruction.
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"Representing theft and other crimes against property in Renaissance dramas on Henry V and in Fielding's ""Amelia""." Tulane University, 1998.
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Several Elizabethan plays on Henry V share with Fielding a marked tendency toward ambiguity and contradiction in representing crimes against property. The Henry plays, including the early anonymous Famous Victories of Henry V, the Henslow play, Sir John Oldcastle: Part I, by Munday, Drayton, et al., and Shakespeare's I & II Henry IV and Henry V alternately eulogize and proscribe theft. They consistently exploit Hal's popular characterization as a thief, while other thieves, or theft in general at times, is disallowed Fielding condemns theft in his prose tract, An Enquiry into the Late Increase of Robbers, and calls for renewed enforcement of laws protecting property. In Amelia, however, Fielding indulges Booth, a debtor, at the expense of property laws Both sets of texts valorize or excuse crimes against property; they also condemn illicit or illegal forms of exchange. My study traces these problematics, and also explores various textual mechanisms that work to efface contradictions in the texts' construction of property and their representation of exchange Certain elements in the dramas, for instance, work to contain illicit forms of exchange. In Oldcastle, certain thefts create what I call 'gift-effects.' Theft is valorized when it brings about the circulation of property as gift. Gift-effects neutralize, sanitize, or redeem illicit forms of exchange; thus, they soften, or even efface, the contradictions produced by a text that valorizes the illicit or illegal. In Amelia, a certain ethics--or a certain nostalgia associated with the gift and with patronage exchange--works to legitimize Fielding's resistance to the criminalization of debt, despite his austere legal reformism in the case of theft. Fielding may be seen both to defend and repudiate the newly emergent market culture that increasingly criminalizes debtacase@tulane.edu
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Leonard, Nathaniel C. "The Reflexive Scaffold: Metatheatricality, Genre, and Cultural Performance in English Renaissance Drama." 2013. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3589073.
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The critical discussion of metatheatre has historically connected a series of reflexive dramatic strategies—like soliloquy, chorus, dumb show, the-play-within-the-play, prologue, and epilogue—and assumed that because these tropes all involve the play's apparent awareness of its own theatrical nature they all have similar dramaturgical functions. This dissertation, by contrast, shows that the efficacy derived from metatheatrical moments that overtly reference theatrical production is better understood in the context of restaged non-theatrical cultural performances. Restaged moments of both theatrical and non-theatrical social ritual produce layers of performance that allow the play to create representational space capable of circumventing traditional power structures. The Reflexive Scaffold argues that this relationship between metatheatricality and restaged moments of culture is central to interrogating the complexities of dramatic genre on the English Renaissance stage. This project asserts that a great deal of early modern English drama begins to experiment with staged moments of cultural performance: social, cultural, and religious events, which have distinct ramifications and efficacy both for the audience and in the world of the play. However, while these restaged social rituals become focal points within a given narrative, their function is determined by the genre of the play in which they appear. A play or a feast inserted into a comic narrative creates a very different sort of efficacy within the world of the play from that which is created when the same moment appears in a tragic narrative. These various types of performance give us a glimpse into the ways that early modern English dramatists understood the relationship between their works and the audiences who viewed them. I argue that the presentation and reinterpretation of early modern social ritual is utilized by many of the major playwrights of the English Renaissance, including Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, and Philip Massinger to redefine genre. These moments of reflexivity construct efficacy that, depending on the genre in which they appear, runs the gambit from reinforcing social order to directly critiquing the dominant cultural discourse.
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Garner, Ann E. "How should I act?: Shakespeare and the theatrical code of conduct." 2012. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3518233.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation examines the intersection of English Renaissance drama and conduct literature. Current scholarship on this intersection usually interprets plays as illustrations of cultural behavioral norms who find their model and justification in courtly norms. In this dissertation, I argue that plays present behavioral norms that emerge from this nascent profession and that were thus influenced by this profession and the concerns of the people who worked in it, rather than by the court. To do so, I examine three behavioral norms that were important to courtiers, specifically Disguise, Moderation and Wit through the work of the English Renaissance theater's most celebrated professional, William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's plays evince a theatrical code of conduct that, rather than being an illustration of courtly norms, was sometimes in direct contrast to them and sometimes formed an alternate or lateral code. This code shows a distrust of disguise, a lack of interest in moderation and a belief in the need to eschew wit in favor of a happy ending. The modern theater has retained many of these essential behavioral norms, including the value of community above the self, the need for sympathy and compassion, and the willingness to risk.