Academic literature on the topic 'Shakespeare's plays'

This thesis traces the development of Shakespeare's conceptualisation of ancient and early modem Greece through an analysis of his Greek plays. Contrary to the numerous studies of Shakespeare's Roman plays, very little interest has been paid to his Greek ones. The single extensive study conducted on the subject to the present, has focused exclusively on the structural interrelation between classical Greece and Renaissance Britain, failing to take into consideration early modern Greece. The specific thesis aims at filling this crucial gap. It sets about to demonstrate that Shakespeare's contemporary Greece was equally, if not in some ways more important, than classical Greece as a moving force in the creation of the Shakespearean reek plays. Reading these literary texts through a historicist approach and in conjunction with a wide variety of other discursive forms ranging from travelogues to ambassadorial reports to historiographies, this thesis demonstrates the deeply contradictory role of Greece in both sustaining and dislocating Renaissance English authority. It reveals that Elizabethan and Jacobean England struggled to achieve selfrepresentation and establish itself as an imperial authority through an emulation of classical Greek cultural, linguistic and imperial models, while simultaneously endeavouring to break free from the overdominant influence of these models and establish an independent identity. At the same time, Renaissance England's ambition to achieve self-representation was unsettled by its anxiety over the vulnerability of Europe's eastern borders, deepened by the subjection of early modem Greece to the Otttoman Empire. Shakespeare's Greek plays are informed by and engage with these particular tensions. The introduction outlines the parameters of this study and explains the choice of texts. The first chapter reads Shakespeare's first dramatic poem, Venus and Adonis, as the playwright's call to Elizabethan England to abandon its emulation of classical Greek language and devolop its own instead. The second chapter focuses on The Comedy of Errors as a Shakespeareane xploration of England's effort to forge itself as different to both the Ottoman Empire and early modern Greece and its inability to achieve such a goal due to its confrontation with an Eastern `other' who is both a reflection of the self and determinately alien. This blurring of boundaries is further highlighted in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play dramatises the dissolution of strict binary oppositions such as the Athenian city and the forest, the elevated classical Greece and the degraded early modem one, and the stereotypical differences between the two sexes by effeminating men and emasculating women. The fourth chapter analyzes Troilus and Cressida as a Shakespeareans atire of the breakdown of the classical world which disrupts the use of the Troy legend as a tool of political propaganda by both Elizabeth and James I. The last three plays of the thesis, written well into the Jacobean era, are analysed in relation to James's and Henry's courts. Timon of Athens satirizes the fall of the Athenian civilisation in order to critique Jacobean England and its decadent monarch. Pericles is read as a dramatisation of the dream of proto-capitalistic Jacobean England's redemption by its re-naissance of feudal values, its engagement in a war against the infidels and its solidification of a Christian Renaissance English identity. The seventh and last chapter examines The Two Noble Kinsmen as a call for Jacobean England to resuscitate its decayed chivalric ethos by abandoning its imitation of Greek antiquity and engaging in a more introspective process, a return to its Gothic origins.

'Banished' - the word resounds in many Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, particularly in those of Shakespeare. This thesis examines the drama of banishment, that is, the sentence, lamentation, displacement, and metamorphosis of the exile in Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Henry IV, As You Like It, King Lear, Coriolanus and The Tempest. To appreciate the rich and polysemous nature of 'banished' in Shakespeare's society I have considered a number of legal, historical and literary sources which reveal certain tropes of exile. The poet of Ovid's Tristia and Plato's Republic, the beast/god of Aristotle's Politics, the seventeenth-century colonialist, the Petrarchan lover, are all examples of the archetypes against which Shakespeare's banished characters fashion themselves. For banishment is a process of annihilation and of self-creation, and as such it raises various questions about identity in Shakespeare's plays. The possibility of its destruction and transformation reveals identity to be a fictional construct, based on ideology not inherent nature or right. This suggestion that the social distinctions between men are equally fictional gives a particular frisson to the juxtaposition of the exiled king and the naked beggar, to the transformation of greatness into barbarousness, that is so often staged on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage through banishment.

In this dissertation, I examine the complex role that the body played in early modern constructions of judgment. Moving away from an overreliance on anti-theatrical texts as the authority on the body in Shakespeare's plays, my project intervenes in the field Shakespearean studies by widening the lens through which scholars view the body's role in the early modern theater. Through readings of four plays—Richard II, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale—I demonstrate that Shakespeare uses a wide range of ideas about the human body from religious, philosophical, medical, and cultural spheres of thought to challenge Puritan accusations that the public theater audience is incapable of rational judgment. The first chapter outlines the parameters of the project. In Chapter 2, I argue that Richard II draws parallels between the theatrical community and the community created through the sacramental experiences of baptism and communion to show that bodies play a crucial role in establishing common experience and providing an avenue for judgment. In Chapter 3, I argue that Shakespeare establishes correspondences between bodily and social collaboration to show how both are needed for the memory-making project of the theater. In the next chapter, I show how Shakespeare appropriates what early moderns perceived of as the natural vulnerability in English bodies to suggest the passionate responses associated with impressionability can actually be sources of productive judgment and self-edification. I argue the storm models this passionate judgment, providing a guide for audience behavior. In Chapter 5, I argue that the memories created by and within the women in The Winter's Tale evoke the tradition of housewifery and emphasize the female role in preservation. Female characters stand in for hidden female contributors to the theater and expose societal blindness to women's work. Through each of these chapters, I argue that Shakespeare's plays emphasize the value of bodily experience and suggest that the audience take up what I have termed "corporeal judgment."

This thesis brings the performativity of William Shakespeare’s plays into focus; in presenting an alternative approach to his works, I show how literary criticism can be reinvigorated. Dramatic works demonstrate that, in their theatrical world, everything is mutable, and capable of evolving and changing, negating stability or reliability. Why, then, should what I term monogeneric approaches (forms of analysis that allocate one genre to plays, adopting a priori ideas as opposed to recognising processes of dramatic construction) to criticism remain prevalent in Shakespearean scholarship? Performativity, as defined by Judith Butler, is a concept that focuses on the dynamic constitution of a subject, rather than on the end result alone (whether ‘female’ for gender, or, for example, ‘comedy’ for plays). In establishing an analogical relationship between the performativity of gender and the performance of dramatic works, I offer new, interpretive possibilities for dramatic works, moving away from monogeneric methods. Constructing a method of analysis based on performativity allows an approach that recognises and privileges dramatic dynamism and characterisation. The role of female characters is vital in Shakespeare’s works: we see defiant, submissive, calculating, principled and overwhelmingly multifaceted performances from these characters who, I argue, influence the courses that plays take. This thesis joins a conversation that began in 335BCE with Aristotle’s Poetics. In acknowledging and interrogating previous scholarship on genre in Shakespeare’s works, I trace monogeneric themes in analysis from Aristotle, through A.C. Bradley, through to later twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics. I challenge the practice of allocating genre based on plot features, including weddings and deaths; such actions are not conclusively representative of one genre alone. To enable this interrogation, I establish relationships between theories such as Nicolas Bourriaud’s work on artistic exchange; Jacques Derrida’s hypothesis on participation and belonging; and feminist research by scholars including Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Performance analysis is a vital component of this thesis, alongside textual analysis. In a number of cases, multiple performances of a dramatic work are considered to illustrate the fascinating variety with which the text is translated from page to stage and the impact of different directorial decisions. I use the term ‘textual analysis’ to include the varying editions of Shakespeare’s plays, and to consider that every Complete Works publication is not, in fact, complete. The existence of quarto texts makes clear an important process of dramatic evolution, particularly when dramatic works and their allocated genres shift between quarto and Folio versions. Such textual instability highlights the difficulties inherent in applying singular identities to dynamic works. In locating performativity at the core of dramatic works and emphasising the key role of female characters, this thesis brings performance to the fore and presents an alternative ‘lens of interpretation’ for readers, watchers, teachers and scholars of Shakespeare.

There has been a turn to religion in Shakespeare Studies by scholars like Kastan, Swift and Shugar in recent years, and this turn has uncovered a wealth of insight that had previously been obscured. I contribute to this recovery of the spiritual dimension of Shakespeare's work by tackling the question of what prayer does in his plays. I place these performed prayers in their historical and theological contexts, as well as analyse their roles dramatically and thematically within the plays. Prayer as a dramatic form is unique in that it falls between a dialogue and a monologue, pointing to something different in terms of rhetoric and content. Characters evoke an invisible being to whom they bare their souls, and the audience is privy to this conversation but not addressed by it. Awareness is created of something other, something beyond, filling the space of the stage with the suggestion of an alternate reality, another terrain beyond the earthly realm. Prayer is a conduit between characters and this alternate reality, a conduit through which multiple human impulses are conducted. I focus specifically on how filial attachment, erotic desire, violence, and visions of citizenship are conducted via prayer, and what happens when any of these impulses and visions is misdirected. Through the ability of prayer to conduct this array of human impulses, I demonstrate Shakespeare's complex engagement with the metaphysical realm, especially as his plays dramatize characters' move to embrace the divine.

This thesis reports an original approach to the language of self-talk in Shakespeare’s plays. Having established that self-talk is a form of discourse worthy of study, and potentially distinguishable from dialogue in terms of language, I ask two questions: 1. What is the nature of self-talk? 2. What language forms are characteristic of self-talk? The second question is really a subsidiary of the first in that it focuses specifically on the linguistic nature of self-talk. In Chapter 2, I begin to answer these questions by drawing on theories in stylistics, (im)politeness, literary criticism and methods employed in corpus linguistics. In doing so, I show how this research breaks new ground by approaching the language of self-talk from innovative angles, for example, by building and studying a corpus of self-talk. Chapter 3 describes the construction of this corpus, together with a dialogue corpus against which to compare the former. Chapters 4 and 5 address the first question. In Chapter 4, qualitative analysis of the self-talk corpus provides insights into the nature of self-talk as discourse, showing, for example, how speakers may linguistically split themselves in two. The focus in Chapter 5 shifts to theories of (im)politeness, and the ways in which self-talkers use linguistic strategies to justify their own social value, or even attack it by being impolite to themselves. Chapter 6 addresses the second question by using automatic analysis of the self-talk corpus, in conjunction with the dialogue corpus, to reveal characteristic language forms. Among others, these include DREAM, EYES, NATURE, and COMES. Chapter 7 uncovers characteristic combinations such as AND YET, I AM and I WILL. Self-talk in comedy, history and tragedy is typified by words such as LOVE, KING and GODS respectively.

This thesis explores how queens in Shakespeare’s English history plays manipulate virtues, space, and memory to embody a specific demeanour in the contexts of early modern England. In the late 1990s, Jean E. Howard’s and Phyllis Rackin’s Engendering a Nation established a feminist study of Shakespeare’s English history plays, focusing on how women support or undermine patriarchal authorities. Yet analysing women’s words and actions in the light of nationalism, New Historicism, and women’s traditional roles as daughters, wives, and mothers within feminism restricts potential readings of women in early modern English literature. This thesis then studies the most powerful women, the queens, to see how they establish themselves as models or counterexamples for women. It first distinguishes between queens regnant, regent, and consort, and investigates the relationship between queenship and kingship. It then traces the three stages of the queens’ ‘career’: the pursuit, practice, and residue of queenship. The ‘pursuit’ analyses how queens-to-be implement their virtues in accepting and rejecting kings’ favours. The queenly virtues parallel and contrast to Machiavelli’s idea of ‘virtú’ and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of ‘cultural capital’. Entitled to exceptional royal status, queens transgress the boundaries of gender and space divisions, while their subversive behaviours are often endorsed by patriarchs. Finally, when queens are widowed, deposed, or divorced, they engage themselves in writing histories; they become monuments presenting alternative memories and insubordinate voices against patriarchal grand narratives. Shakespeare’s queens create iconographical paradigms, which are so recognisable and iconic that their queenship is reiteratively reproduced and appropriated in arts and real practices of later periods. Using early modern arguments and modern theories, this thesis provides a synthesised reading of queens in Shakespeare’s English histories, shedding new light on the position of women in early modern England.

Shakespeare’s last plays, because of their apparent similarity in thematic concern, dramatic arrangements and stylistic features, are often considered by modern scholarship to form a unique group in his canon. Their departure from the preceding great tragedies and their status as an artist’s last works have long aroused scholarly interest in Shakespeare’s lateness—the study, essentially, of the relationship between his advancing years and his last-period dramatic output, encompassing questions such as ‘Why did Shakespeare write the last plays?’, ‘What influenced his writing?’, and ‘What is the significance of these plays?’. Answers to the questions are varied and often contradictory, partly because the subject is the elusive Shakespeare, and partly because the concept of lateness as an artistic phenomenon is itself unstable and problematic. This dissertation reconsiders Shakespeare’s lateness by reading the last plays in the light of, but not bound by current theories of late style and writing. The analysis incorporates traditional literary, stylistic and biographic approach in various combinations. The exploration of the works (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen), while underlined by an interest in their shared concern with the effect, power and the possibilities of art and language, also places an emphasis on each play’s special, distinct features and contexts. A pattern of steady artistic development is revealed, bespeaking Shakespeare’s continued professional energy and ongoing self-challenge, which are, in fact, at the centre of his working methods throughout his career. The dissertation therefore proposes that Shakespeare’s ‘lateness’ is in fact a continuation of his sustained dramatic development instead of, in terms of working attitude and methods, a brand new, sharply different phase, and that his last plays are the result of his, as it were, ‘working as usual’. It also suggests that occasionally ‘ungrouping’ the plays, which frees the critic from perspectives preconditioned by classifying them under labels such as ‘romances’ and ‘tragicomedies’, might yield fruitful insight into late Shakespeare.

'Legitimacy, Illegitimacy and Sovereignty in Shakespeare's British Plays' demonstrates how Shakespeare participates in an early modern 'discourse of legitimacy' as described by Robert Zaller. This thesis, however, proposes an interrelated discourse of illegitimacy that is of equal importance to the discourse of legitimacy. A continuum or spectrum of legitimacy values is hypothesised, and seventeenth century optical illusions known as the curious perspective are used as a visual model that defines the inseparable nature of illegitimacy and legitimacy. Illegitimacy was a state traditionally defined as restrictive, and stereotyped as stigmatised by historians. Examination of the situation of early modern illegitimates in England, however, suggests a more inclusive attitude to illegitimates than has been previously acknowledged.The plays under discussion are under studied as a group; the thesis examines the British-set history and romance plays, defining them as 'British plays'. This is because one of the central implications of the discourse of (il)legitimacy is that it forms an evaluation of nationhood in early modern England and Britain. Using recent reconsiderations of national identity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this thesis identifies a strong national sentiment in Shakespeare's drama. The change from an Elizabethan English monarchy to a Jacobean British one instigated a reconsideration of what national identity might entail, using the discourse of legitimacies and illegitimacies to evaluate this developing concept. 'Legitimacy, Illegitimacy and Sovereignty in Shakespeare's British Plays' identifies how these discourses also link to other related themes in the British plays. The concept of sovereignty, as the thesis title suggests, is strongly linked to ideas of legitimacy and illegitimacy, with examples of the discourse used in this context drawn from Shakespeare's works and a wider range of texts. Identification of the sovereign with national allegiance, to a certain degree, links these themes, yet Shakespeare also dramatises an independent national sentiment in the British plays, revealing developing nationhood onstage. National sentiment also infuses another area in which the discourse of (il)legitimacy is used by Shakespeare; the legal debates of the era are reflected in the British plays; a contemporary conflict between common and civil law, and the aim of many lawyers to rediscover an ancient constitution of Britain, especially in the area of patrilinear inheritance, is acknowledged throughout in Shakespeare's use of legitimacy images and metaphors. As 'metaphors' suggests, illegitimacy is an increasingly conceptual issue in the thesis. Shakespeare uses ideas of illegitimacy to inform many areas; in particular a kind of validity or truth. A chapter on metaphorical illegitimacy demonstrates how illegitimacy and legitimacy language is suggestive of other issues. The invalidity of a usurped kingdom, a false kingship, is negotiated through illegitimacy discourses in Richard II, as the attempt to validate leadership in the second tetralogy is articulated with a discourse of totalising masculine legitimacy. 'Legitimacy, Illegitimacy and Sovereignty in Shakespeare's British Plays' works within a contextual framework to locate the language and concepts Shakespeare dramatises in a wider environment, reflecting the issues of law, sovereignty and nation that existed in early modern English and British society.