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Taylor, Miles Edward. "Nation, history, and theater : representing the English past on the Tudor and Stuart stage /." view abstract or download file of text, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p9986765.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 255-265). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Pruitt, John. "British drama museums : history, heritage, and nation in collections of dramatic literature, 1647-1814 /." View abstract, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3203336.
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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.
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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.
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Howe, Elizabeth. "The impact of the introduction of actresses on English drama, 1660-1700." Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 1988. http://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/items/381ad106-a7de-4394-ae50-3c320741ed15/1/.
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The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the dramatic results of introducing women to replace boy-actors in female roles on the public stage. The impact of the actresses is examined in terms of both the general dramatic consequences of changing the sex of a performer from male to female and the individual influences of the various major actresses who emerged. The thesis begins with an investigation of the exploitation of the female physique in Restoration drama. It examines the treatment of breeches roles after 1660 and shows how sexual relationships in both comedy and tragedy could be substantially changed through the visual, physical dimension provided by real women. The ensuing chapters explore the way in which playwrights were influenced by the popular success of leading actresses in certain types of role and wrote plays around these women and their specialities. In particular, the genesis and development of she-tragedy, the gay couple, the prostitute-mistress figure and the pairing of contrasting female types is traced in relation to the actresses who made these conventions and characters popular. Thus the presence of a particular actress at a particular time may be seen to have crucially affected the course of the drama. The thesis also examines the impact of the actresses' own actual or reputed characters on the roles written for them. It seeks to ascertain the exact nature of the relationship between the leading actresses and their public and how far spectators' knowledge of the women's own personalities affected the type of roles they were given. The study concludes with a brief comment on the scope and general nature of the actresses' influence on Restoration drama.
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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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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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Botica, Allan Richard. "Audience, playhouse and play in Restoration theatre, 1660-1710." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6dc8576e-e5cf-4514-ad90-19e7b1253c8e.
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This thesis addresses three aspects of the relationship between audience, playhouse and play in Restoration theatre from 1660 to 1710. It provides a comprehensive account of the composition of the Restoration audience, an examination of the effect this group of men and women had upon the plays they attended and an account of the ways in which the plays and playhouses of the Restoration touched the lives of London's inhabitants. In the first part of this dissertation I identify the audience. Chapter 1 deals with London's playhouses, their location, archictecture and decoration. It shows how the playhouses effectively created two sets of spectators: the visible and the invisible audience. Chapter 2 is a detailed examination of those audiences, and the social and occupational groupings to which they belonged. Chapter 3 deals with the support the stage received. It analyses attendance patterns, summarizes evidence of audience size, presents case studies of attendance patterns and outlines the incidence and effects of recurrent playgoing. In the second part of the dissertation I deal with theatricality, with the representation of human action on and off the stage. I examine the audience's behaviour in the playhouses and the other public places of London. I focus on the relationships between stage and street to show how values and attitudes were transmitted between those two realms. To do this, I analyse three components of theatrical behaviour--acting, costume, and stage dialogue and look at their effect on peoples' behaviour in and ideas about the social world. Chapter 4 is an introduction to late seventeenth century ideas of theatricality. Chapter 5 examines contemporary ideas of dress and fashion and of their relationship to stage costuming. Chapter 6 considers how contemporary ideas about conversation and criticism affected and were in turn affected by stage dialogue.
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Nagase, Mariko. "Literary editing of seventeenth-century English drama." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2012. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/3628/.
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This thesis explores how literary editing for the dramatic publication was developed in seventeenth-century England. Chapter 1 discusses how the humanist scholars embraced the concept of textual editing and put it into practice about a half century after the invention of the press. Chapter 2 addresses the development of the concept of literary editing in seventeenth-century England by investigating the editorial arguments preserved in the paratextual matter. Chapter 3 explores Jonsonian convention of textual editing which was established in imitation of classical textual editing of the humanist scholars and which eventually furnished a model for dramatic editing to the later editors who were to be commissioned to reproduce play texts for a reading public. Chapter 4 looks at Thomas Middleton’s The Mayor of Quinborough published by Herringman in 1661 which signals the restoration of the Jonsonian editorial convention. Chapter 5 will attempt to identify the printer of the play and considers the division of the editorial work between the editor and the printer. Chapter 6 addresses the reflection of the Jonsonian textual editing in the 1664 Killigrew folio and assesses its establishment of literary editing of seventeenth-century English drama as a herald of the 1709 Shakespeare edition by Nicholas Rowe.
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MacKenzie, Sarah. "Representations of Rape and Gendered Violence in the Drama of Tomson Highway." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/28696.
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In The Rez Sisters (1986), Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (1989), and Rose (1999) renowned Cree dramatist Tomson Highway mounts a dramaturgical critique of colonialism, focusing most prominently upon the disenfranchisement of Native women and the introduction of Western gender roles into First Nations cultures. Within each of the three "Rez Plays," he employs the metaphor of rape to depict cultural, territorial and spiritual dispossession brought about by colonization. However, in hegemonic narratives of colonization, Indigenous women are similarly represented in connection with the land and the metaphor of rape is used to portray colonial takeover; as colonial domination heightened, literary portrayals of Indigenous peoples, particularly women, became increasingly demeaning.
This thesis investigates the extent to which Highway's works can serve as truly subversive, liberating texts given that the recurring portrayals of sexual violence in the "Rez Plays" reinvigorate dangerous, misogynistic stereotypes. Situating Highway's plays within a framework of contemporary feminist postcolonial theory, this thesis problematizes the repeated use of gender specific representations of victimization in the "Rez Plays."
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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.
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van, Pelt Nadia. "Play-making on the edge of reality : managing spectator risk in early English drama." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2013. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/366616/.
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This thesis places the notion of risk and the diversity of treatment that the management of risk involves, at the centre of the discourse about Early English drama. It locates the spectator’s experience on the edge of reality and fiction. Offering an alternative to current theories of metatheatricality and cognitive theory, this research attempts to contribute to knowledge by arguing that the most important element of the dramatic experience exists between the two poles of an awareness of artifice and absorption, and that the dramatic experience is managed by playwright, actor and spectator with respect to these two poles. This thesis focuses on the spectator, not just on the absorbed spectator who ‘lives’ in the drama, such as one finds in cognitive studies, or on the reflective spectator who is conscious of the artifice of drama, such as in metatheatrical studies, but rather on participatory spectators, and on spectators moving between the two positions of absorption and reflection. The case studies in this thesis are reflective of the contexts of early English dramatic performance: they show how similar issues were controlled differently in different contexts; that there might be no clear boundary between Catholic and Protestant drama in terms of spectator management; that some playwrights had political reasons to believe it best if they did not manage their spectators’ experience, while other playwrights displayed a deep commitment to controlling not only spectators’ experiences and responses during the performance but also afterwards, suggesting that risk management is not an act but rather a process; that dramatic performance could cause disaster if not sufficiently managed, or if the performance context in which the drama was performed, was misjudged, but that the use of the dramatic medium could also be recuperated by later events of a similar nature. Examining drama in its specific literary and historical context, this thesis reconstructs the play-experience not only through the plays, but also through a study of how plays were described in Star Chamber records, ambassadorial records, eye-witness accounts, and other records. It clarifies early drama’s most fundamental characteristic to be an intervention in society, and as such always relating to non-dramatic issues, and inevitably carrying risk with it.
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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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O'Brien, Richard Thomas. "Shakespeare and the development of verse drama, 1660-2017." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2017. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/7962/.
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This thesis offers an account of how verse drama, despite the entrenched cultural significance of Shakespeare, came over time to occupy a marginal, often maligned position within English theatre. The introduction establishes its critical-creative methodology: I approach the question not only as a critic, but as a practitioner exploring what T. S. Eliot called ‘the possibility of a poetic drama’ in the modern world. The first chapter demonstrates how verse dramatists over the last thirty years have been inhibited by continuous comparison to Shakespeare. The remainder of the thesis argues more broadly that verse drama between the Restoration and the present day has articulated itself directly in response to an evolving understanding of Shakespearean drama. Chapter Two examines Shakespeare’s own dramatic verse as a model which skilfully exploits the dialectic between norm and variation made possible by a shared metrical framework to stage conflicts between individuals and communities. Chapters Three to Five explore in turn how verse dramatists between 1660 and 1956 engaged with the same dialectic, both politically and prosodically. The thesis closes with an extended reflection on my own practice as a contemporary poet-playwright, discussing three scripts where I experimented with counterpointing individuals and communities through dramatic verse.
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Oram, Yvonne. "Older women in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2002. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/1778/.
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This thesis explores the presentation of older women on stage from 1558-1625, establishing that the character is predominantly pictured within the domestic sphere, as wife, mother, stepmother or widow. Specific dramatic stereotypes for these roles are identified, and compared and contrasted with historical material relating to older women. The few plays in which these stereotypes are subverted are fully examined. Stage nurse and bawd characters are also older women and this study reveals them to be imaged exclusively as matching stereotypes. Only four plays, Peele’s The Old Wives Tale, Fletcher’s Bonduca, and Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale, by Shakespeare, reject stereotyping of the central older women. The Introduction sets out the methodology of this research, and Chapter 1 compares stage stereotyping of the older woman with evidence from contemporary sources. This research pattern is repeated in Chapters 2-4 on the older wife, mother and stepmother, and widow, and subversion of these stereotypes on stage is also considered. Chapter 5 reveals stereotypical stage presentation as our principal source of knowledge about the older nurse and bawd. Chapter 6 examines the subtle, yet comprehensive, rejection of the stereotypes. The Conclusion summarises the academic and ongoing cultural relevance of this thesis.
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Howard, James Joseph. "The English novel's cradle the theatre and the women novelists of the long eighteenth century /." Diss., [Riverside, Calif.] : University of California, Riverside, 2010. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=0&did=2019834031&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1274465922&clientId=48051.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2010.Includes abstract. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Title from first page of PDF file (viewed May 21, 2010). Includes bibliographical references. Also issued in print.
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Handall, Monique Elizabeth. "Translating Spanish language plays into English: A focus on the translation and production of Xavier Robles' Rojo amanecer." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2005. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2958.
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The purpose of this culminating project is to start translating quality Mexican and Latin American dramatic literature in order to provide to educators and theatrical directors a fundamental collection of plays. The author worked with her San Gorgonio High School students to conduct a dramaturgical study of the setting and political background of Rojo Amanecer by Xavier Robles, a play which outlines the events leading to the 1968 student massacre at Mexico City's Plaza de Tlatelolco. The author then directed the play in her role as San Gorgonio High School's new theater teacher.
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Kingston, Talya Anne. "The dramaturgy of dialect an examination of the sociolinguistic problems faced when producing contemporary British plays in the United States /." Connect to this title online, 2008. http://scholarworks.umass.edu/theses/105/.
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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/.
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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.
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Newman, Harry Rex. "Impressive Shakespeare : sexual identity and impressing technologies in Shakespearean drama." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2012. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/3858/.
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This thesis examines the relationship between the sexual formation of identity and three ‘impressing technologies’ (sealing, coining and printing) in Shakespearean drama. In a number of plays, Shakespeare uses the ‘language of impression’ to create metaphors that analogise sexual activities such as kissing, defloration and impregnation with acts of imprinting. In doing so, I argue, he establishes a rhetorical nexus that contributes to the construction of his characters’ sexual identities. Following a chapter on relevant historical contexts, each chapter close reads a single Shakespeare play, focusing on its language of impression. Chapter 2 considers the representation of wounds as impressions in Coriolanus and tracks the development of the protagonist’s identity as a hyper-masculine war machine that stamps and is stamped. Chapter 3 investigates the role of sealing imagery in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play which subverts the patriarchal figuration of women as impressionable wax to be transformed by the imprints of men. Chapter 4 analyses the recurring metaphor of counterfeit coining in Measure for Measure, a trope that associates figures of state with their sexually transgressive subjects. And chapter 5 addresses the analogy of procreation with printing in The Winter’s Tale, arguing that this aspect of the play’s rhetoric influenced the composition of the preliminaries to Shakespeare’s First Folio. The thesis concludes by comparing the plays and exploring what it is that makes Shakespeare ‘impressive’.
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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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Rowe, Julisa. "A guide to ethnodramatology developing culturally appropriate drama in cross-cultural Christian communication : a comparative study of the dramas of Kenya, India and the United States /." Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN), 2004. http://www.tren.com.
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Bean, Heidi R. "Poetry 'n acts: the cultural politics of twentieth-century American poets' theater." Diss., University of Iowa, 2010. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/638.
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"Poetry 'n Acts: The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century American Poets' Theater," focuses on the disciplinary blind spot that obscures the productive overlap between poetry and dramatic theater and prevents us from seeing the cultural work that this combination can perform. Why did 2100 people turn out in 1968 to see a play in which most of the characters speak only in such apparently nonsensical phrases as "Red hus the beat trim doing going" and "Achtung swachtung"? And why would an Obie award-winning playwright move to New Jersey to write such a play in the first place? What led to the founding in 1978 of the San Francisco Poets Theatre by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers, and why have those plays and performers been virtually ignored by critics despite the admitted centrality of performance to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing's textual politics? Why would the renowned Yale Repertory Theatre produce in the 1990s the poetic, plotless plays of a theater newcomer twice in as many years--even when audiences walked out? What vision for the future of theater could possibly involve episodic drama with footnotes? In each example, part of the story is missing. This dissertation begins to fill in that gap.
Attending to often overlooked aspects of theater language, this dissertation examines theatrical performances that use poetic devices to intervene in narratives of cultural oppression, often by questioning the very suitability of narrative as a primary means of social exchange. While Gertrude Stein must be seen as a forerunner to contemporary poets' theater, chapter one argues that the Living Theatre's late 1950s and early 1960s anti-authoritarian theater demonstrates key alliances between poetry and theater at mid-century. The remaining chapters closely examine particular instances of poets' theater by Amiri Baraka (known equally as poet and playwright), Carla Harryman (associated with West Coast poetry), and Suzan-Lori Parks (a critically acclaimed playwright). These productions put poetic theater on the backs of tractors in Harlem streets, in open gallery spaces, and in more conventional black box and proscenium architectures, and each case develops the importance of performance contexts and production histories in determining plays' cultural effects.
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Gibbs, Jenna Marie. "Performing the temple of liberty slavery, rights, and revolution in transatlantic theatricality (1760s-1830s) /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1554940031&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Reiff, Marija. "The syncretic stage: religion and popular drama during the fin de siècle." Diss., University of Iowa, 2018. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6254.
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This dissertation examines the popular theatre of the late-nineteenth century and focuses on the most commercially successful and popular playwrights of the era: Henry Arthur Jones, Arthur Wing Pinero, and Oscar Wilde. Looking at the major popular playwrights reveals that the commercial stage had different concerns than the avant-garde theatre of Ibsen and Shaw. Foremost among these concerns was religion, and starting with Jones’s 1884 play Saints and Sinners, a massive change swept through the commercial stage as religious prejudice and official censorship fell by the wayside. In its place, religion started to become a topic that was once again seen as acceptable, and the fin de siècle stage was awash with syncretic religious views. This syncretism was aided by the publication of scripts and the religious pluralism of the day. Though publication aided the literary and religious quality of the texts, they were crafted as staged works, complete with the shared, collective experiences and emotions of the audience, a collective affect that mimics the collective emotional experience of a congregation in a church, and the stage thus became one of the largest venues for ecumenical religion during the late-Victorian era. The alacrity with which this happened challenges not only the common conception of the secularization of the late-Victorian stage, but also of the larger culture
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Lee, Juo-Yung. "Patronage of livery players and their propagandist function in Tudor England, 1530-80." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2000. http://webex.lib.ed.ac.uk/abstracts/lee01.pdf.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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Garafalo, Sanner. "'Most wonderful!' : a contextual study of twinship in early modern drama and Shakespeare's plays." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2013. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/3937/.
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This thesis examines twins as objects of wonder in early modern drama. In Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150-1750, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park divide the experience of wonder into three separate emotional reactions: horror, repugnance, and pleasure. The thesis builds on this model, arguing that, as objects of wonder, twins were capable of inspiring this range of emotional responses which could, consequently, be capitalized on in a dramatic work. The first three chapters consider non-Shakespearean drama and its depiction of twins as wonderful, tracing how twins emerge as either objects of horror, repugnance, or pleasure in these plays and how these depictions resonate with other circulating discussions of twinship. Chapter 1 examines the horrific depiction of twins in The Duchess of Malfi and The Cruel Brother and its relation to the monstrous and prodigious birth of the early modern broadside. Chapter 2 investigates the repugnant twins of The twins and The Love-sick Court in light of the early modern medical understanding of twins as errors in nature. And Chapter 3 begins to reveal how more pleasurable associations can override these horrific and repugnant connotations, as shown in Changes, Ignoramus, and Senile Odium. However, all of this builds toward a final analysis of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, demonstrating how Shakespeare fully transitions twinship into the realm of the pleasurable, combatting the negative cultural assumptions about twinship with an alternate and largely revolutionary depiction of twinship as a positive characteristic.
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Yun, Hunam. "Appropriations of Irish drama by modern Korean nationalist theatre : a focus on the influence of Sean O’Casey in a colonial context." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2010. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/34647/.
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My thesis explores how a translated author on the periphery of the host culture’s translated repertoire can be at once subversive and innovative on the colonial scene, using as an example the case of Sean O’Casey in colonial Korea. It explores the importation of Irish drama in modern Korean theatre during the colonial period and examines the appropriations of O’Casey’s plays by a central Korean playwright, Yu Chi-jin, in creating his own plays. Under Japanese colonial rule in the early twentieth century, intellectuals perceived the supreme task for the Korean people to be the recovery of national sovereignty and independence. The modern Korean theatre movement which rose among Korean intellectuals and dramatists during the colonial period was to play a major part in this task. The ultimate goal of this movement was to establish a modern national theatre promoting Korean culture and educating the people, thereby recovering national independence. As their modernised dramatic polysystem was still "young", Korean intellectuals and dramatists who were involved in the theatre movement had to borrow dramatic models from other countries. One of the models they chose was Irish playwrights, especially those who were involved in the Irish dramatic movement. They published or staged the works of W.B. Yeats, Lord Dunsany [Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett], Augusta Gregory, J.M. Synge, St. J. Ervine, T.C. Murray and Sean O'Casey. Although O'Casey was considered an important dramatist in the Irish dramatic movement, he was a playwright on the periphery in the list of translated Irish dramatists in Korea due to the colonisers’ censorship. However, he remained as a subversive and innovative playwright on the colonial scene by virtue of being appropriated by Yu Chi-jin who used O’Casey’s plays as models when creating his own works. In discussing the subject matter of my thesis, I use Even Zohar’s polysystems theory as a starting point in looking at ideological issues surrounding translation and extend the discussion to offer a postcolonial perspective. While most translation in a colonial context was considered as "an expression of the cultural power of the colonisers," my thesis shifts the focus to translation as an expression of the cultural power of the colonised. I explore how the colonised uses another colonised culture to subvert the colonisers’ power.
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Kwon, Kyounghye. "Local Performances, Global Stages: Postcolonial and Indigenous Drama and Performance in Glocal Circuits." The Ohio State University, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1259760023.
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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/.
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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.
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Haxton, Robert Peter. "Refusal and rupture as a postdramatic revolt : an analysis of selected South African contemporary devised performances with particular focus on works by First Physical Theatre Company and the Rhodes University Drama Department." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015671.
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This mini-thesis investigates the concepts of refusal and rupture as a postdramatic revolt and how these terms can be applied and read within the context of analysing contemporary devised performance in South Africa. The argument focuses on the efficacy of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic terminology and the potential of its use in an appreciation of contemporary performance analysis. I investigate the potential in South African contemporary devised performance practice to challenge prevailing modes of traditional dramatic expectation in order to restore the experience of discovery and questioning in the spectator. This research is approached through a qualitative process which entails a reading and application of selected critical texts to the analysis with an application of Lehmann’s terminology. This reading/application is engaged in a dialogue with the interpretative and experiential aspects of selected South African devised performances with particular focus on four cross-disciplinary works selected for analysis. Chapter One functions as an introduction to the concept of postdramatic theatre and the application of the terms refusal and rupture as deconstructive keywords in the process of a devised performance. Chapter Two is an analysis of several South African contemporary performances with particular focus on Body of Evidence (2009) by Siwela Sonke Dance Company, Wreckage (2011) a collaboration by Ubom! Eastern Cape Drama Company and First Physical Theatre Company, Discharge (2012) by First Physical Theatre Company, and Drifting (2013) by The Rhodes University Drama Department. This mini-thesis concludes with the idea that with an understanding of refusal and rupture in a postdramatic revolt, contemporary devised performance achieves an awakening in its spectators by deconstructing the expectation of understanding and the need for resolve; the assumption and need for traditional dramatic structures and rules are challenged. Instead, it awakes an experience of discovery and questioning.
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Louro, Maria Filomena Pereira Rodrigues. "The drama of J.M. Synge : a challenge to the ideology and myths of Irishness." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1991. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/108624/.
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Opinions about Synge's work vary from redundant noise to van-guardist art, or the embodiment of the spirit of the Nation. The literary mask created by Yeats and the disparaging caricature his opponents publicised, have barred access to the unbiased study of his work documents. Synge's plays changed the course of the emerging National Theatre. Yeats's plays were attacked for not serving well enough the nationalist cause, but Synge's were seen by nationalists as working completely on the other side of the fence. This argument and the poetical fallacy of Synge's political inactivity are here reappraised. For the nationalists both his witting silence and his social and family background caused aggravation which found opportunity to be voiced at each production of his plays. What still disturbs in the plays is the interaction between individuals and social groups. The exchanges between characters, the progress or stasis of individual characters through the play, the continual change of perspective forced on the audience, these are the features that still strike a controversial note today. Synge is here seen as a "colonizer who refuses" as he frees himself from family strict rule. The first two chapters analyse the historical and personal evolution towards a native Irish Theatre in English. The following chapters study the process by which each play diverts the expectations it arouses in the audience, following the genesis of each play through its source material when possible, to see how some controversial images and dialogues were arrived at, where they acquired their polemic weight. This part of the study focuses on the writing methods of Synge, and the "reading formation” of the public. The grotesque style of the plays and prose is found to be similar in tone to the Rabelaisian grotesque: both share the hope of regeneration in life's forces and nature, as opposed to a strict Christianity. Synge's use of grotesque shattered aesthetic and philosophical expectations in his intellectual audience, causing the anger among the nationalists and the literary coterie. The particular depiction of women's roles in his plays are compared with Victorian and modern patterns of female behaviour. In the plays Nature is seen not as the bucolic "locus" for philosophical self-contemplation, but as nurturer and threat for its original dwellers. The knowledge of and closeness to the forces of Nature elicit respect for outsiders as possessing a valuable culture, either in isolation or organised in marginal societies. The outcasts in Irish society are given an articulate voice in Synge's plays: beggars, vagrants, tinkers, the blind and women. In all plays strong female characters assert themselves in unorthodox ways, defying custom and legend. The use of legend in his last play shows Synge as heralding the end of a mythologising era, presenting legendary events issuing not from fate but personal heroic decision, that of a woman who choses her life and death, following her own values.
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Wassersug, Yolana. ""My picture I enjoin thee to keep" : the function of portraits in English drama, 1558-1642." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2015. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/5935/.
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This thesis considers how visual art is expressed within English drama during the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline periods, through studying how portraits are used in performance and narrative. The first part of the thesis, consisting of Chapters One and Two, is concerned with the stage. It explores the range of different functions that a portrait could have in a play, and considers the challenges of bringing these objects onto the stage. The following three chapters make up the second part of the thesis; which shifts focus from the way portraits were used on stage as signifiers, to a consideration of what they signify. Chapter Three explores how characters use portraiture to promote their identity and advertise individuality. It argues for a re-thinking of the significance of ‘life-like’ painting, arguing that portraits can be markers of identity even without necessarily capturing likeness accurately. Chapter Four is about the functions that portraits have as love tokens and within courtship narratives, arguing that they expose the often-flimsy distinction between lust and love. The final chapter addresses the magical and metaphysical aspects of portraiture, and considers their role in witchcraft and murder narratives, but also their metaphorical potential to ‘hold’ the soul of the person that they depict, and therefore function as commemorative objects.
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Roberts, David. "The ladies : female patronage of Restoration drama 1660-1700." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.670377.
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Buchanan, Douglas B. "The Canada Council, the Regional Theatre System and the English-Canadian playwright, 1957-1975." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/NQ52130.pdf.
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Stone, Robin. "How does it mean? : a discourse analysis of four plays by Harold Pinter, Simon Gray, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 1999. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p9964002.
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Midhin, Majeed Mohammed. "The artist as a dramatic character in contemporary British drama : a critical study of Stoppard, Barker and Wertenbaker." Thesis, University of Essex, 2017. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/20011/.
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The focus of this dissertation is the representation of the artist as a character in British theatre. In this study, which includes three chapters and one introductory chapter, I attempt to show that British playwrights, whether male or female, use their main fictional characters as artists either for self-reflexivity or to comment on the situation of being an artist. In accordance with the above premise, the responsibility of the artist and the function of art is investigated with due reference to radical thinkers, philosophers and writers such as, among others, Immanuel Kant, Oscar Wilde, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Viktor Shklovsky, Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Paul Sartre. This investigation concentrates on the conceptualization and contribution of those intellectuals to the definition of the role of the artist. Though I focus mainly on the period from the 1970s to the 2000s onwards, by analysing the dramatic texts of three British playwrights: Tom Stoppard, Howard Barker, and Timberlake Wertenbaker, I also discuss the decade following John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956). In this manner, I trace the key changes that have taken place in British theatre during the second half of the 20th century. Though there is an abundance of critical material on the subject which focuses on the figure of the artist to show self-referral for the dramatist, the present thesis goes beyond that to highlight the role and responsibility of the artist in British theatre, the function of art, the potential dilemmas he or she may confront and the economic and political circumstances surrounding them. The plays examined in this thesis range from those depicting the problematic role of the artist as an intellectual, who is torn between morality and immorality, as in Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase (1972) and Travesties (1974), to those which reject the utilitarian function of art, for example Barker’s No End of Blame: Scenes of Overcoming (1981) and Scenes from an Execution (1984). In the case of Wertenbaker, I highlight the role and dilemmas of female artists as they use theatre as a means to show the hegemonic political and economic constraints imposed on their artistic creativity. By analysing several of Wertenbaker’s plays which centre on the use of the artist as a character, her Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991) and The Line (2009), reflect the relationship between male and female artists and the dilemmas they faced. This thesis poses the following questions: as a fictional character, how can the artist function as a member of a certain community whilst at the same time retain the distinctiveness of his or her role as an outsider? Is he or she committed to the creative work or to the social usefulness of society? If so, can we expect art or the artist to have the answer to society’s problems? Or is that an overly high expectation to place on the artist? How did artists feel living in a society under censorship? How can they avoid being censored? And if they failed, what is the price of free expression? Springing from the discussion about the dilemmas of the artist in British theatre, it will become apparent how these dilemmas, represented by fictional characters, bring forth the dominant plays about artists. Within the framework of the above mentioned playwrights, it is demonstrated that the pressing dilemma which radical artists are faced with nowadays are multiple: social, commercial and political.
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Tasker, Elizabeth Anne. "Low Brows and High Profiles: Rhetoric and Gender in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century Theater." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2007. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/18.
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The Restoration and early eighteenth-century theaters of London formed an important mixed-gender rhetorical venue, which was acutely focused on the age-old “querrelle des femmes” (or woman question). The immediate popularity of the newly opened Restoration theaters, the new practice of casting actresses rather than actors in female roles, and the libertine social climate of London from 1660 to the early 1700s created a unique rhetorical situation in which women openly participated as speakers and audience members. Through a methodology combining feminist historiography, performance theory, Bitzer’s rhetorical situation, and Habermas’ notion of the public sphere, this dissertation reclaims the Restoration theatre as one of the earliest public, secular, mixed-gender rhetorical venues in the English-speaking world. London theater of the Restoration and the early eighteenth century presents a feminist kairos for rereading and revisioning the actress from object to subject, from passive receiver to deliverer of performative rhetoric. Overall, the attention given to issues of femaleness in the plays of this period exceeds that of preceding and subsequent periods. The novelty of the actresses, as well as disillusionment with the male-dominated government and system of patriarchy, were major contributing factors that led to the female focus on stage. This phenomenon of female rhetoric also reflects the charisma, elocutionary skill, and visual rhetoric of the best female performers of the period, including: Nell Gwyn, Mary Saunderson Betterton, Elizabeth Barry, Anne Bracegirdle, Susannah Mountfort Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, and Lavinia Fenton, all of whom are discussed from a rhetorical perspective in this dissertation.
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Percival, Gary William. "Developments towards a theatre of the absurd in England, 1956-1964." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14879.
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In 1961 Martin Esslin created the term 'Theatre of the Absurd' as a working hypothesis, a device with which to make fundamental traits present in the plays of a number of France-based dramatists accessible to discussion by tracing the features they had in common. Despite the popularity of Esslin's study, there has been no comparable discussion of England-based absurdism. An explanation for this lack of critical attention may be found in the dogged insistence amongst scholars that there are only two absurd playwrights in the English theatre before 1967. My first aim in this thesis is to redress the imbalance in critical literature, to demonstrate that there existed in England, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, an indigenous expression of absurdism far broader and significantly more complex than that which has been recognised by theatrical reviewers during the past thirty years. Having identified an indigenous absurdism, I go on to challenge the generalisations and over-simplifications surrounding the English 'absurd', which are a product of its critical marginalisation and neglect. I discuss the complexities of the evolution of the English 'absurd', and the ramifications of its development, paying due regard to the theatrical, historical and social factors which shaped its early growth. The playwrights who represent the genre are examined in tum, and attention is devoted to the details of the development of an absurd dynamic within their works. The study falls into three parts. Part I attempts to explain why the English 'absurd' had such a limited impact within its own country up until the late 1960s. It is revealed that many of the writers of the English 'absurd' were incapable of divorcing their plays from the social-orientated drama which dominated English theatre in the late 1950s. The cross-fertilization of an overtly social theatre and absurdism resulted in an expression of the genre which was modified and, to an extent, compromised by its adherence to external, political realities. The focus shifts, in the second part, to accommodate those neglected writers of the English 'absurd' who managed to avoid such compromises and who created a more abstract theatre, the aesthetic and epistemological intentions of which resemble those of the French absurd. Part III explains why, despite the relative obscurity of the English 'absurd', a fragmented absurdism managed to be absorbed into the permanent vocabulary of dramatic expression in England in the 1960s. This final section examines the works of a number of non-absurd writers who took on isolated absurd devices as part of an experiment with the parameters of drama, thereby bringing those techniques into mainstream theatre.
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Baird, Rachel A. "String Theory." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1273803256.
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Lewis, Anna Christina Kohler. "WWJD /." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2008. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd2433.pdf.
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Boguszak, Jakub. "Actors' parts in the plays of Ben Jonson." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7732f887-5a9d-4fc6-afce-9bc4242265f9.
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The thesis continues the work undertaken in recent years by (in alphabetical order) James J. Marino, Scott McMillin, Paul Menzer, Simon Palfrey, Tiffany Stern, Evelyn Tribble, and others to put to use what is now known about the purpose, distribution, and usage of early modern actors' parts. The thesis applies the new methodology of reading 'in parts', or reconstituting early modern plays 'in parts', to the body of plays written by Ben Jonson. The aim of the project is to offer a reconsideration of Jonson as a man of theatre, interested not only in the presentation of his works in print, but also in their production at the Globe and at Blackfriars. By reconstructing and examining the parts through which the actors performing in Jonson's plays accessed their characters, the thesis proposes answers to the questions: how can we read and analyse Jonson's plays differently when looking at them in terms of actors' parts; did Jonson write with parts in mind; what did Jonsonian parts have to offer actors by way of challenge and guidance; what can we learn from parts about Jonson's assumptions and demands with regard to the actors; and how did actors themselves respond to those demands. These questions are significant because they engage critically with the tradition of seeing Jonson as a playwright dismissive of actors and distrustful of the theatre; they seek to establish a perspective that allows us to assess Jonson's abilities to instruct and challenge his actors through staging documents. More generally, the research contributes to the studies of the early modern rehearsal and staging practices and invites consideration of Shakespeare's part-writing techniques in contrast with those of his major rival. With no surviving early modern parts from Jonson's plays (indeed with only a handful of surviving parts from the period), the first task is to determine the level of accuracy with which the parts can be reconstructed from Jonson's printed plays. Stephen Orgel was by no means the first critic who used the example of Sejanus to assert that Jonson habitually doctored his plays before they were published, but his view has become a critical commonplace. This thesis re-examines the case of Jonson's revisions and concludes that, far from being representative, the 1605 Sejanus quarto is an anomaly which Jonson himself needed to account for in his address to the reader. It is true that Jonson cultivated a distinct style of presentation of printed material, but the evidence that he extensively tampered with the texts themselves after they were performed is scarce (again, the revisions found in the Folio versions of Every Man in His Humour and Cynthia's Revels are addressed and found to be exceptional, rather than typical), while the evidence of his pride in the original compositions and performances is much stronger. Since such enhancements as dedicatory poems, arguments (i.e. plot summaries), character sketches, or marginalia have no bearing on the shapes of actor's parts, they do not in any way compromise the reliability of the printed texts as sources from which Jonson's parts can, argues the thesis, be reconstructed with reasonable accuracy. Jonson, himself an actor and apparently a friend and admirer of a number of great actors of his age (Edward Alleyn, Nathan Field, Richard Robinson, Salomon Pavy, Richard Burbage), knew from personal experience how much depended on actors mastering, or, in their terminology, being 'perfect' in, their parts. By granting the actor access only to select portions of the complete play-text (i.e. his own lines and cues), the part effectively regulated the performance in cases when the actor had only limited knowledge of the rest of the play. Such cases seem to have been very common: documentary evidence suggests that actors had to learn their parts on their own over the course of a few weeks, and only then attended group rehearsals, most of which were concerned with 'business', not text which had already been learned. While some might have attended a reading of the play (if one was arranged for the benefit of the sharers, for instance), or gained more information about the play from their fellow actors, the parts remained their chief means of internalising their text and acquiring a sense of the play they were in. Jonson, who was not a resident playwright with any company performing in London and thus probably did not always have easy and regular access to the actors, could sometimes have taken advantage of the actors' dependence on their parts and crafted the parts as a means of exercising control over the performances of his plays. Building on this premise, the thesis examines various features of actors' parts that would have made a difference to an actor's performance. It draws on recent advancements in the studies of textual cohesion (linguistic features such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, etc.) to point out how the high and low frequency of cohesive ties (pairs of cohesively related words or phrases) in various sections of the part would have given an actor a good idea of how prominent his part was at any given moment. It examines Jonson's use of cues and patterns of cueing: like Shakespeare, Jonson was fond of using repeated cues to open up a space for improvisation, and he seems to have been aware of the need to provide the apprentices in the company with parts cued by a limited number of actors so as to allow for easier private rehearsals with their masters. The thesis also examines the common feature of Jonson's 'split jokes' - jokes that are divided across multiple parts - and asks whether any kind of comic effect can be achieved by excluding the punch line of a joke from the part that contains its setup, and the setup from the part that delivers the punch line, offering a fresh look at the nature of early modern comedy. In structural terms, the thesis considers how a narrative constituted solely by the lines present on an actor's part can diverge from the narrative of the play as a whole and how an understanding of a play as a text composed of actors' parts, as well as of acts and scenes, can help to refine arguments about Jonson's assumptions about the strengths of the companies for which he wrote. What emerges is an image of Jonson who, far from concerned only with readership, consciously developed a brand of comedy that was uniquely suited to, perhaps even relying on, the solipsistic manner in which the actors received and learned their parts.
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Miyoshi, Riki. "Thomas Killigrew and Carolean stage rivalry in London, 1660-1682." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0cf4bd8a-041c-47a9-b82f-bb38ce159dd7.
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This thesis has two aims: to make an original contribution to knowledge by demonstrating the importance of theatrical rivalry to the development of drama in the Carolean period (the reign of Charles II), and to re-evaluate the managerial career of Thomas Killigrew (1612-1683). This is the first detailed survey of the circumstances in which the King's Company and the Duke's Company competed and an analysis of the troupes' devices of plotting and counter-plotting during their twenty-two years of stage rivalry from 1660 to 1682. As well as charting the stage rivalry between the two companies, my dissertation argues that Killigrew was a competent but unscrupulous and devious playhouse-manager. A close analysis of his managerial career will show how Thomas Killigrew was the central figure in the Carolean stage rivalry in London and how he helped to shape the future of English theatre. The survey starts from Killigrew's beginnings as the manager of the King's Company from 1660 and concludes in 1682 when the King's Company was effectively taken over by its rival, the Duke's Company, to make one United Company, thus ending the span of theatrical competition in the Carolean period. Each chapter is divided in accordance with the beginning and end of significant events of rivalry and are organised chronologically at different phases of the competition. The first chapter provides the historical background of the establishment of the patent grants and the gradual consolidation of the monopoly over dramatic entertainment in London. In charting the initial stages of the development of the King's Company and the Duke's Company from 1660 to 1663, this chapter argues that it was largely due to Thomas Killigrew's underhandedness that the King's Company began the competition in an advantageous position. The second chapter focuses on the theatrical competition from 1663 to 1668. Until 1663 both companies were busy consolidating their duopoly and the competition between the two managers ended abruptly with William Davenant's death in 1668. In the survey of the Killigrew-Davenant rivalry, this chapter's overall aim is to argue for narrowing of the wide chasm often described between the managerial skills of the two managers. Chapter three explores the period from when Mary Davenant, Thomas Betterton and Henry Harris took over the management of the Duke's Company to the burning of the King's Company's playhouse in 1672. It argues that the competition in this period was evenly matched. This chapter also revises the perceived style of management adopted by both Betterton and Killigrew. The chapter argues that Betterton was perhaps less involved in the most audacious project of the Duke's Company during these years: the building of three theatres including the Dorset Garden Theatre. In the case of the latter, this chapter argues that Killigrew continually took risks at other people's expense and was little concerned with the well being of his staff and shareholders as long as the company gained notoriety and retained its success. The penultimate chapter of the dissertation covers the time span from the Bridges Street Theatre's fire to the ousting of Killigrew as the manager by his own son, Charles Killigrew. It argues that this was the crucial period in which the Duke's Company began clearly to surpass its rival. This chapter qualifies the orthodox view that the King's Company simply lost its battle against the Duke's Company by demonstrating that the two companies also had to contend with a large number of foreign troupes and the rising popularity of music concerts. The final chapter explores the period from when Charles Killigrew took over the management of the King's Company to the amalgamation of the two acting troupes in 1682. It demonstrates the negative effects of the political turbulence of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis on both the troupes' plays and players. The chapter also argues that Charles Killigrew was not as charismatic or manipulative as his father, and that he greatly contributed to the demise of the King's Company. In conclusion, this is strictly a study of theatre history that looks at the importance of management and company rivalry to the development of Carolean drama. At its peak in the 1670s, the Carolean period produced on average twenty new plays per season. The highly competitive nature of the rivalry between the King's Company and the Duke's Company and how the respective managements responded to the success or the failure of the other theatre is the background against which one must read the plays of the Carolean period. Thomas Killigrew, whose managerial career spanned the longest in the Carolean years, was an influential figure in the period and whose innovations and difficulties as a manager had a direct effect not only on theatre history but also on the dramatic traditions of the seventeenth century.
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Dyson, Jessica. "Staging legal authority : ideas of law in Caroline drama." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/366.
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This thesis seeks to place drama of the Caroline commercial theatre in its contemporary political and legal context; particularly, it addresses the ways in which the struggle for supremacy between the royal prerogative, common law and local custom is constructed and negotiated in plays of the period. It argues that as the reign of Charles I progresses, the divine right and absolute power of the monarchy on stage begins to lose its authority, as playwrights, particularly Massinger and Brome, present a decline from divinity into the presentation of an arbitrary man who seeks to impose and increase his authority by enforcing obedience to selfish and wilful actions and demands. This decline from divinity, I argue, allows for the rise of a competing legitimate legal authority in the form of common law. Engaging with the contemporary discourse of custom, reason and law which pervades legal tracts of the period such as Coke’s Institutes and Reports and Davies’ ‘Preface Dedicatory’ to Le Primer Report des Cases & Matters en Ley resolues & adiudges en les Courts del Roy en Ireland, drama by Brome, Jonson, Massinger and Shirley presents arbitrary absolutism as madness, and adherence to customary common law as reason which restores order. In this climate, the drama suggests, royal manipulation of the law for personal ends, of which Charles I was often accused, destabilises law and legal authority. This destabilisation of legal authority is examined in a broader context in plays set in areas outwith London, geographically distant from central authority. The thesis places these plays in the context of Charles I’s attempts to centralise local law enforcement through such publications as the Book of Orders. When maintaining order in the provinces came into conflict with central legislation, the local officials exercised what Keith Wrightson describes as ‘two concepts of order’, turning a blind eye to certain activities when strict enforcement of law would create rather than dissolve local tensions. In both attempting to insist on unity between the centre and the provinces through tighter control of local officials, and dividing the centre from the provinces in the dissolution of Parliament, Charles’s government was, the plays suggest, in danger not only of destabilising and decentralising legal authority but of fragmenting it. This thesis argues that drama provides a medium whereby the politico-legal debates of the period may be presented to, and debated by, a wider audience than the more technical contemporary legal arguments, and, during Charles I’s personal rule, the theatre became a public forum for debate when Parliament was unavailable.
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Miranker, Emily. "An Infinity of Questions: Dramatizing Science on Stage." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1212179899.
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Di, Ponio Amanda. "The Elizabethan Theatre of Cruelty and its double /." St Andrews, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/836.
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Tomlinson, Sophie Eliza. "Theatrical women : the female actor in English theatre and drama 1603-1670." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.338185.
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