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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'English drama'
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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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McCarthy, Andrew D. "Mourning men in early English drama." Pullman, Wash. : Washington State University, 2010. http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Dissertations/Spring2010/a_mccarthy_020910.pdf.
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Pearson, Meg Forbes. "Spectacle in early modern English drama." College Park, Md. : University of Maryland, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/3780.
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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2006.Thesis research directed by: English Language and Literature. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
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Leininger, Jeffrey Walter. "The Reformation in English Reformation drama." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.275391.
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Shell, Alison. "English Catholicism and drama, 1578-1688." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.334998.
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Mohd, Nawi Abdullah. "Applied Drama in English Language Learning." Thesis, University of Canterbury. School of Literacies and Arts in Education, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/9584.
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This thesis is a reflective exploration of the use and impact of using drama pedagogies in the English as a Second Language (ESL)/ English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. It stems from the problem of secondary school English language learning in Malaysia, where current teaching practices appear to have led to the decline of the standard of English as a second language in school leavers and university graduates (Abdul Rahman, 1997; Carol Ong Teck Lan, Anne Leong Chooi Khaun, & Singh, 2011; Hazita et al., 2010; Nalliah & Thiyagarajah, 1999). This problem resonates with my own experiences at school, as a secondary school student, an ESL teacher and, later, as a teacher trainer. Consequently, these experiences led me to explore alternative or supplementary teaching methodologies that could enhance the ESL learning experience, drawing initially from drama techniques such as those advocated by Maley and Duff (1983), Wessels (1987), and Di Pietro (1983), and later from process drama pedagogies such as those advocated by Greenwood (2005); Heathcote and Bolton (1995); Kao and O'Neill (1998), and Miller and Saxton (2004). This thesis is an account of my own exploration in adapting drama pedagogies to ESL/EFL teaching. It examines ways in which drama pedagogies might increase motivation and competency in English language learning.
The main methodology of the study is that of reflective practice (e.g. Griffiths & Tann, 1992; Zeichner & Liston, 1996). It tracks a learning journey, where I critically reflect on my learning, exploring and implementing such pedagogical approaches as well as evaluate their impact on my students’ learning. These critical reflections arise from three case studies, based on three different contexts: the first a New Zealand English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) class in an intermediate school, the second a Malaysian ESL class in a rural secondary school, and the third an English proficiency class of adult learners in a language school. Data for the study were obtained through the following: research journal and reflective memo; observation and field notes; interview; social media; students’ class work; discussion with co-researchers; and through the literature of the field.
A major teaching methodology that emerges from the reflective cycles is that of staging the textbook, where the textbook section to be used for the teaching programme is distilled, and the key focuses of the language, skills, vocabulary, and themes to be learnt are identified and extracted. A layer of drama is matched with these distilled elements and then ‘staged’ on top of the textbook unit, incorporating context-setting opportunities, potential for a story, potential for tension or complication, and the target language elements.
The findings that emerge through critical reflection in the study relate to the drama methodologies that I learn and acquire, the impact of these methodologies on students, the role of culture in the application of drama methodologies, and language learning and acquisition. These findings have a number of implications. Firstly, they show how an English Language Teaching (ELT) practitioner might use drama methodologies and what their impact is on student learning. While the focus is primarily on the Malaysian context, aspects of the findings may resonate internationally. Secondly, they suggest a model of reflective practice that can be used by other ELT practitioners who are interested in using drama methodologies in their teaching. Thirdly, these findings also point towards the development of a more comprehensive syllabus for using drama pedagogies, as well as the development of reflective practice, in the teacher training programmes in Malaysia.
The use of drama pedagogies for language learning is a field that has not been researched in a Malaysian context. Therefore, this account of reflective practice offers a platform for further research and reflection in this context.
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Harvie, Jennifer B. "Liz Lochhead's drama." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1996. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5026/.
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This thesis is an examination of Liz Lochhead's three published plays: Blood and Ice (1982), Dracula (1989), and Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1989). Each of these three plays deals centrally with a literary or historical pre-text: the life of Mary Shelley and the ideology of English Romanticism in Blood and Ice; Bram Stoker's novel Dracula and late-Victorian British ruling-class culture in Dracula; and sixteenth-century Scottish and English history in Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. Given these dramatic emphases, the critical emphasis of this thesis is the plays' reassessment of their pre-texts, and particularly of those pre-texts' power to exercise and selectively to confer cultural authority. The thesis argues that the plays critically re-cast their pre-texts, re-interpreting those texts and compelling audiences to do the same. Altering diegetic emphases, the plays emphasize and interrogate the perhaps dubious function of their pre-texts to narrate and legitimate certain cultural groups' dominance and others' subordination. And using narrative forms which contrast in significant ways with those of the pre-texts, the plays demonstrate alternative, less prescriptive narrative forms. The effect of these textual re-interpretations and alternative narrative forms to intervene in hegemonic operations of power is important not least because each of the pre-texts, in different ways, thematically and/or formally, is ostensibly committed to the "fair" distributed of power. Romanticism claims commitment to the liberation of humanity. The protagonists of Stoker's Dracula fight avowedly to protect the superiority of their "good" Western humanity over Dracula's "bad" Eastern monstrosity. And orthodox histories, including those of Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I of England, frequently function to absolve present communities' responsibility for their "closed" histories, but also for their histories' legacies, and, thus, for responsibility for the present.
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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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Bainton, Martin. "Generational politics in English drama, 1588-1612." Thesis, University of Hull, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.272039.
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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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Meads, Christopher Douglas. "Banquet scenes in English drama, 1585-1642." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.668323.
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Minnis-Lemley, Ashley M. "The Scholar Magician in English Renaissance Drama." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/838.
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In this paper, I will explore the rise and fall of the scholar magician or sorcerer, both as a popular dramatic subject and as an arc for individual characters, and the ways in which these figures tied into contemporary fears about the intersection of religion and developing scientific knowledge.
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Riemer, Seth Daniel. "National biases in French and English drama /." New York : Garland publ, 1990. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb35521574h.
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Collins, Lisa A. "Teaching drama in the ESL classroom." [Denver, Colo.] : Regis University, 2006. http://165.236.235.140/lib/LCollins2007.pdf.
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Loeb, Andrew. "Subjectivity and Music in Early Modern English Drama." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/32129.
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Music in the early modern world was an art form fraught with tensions. Writers from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines engaged in a vibrant debate about the value of hearing and playing music, which could be seen as a useful tool for the refinement of the individual or a dangerous liability, capable of compelling inappropriate thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.
This study analyzes music on the early modern stage and its relation to emerging ideas about subjectivity. Early modern philosophies of music, I demonstrate, are concerned with the stability of the body, the soul, and the humours and spirits that unite them, along with the individual’s capacity for autonomy and agency. In the theatre, I argue, music is frequently deployed as a strategy for experimenting with ways of imagining and performing selfhood. On one hand, it can facilitate self-fashioning, acting as a marker for such characteristics as class and spiritual condition; on the other, it can be disruptive to identity and the capacity for agency and autonomy, since music was understood as both penetrative and transformative, facilitating the disruption of one self by an other.
Chapter 1, “Meanings of Music in Early Modern England,” surveys a range of early modern texts on music to demonstrate their concerns with both the performance of the self and the threat of its dissolution. Chapter 2, “Many Sorts of Music in Twelfth Night and The Roaring Girl,” examines music’s role as an imaginative strategy for improvising an unstable, hybrid gender identity, an alternative subject-position from which to speak and act in ways ordinarily denied to women. Chapter 3, “Music, Magic, and Community in Early Modern Witchcraft Plays,” explores witches’ uses of music to establish a sense of communal identity and to magically disrupt the communities from which they have been excluded. Finally, Chapter 4, “Noise, the City, and the Subject in Epicoene” makes a case for understanding Morose’s fear of noise in terms of early modern ideas about music, reading noise as a radical instability representative of new ways of fashioning selves in a rapidly expanding urban environment.
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Wiggins, Martin. "The assassin in English Renaissance drama, 1558-1642." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.315828.
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Demiralp, Ayse Nur. "'Unnatural Englishmen': social protest in English Renaissance drama." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.569576.
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Jung, Jessica. "Truth and honesty in early modern English drama." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.493076.
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'Truth' and 'honesty' were two terms that were distinctly gendered in Renaissance England. For women, 'honesty' had developed a meaning synonymous with chastity. Male 'honesty', alternately, suggested honourable and befitting words and actions. Women were also perceived as less likely than men to be telling the truth. My focus in this thesis is on a point of convergence for these two complex terms: when female characters in contemporary drama are falsely accused of dishonesty.
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Pfeiffer, Kerstin. "Passionate encounters : emotion in early English Biblical drama." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/3575.
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This thesis seeks to investigate the ways in which late medieval English drama produces and theorises emotions, in order to engage with the complex nexus of ideas about the links between sensation, emotion, and cognition in contemporary philosophical and theologial thought. It contributes to broader considerations of the cultural work that religious drama performed in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England in the context of the ongoing debates concerning its theological and social relevance. Drawing on recent research in the cognitive sciences and the history of emotion, this thesis conceives of dramatic performances as passionate encounters between actors and audiences – encounters which do not only re-create biblical history as a sensual reality, but in which emotion becomes attached to signs and bodies through theatrical means. It suggests that the attention paid to the processes through which audiences become emotionally invested in a play challenges assumptions about biblical drama of the English towns as a negligible contribution to philosophical and theological thinking in the vernacular. The analysis is conducted against the background of medieval and modern conceptions of emotions as ethically and morally relevant phenomena at the intersection between body and reason, which is outlined in chapter one. Each of the four main chapters presents a detailed examination of a series of pageants or plays drawn mainly from the Chester and York cycles and the Towneley and N-Town collections. These are supplemented, on occasion, with analysis of individual plays from fragmentary cycles and collections. The examinations undertaken are placed against the devotional and intellectual backdrop of late medieval England, in order to demonstrate how dramatic performances of biblical subject matter engage with some of the central issues in the wider debate about the human body, soul, and intellect. The second chapter focuses on the creation of living images on the stage, and specifically on didactically relevant stage images, in the Towneley Processus Prophetarum, the Chester Moses and the Law, and the N-Town Moses. The third chapter shifts the focus to the performance of the Passion in the N-Town second Passion play and the York Crucifixio Christi, concentrating on the potential effects of the perception of physical violence on audience response. The subject of chapter four is the emotional behaviours and expressions accorded to the Virgin Mary in the Towneley and N-Town Crucifixion scenes, and those of her precursors, the mothers of the innocents, in the Digby and Coventry plays of the Massacre of the Inncocents. In chapter five, the analysis finally turns to dramatisations of the Resurrection, examining its realisation on stage in the Chester Skinners’ play, as well as staged responses to the event by the apostles and the Marys in the N-Town The Announcement to the Three Marys; Peter and John at the Sepulchre and the Towneley Thomas of India. These four central chapters pave the way for a summary, in the conclusion, of the central problematic underpinning this thesis: how the evocation of emotion in an audience is linked to embodiment in theatrical performance, and tied to a certain awareness, on the part of playwrights, of the popular biblical drama’s potential as a locus of philosophical-theological debate.
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Cooke, Lez. "Television drama in the English regions, 1956-82." Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.441002.
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Black, Gladys Elizabeth. "Educational drama, regional dialect & spoken standard English." Thesis, University of Ulster, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.390152.
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Heawood, Jonathan. "'Never acted, but-- ' : English closet drama, 1625-1685." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.403383.
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Donley, Maren L. "Merchant drama: Trade, piety, and the paths to salvation in English drama, 1400--1532." Connect to online resource, 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3337088.
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Rothkirch, Alyce von. "The place of Wales staging place in contemporary Welsh drama in English." Trier Wiss. Verl. Trier, 2007. http://www.wvttrier.de/top/Beschreibungen/MUSE.html.
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Wozniak, Heather Anne. "Brilliant gloom the contradictions of British gothic drama, 1768-1823 /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1692743101&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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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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Le, Van Curtis. "Body as Text: Physiognomy on the Early English Stage." Scholar Commons, 2017. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6886.
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My dissertation explores the presence of physiognomy, which is the reading of faces and bodily affects to determine a person’s character. I investigate plays originally produced for the early English stage, ranging from the late Middle Ages to the Restoration. In this work I argue that the bodies within the selected plays exist as texts that are to be interpreted by readers and audience members alike. While embodiment theory has done excellent work in explaining the corporeality of the pre-modern body, it does not consider the body as a textual construction. My work aims to fill such a gap. My main methodology is historicist, both old and new. I employ the former insofar as I incorporate primary texts relevant to understanding physiognomy and its workings on the early English stage. I also use New Historicism since I cover many influences on physiognomy, including theology, politics, and philosophy of the mind. The first chapter probes the York Cycle’s biblical play The Conspiracy, as well as the morality play Mankind. I claim that physiognomy highlights the participatory aspects of both plays, as each contains bodies that help audiences learn of true piety. In the second chapter, I discuss Shakespeare’s problem plays All’s Well that Ends Well and Hamlet. I posit that the genre of problem play can best be understood as including works that contain incomplete or inaccurate physiognomic readings. For my final chapter, I analyze the tragicomedies Marriage a-la-Mode, by John Dryden, and The Widow Ranter, by Aphra Behn. I insist that examining the physiognomic readings can help us unite the dialectics between and among the multiple plots within each play. Over the course of these three chapters, I conclude that the body-as-text, understood through physiognomy, allows modern readers to better grasp pre-modern understandings of internality as it evolved from the Middle Ages to the Restoration. In addition, I contend that genre often dictates the ways in which bodies are constructed textually. In summary, the contributions of my work can be listed as the following: (1) I provide examples of how physiognomy can be used to support a variety of methodologies, including Marxism, feminism, and deconstruction. (2) I offer a more thorough history of physiognomy, ranging from the late Middle Ages to the Restoration. (3) My work with genre is unique among current scholarship that engages with physiognomy. In my conclusion, I suggest paths forward with this project, such as the use of other methods for interpreting the body as a text, consisting of anatomy, physiology, and allegory.
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Turner, Irene. "Farce on the borderline with special reference to plays by Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard." [Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong], 1987. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B12367898.
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McIntosh, Shona. "Courtly mirrors : the politics of Chapman's drama." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/726/.
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This thesis argues that the drama of George Chapman (1559-1634) can be read in light of his deep ambivalence towards the political elite of the Jacobean court. It suggests that Chapman’s lack of success in securing courtly patronage, and his constant battle with indebtedness (which resulted in several court appearances and two imprisonments) left him divided in attitude towards the system of courtly reward – he resented his lack of success but continued to struggle to fit in and gain the approval of the powerful figures of the era. I argue that this gave him a critical perspective on many of the important issues of the time. My work examines the configuration of English national identity in his plays, positing an idea of Englishness which is separate from, and often critical of, the monarchy, and which relies on a structural parallel with the French court in order to imagine English identity. It then considers the ways in which money and debt are dealt with in several plays, arguing that Chapman felt deeply concerned by the perennial indebtedness of Jacobean culture but was also aware of the necessity of maintaining his own credibility and supply of credit. It further examines the representation of patronage, suggesting that Chapman saw the soliciting of aristocratic patronage in distinctly sexual terms, almost as a form of artistic prostitution. It then considers the many situations in the plays where royal patronage towards a favourite breaks down, and argues that this often results in allegations of treason which Chapman shows to originate in the paranoia or suspicions of the monarch. Finally, it looks at the concept of virtue in the plays, arguing that Chapman viewed virtue as fundamentally unsustainable in a corrupt court setting, but that he saw some form of engagement in public life as being a moral obligation on the virtuous man. Throughout I argue that Chapman was deeply radical in his social outlook, critical of inherited privilege and government by personal or absolutist rule. The social tensions and political struggles presented in his plays were to find their full expression in the violence of the Civil War and in the trial and execution of Charles I.
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Alfar, Cristina León. ""Evil" women : patrilineal fantasies in early modern tragedy /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9455.
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Gibbons, Zoe Hope. "A dedicated follower of fashion : the ahistoric rake in Restoration literature /." Connect to online version, 2009. http://ada.mtholyoke.edu/setr/websrc/pdfs/www/2009/373.pdf.
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Wright, Myra. "Whores and their metaphors in early modern English drama." Thesis, McGill University, 2010. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=86819.
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Several clusters of metaphors were routinely used to represent the sex trade onstage in early modern England. Close philological study of these figures reveals that even the most conventional metaphors for whores and their work were capable of meaning many things at once, especially in the discursive context of the drama. This project follows a practice of reading that admits multiple significations for the words used by characters on the early modern stage. I argue that metaphors are social phenomena with consequences as varied and complex as the human interactions they're meant to describe. Each chapter treats a different set of images: commodities and commercial transactions, buildings and thoroughfares, food and drink, and rhetorical and theatrical ingenuity. Using methods based on the study of conceptual metaphor in the field of cognitive linguistics, I trace the deployment of conventional figures for prostitution in plays by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, and John Marston. I also introduce occurrences of these metaphors in other genres (news pamphlets, prose narratives, homilies, medical manuals, and so on) to show that they were part of pervasive cultural patterns. The readings below dwell on the figurative associations that were most available to early modern writers as they fashioned prostitute characters for the stage—metaphors commonly taken for granted as literal descriptions of sex work. An understanding of the social force of metaphor begins with the realization that words convey more than any writer, printer, or actor intends. The language of prostitution in the early modern theatre is therefore both common and complex, much like the characters it conjures.Pendant la Renaissance, divers grappes de métaphores étaient utilisées couramment dans les représentations théâtrale de la prostitution en Angleterre. Des études minutieuses philologiques des métaphores pour les putains et leur travail révéler que même les plus conventionnelles pouvaient signifier plusieurs choses à la fois, particulièrement dans le contexte discursif du théâtre. Le projet suit un procédé de lecture qui admet plusieurs significations pour les mots utilisés par des personnages de la Renaissance. Je soutiens que les métaphores sont des phénomènes sociaux qui ont des conséquences aussi variées et complexes que les interactions humaines qu'elles sont censées décrire. Chaque chapitre met en évidence une différente série d'images: les marchandises et transactions commerciales, les bâtiments et les voies urbaines, la nourriture et les boissons, l'ingénuité rhétorique et théâtrale. En utilisant des méthodes basées sur l'étude des métaphores conceptuelles dans le domaine de la linguistique cognitive, je retrace le cortège des figures conventionnelles de prostitution dans les pièces de théâtre de William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, et John Marston. Je signale aussi l'existence de ces métaphores dans d'autres genres littéraires (pamphlets de nouvelles, narratives en prose, homélies, manuels médicaux, etc.) pour démontrer qu'elles faisaient partie des tendances culturelles omniprésentes. Les explications ci-dessous s'entendent sur les associations figurées qui étaiaent les plus à la disposition des écrivains de la Renaissance en façonnant les personnages des prostituées—les métaphores qui étaient souvent considerées comme constituant les descriptions littérales du travail sexuel. Pour bien comprendre la force sociale de la métaphore, il faut realiser d'abord que les mots communiquent beaucoup plus qu'un écrivain, un imprimeur, ou un acteur les destine. La la
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Porter, Chloe. "Interactions between English drama and visual culture, 1576-1642." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2007. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/interactions-between-english-drama-and-visual-culture-15761642(00bc2f2b-6bed-45db-836c-276842a7fca8).html.
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Coleman, D. J. S. "Indelible characters : sacramental themes in sixteenth-century English drama." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.411754.
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Howlett, Sophia. "The platonic academy of Florence and English Renaissance drama." Thesis, University of York, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.317934.
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Wiggins, Martin. "Journeymen in murder : the assassin in English Renaissance drama /." Oxford [GB] : Clarendon press, 1991. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb357127853.
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Gibbard, Peter John. "Republicanism, tacitism and style in English drama: 1585–1608." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/11456.
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In the sixteenth century, both on the Continent and in England, Cicero served as a pre-eminent model for rhetorical style. Reacting against the veneration for Cicero’s rhetoric, late Elizabethan authors experimented with an ‘anti-Ciceronian’ style, imitating the writings of Seneca and Tacitus rather than those of Cicero. Whereas in the middle decades of the twentieth century the contrast between Ciceronian and anti-Ciceronian styles provided the dominant framework for studies of early modern prose, more recent commentators have offered compelling criticisms of this distinction. In response, this dissertation provides an alterative account of the anti-Ciceronian style, arguing that it can be characterized as an epigrammatic ‘sententious’ style. Adopting a historical formalist approach, this dissertation examines the political context of the sententious and Ciceronian stylistic movements. While sententious writing was associated with Tacitean political attitudes, the Ciceronian style was linked to the republicanism of its namesake. Accordingly, early modern dramatists, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and Kyd, used the sententious style to convey Tacitean restraint, whereas Ciceronian rhetoric expressed republican outspokenness. In a series of recent studies on republicanism, Quentin Skinner has shown that early modern republicans were committed to a distinctly classical conception of liberty. Applying Skinner’s views on political philosophy to drama, this dissertation reconceives the role of republicanism in early modern drama, showing that the classical republican notion of liberty is explored in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Richard II, Jonson’s Sejanus and several plays by Marlowe, Daniel and Chapman. This dissertation changes our understanding of both early modern rhetorical style and also the dramatization of republicanism and Tacitism.
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Mazzilli, Mary. "Gao Xingjian vs. Martin Crimp in between modernism and postmodernism." Thesis, SOAS, University of London, 2009. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/29543/.
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This thesis deals with the plays by Gao Xingjian - a Chinese contemporary playwright and Nobel Prize winner for literature in 2000 - and Martin Crimp a contemporary English playwright. The plays from both authors will be looked at from a comparative perspective within the theoretical framework linked to the debate between modernism and postmodernism, as inspired by Calinescu's theory. Calinescu's theory is based on the idea that Postmodernism is a 'face of modernism': he speaks about recurrent aspects ('similarities') of Modernism in Postmodernism, not only in terms of the repetition of patterns from the past in the present culture, but in terms of a natural historical evolution of Modernism into new cultural forms. The aim of this thesis is, therefore, to prove Calinescu's idea of continuity between Modernism and Postmodernism through the work by the two playwrights and by doing this it inevitably demonstrates a link between two writers coming from two different continents, hence a connection between Eastern and Western Literature. This thesis carries out an investigation into the two \vriters' dramatic texts and searches for signs of modem and postmodern elements and highlights how these elements coexist. In particular, in each chapter the thesis will carry out a close reading analysis of one or more plays by each author: in the case of Gao, we focus on post-exile plays, written after he left China in 1986 and are analysed chronologically; in the case of Crimp, the plays in question are not in strict chronological order but almost in parallel order to Gao's plays as they were written from the 1990s up to the present day.
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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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Al-Muhammad, Hasan. "Domestics in the English comedy : 1660-1737." Thesis, Bangor University, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.267347.
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Deiter, Kristen. "The Tower of London icon of early modern English drama /." Diss., Online access via UMI:, 2005.
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Wong, Katrine Ka-Ki. "Theatrical Aspects and Meanings of Music in English Renaissance Drama." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.490819.
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The central concern of this thesis is the negotiation between the dichotomous qualities with which ~usic is associated: the heavenly and the demonic. This duality has always been an important concept in social and philosophical perception ofthe art since classical times. Despite the moral threat that some thinkers have warned about with regards to engaging oneself in musical activities, the element ofmusic is indispensable on the Renaissance stage. The thesis is constructed around a discussion ofthe theatrical meanings ofmusic and its expression of gender, love, and love-related madness in Renaissance drama. One of my major intentions is to e~plore music in non-Shakespearean works in order to provide a wider context, one that has received very little critical discussion. Theatrical music, both songs and instrumental episodes, helps in shaping audience response toward characters and events. Therefore an important aspect of this thesis is the discussion of recent stage productions of Shakespearean plays, which are used to illustrate theoretical questions encountered in the process ofexamining theatrical music and its meanings. The Introduction explores questions related to the mechanisms of meaning-making I in music and in various types of musical episodes in the theatre. As is informed or implied by . . stage directions, instrumental music can be classified as diegetic or non-diegetic, but I argue that both diegetic and non-diegetic music can be further described as either inset or non-inset. Song episodes are relatively more straightforward to be identified as either perfonnative or impromptu. Some of these issues regarding theatrical meanings of music and the musical portrayal of characters and dramatic atmosphere are explored in detail in a case study of Autolycus's songs in recent productions of The Winter sTale. The chapter 'Music and Women' investigates the parallelism between music and women in the Renaissance, and the moral dichotomy of good and evil present in women engaged in singing and instrumental perfonnance. The existing scholarship on music and Shakespearean female characters will be expanded into an analysis of a much wider range of women on the Renaissance stage and their relationship with their music. 'Music and Men' develops similar questions, with masculinity as the focal point. The central argument of this chapter is that Renaissance men are also concerned with the binary effects of music on their masculine identity. The subject of music and masculinity in Renaissance literature has hardly received any examination, a lack which this chapter attempts to begin to repair. The chapter discusses the paradox that while music is an indispensable part of a boy's education in becoming' a well-developed and multi-skilled man, as \vell as a vital factor found in male bondjng, it can, however, also effeminate' a man unless appropriate 'masculine' music is practised in a temperate and moderate ~anner. 'In 'Music and Love', that music is ubiquitously dualistic is once again manifested in the central theme of love and lust in Renaissance drama. Following the observation in the two chapters on women and men that music can trigger off both divine and vulgar feelings, so can the feeling of love be celestial or obscene. Love can also lead to erotomania and various kinds of madness, which will be discussed in the latter half of the chapter. Two more case studies of Twelfth Night and Hamlet are included to further explore queries developed in the examination of the bipolarity in the practice of music related to men and women in times of both sanity and madness. These questions include the distinction between diegeticlnon-diegetic music and in-set/non in-set music; how music contributes to the semantics of love and madness in a specific performance environment; how our modem understanding and interpretation of theatrical music differ from or resemble the socio-culturally positioned perception in Renaissance England.
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Scoville, Chester N. "The rhetoric of the saints in Middle English biblical drama." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/NQ49888.pdf.
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Chang, Li-Yu. "Acting it out : children learning English through story-based drama." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2009. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3128/.
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The purpose of this study was to explore why and how stories and drama can encourage children’s participation in class and also affect their learning of English as a foreign language in Taiwanese primary schools. The author takes a strong interest in both fields, English for Young Learners (EYL) and educational drama, and attempts to propose a solution, story-based drama, to two of the more common problems faced by teachers at primary level—mixed ability classes and limited teaching hours. The key methodological approach was action research in a case study format, using mixed methods and gathering quantitative as well as qualitative data in order to evaluate the impact of the author’s teaching on the children’s English learning. The quantitative research data was gathered with the aid of questionnaires responded to by one hundred and nine teachers and thirty-two fifth graders, while the qualitative data was collected from interviews, participant observation, fieldnotes, journals, artefacts, and video and audio recordings. Quantitative and qualitative data analyses revealed that the incorporation of stories and drama into the existing school curriculum was workable, and the story-based drama assisted the pupils to have greater participation in class and a higher degree of improvements than before in terms of their four language and non-verbal communication skills. This was corroborated by questionnaire results, interviewees’ responses, the co-teacher’s observations, and the pupils’ written work. The author recommends that a collaborative approach to curriculum design and research methodology could be adopted by teachers themselves or between teachers and researchers in order to stimulate more research on the use of story-based drama in similar contexts, while deepening our understanding of this resourceful teaching approach.
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Stewart, Lauren Marie. "Representation of Northern English and Scots in seventeenth century drama." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5988.
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Early Modern English (c. 1500-‐1700) is a difficult period for dialectological study. A dearth of textual evidence means that no comprehensive account of regional variation for this period can be attempted, and the field has therefore tended to be somewhat neglected. However, some evidence of regional varieties of English is provided by dialect representation in Early Modern drama. The dialogue of certain English and Scottish characters (and of those who impersonate them) is often marked linguistically as different from other characters: morphosyntactic forms, lexical items, and phonological features shown through variant spellings suggest dialectal usage in contrast to Standard English. This evidence, I argue, forms a legitimate basis on which to build at least a partial account of regional variation. The 47 plays analysed in this thesis were all written and/or printed between 1598 and 1705, and all feature examples of either Northern English or Scots dialect representation. From these examples we can build up a picture of some of the main phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical elements of the seventeenth century dialects spoken in Scotland and northern England. Moreover, this literary evidence can help clarify and contextualise earlier scholarly work on the topic. The content of the plays themselves, along with the dialect representations, also provide sociocultural and sociolinguistic information about the perception of Scots and northerners and of the attitudes towards them across the country. In Chapter 1 I outline my methodology and provide a review of relevant literature, particularly focusing on other studies of dialect representation in drama. Chapter 2 gives an overview of the historical context for my linguistic data in seventeenth century Britain, including discussions of theatrical history in both England and Scotland, and of population movement and dialect contact. The Scottish dialect evidence is presented in Chapters 3 to 6. In Chapter 3, I give a chronological list of 33 plays featuring Scots dialect representation. In order to contextualise the plays, I provide background information about the author, printing, and performance history; a brief summary of the plot and a description of the dialect speaker; my assessment of the dialect representation; and if pertinent, commentary by other critics. I present and analyse the data from dramatic depictions of Scots, focusing on lexical items (Chapter 4), morphosyntactic features (Chapter 5), and phonological features as indicated by variant spellings (Chapter 6). I compare the literary data with linguistic reference works, including modern and historical dialect atlases, dictionaries, and dialect surveys. I also consult additional Early Modern sources and other reference works. The next four chapters focus on representations of dialects of northern England. These chapters follow the same format as the chapters on Scottish dialect: Chapter 7 contains a discussion of 15 seventeenth-‐century plays featuring representations of Northern English. Chapters 8, 9, and 10 mirror the structure of Chapters 4, 5, and 6, respectively, discussing lexical forms, and morphosyntactic and phonological features in representations of Northern English. I offer my conclusions in Chapter 11. With my detailed analysis of the data, I demonstrate that representations of regional usage in seventeenth century drama cannot be dismissed as stereotyped examples of a stage dialect, and that these literary data are worthy of being analysed linguistically. Although the quantity of dialect representation differs from one play to the next, and the quality covers a broad spectrum of linguistic accuracy, it nevertheless provides important information about non-‐standard dialects of northern England and Scotland in the seventeenth century.
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Albano, Caterina. "Representations of food and starvation in early modern English drama." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.314188.
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Stapleton, Ian Geoffrey. "The theatrical vocabulary of the sword in English Renaissance drama." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.412233.
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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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Goulahsen, Leila. "Women as threat in French and English drama (1553-1610)." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2012. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/women-as-threat-in-french-and-english-drama--15531610(0db41d82-6815-4e72-acf5-ae79139a434e).html.
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This thesis establishes the extent to which theatrical treatments of the notion of women as threat, in England and France from 1553 to 1610, participated in contemporary pro-feminine discourses, and identifies the specificities of female representation in drama as a genre. In studying the diverse theatrical representations of female threat (e.g. political, sexual, ethnic, verbal), it draws on recent studies of gender, sexuality and race in Renaissance France and England. The thesis engages with a broad corpus, which includes relatively little-studied French dramatists such as Etienne Jodelle, Gabriel Bounin, Robert Garnier and Antoine de Montchrestien, and focuses on inconsistencies in representations of femininity, with a view to revealing the ideological tensions and contradictions in the plays’ depictions of threatening female characters drawn from Biblical, classical, or more recent history. This research therefore enhances understanding not only of late sixteenth-century drama, particularly in France, but also of early modern concepts of sexual, class, and racial difference. The thesis illustrates the contested nature of the discourses of class, gender and race in contemporary social debate in this period, indicating the differences between French and English cultures in the modalities of the representation of women, acknowledging the plays’ ambivalence in this respect, rather than minimizing it or explaining it away. It is an interdisciplinary work, drawing on gender and feminist theory, social history, new-historicism, post-colonialism and theories of sexuality, in order to explore concepts, discourses and representations of normative and non-normative femininity in a number of plays. In the plays the female characters are represented as negotiating and subverting the cultural constraints imposed on women, and the gendering of power, violence, language and sexuality. The first chapter analyses the representation of women and power, through the transgression of gender codes and appropriation of masculine values. The threat that women represent is manifested by their rebellion against, resistance to and subversion of patriarchal power and structures, which enable them both to question and to validate them, as power is both fuelled and destabilised by resistance. The second chapter considers the extent to which certain forms of violence are sanctified and others abhorred, in order to acknowledge the threatening potential of female violence and to understand the strategies of social repression of women’s violent instincts and masculine qualities both within the plays and as part of their overall social context. Verbal and psychological violence are addressed in the third chapter which analyses the representation of women as rhetorical threat. Chapter Three demonstrates how women can seduce men with their words, not only to arouse desire but also to provoke action. Seduction can also be physical when the male characters are represented as dependent on women’s beauty, as explored in Chapter Four. The preceding chapters point to one common feature, the imbrication of the issue of gender with those of sexuality, race and class; this is the main concern of the fourth chapter, where the issue of female sexuality is tackled through its link with race.
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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.