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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Renaissance drama'

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Published: 4 June 2021

Last updated: 20 February 2023

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1

Toda, K. "T.S. Eliot and Renaissance drama." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2015. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1463322/.

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The crucial importance of non-Shakespearian Renaissance dramatists to T.S. Eliot is evident in both his poetry and his prose. Eliot himself drew attention to this: he credited his own ‘poetic formation’ to the ‘minor Elizabethan dramatists’, and when reviewing his ‘critical output for the last thirty-odd years’ in 1951, he confessed himself ‘surprised to find how constantly I have returned to the drama, whether by examining the work of the contemporaries of Shakespeare, or by reflecting on the possibilities of the future.’ As C.S. Lewis disapprovingly wrote, Eliot’s ‘sympathy with depraved poets (Marlowe, Jonson, Webster) is apparent’. This thesis will trace Eliot’s engagement with these dramatists; it is a topic that has been comparatively neglected despite the central role it played in the evolution of his poetic and critical sensibility. The first section, which is largely biographical, explores Eliot’s background and education for clues to the development of his great interest in Renaissance drama, as well as detailing the ways in which he pursued this interest when he moved to England. The second comprises a detailed study of Eliot’s many essays on Renaissance dramatists. The last section examines his poetry, from the juvenilia to The Waste Land of 1922, when the outward signs of his ‘saturation’ were particularly prominent. In my conclusion I discuss how his engagement with Renaissance drama evolved in his post-1922 poetry and culminated in the composition of his own verse plays. The aim of this thesis is to explore the nature of the ‘profound kinship’ Eliot shared with Renaissance dramatists; their work appealed to him because it combines erudition with emotion, refinement with savagery, levity with the macabre and squalid. This appeal was so strong that it powerfully shaped both his poetic ideals and his vision of modernity.

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2

Salkeld, Duncan. "Madness in Shakespearean and Renaissance drama." Thesis, Cardiff University, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.293065.

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3

Piatt, Wendy Louisa. "Politics and religion in Renaissance closet drama." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.287042.

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4

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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5

Chakravarti, Paromita. "Renaissance discourses of folly illustrated with examples from English Renaissance drama, especially Shakespeare." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.421739.

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6

Warnock, Jeanie E. "Kind tyranny: Brother-sister relationships in Renaissance drama." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/9116.

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The study focuses on the social, literary, and psychological significance of the brother-sister relationship to a broad range of Renaissance tragedy and tragicomedy. After a brief historical analysis of siblings, the thesis considers the brother-sister relationship as an important means for dramatists to explore questions of identity, of gender conflict, and of differing understandings of family. It also examines the relationship as a developing literary tradition in the drama of the Stuart period, a tradition which culminates in the works of John Ford. The first half of the study surveys a large range of non-Shakespearean revenge tragedy and tragicomedy. In revenge tragedy, violent brother-sister strife serves as a symbol of the self in turmoil, as an image of a disordered family and society, and as a focal point for tension over the nature of women. Brothers also subvert traditional family roles in their relationships with their sisters. The avenging brother and sister, joined in shared loyalty to their house, mount a legitimate challenge to the authority of husband and king; pandar brothers become diabolical inversions of father and husband. Proceeding to tragicomedy, the thesis analyzes the brother as a figure of illegitimate authority and considers the privileged position gained by royal sisters, whose noble blood renders them the equal of their brothers. The latter half of the dissertation reinterprets the plays of John Webster and John Ford. In The Duchess of Malfi, the royal siblings' similarity, close blood tie, and high rank overturn gender difference and affirm the intimate connection between the sexes. The study considers the importance of blood family to the Duchess' self-conception and examines Ferdinand's attempts to create identity by usurping the place of his sister's husband. Ford's two plays 'Tis Pity She's A Whore and The Fancies Chaste and Noble stand as the culmination of dramatic treatments of idealized and antagonistic brother-sister relationships alike. Both works contrast the opposing nature of physical and familial love and elevate asexual love above sexual passion, presenting a sibling tie which undermines the bond between husband and wife.

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7

Warnock, Jeanie. "Kind tyranny, brother-sister relationships in Renaissance drama." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/NQ57078.pdf.

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8

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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9

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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10

Cadman, Daniel John. "Republicanism and stoicism in Renaissance neo-Senecan drama." Thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, 2011. http://shura.shu.ac.uk/19417/.

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This study will focus upon the dramas of Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Samuel Brandon, William Alexander, and Elizabeth Cary, as well as the Roman tragedies of Thomas Kyd and Ben Jonson, which are characterised, to varying degrees, by their appropriation of continental models of neo-classical tragedy practised by the French tragedian Robert Gamier. The idea, promulgated by several early twentieth century critics, that many of these plays are linked by a common anti-theatrical agenda has been roundly rejected by more recent critics. This thesis will offer a new perspective on these plays by arguing that the recent criticism which distances them from the anti-theatrical agenda has served to repress the intertextual affinities that exist between them. These are characterised by their common interests in such humanist outlooks as republicanism and stoicism. Classical authorities, including Seneca and Tacitus, as well as contemporary theorists, such as Niccolo Machiavelli and Justus Lipsius inform these discourses. This form of drama also offered the authors a space to interrogate the practical utility of a number of theories from a variety of perspectives, indicating that the plays are in dialogue with one another rather than offering a single uniform outlook. As a related issue, the study will consider the various ways that the engagement with these theories affects the representation of a number of features in these plays, such as the dramatisation of key historical events, the representation of exemplary figures like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and the plight of the individual in a tyrannical society, as well as their response to topical events such as the accession of James I. Such features, this study will argue, provide evidence of how this form of drama was appropriated to address the concerns of a politically disenfranchised group of writers during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras, as well as revealing the commitment of the writers to a form of humanist dramatic authorship.

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11

Hughes, Christine. "The use of necromancy in Renaissance drama : 1570-1620." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.367541.

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12

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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13

Meza, Carmen M. Meza. "Renaissance Borderlands: Geographies of Race in Early Modern Drama." The Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1534523344820988.

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14

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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15

Cunico, Sonia. "An anatomy of madness : (dis)ordered speech in drama." Thesis, Lancaster University, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.274210.

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16

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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17

Johnston, Mark Albert. "About face, performing the beard in Renaissance drama, 1552-1614." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0007/MQ42638.pdf.

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18

Stymeist, David. "Renaissance scapegoating, the representation of persecution in early modern drama." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/NQ56100.pdf.

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19

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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20

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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21

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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22

Marshall, Tristan Scott. "The idea of the British Empire in the Jacobean public theatre, 1603-c1614." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.307910.

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23

Mukherjee, Manisha. "The representation of transgressive love and marriage in English Renaissance drama." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ30345.pdf.

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24

Mukherjee, Manisha. "The representation of transgressive love and marriage in English Renaissance drama /." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=42103.

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This study explores the presentation of transgressive, effective and erotic relationships in a selected group of early modern plays as those relationships relate to the English Renaissance ideal of marriage and sexuality expressed in religious and secular tracts. The depictions of illicit love and sexuality in these plays reveal problematic social and moral issues inherent in the construction of the English Renaissance ideal of love and marriage. Not only do the dramatists reveal the tension between transgressive and normative love and sexuality, but they do so through the use of aesthetic forms that transgress conventional dramatic structure. This dissertation contends that the unconventional dramatic representation of transgression functions as a cognitive mode for the audience in their understanding of the practical social reality associated with the abstract ideality of love and marriage. Focussing on a selected plays of English Renaissance dramatists William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Thomas Heywood, John Ford, and two anonymous playwrights, I suggest that the dramatists refuse to condemn or condone the transgression. Rather, they endow it with meaning, and while not rescinding the ideal love and sexuality, offer possible ways of accommodating it.

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25

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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Karim-Cooper, Farahnaz Vera. "'Beautied with plast'ring art' : cosmeticism in English Renaissance drama and culture." Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.401770.

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27

Westhoff, Erica Lynn Mercati Francesco Mercati Francesco Mercati Francesco. "Il sensale, Il lanzi, L'imbroglia reconsidering Renaissance comedy through the plays of Francesco Mercati /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2010. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1997581951&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.

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28

Grossman, Joanna Rebecah. "Shakespeare Grounded: Ecocritical Approaches to Shakespearean Drama." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13064927.

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Using the "Great Chain of Being" -- which was integral to the Elizabethan understanding of the world -- as a starting point, this dissertation examines the sometimes startling ways in which Shakespeare's plays invert this all-encompassing hierarchy. At times, plants come to the forefront as the essential life form that others should emulate to achieve a kind of utopian ideal. Still other times, the soil and rocks themselves become the logical extension of a desire to remove man from the pinnacle of earthly creation. Over the course of this project, I explore plays that emphasize a) alternative, non-mammalian modes of propagation, b) the desire to sink the human body into the earth (or, at a minimum, man's closeness to the ground), and c) the imagined lives of flora and fauna, while underscoring man's kinship with myriad organisms. In many of the works explored, a modern vision of materiality comes to the forefront, presenting a stark contrast to the deeply held religious views of the day. In flipping the ladder upside down, Shakespeare entices his reader to confront inherent weaknesses in human and animal biology, and ultimately to question why man cannot seek a better model from the lowly ground upon which he treads.

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Sargent, Gary Richard. "'A wilderness of mirrors' : T.S. Eliot, expression and Renaissance drama (1916-1934)." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.244271.

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30

Hüsken, Wim N. M. "Noyt meerder vreucht compositie en structuur van het komische toneel in de Nederlanden voor de Renaissance /." Deventer : Sub Rosa, 1987. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/21298880.html.

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31

Mukherji, Subha. "Issues of evidence, interpretation and judgement in Renaissance English drama, c. 1580-1640." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.275396.

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32

Speed, Helena Christina. "The influence of the Inns of Court on English Renaissance drama 1584-1594." Thesis, University of Reading, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.262855.

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33

Stewart, Fenn Elan. ""The king is a thing": Hamlet and the prostheses of nobility." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/2645.

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The language used in critical readings of Hamlet is rife with implicitly teleological terms: according to many critics, and the ghost of King Hamlet, the story of his father's murder and Claudius' succession requires Hamlet to do something. I ask, why should Hamlet kill his uncle, revenge his father, correct his mother, become king, marry Ophelia, and produce heirs to rule when he is gone? While Hamlet's inaction is often described as delay or paralysis, I suggest that the Danish prince resists teleology through his studied ambivalence towards dynasty: land-owning, child-bearing, wars and marriage. Building on recent theoretical and historical work by scholars like Lee Edelman, Will Fisher, Margreta de Grazia and Madhavi Menon, I suggest that Hamlet, through the interventions of its main character, thwarts the assumption that the relationship between a nobleman and his land is natural, that the desire for possession and rule is inherent. Combining de Grazia's invaluable historicism with Fisher's discussion of prostheses, Ir ead the Renaissance nobleman as a prosthetic creature, physically and politically embodied by his marriage, his children, his land. In delaying the revenge he has been called upon to carry out, in hesitating to take up the crown, Hamlet defers the prostheses of nobility, and opens up a space from which to question the dynastic project.

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Steggle, Matthew. "Aristopanes grandsons : the poetics of comedy and satire in the age of Jonson." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.320684.

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35

Atwood, Emma Katherine. "Spatial Dramaturgy and Domestic Control in Early Modern Drama." Thesis, Boston College, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:104813.

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Thesis advisor: Mary T. Crane
Thesis advisor: Andrew Sofer
Spatial Dramaturgy and Domestic Control in Early Modern Drama explores the social components of early modern domestic architecture and the spatial practices that helped to dramatize them. Each chapter examines a particular domestic feature—doors, windows, galleries, studies—and considers its role in a variety of early modern plays. Methodologically, I bridge the gaps between literary study, dramaturgy, and history by analyzing the palimpsest of the physical stage (e.g., the upper playing balcony) and the fictional spaces produced in performance (e.g., Juliet’s window). My work takes its influence from literary scholars, primarily Lena Cowen Orlin and Patricia Fumerton; theater historians, primarily Tim Fitzpatrick, Alan Dessen, Leslie Thompson, and Mariko Ichikawa; and architectural historians, primarily Mark Girouard and Alice T. Friedman. Bringing together these fields of study allows me to reconsider the theory of the unlocalized early modern stage that has largely dominated scholarly and theatrical approaches to early modern theater for half a century. In my first chapter, “Doors and Keys: Enclosure and Spatial Control,” I argue that doors and keys operate in productive tension with the spatial flexibility of the “unlocalized” stage, troubling the fantasy of domestic spatial control in plays such as A Woman Killed With Kindness and The Comedy of Errors. In my second chapter, “Windows: Locus, Platea, and Contested Authority,” I explore the way window scenes in plays such as Romeo and Juliet and Women Beware Women provide a liminal space between house and street where the tiring house façade and the apron of the stage could intersect. My third chapter, “Galleries: Feigned Soliloquy and Interiority,” shows how playwrights used gallery settings to stage feigned soliloquy, exposing the limits of private speech and the struggle to access another person’s most inner thoughts. My final chapter, “Studies: Hauntings and Impossible Privacy,” looks at plays that feature ghosts or devils in studies, such as Doctor Faustus and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, to argues that these supernatural elements reflect the ease with which playwrights could violate presumably protected spaces. In turn, these hauntings explore the danger presented in early modern humanism: that the most haunted place of all is one’s own mind
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: English

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36

Montanari, Anna Maria. "'A heart in Egypt' : Cleopatra on the Renaissance stage in Italy and England." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709112.

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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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38

Mazimhaka, Jolly Rwanyonga. "The discourse of difference, the representation of black African characters in english Renaissance drama." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp05/nq23965.pdf.

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39

Pilhuj, Katherine. "A Mirror for the World: Gender, Geography, and Identity in Early Modern English Drama." Scholarly Repository, 2008. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_dissertations/90.

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This dissertation focuses on the particular ways in which early modern English playwrights connect geographical territory depicted in charts, travel, and colonial literature to the female body. By examining the rhetorical methods that both male and female writers employ, I demonstrate how the emerging imperial discourse relies upon the idea that through marriage, women represent and convey territory for their male relatives. But as physical embodiments of family wealth and property that serve as crucial links between males, these women can subvert this use of their bodies in order to formulate a site of resistance to masculine modes of mapping that penetrate, explore, and chart both territory and bodies. Beginning with depictions of Queen Elizabeth and English geography, I investigate plays from the 1570s to the 1670s that reflect and reshape Elizabeth's cartography of her virgin body. In my consideration of Christopher Marlowe's Tragedie of Dido, Queene of Carthage, and Tamburlaine, I argue that although Dido and Zenocrate serve to represent their homelands and legitimize its conquest by their men, the two queens upset this rhetoric when they delineate their own geographic re-imaginings. Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedie of Mariam and The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II reveal how both Mariam and Isabel are inscribed by the same colonial rhetoric that imagines the women to be fertile land that can only be properly civilized by men. The next chapter reveals how Thomas Heywood's works reflect and legitimize the growing importance of trade rather than outright conquest in English overseas expansion. In If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie and The Fair Maid of the West, Heywood's Queen Elizabeth and her counterpart Bess Bridges demonstrate how any woman's virginity becomes a commodity to be used and traded as a representation of English virtue. The final chapter examines how Margaret Cavendish in Loves Adventures and Bell in Campo reclaims the body as a site of potential resistance by redeploying the rhetoric of virginity and cartography. The coda calls for continued investigation into the uses of geographic rhetoric through the example of Queen Anne.

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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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Headley, Cynthia Marie. "The Temporary Nature of Health: The Humoral Body in Early Modern Drama." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/222851.

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The Temporary Nature of Health: The Humoral Body in Early Modern Drama explores the ways in which drama, political theory, and travel accounts deploy metaphors and practices generated by the humoral body to provide an account for living in a postlapsarian world. This project's interdisciplinary approach builds on the work of Gail Paster and Valerie Traub and analyzes the ways in which understandings of the body both inflect and are inflected by culture. Chapter one, "'Letting' Blood: The Impossibility of Social Health and Stability in Shakespeare and Cary," focuses on metonyms and metaphors of blood, using both Richard II and Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam. Both plays challenge the notion that blood as bloodline metonymically means character fitness and the ability to rule. Chapter two, "The Failure of Authority: Medical Practitioners and Heads of State in The Winter's Tale, All's Well that Ends Well, and Measure for Measure," argues that these plays' central characters fail as healers in their attempts to find balance and stability for others, usually through the comedic conventional ending of marriage. Chapter three, "Pastoral's Temporary Healing: Elizabethan-Jacobean Comedies, Tragicomedies, and Travel Accounts," uses pastoral dramas such as Mary Wroth's Love's Victorie, John Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess, and Shakespeare's As You Like It, as well as travel accounts such as Walter Ralegh's A Discourse Concerning Western Planting. This chapter examines the relationship among pastoral drama, humoral understanding of the body, and travel accounts.

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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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Sheldon, Dania S. K. "'Unregarded age' : texts and contexts for elderly characters in English Renaissance drama, c.1480-1625." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:20f5d513-2121-4cb6-afcb-de9846ab9a8e.

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This study seeks to provide historical and literary contexts for elderly characters from English play-texts c.1580 to 1625. Its primary aim, from a literary perspective, is to draw attention to the ways that a better understanding of elderly characterisation can enrich the appreciation of much-studied play-texts, and to indicate some interesting features of more obscure ones. Its secondary aim is to suggest the value, for social historians of old age in early modern England, of play-texts as social evidence. I have examined most of the published extant play-texts of the period, and have found approximately 150 of these to be relevant (the most important of these are listed in the Appendix). Because of the problems of handling all aspects of such a large amount of material, I have chosen to consider the plays chiefly as texts to be read, with little reference to their performative aspects. However, I analyse the dramas as literary as well as social documents. Specific plays provide illustrations for observations and support for various hypotheses about dramatic representations of the elderly. In some instances, I address plays which have received little critical attention. The thesis falls into two parts. In the first three chapters, I discuss the socio-historical, cultural and non-dramatic literary contexts for representations of elderly men and women in play-texts. In chapters four through seven, I examine elderly characters in specific role or relationship categories: as sovereigns and magistrates, in sexual and marital relationships, and as parents. In the final chapter, I offer a detailed analysis of The Old Law by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley.

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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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Rogers, Mark Christopher. "Art and public festival in Renaissance Florence studies in relationships /." Full text available online (restricted access), 1996. http://images.lib.monash.edu.au/ts/theses/Rogers.pdf.

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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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Frassinelli, Pier Paolo. "Visible god : a study in culture, drama and the mystery of commodification in the English Renaissance." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.396183.

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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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Sim, Susan. "Memory's wizard pencil : the perpetuation of an ethos in early nineteenth-century representations of Renaissance drama." Thesis, University of Stirling, 1991. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.306868.

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Hann, Yvonne D. "Money talks : economics, discourse and identity in three Renaissance comedies /." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape15/PQDD_0004/MQ36130.pdf.

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