For my MFA internship requirement, I currently serve as an acting intern at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater in Partnership with UCF. I was cast as Lavinia in OST’s spring production of Titus Andronicus, and I will use this as my thesis role. It will be the very last show of my MFA career, and it will provide an exceptional opportunity for me to utilize all the skills learned during my three years of MFA classes and training. Jim Helsinger, Artistic Director at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida, will direct the production. I intend to approach this role in a manner very similar to my MFA coursework: through vocal work, physical work, and research. Lavinia is a Shakespearean character; Shakespeare is immediately associated with language. However, Lavinia is interesting because the role’s vocal work will require both verbal and non-verbal experimentation. I will be able to utilize the various language tools and techniques I have learned in my MFA voice classes to approach Shakespeare’s text; but Lavinia has her tongue cut off halfway through the show, so I anticipate additional vocal, non-verbal contributions to make the role unique. Physicality will also play a large part of my acting work in this particular role, more so, perhaps, than in a typical Shakespearean ingénue. Because Lavinia is verbally silenced, her body must also speak. No approach to a Shakespeare role would be complete without character work, and research will play a large part of this role in particular. Mr. Helsinger encourages his interns to watch other productions of the same character and to perform visual research from which to pick iv and choose. I also plan to do research on violence against women and its significance in both the play and real life in order to better inform my vocal and physical choices. By delving into this role, I plan to explore several questions. What exactly makes up the voice, as heard or interpreted by an audience, of a Shakespearean character? How has my graduate study prepared me for this role? What techniques work for my own personal process as an actor? How do the voice, mind, and body combine to inform a character’s arc, and which of these will prove most powerful to an audience’s understanding of that character’s journey? Is it possible to retain the audience’s attention in a Shakespearean, text-oriented, production without using words? I hope to answer these questions through the process of combining, in one character, all of the aspects of my MFA journey.

In offering readings of Shakespeare’s tragic women on film, this thesis explores bodies that are caught between signifiers of absence and presence: the woman’s body that is present with absent body parts; the woman’s body that is spoken about or alluded to when absent from view; the woman’s living body that appears as a corpse; the woman’s body that must be exposed and concealed from sight. These are bodies that appear on the borderline of meaning, that open up a marginal or liminal space of investigation. In concentrating on a state of ‘betweenness’, I am seeking to offer new interpretive possibilities for bodies that have become the site of much critical anxiety, and bodies that, due to their own peculiar liminality, have so far been critically ignored. In reading Shakespeare’s tragic women on film, I am interested specifically in screen representations of Gertrude’s sexualised body that is both absent and present in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Desdemona’s (un)chaste body that is both exposed and concealed in film adaptations of Othello; Juliet’s ‘living corpse’ that represents life and death in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; the woman’s naked body in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971) that is absent from Shakespeare’s play-text; and Lavinia’s violated, dismembered body in Julie Taymor’s (Titus, 1999) and Titus Andronicus, which, in signifying both life and death, wholeness and fragmentation, absence and presence, something and nothing, embodies many of the paradoxes explored within this thesis. Through readings that demonstrate a combined interest in Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare films, and Shakespeare criticism, this thesis brings these liminal bodies into focus, revealing how an understanding of their ‘absent presence’ can affect our responses as spectators of Shakespeare’s tragedies on film.

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Shakespeare references humoral medical theory and social definitions of gender throughout much of his work. His references to medical practices like purging, the siphoning of excessive emotional fluids to bring the body into balance, are more than allusions to medical theories. Shakespeare's works unveil and challenge early modern approaches to emotional experience, most particularly when it comes to traumatic experiences that overwhelm comprehension. In Titus Andronicus (1592), The Rape of Lucrece (1593), Hamlet (1603), King Lear (1608), and Macbeth (1606), Shakespeare invokes humoral theory to articulate the early modern traumatic experience and to criticize the efficacy of purging in representations of trauma. For Shakespeare, the siphoning of destabilized emotions, through metaphorical and rhetorical practices, has dangerous consequences for bodies coded as feminine.

[pt] O objetivo desta dissertação é analisar o tratamento dado pelas traduções brasileiras aos personagens negros na obra de William Shakespeare: o Príncipe de Marrocos em O mercador de Veneza, Aarão em Tito Andrônico e Otelo na tragédia homônima. O estudo parte dos pressupostos de que o preconceito racial é uma construção ideológica que se dá pela via do discurso e de que a tradução, como uma modalidade discursiva, pode desempenhar um papel na reprodução de ideologias. O estudo desenvolveu-se em três etapas: (i) identificação de ocorrências de discurso racista no texto-fonte; (ii) localização, nos textos-alvo, das traduções de cada possível afirmação racista previamente identificada; (iii) análise das soluções tradutórias observadas e os efeitos gerais que estas provocaram nos diferentes produtos finais, a fim de verificar em que medida as versões acabam por reconstruir, intensificar ou atenuar o preconceito percebido na obra original. O corpus de análise é constituído por The Merchant of Venice, juntamente com três traduções brasileiras, feitas por Carlos Alberto Nunes, Cunha Medeiros/Oscar Mendes, e Barbara Heliodora; Titus Andronicus, e as versões brasileiras realizadas pelos mesmos tradutores; e Othello, nas traduções de Onestaldo de Pennafort, Carlos Alberto Nunes, Cunha Medeiros/Oscar Mendes, Péricles Eugênio da Silva Ramos, Barbara Heliodora, Beatriz Viegas-Faria e Jean Melville. / [en] The purpose of this thesis is to examine how Brazilian translations deal with Shakespeare`s black male characters: The Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, Aaron in Titus Andronicus and Othello. The study is based on the assumption that racial prejudice is an ideological construct, mediated by language, and that translation as a discursive mode may play an important role in the reproduction of ideology. The research was conducted in three steps: (i) identification of instances of racist discourse in the source text; (ii) identification in the target text of the translated instances of such racist discourse; (iii) analysis of these translations and the general effect they may have on the different end products, so as to verify whether the Brazilian versions reconstruct, intensify or mitigate the prejudice identified in the original work. The plays examined were The Merchant of Venice, and three Brazilian translations by Carlos Alberto Nunes, Cunha Medeiros/Oscar Mendes, and Barbara Heliodora; Titus Andronicus, in renderings by these same translators; and Othello, as translated by Onestaldo de Pennafort, Carlos Alberto Nunes, Cunha Medeiros/Oscar Mendes, Péricles Eugênio da Silva Ramos, Barbara Heliodora, Beatriz Viegas- Faria, and Jean Melville.

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In his Book of the Courtier, Castiglione appeals to the Renaissance notion of self-fashioning, the idea that individuals could shape their identity rather than relying solely on the influence of external factors such as birth, social class, or fate. While other early modern authors explore the practice of self-fashioning—Niccolò Machiavelli, for example, surveys numerous princes identifying ways they have molded themselves—Castiglione emphasizes the necessity of modeling one's-self after a variety of sources, "[taking] various qualities now from one man and now from another." In this way, Castiglione advocates for a self-fashioning grounded in a discriminating kind of synthesis, the generation of a new ideal form through the selective combination of various source materials. While Castiglione focuses on the moves necessary for an individual to fashion himself through this act of discriminatory mimesis, his views can explain the ways authors of the period use source material in the process of textual production. As poets and playwrights fashioned their texts, they did so by consciously combining various source materials in order to create not individuals, as Castiglione suggests, but characters to represent new cultural ideals and values. Early moderns viewed the process of textual, as well as cultural production, as a kind of synthesis. Creation through textual fusion is particularly common in early modern accounts of the heroic, in which authors synthesize classical conceptions of the hero, which privilege the completion of martial feats, and Christian notions of the heroic, based on the contemplative nature of Christ. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy (1585), Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1590), William Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus (1594), and John Milton in A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (1632) syncretized classical and Christian notions of the heroic ideal in order to comment upon and shape political, social, and literary discourses. By recognizing this fusion of classical heroism with contemplative heroism, we gain a more nuanced understanding of the reception of classical ideas within an increasingly secular society.

This thesis traces the use of pity in early modern English literature, highlighting in particular the ways in which the emotion prompted personal anxieties and threatened Burckhardtian notions of the self-contained, autonomous individual, even as it acted as a central, crucial component of personal identity. The first chapter considers pity in medieval drama, and ultimately argues that the institutional changes that took place during the Reformation ushered in a new era, in which people felt themselves to be subjected to interpersonal emotions – pity especially – in new, overwhelming, and difficult ways. The remaining three chapters examine how pity complicates questions of personal identity in Renaissance literature. Chapter Two discusses the masculine bid for pity in courtly lyric poetry, including Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Barnabe Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe, and considers the undercurrents of vulnerability and violation that emerge in the wake of unanswered emotional appeals. This chapter also examines these themes in Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Sidney's Arcadia. Chapter Three also picks up the element of violation, extending it to the pitiable presentation of sexual aggression in Lucrece narratives. Chapter Four explores the recognition of suffering and vulnerability across species boundaries, highlighting the use of pity to define humanity against the rest of the animal kingdom, and focusing in particular on how these questions are handled by Shakespeare in The Tempest and Ben Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair. This work represents the first extended study of pity in early modern English literature, and suggests that the emotion had a constitutive role in personal subjectivity, in addition to structuring various forms of social relation. Ultimately, the thesis contends that the early modern English interest in pity indicates a central worry about vulnerability, but also, crucially, a belief in the necessity of recognising shared, human weakness.

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