John Marston’s literary legacy has inevitably existed in the larger-than-life shadows of his great contemporaries William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. In the last two centuries, his works were hardly taken on their own terms but were perceived instead in overt or implicit comparison to Shakespeare’s or Jonson’s. As a result, Marston’s plays acquired the lasting but unfair image of haphazard concoctions whose cheap sensationalism and personal satire often got them in trouble with the authorities. This was the case until recently, especially with Marston’s comic drama. Following revisionist trends, this study sets out to restore some perspective: it offers a fresh reading of Marston’s comic plays and collaborations—Antonio and Mellida, What You Will, Jack Drum’s Entertainment, The Dutch Courtesan, The Malcontent, Parasitaster, Eastward Ho, and Histrio-Mastix—by pursuing a more nuanced contextualization with regard to religious context and archival evidence. The first central contention here is that instead of undermining political and religious authority, Marston’s comic drama can demonstrate consistent conformist and conservative affinities, which imply a seriously considered agenda. This study’s second main point is that the perceived failures of Marston’s comic plays—such as tragic elements, basic characterization, and sudden final reversals—can be plausibly read as deliberate effects, designed with this agenda in mind. The significance of this analysis lies in its interpretation of Marston’s comedies from the angle of religious and political conformism, which argues for an alternative identity for this playwright. The discussion opens with a presentation of Marston’s early satirical books as texts informed by a moderate Church of England Protestantism, yet coinciding at times with some of Calvin’s writings, and by a distrust of the individualistic tendencies of the English Presbyterian movement as well as the perceived literal ritualism of the old Catholic faith. On this basis, it then proceeds to reveal an identical philosophy behind Marston’s comic plays and collaborations. Antonio and Mellida and What You Will are interpreted to dramatize the human soul’s dependence on God’s favourable grace; Jack Drum’s Entertainment and The Dutch Courtesan to insist on the acknowledgement of God in romantic desire; The Malcontent and Parasitaster to present the dangers of the political immorality; and Eastward Ho and Histrio-Mastix to argue for the necessity of edifying occupations for the wayward human will. In its conclusion, this study further highlights Marston’s bias for political and religious individual obedience to established hierarchies and his suspicion of the early modern forces of change. The conformist identity that emerges from the present discussion is consistently supported by the archival evidence surviving from the playwright’s life. Thus, Marston’s comic drama can be interpreted as the result of carefully considered and skilfully implemented political and religious ideas that have been neglected so far.

Regardless of genre, Shakespeare’s plays open in many different ways on the stage. Some openings come in the form of a prologue and extend from it; others in the form of a framing dialogue; some may begin in medias res; and there is also a single case of an induction in The Taming of the Shrew. My dissertation, “Shakespeare’s Openings in Action: A Study of Four Plays from the Period 1591- c.1602,” subsequently referred to as “Shakespeare’s Openings in Action,” attempts to define the construction of openings in the context of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy and to understand texts which were written in the first place to be performed on a platform stage by actors experienced in theatrical practice. By analysing the playwright’s organization of the dramatic material, as reflected in the play-texts, I attempt to gauge how an opening set out to engage original audiences in the play, an essential function of theatrical composition, and to determine to what extent the play-text may be considered as an extended stage direction for early modern actors.1 What is the present state of scholarship in the subject? Although sparse, critical interest in the openings of Shakespeare’s plays can be found as early as 1935 in the work of A. C. Sprague, Shakespeare and the Audience. In more recent years, other studies have appeared, for instance, Robert F. Willson, Jr., Shakespeare’s Opening Scenes (1977), and a number of articles included in Entering the Maze: Shakespeare’s Art of Beginning, edited by F. Willson Jr. (1995). Existing scholarship provides a good general framework for further research into the openings of Shakespeare’s plays. In addition to the studies presented above, I shall draw on analytical approaches to play-text analysis which involve theatre practice, for example in the work of André Helbo, Approaching Theatre (1991), Anne Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre (1996), and John Russell Brown, Shakespeare’s Plays in Performance (1993); John Barton, Playing Shakespeare (1984), and Cicely Berry, Text in Action. London (2001). These works provide revealing insights into the theatrical possibilities of dramatic language and actor technique. 1The analytical method presented in this dissertation supplements studies made of the complex textual histories of Shakespeare’s plays by considering the staging and characterisation information they contain. In the case of multiple-text plays, it takes account of editorial scholarship and explains the reasons for choosing to analyse the material contained in one version over the other(s).

Variations on Charisma: Shakespeare’s Saintly, Villain, and Lustful Leaders est une étude des mécanismes du leadership charismatique dans Henry V, Richard III et Antoine et Cléopâtre de William Shakespeare, respectivement. Le mémoire explore certains outils, tels que la rhétorique, l'ironie et resignification, qui permettent aux dirigeants de gagner l'amour des disciples, la reconnaissance, et même la crainte. Cette thèse ne traitera pas avec l'essence du charisme en tant que telle, mais plutôt avec les techniques de leadership charismatique. Dans le premier chapitre, j'ai étudié le caractère du roi Harry dans trois différents aspects: en tant que chef militaire, en tant que chef spirituel, et comme un leader politique. Parmi les techniques de leadership charismatique qui déploie Henry V de gagner l'amour de ses disciples et de dévouement est rhétorique. La capacité de livrer le discours à droite dans la conjoncture à droite et à convaincre les adeptes, même dans les moments de difficultés formes sa force clé comme une figure centrale dans la pièce. Le deuxième chapitre traite du leadership charismatique Richard III, qui est évaluée sur le plan éthique parce qu'elle est acquise grâce à assassiner. J'ai essayé d'examiner les relations possibles qui pourraient exister entre le charisme et l'agence moral. Dans ce chapitre, j'ai soulevé des questions sur la mesure dans laquelle le charisme est d'ordre éthique et comment un chef de file, qui usurpes alimentation via assassiner, est charismatique. Une technique qui renforce le leadership charismatique de Richard est l'ironie. Richard III déploie l'ironie de gagner la complicité du public. Dans le troisième chapitre, l'accent est mis sur le caractère de Cléopâtre. La question soulevée dans le chapitre concerne la relation entre le charisme et la lutte pour une identité féminine orientale. politique sexuelle de Cléopâtre est également au cœur de mon étude, car il est revu et de nouveaux sens de Shakespeare d'une manière qui souligne les qualités charismatiques de Cléopâtre. Mots clés: le charisme, la rhétorique, l'agence morale, resignification, William Shakespeare / Variations on Charisma: Shakespeare’s Saintly, Villain, and Lustful Leaders is an investigation of the mechanisms of charismatic leadership in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Richard III, and Antony and Cleopatra respectively. It explores certain tools, such as rhetoric, irony, and resignification, which allow the leaders to gain the followers’ love, recognition, and even awe. This thesis will not deal with the essence of charisma as such but rather with the techniques of charismatic leadership. In the first chapter, I have studied the character of King Harry in three different aspects: as a military leader, as a spiritual leader, and as a political leader. Among the techniques of charismatic leadership which Henry V deploys to gain his followers’ love and devotion is rhetoric. The ability to deliver the right discourse in the right conjuncture and to persuade the followers even in the moments of hardship forms his key strength as a central figure in the play. The second chapter deals with Richard III’s charismatic leadership which is assessed ethically because it is gained through murder. I have tried to examine the possible relations that might exist between charisma and moral agency. In this chapter, I have raised questions about the extent to which charisma is ethical and how a leader, who usurpes power via murder, is charismatic. One technique which reinforces Richard’s charismatic leadership is irony. Richard III deploys irony to gain the audience’s complicity. In the third chapter, the focus is on the character of Cleopatra. The question raised in the chapter concerns the relationship between charisma and the struggle for an oriental feminine identity. Cleopatra’s sexual politics is also at the heart of my study because it is revisited and resignified by Shakespeare in a way that highlights Cleopatra’s charismatic qualities. Key words: charisma, rhetoric, moral agency, resignification, William Shakespeare

My thesis explores the formation of the subject in the novels of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. I attach the concept of property in terms of how male protagonists are obsessed with materialistic ownership and with the subordination of women who, as properties, consolidate their manhood. The three novelists despite their racial, gendered, and literary differences share the view that identity and truth are mere social and cultural constructs. I incorporate the work of Judith Butler and other poststructuralist figures, who see identity as a matter of performance rather than a natural entity. My thesis explores the theme of freedom, which I attached to the ways characters use their bodies either to confine or to emancipate themselves from the restricting world of race, class, and gender. The three novelists deconstruct any system of belief that promulgates the objectivity of truth in historical documents. History in the three novels, as with the protagonists, perception of identity, remains a social construct laden with distortions to serve particular political or ideological agendas. My thesis gives voice to African American female characters who are associated with love and racial and gender resistance. They become the reservoirs of the African American legacy in terms of their association with the oral and intuitionist mode of knowing, which subverts the male characters’ obsession with property and with the mainstream empiricist world. In this dissertation, I use the concept of hybridity as a literary and theoretical devise that African-American writers employ. In effect, I embark on the postcolonial studies of Henry Louise Gates, Paul Gilroy, W. E. B Du Bois, James Clifford, and Arjun Appadurai in order to reflect upon the fluidity of Morrison’s and Naylor’s works. I show how these two novelists subvert Faulkner’s essentialist perception of truth, and of racial and gendered identity. They associate the myth of the Flying African with the notion of hybridity by making their male protagonists criss-cross Northern and Southern regions. I refer to Mae Gwendolyn Henderson’s article on “Speaking in Tongues” in my analysis of how Naylor subverts the patriarchal text of both Faulkner and Morrison in embarking on a more feminine version of the flying African, which she relates to an ex-slave, Sapphira Wade, a volatile female character who resists fixed claim over her story and identity. In dealing with the concept of hybridity, I show that Naylor rewrites both authors’ South by making Willow Springs a more fluid space, an assumption that unsettles the scores of critics who associate the island with authenticity and exclusive rootedness. / Ma thèse est une étude comparative entre William Faulkner, Toni Morrison et Gloria Naylor. Elle me permet d’explorer comment les protagonistes males construisent leur identités en se référant à la possession matérialiste et en se basant sur la subordination de la femme, qui est une autre forme de possession, afin de consolider leur masculinité. Dans leurs textes respectifs, Go Down, Moses, Song of Solomon, et Mama Day, les trois auteurs, malgré leur différences culturelles et même littéraires, partagent l’idée que l’identité, l’histoire, et la vérité ne sont que des construits culturels et sociales. On se basant sur la théorie de Judith Butler et d’autres théoriciens poststructuralistes et contemporains, ma thèse reflète qu’il n’y a pas d’identité « naturelle » ou de réalité objective. La perception identitaire n’est qu’une illusion imaginaire et idéologique ou le sujet ne fait que répéter et performer le discours de son environnent. Faulkner, Morrison, et Naylor basent leurs oeuvres sur le thème de la liberté. Ils explorent comment, à partir de leurs corps, leurs caractères se conforment ou bien se détachent de l’idéologie qui confine leurs identités sexuelles, raciales et sociales. En critiquant, non seulement l’identité’ mais aussi l’histoire, ma thèse montre que les trois écrivains détruisent la perception que la vérité est objective surtout dans les documents historiques. Ainsi, la vérité devient qu’une forme de distorsion qui consolide une certaine idéologie. Ma thèse montre que les trois auteurs mettent en valeur la voix de la femme Afro-Américaine. Elle joue le rôle d’une médiatrice pour les protagonistes males. Elle rejette le discours matérialiste et sexiste. Cette voix féminine représente le thème de l’amour et la survie de sa communauté noire et la résistance raciale. La femme Afro-Américaine préserve la culture Africaine à travers son attachement à la tradition orale et à la connaissance intuitive. En se basant sur la tendance subversive de l’art et de la littérature postcoloniale qui est promulguée par les théories de Henry Louise Gates, Paul Gilroy, W. E. B Du Bois, James Clifford et Arjun Appadurai, je montre qu’à travers Toni Morrison et Gloria Naylor, le texte de Faulkner reste logocentrique et essentialiste dans sa vision hiérarchique de l’identité raciale et sexuelle. Morrison et Naylor se référant au mythe de l’Africain volant afin de justifier qu’il n’y a pas d’identité fixe et stable, donnant ainsi la voix a une identité hybride et fluide. En se basant sur l’article, « Parler en Langues » de Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, ma thèse explore comment en réécrivant d’autres textes, Gloria Naylor déconstruit non seulement Faulkner, mais aussi le sexisme qui demeure résident dans le texte de Toni Morrison. L’histoire de Willow Springs se base sur le mythe féminin d’une ex esclave Sapphira Wade, qui en étant volatile, son histoire et son identité résistent toute forme de catégorisations. En étudiant l’hybridité’ dans la culture Afro-Américaine, ma thèse montre que le Sud qui est décrit dans l’oeuvre de Mama Day est plus hybride que celui de Faulkner et Morrison.

Focusing on "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Singing Detective (1986) by Dennis Potter in dialogue with theories from Freud, Szasz, Foucault and Butler, my thesis considers the role of medicine in encouraging a patient toward a normative subjectivity. The protagonists of each text have become ill as a result of their inability to accept the social contradictions and lies upon which gendered subjectivity is reliant; the unnamed narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" comprehends femininity as servitude to male demands, while Marlow of The Singing Detective desires the power patriarchy offers him as a male, but his loss of belief and faith prevent his ascension to masculine status.Both the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Marlow resist the imposition of normative gender by practitioners of mainstream medicine. Therefore, a more complex and subtle method of treatment, the psychoanalysis developed by Freud, is employed in The Singing Detective, thereby encouraging the patient to identify illness and discontent as personal, not societal, responsibility.I commence the thesis with an overview of the unequal power relations presupposed and encouraged by medical discourse. Through a process of 'hystericisation' the patient is infantilised and made dependent upon medical care. Linguistic control is central to manipulating patient behaviour within the hospital, and correspondingly the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Marlow both seek a new subjectivity through their writing. Difficulties in appropriating language leads to internal incoherency for the protagonists, met by a split subjectivity - a defence mechanism which allows the protagonists to deviate from, at the same time as preserving, their 'good self'.The refusal of "The Yellow Wallpaper's" narrator to relinquish her defiant self and assume femininity is contained by patriarchy - embodied by her husband, John - as insanity. The strict limitation upon a nineteenth-century woman's expression prevents her from positively escaping her physician/husband's script leading to her mental demise. By contrast, Marlow successfully resocialises himself by modifying the hypermasculine persona he idealises, and is finally situated to confront and reform the social contradictions that precipitated his ill-health. However, subdued by having been led to identify discontent as a personal problem, Marlow is unlikely to challenge the power relations which have made his subjectivity possible. His capitulation to normalisation demonstrates a fundamental point linking the otherwise divergent theories of Freud and Foucault, that the creation of agency first requires the subject's subordination.

This dissertation analyzes undertheorized grammatical and linguistic details of Shakespeare’s language. Using tools derived from the fields of linguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis, I trace the ways that Shakespeare’s speakers represent themselves in language, and how they position themselves relative to their interlocutors. Grounding my study in a selection of Shakespeare’s works in which questions of self-positioning are particularly fraught, I argue that the nuances of grammar that undergird the linguistic performance of Shakespeare’s speakers encode significant clues about interaction and interpersonal relationships. I maintain that the minute details of linguistic encounters, easily overlooked words such as modal verbs (particularly shall and will) and deictic markers (words such as I, this, and now), hold important information about speakers’ perceptions of themselves, their interlocutors, and their environment. Attention to such details, and to charged moments of linguistic encounter in which speakers must negotiate their modes of self-positioning, helps to illuminate the troubled processes of self-representation and changing self-perception. Chapter one focuses on Shakespeare’s sonnets, and suggests that these poems provide a productive model for the examination of the nuances of speech and interactive dialogue. I anchor my discussion in the particular resonance of the word shall in the sonnets, and explore the ways in which the sonnet speaker attempts to preserve linguistic control relative to a threatening interlocutor. The second chapter extends these concerns to consider how the speakers of Troilus and Cressida respond to a wide network of potentially threatening interlocutors. In this chapter, I focus on linguistic encounters such as arguments and gossip to examine the risks that speakers encounter when they enter the fray of communal discourse. My third chapter turns to Coriolanus to consider moments of aggressive linguistic collisions, in which speakers vie for the right to speak a potent and contested word such as shall. The fourth and final chapter analyzes Richard II through the frame of deictic markers and grammatical modes of self-reference to consider the protective strategies afforded by language in moments of crisis.

This study considers the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted in cross-cultural contexts from the nineteenth century to the present, specifically in Europe and India, through the media of opera and film. I bring into dialogue reception theory, adaptation studies, Shakespeare scholarship, musicology, film studies, and postcolonial theory in order to examine the mechanisms of Shakespeare’s reception in these two culturally diverse regions of the globe, and argue that there are significant parallels between European and Indian adaptations of Shakespeare. Despite the different cultural and political histories of the two regions, Shakespeare’s plays reached out to local audiences only when they were modified in order to make them relevant to the cultural and ideological concerns of the new audiences that were far removed from Shakespeare’s own. Moving away from understanding Shakespeare’s reception either in terms of the dramatist’s “universal appeal” or in terms of colonial instrumentality, as has usually been the case, I argue that such predetermined critical paradigms take away from what in Shakespeare various cultures have found truly valuable, truly affective. Moreover, I argue that the degree of transculturation, both with European and Indian adaptations, is greater when Shakespeare is adapted in media that involves performance, than when he is adapted in a purely verbal medium, such as translations. This process of indigenization through performance, one that I have termed “performative transculturation,” has opened up fresh avenues of cross-cultural exchange over the ages. The works I examine in detail are Ambroise Thomas’ opera Hamlet, Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Otello, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar’s Bhrantibilash, a prose adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, and Vishal Bhardwaj’s films Maqbool and Omkara, based on Macbeth and Othello respectively.

ABSTRACT “Theories of the Fantastic: Postmodernism, Game Theory, and Modern Physics” Karen Pike Degree: Doctor of Philosophy (2010) Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto This dissertation examines the fantastic mode of narrative as it appears in postmodern texts in a variety of media including literature, television, and film. By analyzing the kinds of changes which the fantastic mode has undergone in order to accommodate postmodern concerns, this project attempts to answer both how and why the fantastic has maintained its popularity and effectiveness. The first chapter seeks to define the fantastic mode by tracing the history of its definition from the early twentieth century up until the present. In doing so, it revisits the contributions of such analysts as Vax, Caillois, Todorov, and Freud. The second chapter discusses the changes to conventions demanded by postmodern discursive strategies, many of which include a back-and-forth movement between equally valid interpretations of the text. A discussion of Armin Ayren’s “Der Brandstifter,” a comparison of a recurring X-Files sub-plot to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and an analysis of an intentionally self-reflexive episode of The X-Files demonstrate these changes. The third chapter introduces game theory as a way of understanding the back-and-forth movement typical of the fantastic mode. Hanns Heinz Ewers’s “Die Spinne” is used to illustrate the psychoanalytical aspect of this movement. The next chapter compares and contrasts three vampire films, The Addiction, Lair of the White Worm, and Nadja, in order to demonstrate how the degree to which this back-and-forth movement is present is an indicator of how successfully the fantastic effect emerges. The fifth chapter introduces modern physics as another mode for understanding the presence of the fantastic mode in the postmodern era. The analysis of House of Leaves in the final chapter illustrates how postmodern theory, game theory, and physics all work together to explain the fantastic’s effectiveness. This dissertation’s aim is to explain how and why a mode once defined as a specific nineteenth-century phenomenon keeps reinventing itself and re-emerging to continue to frighten and entertain us.

This thesis considers how the digital medium and social networks affect the short story. I argue that digital short fiction has shown changes, such as signs of becoming more modular or briefer than its print counterparts, and that it has also reflected a shift to the personal or semi-autobiographical story. Digital short fiction has also been used increasingly to market a publisher’s or author’s name or non-digital works. I begin contextualizing this shift in Chapter 1 by analyzing different approaches to the study of the short story, including an overview of generic and historical scholarship, and I conclude with a working definition of the short story. In Chapter 2, I analyze early digital short fiction along with the themes of contemporary fiction in general that have been affected by digital media, social networks, and other changes. I also consider digital short fiction in the context of its publication media, postmodernism, and changes in communication in general. In Chapter 3, I verify these considerations with responses to questionnaires sent to writers of short fiction both on the Web and off. By studying these writers’ conceptions of the short story, preferred publication media, and writing habits, I build on the working definitions of the short story from Chapters 1 and 2. In Chapter 4, I consider the effects on the short story and conclude that we can update print-based conceptions of the short story to include born-digital short fiction and accommodate the contemporary shift in general to modularity, open source, social networks, and the focus on the self. Rather than establishing a concrete definition of what short fiction is at this time, I conclude that a better approach is to replace pre-defined categories with an acknowledgement that the short story is perhaps shifting closer to pre-print storytelling roots, although within the confines of current limitations such as copyright and the attention span of contemporary readers. Although we cannot fully quantify these changes at this time, I argue that they impact the short story and require scholars to consider its paratexts and publication media differently than in pre-Web years.

This thesis considers how the digital medium and social networks affect the short story. I argue that digital short fiction has shown changes, such as signs of becoming more modular or briefer than its print counterparts, and that it has also reflected a shift to the personal or semi-autobiographical story. Digital short fiction has also been used increasingly to market a publisher’s or author’s name or non-digital works. I begin contextualizing this shift in Chapter 1 by analyzing different approaches to the study of the short story, including an overview of generic and historical scholarship, and I conclude with a working definition of the short story. In Chapter 2, I analyze early digital short fiction along with the themes of contemporary fiction in general that have been affected by digital media, social networks, and other changes. I also consider digital short fiction in the context of its publication media, postmodernism, and changes in communication in general. In Chapter 3, I verify these considerations with responses to questionnaires sent to writers of short fiction both on the Web and off. By studying these writers’ conceptions of the short story, preferred publication media, and writing habits, I build on the working definitions of the short story from Chapters 1 and 2. In Chapter 4, I consider the effects on the short story and conclude that we can update print-based conceptions of the short story to include born-digital short fiction and accommodate the contemporary shift in general to modularity, open source, social networks, and the focus on the self. Rather than establishing a concrete definition of what short fiction is at this time, I conclude that a better approach is to replace pre-defined categories with an acknowledgement that the short story is perhaps shifting closer to pre-print storytelling roots, although within the confines of current limitations such as copyright and the attention span of contemporary readers. Although we cannot fully quantify these changes at this time, I argue that they impact the short story and require scholars to consider its paratexts and publication media differently than in pre-Web years.