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The encounter between Spain and the New World --the Americas-- is one of the distinctive historical events of the 15th century. So it is surprising that there is very little reference to the Americas in the many plays remaining from the Spanish Golden Age theatre. This thesis studies six plays centering on the Arauco wars in Southern Chile and the figure of one of the first governors of that country, don Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza. The main objective of this study is to demonstrate to what extent the literary elaboration of the topic contributed to the vision of the New World held by the Spanish public. The dramatists that dealt with this theme did not have any direct contact with the Americas, therefore their representation of that world was based on oral accounts and literary sources available at the time. Among the latter are the letters of a conqueror, two chronicles, two epic poems and a panegiric text. The first part of this thesis consists of the textual analysis of this literary corpus. The main focus of the analysis is the influence of these sources on the dramas and how the characteristics of each genre contributed to their creation. The analysis of the dramatic works with Araucanian content (five plays and one auto sacramental) forms the second part of this thesis. The approach centers particularly on the representation of the Indian world as the "Other" opposed to the Spanish world. The analysis of these texts shows the subtle evolutionary process by which the treatment of the historical fact --Arauco and the Conquest-- in the theatre contributed to create the "idea" of America held at the time in Spain. Also, the re-elaboration of characters and motives indicates the emergence of native mythical figures which have become part of the historic and cultural patrimony of Chile today.

This dissertation investigates the symbolic presence of medieval forms of textual selfhood in early modern English Petrarchan poetry. Undertaking a systematic re-reading of a significant body of English Petrarchism through the prism of late medieval English poetry, it argues that medieval poetic texts inscribe in the vernacular literary imaginary (i.e. a repository of discursive forms and identities available to early modern writers through antecedent and contemporaneous literary utterances) a network of recognizable and iterable discursive structures and associated subject positions; and that various linguistic and ideological traces of these medieval discourses and selves can be discovered in early modern English Petrarchism. Each of the four chapters traces medieval genealogies of a distinct scenario of subjectivity deployed by English Renaissance Petrarchism. The first chapter considers the significance of William Langland???s poetics of meed (reward) for the anti-laureate and anti-courtly identities assumed by Thomas Wyatt in his Petrarchan poems and by Edmund Spenser in the Amoretti. The second chapter examines the persistence of vernacular melancholy (encapsulated in Geoffrey Chaucer???s Book of the Duchess) in the verse of Henry Howard, earl of Surrey and in Philip Sidney???s Astrophil and Stella. The poetics of melancholy engenders a fragmented subjectivity that manifests itself through a series of quasi-theatrical performances of identity, as well as an ambivalent form of poetic discourse in which the production of Petrarchism is carried out alongside its radical critique. The focus of chapter three is the master trope of royal incarceration and its function as a mechanism of subject formation in the poetry of James I Stewart, Charles of Orleans, Mary Stewart, and Lady Mary Wroth. As the dissertation argues, the figure of an imprisoned sovereign is a crucial ideologeme of the pre-modern English political and literary imaginary, underwriting the poetics and politics of royal identity from Sir John Fortescue to James VI/I. Lastly, the fourth chapter investigates medieval genealogies of the subject afflicted with a malady of desire in Shakespeare???s sonnets, by tracing its inchoate vernacular precedents back to the poems of Thomas Hoccleve (La Male Regle) and Robert Henryson (The Testament of Cresseid).

The first Englishmen to write about the city-state of Venice were the pilgrims passing through on their way to the Holy Land. Their impressions are recorded in the travel diaries and collections of advice for prospective fellow pilgrims between the early fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the most substantial being those of William Wey, Sir Richard Guylforde and Sir Richard Torkington, who visited Venice in 1458 and '62, 1506, and 1517 respectively. In the 1540s arrived the men who saw Venice as part of the new Europe--Andrew Borde and William Thomas. Thomas's study of the Venetian state emphasized the efficiency of its administration, seeing it as an example of constructive government, where effective organisation for the common good led directly to national stability and prosperity. The mid-sixteenth century saw the beginnings of Venice as a tourist centre; the visitors who came between 1550 and the end of the century described the sights and the people, the traditions and way of life. Fynes Moryson's extensive account details what could be seen and learned in the city by an observant and enquiring visitor. In addition to information available in first-hand accounts of Venice, much could be learned from the work of the late sixteenth-century English translators. Linguistic, cultural, geographical, historical and literary translations yielded further knowledge and, more importantly, new perspectives, Venice being seen through the eyes of Italians and, through Lewkenor's comprehensive work, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, of Venetians themselves. Finally, to assess the general impressions of Venice and the Venetians, we consider the literature of the turn of the sixteenth-seventeenth century; what, and how much, of the three-hundred year accumulation of knowledge of the city and people of Venice had most caught the attention and imagination of the English mind, and how close was the relationship between the popular impression and the documentary information from which it had largely developed.

This thesis explores the use made by Lyly, Spenser, Chapman and Marston of the idea of metamorphosis, with a brief epilogue on Jonson. The two preliminary chapters define certain important contexts for the theme of metamorphosis in this period. Chapter I briefly considers Ovid's use of the theme, the Pythagorean and Platonic theory of transmigration, and the allegorization of metamorphosis. Medieval commentaries on the Metamorphoses are examined, but it is argued that Renaissance attitudes to Ovid and to metamorphosis are significantly different, being uniquely sensitive to both the poetic and metaphysical aspects. Renaissance responses to Apuleius' Golden Ass are also examined. Chapter II studies other Renaissance contexts: in the philosophy of man, in magic, witchcraft and alchemy, and in the love-poetry of Petrarch and Ronsard. Neither Elizabethan lyric poetry nor the epyllion, however, make suggestive use of theltheme: it is explored more fully in larger structures or different poetic modes. The next four chapters deal with the English writers. Lyly's plays use the theme of metamorphosis in two contexts: love, and the adulatory myths of the court. Chapter IV considers the complex and varied uses of metamorphosis in Spenser's Faerie Queene. It examines the treatment of of myth, the concepts behind the Garden of Adonis, and transformation as related to the theme of mutability. Chapter V examines the idea of form, set against deformity or transformation, in Chapman's poetry: especially The Shadow of Night and Hero and Leander. Here the basic philosophic or metaphysical assumptions behind Renaissance views-of the myth of metamorphosis are defined. Chapter VI deals with the satiric use of transformation by Marston. His Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image is analysed as parodying the common image of metamorphosis as an effect of love. The satires present a negative image of transformation caused by man's guilt and folly. The Epilogue, dealing with the negative image of transformation in Jonson's. plays and the positive one in the masques, concludes the study while suggesting further directions for exploration.