No abstract available. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1980.

Shakespeare's history plays are not merely benign representations of various historical figures and events but the site of political, cultural, and ideological contestation at the time of their performance. Richard II documents two divergent theoretical approaches to sovereignty which are more applicable to the political climate in Shakespeare's time than Richard's. In this essay, I read this play through the lens of various political tracts and historical tendencies dominant in late Elizabethan England. Though such an analysis might best be understood as historical materialist in orientation, I offer a contextual analysis of various modes of early modern political thought drawing variously upon theoretical precepts associated with new historicism as well as the 'ideas in context' school associated with Quentin Skinner, among others. / Such an analysis reveals a shift in the mode of theoretical discourse. Richard's divine-right/monarchical approach to sovereignty based in an overarching ecclesiastical power base gives way to Bolingbroke's pragmatic and consensus driven politics. This shift mirrors the movement in late 16$ rm sp{th}$ and early 17$ rm sp{th}$ century England from traditional religious arguments offered by Richard Hooker, John Whitgift, and residually by James I to a more secular political discourse inaugurated by Machiavelli and his English adherents and symptomatic of the reign of Elizabeth herself. Roughly speaking this modulation follows the pattern of paradigm shifts in the physical sciences exposed by Thomas Kuhn's influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). The emergent theory, while marking a rapid and overwhelming reorientation of the terms and initial presuppositions of political discourse, draws in many crucial respects on the accrued tenets of the outgoing paradigm. The play therefore acts as a retroactive representation of a political reformation which occurred much later than the events depicted in the play.

The sacramental rhetoric and iconography of the Lancastrian Tetralogy significantly contribute to our recognition that the theological center of Shakespeare's historical drama is distinctively Anglican. Shakespeare (whether he personally was an Anglican churchman) invokes in the Lancaster plays the symbols and speech definitive of the Protestant Reformation in order to illustrate dramatically the Crown's convictions of the transcendent purpose of the English nation in human history, especially as that purpose had been defined by Tudor historiography. Shakespeare's histories demonstrate a conviction, broadly conceived and illustrated, of faith in the providential destiny of a nation whose very birth and sustenance in adversity form a sign of its election to grace and divine favor.Furthermore, Shakespeare's Lancaster plays, by continuing the didactic tradition of the medieval stage, embrace the precepts of Tudor monarchy and apply those principles of government and Reformation theology to the Elizabethan stage. Shakespeare's histories therefore interpret history; they do not recollect it--except in the spirit of sixteenth-century imagination, harmonized with legend and myth. Consequently, the Lancaster cycle of histories constitutes a unified dramatic quartet in which history as fact is eschewed in favor of history as progressive revelatory sign, a vision enabled by mythography derived from the emblems and rhetoric of the sixteenth-century Anglican Christian tradition. / Department of English

Through a close analysis of four plays by Shakespeare, this thesis argues that the question of subjectivity ultimately comes to be negotiated around a structural impasse or certain points of opacity in each of the text's signifying practices. Challenging assumptions about the utatively "theatrical" contexts of Richard III, Richard II, Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, I argue that, to varying degrees, the specular economy of each play is in fact traversed by a radical alterity that constitutively gives rise to a notion of subjectivity commonly referred to as "Shakespearean". Elaborating upon the work of both Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, I argue that "subjectivity" in the plays is, rather, the articulated confrontation with a non-dialectizable remainder that haunts each text from within. Crucially in this respect I relate each of the texts to Lacan's account of the "gaze" as a species of what he calls the object a: an alien kernel of jouissance exceeding all subjective mediation yet, paradoxically, also that which confers internal consistency both to subjectivity and to the very process of symbolization as such. I am, moreover, also concerned to read the work of Jacques Derrida as providing an illuminating context for how this incursion of alterity that he terms differance (what Lacan calls the Real) may be read as the unacknowledged support of subjectivity. The thesis concludes with a consideration of how this analysis of the Shakespearean object, rather than succumbing to the heady pleasures of an unfettered textuality, opens, ineluctably, onto a rethinking of the very category of the "political" itself.

In this dissertation I develop and theorize an approach to Shakespearean character. I focus on the ways in which characters talk about knowing others and being known; in other words, this is an approach to characters who are themselves approaching characters. The plays I treat in detail are Coriolanus and Hamlet. The words characters in these plays use when they explain their decisions, avoid explaining their decisions, talk about others' decisions, or try to expose others' secrets, are often position-and-movement words. I argue that characters use for these purposes words related by wordplay to the postures and gestures involved in crucial rituals (the "custom of request" in Coriolanus, the fencing match in Hamlet). At the same time, this is a metacritical project: I deal with approaches and attitudes of Shakespeare interpreters. How do we stand in relation to each other? How do editors and critics echo and transform the characters' postural/gestural language, and what are the implications of these echoes and transformations? Why is it worthwhile to work toward awareness of these echoes and transformations? In an extensive introductory section I theorize the kind of reading practiced here as an ethical practice-a practice intended to modify what Michel Foucault calls the rapport a soi. / The project's main original contribution is its way of re-conceiving the relationships among several currents in Shakespeare studies. My discussion engages with recent work in textual studies. Examples include work by Leah Marcus and Paul Werstine. It also engages with historically informed treatments of wordplay. Examples include work by Margreta de Grazia and Patricia Parker. And it addresses work that could be said to be part of a move in the field toward "ethical criticism." Examples include work by Stanley Cavell and John Guillory. As well, my discussion engages with psychoanalytic criticism by Marjorie Garber, Coppelia Kahn, and others. While I do not consider myself a psychoanalytic critic, the affinity my approach has with psychoanalysis has to do with my interest in making explicit some of the implications of unreflectively chosen metaphors, word associations, etc. The implications that concern me most are those that have to do with the ways interpreters relate to each other.

This dissertation provides a critical, systematic survey of economics in literary theory and practice. Since Aristotle, economic categories have been used as interpretive grounds on which to conceptualize the literary text and distinguish it as a moral or normative sphere. Because economic categories presuppose different norms of individual and social action, the use of a specific category as an interpretive ground generates a particular outlook or moral perspective. / In the first part of the discussion, we critique theories in which the literary text is conceptualized as an economy. After distinguishing three distinct models of the "textual economy," we evaluate them in terms of their logical consistency and normative presuppositions. Selecting the model that is the most logically consistent and normatively valuable, we study two early modern works to see if this model operates as an intentional device implicated in a work's form and content. The works chosen are William Shakespeare's Sonnets and William Bradford's history "Of Plimoth Plantation," both of which display a facination with economic discourse. / The second part of the discussion takes up the question of economics in the theory and practice of putting texts in context. We distinguish four different models of contextualization that depend on economic categories. Explicitly or implicitly, contemporary research agendas and critical positions depend on these categories to situate a literary text in a specific setting. An economic category like exchange, for example, is frequently privileged as a common ground, a shared quality or characteristic used to integrate a text with a context. After critiquing models of contextualization, we synthesize the best they have to offer into a new framework. We then use this framework to situate the texts by Shakespeare and Bradford into the historical settings of their production and reception. The result is a picture of the text in context that is vital, a moving picture, quite unlike the customary still life of artifact and background.

This thesis attempts to provide an historicised account of excuse-making strategies in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. This issue is considered, broadly, in the light of the pervasive influence of rhetoric in early modem culture at large, and specifically, as an aspect of the rhetorical construction of moral ambiguity in Shakespearean drama. Its chief concern is with the intractable ambiguity of 'favourable interpretations' or 'charitable constructions' of actions or events, the apparent desirability of which seems beyond doubt. Chapter I uses the 'generosity' often regarded as Shakespeare's own trademark as a way into exploring the aims of the thesis. Its central section focuses more closely on the ambiguity inherent in a 'female rhetoric' of mitigation, apology and extenuation. Where these chapters concentrate on 'covert' excuse-making strategies. Chapter V, by contrast, begins with an exploration of the early modern transformation (or domestication) of classical, female orators into decent, modest, seventeenth-century women. The thesis concludes with an account of Shakespeare's suppliant women, a group of petitioners who are repeatedly represented 'between men'. The persistence of this pattern, I argue, stresses the extent to which excuse-making is gendered, and might be read, as well, as the playwright's own attempt to 'contain' the radical moral ambiguity (radical because as difficult to condone as to condemn) generated by such 'female' excuse-making.

"His criticism may be considered as general or occasional. In his general precepts, which depend upon the nature of things and the structure of the human mind, he may doubtlessly be safely recommended to the confidence of the reader: but his occasional and particular positions were sometimes interested, sometimes negligent, and sometimes capricious." With certain qualifications, it would be the opinion of those critics who share a great admiration of the man that this statement might well have been made of Johnson himself. There are those, however, whose esteem of Johnson is perhaps not so great. One thus finds Alan Tate writing: "One is constantly impressed by Johnson's consistency of point of view, over the long pull of his self-dedication to letters. There is seldom either consistency or precision in his particular judgements and definitions -- a defect that perhaps accounts negatively for his greatness as a critic: the perpetual reformulation of his standards, with his eye on the poetry, has done much to keep eighteenth century verse alive in our day. His theories (if his ideas ever reach that level of logical abstraction) are perhaps too simple for our taste and too improvised; but his reading is disciplined and acute." Tate is eager to perpetuate the notion of Johnson as a critic with a massive common sense and little more, an imputation which Johnson would not only resent, but dismiss as short-sighted. Intro., p. 1.

It would be difficult to prove conclusively that Shakespeare was not invited or requested to write a play based on the popular story of Coriolanus. J.M. Robertson concretises this possibility with an intriguing thesis that the play was in fact rewritten from an original by Chapman. The story, he argues, would have had a far greater appeal to Chapman with his consuming interest in the heroic age of Classical antiquity, than to Shakespeare. Further, it is likely, he says, that Chapman was familiar with Alexandre Hardy 's Coriolan which, it is generally accepted, Shakespeare was not, hence the startling similarities in some of the two plays' deviations from their common source. This is hardly a more satisfactory explanation than the kind of airy alternative that disposes of the mystery by saying the source material is such that it would invite any dramatist to make similar changes. Chap. 1

Since F.S. Boas coined the term in 1896, All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure For Measure have been generally accepted as "problem plays," and many critics have offered biographical, thematic, and formal explanations of why these plays are so "dark." In this thesis, I accept that these plays are "problems" and I propose a rhetorical explanation for dissatisfaction with them, especially with their endings. Drawing on Kenneth Burke's philosophy of literary form and his anthropology of man as the symbol-using animal, I show that in these plays Shakespeare frustrates the expectations of an audience for a definite ending through death or marriage which would define the "terms" characterized in each play; secondly, he provides no scapegoat whose victimage would allow the audience to recognize an order clearly proposed for its acceptance; finally, he supplies no symbol of order which credibly demonstrates its power to establish a renewed society. As rhetoric, these plays show an intense "dancing of attitudes" toward symbols of order and toward conventional forms which would provide a clear sense of an ending. As such, they show what Burke calls "self-interference" on the part of the playwright — a deliberate balancing of arguments for the sake of "quizzicality" toward language as symbolic action. According to this analysis, the problem plays remain problems for an audience which seeks identification with symbols of order; they are, however, a tribute to the agile mind of a master rhetorician. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate