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Many scholars who study Plato and Shakespeare together focus only on erotic love between lovers or nonsexual love between others. A closer study of A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows that Shakespeare uses Plato’s concepts of the soul in addition to the Forms, the guide, as well as staging the varieties of love that can exist between two individuals and the dangers of loving the physical more than the mind. Shakespeare takes these ideas embedded in Symposium and Phaedrus and not only crafts his play accordingly, but also creates his own versions through his unique interpretations. These alterations appear reflected in the play’s sequence of events, the characters’ actions, and the merging of the faerie and human realms. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

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This thesis attempts to examine the birth and development of the pox metaphor in sixteenth-century English literature. In researching this literary history of a disease---of syphilis' life as an early modem metaphor---I have attempted to contextualize the pox metaphor's development within the social and economic constructs that led to the early modern conflation of excessive consumption with poxy corruption. This conflation freed the metaphor from the confines of discussion on disease and allowed early modern authors the freedom to apply pockifed tropes to describe various social ills and abuses. Initially these pox metaphors were restricted to sexualized subject matter such as inconstant women, but through the rise of satire, the metaphor became a means of describing London as rampant, diseased and corrupt. Finally, Shakespeare was able to take the pox and apply it to the economic sickness that was affecting England by inscribing appetites with consuming pox-inspired qualities that were, in effect, a commentary on the uncontrolled rise of the capitalist state and the dangers of desire.

In order to contribute to the body of work on Bolingbroke and on Shakespeare's development of character, this thesis examines various rhetorical and stylistic methods used by Shakespeare in his creation of the character of Henry Bolingbroke.

The following psychological interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest is unique to articles on the same subject which have appeared in literary journals because it applies a purely Jungian reading to the characters in the play. Here each character is shown to represent one of the archetypes which Jung described in his book Archetypes ~ the Collective Unconscious. In giving the play a psychological interpretation, the action must be seen to occur inside Prospera's own unconscious mind. He is experiencing a psychic transformation or what Jung called the individuation process, where a person becomes "a separate, indivisible unity or whole" and where the conscious and unconscious are united.

In this dissertation, I examine the complex role that the body played in early modern constructions of judgment. Moving away from an overreliance on anti-theatrical texts as the authority on the body in Shakespeare's plays, my project intervenes in the field Shakespearean studies by widening the lens through which scholars view the body's role in the early modern theater. Through readings of four plays—Richard II, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale—I demonstrate that Shakespeare uses a wide range of ideas about the human body from religious, philosophical, medical, and cultural spheres of thought to challenge Puritan accusations that the public theater audience is incapable of rational judgment. The first chapter outlines the parameters of the project. In Chapter 2, I argue that Richard II draws parallels between the theatrical community and the community created through the sacramental experiences of baptism and communion to show that bodies play a crucial role in establishing common experience and providing an avenue for judgment. In Chapter 3, I argue that Shakespeare establishes correspondences between bodily and social collaboration to show how both are needed for the memory-making project of the theater. In the next chapter, I show how Shakespeare appropriates what early moderns perceived of as the natural vulnerability in English bodies to suggest the passionate responses associated with impressionability can actually be sources of productive judgment and self-edification. I argue the storm models this passionate judgment, providing a guide for audience behavior. In Chapter 5, I argue that the memories created by and within the women in The Winter's Tale evoke the tradition of housewifery and emphasize the female role in preservation. Female characters stand in for hidden female contributors to the theater and expose societal blindness to women's work. Through each of these chapters, I argue that Shakespeare's plays emphasize the value of bodily experience and suggest that the audience take up what I have termed "corporeal judgment."