Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciada en Lengua y Literatura Hispánica / En términos generales, este trabajo presenta el estudio y análisis comparativo entre la obra Invitación a la Muerte del mexicano Xavier Villaurrutia y la tragedia clásica de William Shakespeare Hamlet, con el cual se pretende demostrar cómo Villaurrutia realiza una reelaboración surrealista de la obra renacentista, a partir de la recepción del os movimientos europeos de vanguardia de la primera mitad del siglo XX por parte de los artistas y escritores latinoamericanos con el fin de renovar la producción literaria de la época. Villaurrutia, particularmente, innovará en la producción dramática de México con el teatro experimental, el neopsicologismo y una poética surrealista fuertemente influenciada por el trabajo del artista y escritor francés Jean Cocteau, la que no solo encontramos en su obra dramática, sino también poética. Con estos nuevos recursos estéticos, el autor mexicano escribirá Invitación a la muerte, cuyo argumento es elaborado a partir de la tragedia Hamlet, donde Villaurrutia encuentra motivos que le permiten trabajar su drama desde una estética surrealista; entre ellos encontramos el motivo de la muerte, el sueño, la soledad, el amor, la locura y búsqueda por la verdad.

M.A. (English) / This study applies st Thomas Aquinas's principles of love to William Shakespeare's Hamlet in order to establish the moral bases of the causes and effects of the actions of the characters in the play. The dissertation is divided into two parts comprising six chapters. The first part, chapter one, establishes the availability of st Thomas's precepts in the English Renaissance. The second part, comprising chapters two to six, applies st Thomas's principles relating to charitable and concupiscent love to the characters in the play. st Thomas's philosophy exerted a pervasive influence in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and was accessible to educated circles in England. In view of this influence, it is possible that Shakespeare was influenced by Thomist thought when he wrote Hamlet. In this study, the characters are grouped in terms of the Thomist principles of love that they exemplify in Hamlet, with Horatio providing a moral norm, Claudius being the epitome of evil, and the central character, Hamlet, being a source of moral ambiguity. The cast of supporting characters reflects the nuances of good and evil in the play. The study concludes that, while Shakespeare's characters are governed by established Thomist principles, the translation of moral abstracts into practice elicits moral dilemmas that are difficult to resolve.

The thesis is an attempt to understand tragic guilt. My starting point is a comparison of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus with Shakespeare's Macbeth. The question of "guilt" is treated very differently in these two plays. Oedipus' guilt is a result of an action which is discovered, not chosen. He is the victim of a curse which lies upon his family and thus his own guilt is an ambiguous thing. He suffers against a background of a Law which demands punishment and a promise from a god that he shall be "saved". Oedipus at Colonus begins, as does Oedipus Rex, after the decisive act of murder and incest has been committed. But Macbeth begins before anything has been done; Macbeth is presented with a possibility and he chooses to believe that he can make it a reality. We are allowed to see the moment at which guilt appears in the individual. Macbeth becomes guilty before the very image of himself murdering Duncan. In Greek tragedy the guilt is often blood-guilt, a curse which descends from one member of a family to another and may devastate an entire house. But in Macbeth the guilt begins in the desires of one man. Macbeth is left with a personal despair which is different from the suffering that Oedipus undergoes. In the novels of Thomas Hardy, the perspective on guilt has shifted from the privacy that surrounds Macbeth at his death to the social world of nineteenth century England. Michael Henchard is perhaps closest to Macbeth in that he is destroyed more by the forces in his own personality than by the pressures of external society. But with Tess we have a heroine who is "pure", a woman who is defeated more as a result of the failings in a society than by any personal faults. There is little feeling of her having any particular "guilt". Jude Fawley's particular "tragedy" also must be seen in terms of the society that moves around him, its laws and conventions. The guilt is never entirely his own, nor is he simply an innocent victim. The presence of a definite society is hardly felt at all in the two novels of Conrad. Jim is a "romantic", a young man barely past adolescence who is obsessed with a concept of honour which he feels he has betrayed in a moment of cowardice. But he seems to become guilty in a deeper sense because of this obsession; he betrays others by choosing to live in an imaginary world of romantic achievement. Nostromo is also obsessed with a dream: to be a Man of the People. If Conrad's characters become guilty, it is because of their intense egoism, their inability to escape their passion for an idea. In Arthur Miller's The Crucible the guilt of an individual seems less important than the guilt present in a society. That guilt is an illusion based on a fear of not conforming to a rigorous law. We are left with the tragedy of a society which must find a victim to appease its own feeling of guilt. John Proctor is one of the chosen victims; a man who must die to save his integrity. But his death is the result of a web of guilt spread through an entire society. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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

William Shakespeare's play, The Taming of the Shrew has a varied and interesting stage history. Beginning with Fletcher's The Tamer Tarn'd (1633), a sequel to Shakespeare, there have been many adaptations of the plot in farce, opera and poetic drama, including an American musical comedy. This thesis will follow the stage history of The Taming of the Shrew, focussing on the dramatic development and treatment of the heroine, Katherine. Shakespeare's shrew, Katherine, is much more than a traditional shrew stereotype. Her dramatic presentation in language and action has enough depth and subtlety to provoke much conflicting criticism and interpretation. What motivates her anger? Why is she physically abusive? Is she subdued, tamed or reeducated? Enough clues are present in the play to provide for interesting debate. The first part of the thesis is concerned with examining Shakespeare's dramatic concept of the shrew to establish the scope and range of Katherine's personality and her response to Petruchio's taming tricks. In later versions of the play, the character of Katherine receives a variety of dramatic treatments. Some playwrights reduce Katherine's dramatic function to a mere outline. Others accentuate her physically abusive and sharp-tongued qualities. Yet another variation is a softening of the shrewish disposition to allow for a sentimental treatment of shrew conditioning. The dramatic vigour of the shrew character is constant, but variations in plot, language and thematic idea result in very different and entertaining shrew types. This stage history of The Taming of the Shrew as it relates to the heroine, Katherine, includes an analysis of the following plays. The Tamer Tarn'd (1633), a sequel by John Fletcher serves to comment on Shakespeare's Kate by direct allusion and by dramatic contrast. Sauny the Scot (1667) is a bastardised Restoration version in which the shrew is a farcical stereotype who must suffer extensive physical humiliation for her excessive displays of nastiness. Catherine and Petruohio (1756) is David Garrick's miniature version of Shakespeare which stresses the farce, simplifying the play and the dramatic impact of Catherine. John Tobin's The Honeymoon (1805) is a poetic attempt to re-create The Shrew. The heroine in this play suffers the sin of pride, but is won over to domesticity and humility by love and rural surroundings provided by a gentle tamer. The thesis also considers the nineteenth century attempts to revive the Shakespeare original which struggled unsuccessfully with the popularity of the Garrick version. Some of the musical adaptations of The Shrew provide a rich variety of shrew heroines in very different settings. Included are a ballad opera, A Cure for a Scold (1735), a German opera by Hermann Goetz, The Taming of the Shrew (1878), and a modern musical comedy version, Kiss Me Kate (1948). These adaptations and variant versions provide a veritable school of Katherines. The streak of genius in Shakespeare's dramatic idea of a shrew, who, even in the realm of farce is seen as a human being with the capacity to feel, change and grow, becomes very strongly apparent as Shakespeare's Kate is measured against the shrew heroines in these derivative plays. The contrasting shrew types, though interesting and pleasing in their own way, never quite acquire the stature, poise, wit, intelligence and humour which characterise Shakespeare's attractive Kate. For Kate's civilising and learning encounter with Petruchio is not the brutalising, punitive or subjugating ritual of tradition; amidst the slapstick of farce, Kate, with her Petruchio, provides a unique variation of the shrew heroine. She is not conquered. She changes herself. This is her distinction and her strength and the mark of Shakespeare's human touch. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Mary Reynolds / Caption title / Typescript / M.A. Florida State College for Women 1908

Memoria (licenciado en ciencias jurídicas y sociales) / Autor no autoriza el acceso completo de su documento

This dissertation makes a case for the Shakespearean stage in the modern Anglo-American tradition as a distinctive laboratory for producing and navigating theories of emotion. The dissertation brings together Shakespeare performance studies and the newer fields of the history of emotions and cultural emotion studies, arguing that Shakespeare’s enduring status as the playwright of human emotion makes the plays in performance critical sites of discourse about human emotion. More specifically, the dissertation charts how, since the late nineteenth century, Shakespeare performance has been implicated in an effort to understand emotion as it defines and relates to the “human” subject. The advent of scientific materialism and Darwinism involved a dethroning of emotion and its expression as a specially endowed human faculty, best evidenced by Charles Darwin’s 1871 The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Shakespeare’s poetic, formal expression of the passions was seen as proof of this faculty, and nowhere better exemplified than in the tragedies and in the passionate displays of the great tragic heroes. The controversy surrounding the tragic roles of the famous Victorian actor-manager Henry Irving illustrates how the embodied, human medium of the Shakespearean stage served as valuable leverage in contemporary debates about emotion. The dissertation then considers major Shakespearean figures of the twentieth century, including Harley Granville Barker, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, and Peter Brook, whose “stages” similarly galvanize and reflect contestation and change in what William Reddy has called “emotional regimes” or Barbara Rosenwein “emotional communities.” For each of these figures, a specific emotional paradigm is at stake in staging Shakespeare and particularly Shakespearean tragedy. I engage with a range of sources, from performance reviews to popular psychology, to locate these canonical moments in Shakespearean performance history as flashpoints in a cultural history of emotion.

The purpose of this study is to treat one aspect of Shakespeare's political views, his views on monarchy as found in the two great English history tetralogies, and to compare them to the monarchical views of his age.

“Desifying Shakespeare” focuses on the sharp spike in Shakespeare performances in India in the last three decades (1993-2018), a period of time that coincides with the advent of globalization, the liberalization of India’s economy, and the emergence of the field of Global Shakespeare. By mobilizing the bilingual portmanteau desify, a word that simultaneously references the abstract and aspirational nation (des) and the quotidian process of making local or native in popular culture, this project argues that these self-consciously Indian productions or “desified Shakespeare” disclose contemporary Indian ideas and inquiries of the nation. The dissertation thus works to demonstrate the discursive overlaps and tensions between race, caste, religion, gender, language, color, and nationality, categories that are historically contingent, fluid, and performative. Each chapter centers around the affordances and appropriations of a different Shakespeare play and its iterations in contemporary India: Romeo and Juliet and the neighborhood as nation, Othello and the performativity of caste, Hamlet and the borderlands,Twelfth Night and diaspora space. “Desifying Shakespeare” thus marks the overlap and tension between the intensely local, the triumphantly national, and the universally global. Over the past two decades, the rise of the Hindu Right in India has resulted in Indian public discourse marking a return to and renewed investigation of the nation and its paronyms: national and nationalism. While the Hindu Right propounds a triumphalist and homogenous narrative of the nation, “Desifying Shakespeare” troubles this narrative by turning to performance, which I argue negotiates the tension between the des or the nation and desifying or the process of making local, concepts that both overlap and oppose each other. Prior studies on Shakespeare in India have relied heavily on the consequences of Shakespearean adaptations’ colonial origins, often restricted to analyses of single productions. However, “Desifying Shakespeare” shifts, in its methodology, to emphasize a synoptic view of Shakespeare in India, its multiple vectors of influence—colonial, global, postcolonial, and transnational—and its diverse areas of overlap. While the tendency within the field of Global Shakespeare is to dismiss the nation in favor of the local and the transnational, this project argues that the local and the transnational are entwined in the contemporary notions of the nation. “Desifying Shakespeare” works to provide an alternative theorization of adaptation by using the portmanteau desify—a word that performs the very action it describes. A combination of des, the Hindi word for country/nation (implicitly understood to mean Indian), and the English suffix “—fy” denoting the transformation or the process of making into, desify is itself a word that desifies the English for change. An analysis of desification, thus involves a shift from a privileging of the putative original to an approach that considers a wider web of influences spanning different media, genres, languages, and sources. Running through this dissertation is a theorization of language in performance, moving between the concepts of neighboring, regional, vernacular, and dialect. “Desifying Shakespeare” thus shifts away from the dominant postcolonial metaphors of narration and imagination to emphasize the role of embodied performance in determining and upending a national identity. How the des is constructed in these productions provides an alternative to a neat narrative of the nation that moves beyond the Indian context to provide a model for Global Shakespeare criticism more broadly.